arried his theory beyond the material part of man. He
never professed to trace the birth of ethics, idealization, science,
poetry, art, religion, or anything spiritual in the anthropoid ape.
There is here, apparently, not only a step in development but a _saltus
mortalis_, a dividing and impassable gulf.

Our bodily senses we share with the brutes. Some brutes excel us in
quickness of sense. They have the rudiments, but the rudiments only,
of our emotions and affections. The mother bird loves her offspring,
but only until they are fledged. The dog is attached to the master who
feeds him, commands him, and if he offends whips him; but without
respect to that master's personal character or deserts. He is as much
attached to Bill Sykes as he would be to the best of men. The workings
of what we call instinct in beavers, bees, and ants are marvellous and
seem in some ways almost to outstrip humanity, but they are not, like
humanity, progressive. The ant and the bee of thousands of years ago
are the ant and the bee of the present day. The bee is not even taught
by experience that her honey will be taken again next year. Still less
is it possible to detect anything like moral aspiration or effort at
improving the community in a moral way. Beavers are wonderfully
co-operative, but they have shown no tendency to establish a church.

Of the science of ethics the foundation surely is our sense of the
difference between right and wrong, and of our obligation to choose the
right and avoid the wrong for our own sake and for the sake of the
society of which we are members and the character of which reacts upon
ourselves. This sense seems to me to be authoritative, whatever its
origin may be. Different conceptions of right and wrong may to some
extent prevail under different circumstances, national or of other
kinds, giving room for different ethical systems, as a comparison of
the ethics of the Gospel with those of Aristotle shows. Still, there
is always the sense of the difference between right and wrong and of
the necessity, individual and social, of embracing the first and
eschewing the second. If the Christian system is found by experience
to show itself essentially superior to all other systems and to satisfy
individually and socially, it is supreme, and is presumably the dictate
of the author of our being, if an author of our being there is.

The necessarian theory, which in this connection is still advanced or