ments was attributed either to use-inheritance or to the natural selection of fortuitous variations, the manner and order of their appearance in the child had no significance that could be directly interpreted by psychology. It all presumably depended upon a fixed order of brain development, which, again, could only be understood as an imperfect recapitulation of the phylogenetic order. Thus the only significance of child psychology for ethics (apart, of course, from its pedagogical value) was the fact that, indirectly and imperfectly, it helped to fill out enormous lacunæ in the history of human morals. Many phenomena of child life, which show a fixed order of appearance, independent of external circumstances, are, indeed, thus explained. But if the development of the moral sentiments is, on the contrary, determined by such varying individual experiences as those of imitation; then, although the individual growth is, indeed, determined by the actual social environment, which is itself the product of a long social history; still in a very true sense it is now the individual development that must be regarded as the complete process, of which social history, as its records reveal it, is the imperfect recapitulation,—imperfect, just because it omits the all-significant facts of individual experience, by which, in the last resort, social history itself must be explained.[1] Accordingly, we are not surprised that among the most interesting essays included in the scope of evolutionary ethics in its largest sense, have been those based upon child-study.
Moreover, it has become increasingly evident that within the wide limits of social evolution a further important distinction must be drawn; namely, that between the merely ethiconomic and the specifically ethical factors. Writers, such as Mauxion, who fully recognize the reciprocal influences operating between morality, on the one hand, and custom, law, and political and domestic economy on the other, find also that no history of one or all of these latter does justice to the specific character of moral evolution. It is the history of moral sentiments upon which emphasis is to be laid; in relation to which those external factors stand somewhat
- ↑ This is altogether apart from the question, whether recapitulation, in the ordinary sense, occurs as well in social as in organic evolution. If true, this needs independent proof.
