George Mivart, F.R.S." The name of the author
demanded all attention and respect; and as I read on, I found him,
to my exceeding pleasure, advocating views which I had long held,
with a learning and ability to which I have no pretensions. The
book will, doubtless, excite much useful criticism and discussion in
the scientific world. I hope that it may do the same in the
clerical world; and I earnestly beg those clergymen who heard me
with so much patience and courtesy at Sion College, to ponder well
Mr. Mivart's last chapter, on "Theology and Evolution."
{320} Quoted from Schleiden's "The Plant, a Biography."--Lecture
XI. in fine.
{326} I am well aware what a serious question is opened up in these
words. The fact that the great majority of workers among the social
insects are barren females or nuns, devoting themselves to the care
of other individuals' offspring, by an act of self-sacrifice, and
that by means of that self-sacrifice these communities grow large
and prosperous, ought to be well weighed just now; both by those who
hold that morality has been evolved from perceptions of what was
useful or pleasurable, and by those who hold as I do that morality
is one, immutable and eternal. Those who take the former view
(confounding, as Mr. Mivart well points out in his Genesis of
Species, "material" and "formal" morality) have no difficulty in
tracing the germs of the highest human morality in animals; for
self-interest is, in their eyes, the ultimate ground of morality,
and the average animal is utterly selfish.
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