rior power; or certain mental images, which the sight of offered food, or of the apparatus in which it is placed, calls up, may inspire caution and compel abstinence. Mr. Spencer here shows that the interest of the individual is generally concerned in obeying the higher or more lately-developed sense, instinct; or faculty, in preference to the simpler and more primitive impulse; and this distinction between actions inspired by more far-reaching and those inspired by less far-reaching perceptions he considers as homologous to the distinction which emerges in the human region—and which, as civilization advances, becomes ever more pronounced—between right and wrong. In the one case the individual weighs present gratification against his permanent interests as an individual; in the second he weighs his interests as an individual against those of the social body in which he is included. In either case he does well if he yield to the larger thought—that which summons to self-control, and which promises a continuance and enlargement of his activities. From this point of view the conduct which places a man in harmony with society is simply an extension, a further development, of the conduct which places him in harmony with himself, by subordinating his momentary desires to his permanent interests. In the one case he says: "I have a larger life to consider than that of this moment; I have all my past, the memory of which I would not wish to extinguish; I have all my future, which I am not prepared to sacrifice." In the latter he says: "I have a larger life to consider than that which is made up of my personal pains and pleasures; I have inherited sympathies and acquired attachments; the good will of my fellow-man is much to me, and I feel that, apart from the support and assistance that they render me and apart from the activities I exercise as a member of society, I should be a miserably contracted creature. Shall I therefore in the interests of my narrower self make war upon my larger and better self by pursuing anti-social courses of action?" The argument in both cases is the same; the only difference is that in one case length of life is at stake, and in the other breadth of life; but all higher action, it may be assumed as a principle, tends to life. "Do this and ye shall live"; in these words lies all that the evolution philosophy has to teach on the subject of morals; for they summon to right action, and they point to the reward—Life.
I fail to see that under this mode of treatment the distinction between right and wrong is in danger of disappearing. Those possibly who have considered it a pious thing not to know why right is right or why wrong is wrong may resent being told that a rationale of the antagonism between the two has been discovered. They may insist that they have hitherto done right and avoided wrong from motives far transcending in elevation any regard for perpetuation or improvement of life, their own or others'; and it would be ungracious, doubtless, to contradict them. But, for all that, as a motive to sway the mass of mankind, the thought that right action tends to life and higher life,
