CHAPTER IX.
EVOLUTION AND ETHICS.
The origin of morals an inquiry not foreign to the subject of this book .-- Modern utilitarian view as to that origin .-- Mr.Darwin's speculation as to the origin of the abhorrence of incest .-- Cause assigned by him insufficient .-- Care of the aged and infirm opposed by "Natural Selection;" also self-abnegation and asceticism .-- Distinctness of the ideas "right" and "useful."-- Mr.John Stuart Mill .-- Insufficiency of "Natural Selection" to account for the origin of the distinction between duty and profit .-- -Distinction of moral acts into "material" and "formal."-- No ground for believing that formal morality exists in brutes .-- Evidence that it does exist in savages .-- Facility with which savages may be misunderstood .-- Objections as to diversity of customs .-- Mr.Hutton's review of Mr.Herbert Spencer .-- Anticipatory character of morals .-- Sir John Lubbock's explanation .-- Summary and conclusion.
Any inquiry into the origin of the notion of "morality"-- the conception of "right"-- may, perhaps, be considered as somewhat remote from the question of the Genesis of Species; the more so, since Mr.Darwin, at one time, disclaimed any pretension to explain the origin of the higher psychical phenomena of man.

His disciples, however, were never equally reticent, and indeed he himself is now not only about to produce a work on man (in which this question must be considered), but he has distinctly announced the extension of the application of his theory to the very phenomena in question.

He says:[202] "In the distant future I see open fields for {189} far more important researches.

Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.

Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." It may not be amiss then to glance slightly at the question, so much disputed, concerning the origin of ethical conceptions and its bearing on the theory of "Natural Selection." The followers of Mr.John Stuart Mill, of Mr.Herbert Spencer, and apparently, also, of Mr.Darwin, assert that in spite of the great _present_ difference between the ideas "useful" and "right," yet that they are, nevertheless, one in _origin_, and that that origin consisted ultimately of pleasurable and painful sensations.
They say that "Natural Selection" has evolved moral conceptions from perceptions of what was useful, _i.e._ pleasurable, by having through long ages preserved a predominating number of those individuals who have had a natural and spontaneous liking for practices and habits of mind useful to the race, and that the same power has destroyed a predominating number of those individuals who possessed a marked tendency to contrary practices.
The descendants of individuals so preserved have, they say, come to inherit such a liking and such useful habits of mind, and that at last (finding this inherited tendency thus existing in themselves, distinct from their tendency to conscious self-gratification) they have become apt to regard it as fundamentally distinct, _innate_, and independent of all experience.