no pretensions. The
book will, doubtless, excite much useful criticism and discussion in
the scientific world. I hope that it may do the same in the
clerical world; and I earnestly beg those clergymen who heard me
with so much patience and courtesy at Sion College, to ponder well
Mr. Mivart's last chapter, on "Theology and Evolution."

{320} Quoted from Schleiden's "The Plant, a Biography."--Lecture
XI. in fine.

{326} I am well aware what a serious question is opened up in these
words. The fact that the great majority of workers among the social
insects are barren females or nuns, devoting themselves to the care
of other individuals' offspring, by an act of self-sacrifice, and
that by means of that self-sacrifice these communities grow large
and prosperous, ought to be well weighed just now; both by those who
hold that morality has been evolved from perceptions of what was
useful or pleasurable, and by those who hold as I do that morality
is one, immutable and eternal. Those who take the former view
(confounding, as Mr. Mivart well points out in his Genesis of
Species, "material" and "formal" morality) have no difficulty in
tracing the germs of the highest human morality in animals; for
self-interest is, in their eyes, the ultimate ground of morality,
and the average animal is utterly selfish. But certain animals
perform acts, as in the case of working bees and ants, and (as I
hold) in the case of mothers working for and protecting their
offspring, which at least seem formally moral; because they seem
founded on self-sacrifice. I am well aware, I say again, of the
very serious admissions which we clergymen should have to make if we
confessed that these acts really are that which they seem to be.
But I do not see why we should not be as just to an ant as to a
human being; I am ready, with Socrates, to follow the Logos
whithersoever it leads; and I hope that Mr. Mivart will reconsider
the two latter paragraphs of p. 196, and let his "thoughts play
freely" round this curious subject. Perhaps, in so doing, he may
lay his hand on an even sharper weapon than those which he has
already used against the sensationalist theory of morals.

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