so decided. Such rules may not be of necessary and universal obligation, may not hold good in every conceivable case; yet in some instances, such as the rules against lying and adultery, may be so nearly universal in the conditions in which men live, and so vital to social welfare, that perhaps our only safety lies in treating them for practical purposes as if they were absolute.
If what is called 'evolutionary ethics' can account for the origin and development of conscience, and explain why certain specific acts have come to be regarded by a large section of society with moral aversion or approbation, independently of any immediate and apparent consequences, evolutionary ethics may throw valuable light on difficult problems in applied morality. Conceivably, though I think most improbably, the evolutionist may demonstrate that happiness is so intimately and exclusively dependent on evolutionary progress, that all concrete rules of conduct might be generalized into one rule: Promote evolution. But if the evolutionist, invading the sphere of abstract ethics, attempts to show that moral obligation itself, and the principles of obligation, are not objective realities absolutely true, but merely fictions, conventions, arbitrary ways of looking at things imposed upon us by evolution, though he may conceivably be right, he is practically destroying for an independent and reasoning mind the very foundation and essence of morality. Inconvenient scruples which answer to no reality, truths which are only shams, are not very likely to influence a sensible man when once the trick of evolution is discovered.
The idea may sometimes be met with in modern ethical literature, that the moment morality is made to consist in the promotion of happiness, and hence to have reference to the consequences of conduct, or, subjectively, the expected consequences, the position has to be abandoned that there is anything absolute, eternal, immutable about it. Not so, I trust, by any means; and the separation of ethics into abstract and concrete may help us to see what it is that is permanent, and what it is that is not. The concrete maxims forbidding or enjoining particular acts are, strictly speaking, conditional on the circumstances in which man lives. But the underlying principles of right and wrong,
