stronger, the victory of the least
scrupulous and best equipped; and this in the midst of the most
inexcusable wars, the most flagrant acts of injustice or cruelty. Our
one object would be our own personal triumph; nor should we pay the
least heed to the rights or sufferings of our victims, to their
innocence or beauty, moral or intellectual superiority. But, in that
case, why has Nature placed within us a consciousness and a sense of
justice that have prevented us from desiring those things that she
desires? Or is it we ourselves who have placed them there? Are we
capable of deriving from within us something that is not in Nature; are
we capable of giving abnormal development to a force that opposes her
force; and if we possess this power, must not Nature have reasons of
her own for permitting us to possess it? Why should there be only in
us, and nowhere else in the world, these two irreconcilable tendencies,
that in every man are incessantly at strife, and alternately
victorious? Would one have been dangerous without the other? Would it
have overstepped its goal, perhaps; would the desire for conquest,
unchecked by the sense of justice, have led to annihilation, as the
sense of justice without the desire for conquest might have lured us to
inertia? Which of these two tendencies is the more natural and
necessary, which is the narrower and which the vaster, which is
provisional and which eternal? Where shall we learn which one we
should combat and which one encourage? Ought we to conform to the law
that is incontestably the more general, or should we cherish in our
heart a law that is evidently exceptional? Are there circumstances
under which we have the right to go forth in search of the apparent
ideal of life? Is it our duty to follow the morality of the species or
race, which seems irresistible to us, being one of the visible sides of
Nature's obscure and unknown intentions; or is it essential that the
individual should maintain and develop within him a morality entirely
opposed to that of the race or species whereof he forms part?

20

The truth is that the question which confronts us here is only another
form of the one which lies at the root of evolutionary morality, and is
probably scientifically unsolvable. Evolutionary morality bases itself
on the justice of Nature--though it dare not speak out the word; on the
justice of Nature, which imposes upon each individual the good or evil
consequences