organisation, are as clear evidences of design, as any other
features that can be named.

Observation and experiment upon the phenomena of society soon taught
men that, in order to obtain the advantages of social existence,
certain rules must be observed. Morality commenced with society.
Society is possible only upon the condition that the members of it
shall surrender more or less of their individual freedom of action. In
primitive societies, individual selfishness is a centrifugal force of
such intensity that it is constantly bringing the social organisation
to the verge of destruction. Hence the prominence of the positive
rules of obedience to the elders; of standing by the family or the
tribe in all emergencies; of fulfilling the religious rites,
non-observance of which is conceived to damage it with the
supernatural powers, belief in whose existence is one of the earliest
products of human thought; and of the negative rules which restrain
each from meddling with the life or property of another.

12. The highest conceivable form of human society is that in which the
desire to do what is best for the whole dominates and limits the
action of every member of that society. The more complex the social
organisation the greater the number of acts from which each man must
abstain if he desires to do that which is best for all. Thus the
progressive evolution of society means increasing restriction of
individual freedom in certain directions.

With the advance of civilisation, and the growth of cities and of
nations by the coalescence of families and of tribes, the rules which
constitute the common foundation of morality and of law became more
numerous and complicated, and the temptations to break or evade many
of them stronger. In the absence of a clear apprehension of the
natural sanctions of these rules, a supernatural sanction was assumed;
and imagination supplied the motives which reason was supposed to be
incompetent to furnish. Religion, at first independent of morality,
gradually took morality under its protection; and the supernaturalists
have ever since tried to persuade mankind that the existence of ethics
is bound up with that of supernaturalism.

I am not of that opinion. But, whether it is correct or otherwise, it
is very clear to me that, as Beelzebub is not to be cast out by the
aid of Beelzebub, so morality is not to be established by immorality.
It is, we are told, the special peculiarity of the devil th