Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace.
- Alfred Russel Wallace
- Date:
- 1913
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace. Source: Wellcome Collection.
103/180 page 91
![XIII] Selection in the Animal World ently vacant spaces of our solar system, and from which comets and stars are in all probability the aggregations due to the action of the various cosmic forces which everywhere seem capable of produc¬ ing variety and order out of a more uni¬ form but less orderly chaos. But besides this lofty intellect, man is gifted with what we term a moral sense : an insistent perception of justice and in¬ justice, of right and wrong, of order and beauty and truth, which as a whole con¬ stitute his moral and aesthetic nature, the origin and progress of which I have en¬ deavoured to throw some light upon in the present volume. The long course of human history leads us to the conclusion that this higher nature of man arose at some far distant epoch, and though it has developed in various directions, does not seem yet to have elevated the whole race much above its earliest condition, at the time when, by the influx of some portion of the spirit of the Deity, man became a living soul. We will now consider some of the changes which this higher nature of man has produced in the action of the laws of variation and natural selection. These are 91](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18022121_0104.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
