preserved or
restored, and containing those natural and ideal activities which
disease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having tasted order,
cannot conceive it, and identifies progress with new conflicts and life
with continual death. Its deification of unreason, instability, and
strife comes partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There is
piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that
since no equilibrium is maintained for ever none, perhaps, deserves to
be. There is inexperience in not considering that wherever interests and
judgments exist, the natural flux has fallen, so to speak, into a
vortex, and created a natural good, a cumulative life, and an ideal
purpose. Art, science, government, human nature itself, are
self-defining and self-preserving: by partly fixing a structure they fix
an ideal. But the barbarian can hardly regard such things, for to have
distinguished and fostered them would be to have founded a civilisation.

[Sidenote: Darwin on moral sense.]

Reason's function in defining the ideal is in principle extremely
simple, although all time and all existence would have to be gathered in
before the applications of that principle could be exhausted. A better
example of its essential working could hardly be found than one which
Darwin gives to illustrate the natural origin of moral sense. A swallow,
impelled by migratory instincts to leave a nest full of unfledged young,
would endure a moral conflict. The more lasting impulse, memory being
assumed, would prompt a moral judgment when it emerged again after being
momentarily obscured by an intermittent passion. "While the mother bird
is feeding or brooding over her nestlings, the maternal instinct is
probably stronger than the migratory; but the instinct which is more
persistent gains the victory, and at last, at a moment when her young
ones are not in sight, she takes flight and deserts them. When arrived
at the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct ceases to
act, what an agony of remorse each bird would feel if, from being
endowed with great mental activity, she could not prevent the image
continually passing before her mind of her young ones perishing in the
bleak north from cold and hunger."[E] She would doubtless upbraid
herself, like any sinner, for a senseless perfidy to her own dearest
good. The perfidy, however, was not wholly senseless, because the
forgotten instinct was not less natural and necessar