Heredity : with preludes on current events / by Joseph Cook.

  • Josephus Flavius Cook
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Heredity : with preludes on current events / by Joseph Cook. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    104/208 page 96
    '96 heredity. ОТ from any other animal. (Nature, Dec. 6, 1877, pp. 112, 113.) 2. If you will allow me to affirm that Darwin teaches, at the outset of his discussion of the moral sense, propositions that would undermine the whole doctrine of personal obligation, I shall have said enough to make you cautious in adopting that theory of the origin of conscience. 3. In Darwin's attempt to trace the development of conscience from purely animal instincts, ideas of morality drawn from other sources slip into the argu¬ ment. (See this criticism developed in Newman Smyth's Religious Feeling, and in St. George Mr- vart's Genesis of Species, and in various other writers.) The atmosphere in which he conducts his experi¬ ment is full of germs of the moral sense. It has been well said that they who try to prove spontaneous generation to be a fact usually perform their experi¬ ments in an atmosphere saturated with the germs which they wish to develop. Darwin calls to his aid, in explaining the origin of the moral sense, a great number of floating moral germs. I have singled out twelve of these, and hardly need do more than name them in his language :— (1) Highly developed mental faculties. That word mental is very vague. If by mind you mean the whole spiritual equipment of man, as you some¬ times do, it includes moral perception ; and so sur¬ reptitiously, or at least unobserved, comes in the very idea of which Darwin would explain the origin. (2) The feeling of dissatisfaction. That is an¬ other vague phrase. It might mean moi'al dissatis¬ faction. (3) The power of language. (4) The idea of the good of the community. A very vague phrase that пел^ег would pass without being challenged under the microscope of metaphysical research.
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