purely and exclusively the natural basis as its origin. If that is once
the standpoint to which man sees himself led, he has, in order to reason
logically, but a double choice. He must either say that a development out
of a natural basis can possibly be consistent with the appearance of a new
and higher principle, or must give up the autonomy of the moral law, and
leave the moral action of {242} man, even in his maxims, to the unsteady
flowing of development, or even of arbitrariness, and to the degree of
education and intelligence of subjectivity. Neither the one nor the other
is done by Darwin. It is true, on the one hand he shows that modesty, so
often exhibited by him, of the investigator who does not wish to express
any opinion on questions regarding which he has not yet attained a mature
judgment; but on the other hand he also manifests the same aversion to
going beyond purely naturo-historical speculations which, as we have seen
in Part I, Book II, Chapter I, Sec. 1, hindered him from obtaining a clear
conception of the importance of the question as to the origin of
self-consciousness and of moral self-determination, and the same want of
sequence in reasoning, which, as we have found in Chap. III, prevented him
from giving an affirmative or negative decision in such an important
question, as whether a divine end is to be observed in the processes of the
world.

In this naturalization of ethical principles, he is closely related to that
peculiar moral-philosophic tendency in England, which long before Darwin's
appearance, took its origin in John Stuart Mill, but which now, in the
closest connection with Darwin's principles, has its main advocate in
Herbert Spencer, and is commonly called the _utilitarian_ tendency. We
understand by this that conception of the moral motive which allows the
moral good, however it may be ideally separated from the useful in the
developed condition of mankind at the present time, in its origin to be
developed at the outset from the same origin as the useful,--namely, from
the sensation of like and dislike; a theory of utility which Sir John
Lubbock still tried to complete and deepen by {243} the theory of an
inheritance of the sensation of authority. Activities which originally
proved to be only useful, were inherited as traditional instinct by the
offspring, and were thus freed from the sensation of the useful, and acted
as _authority_; this is the origin of _duty_, according to the h