Ethics and Ethnology

Abstract

ALTHOUGH nearly fifty years lie between T. H. Huxley's Romanes Lecture on “Evolution and Ethics”, delivered at Oxford in 1892, and the recent address on “Science and Ethics” by Dr. E. G. Conklin as outgoing president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (see NATURE, January 15, p. 101), there is in them a striking congruity of outlook. In both, the ethical idea is paramount in the application of evolutionary doctrine to the problems of man's advancement. While for Huxley the blind struggle for existence, which had brought subhuman forms to the threshold of intelligence, henceforward in human society is dominated by moral and intellectual forces in a conflict—in the ultimate resort, one of ethical ideals—for Dr. Conklin determinism, to many an inescapable corollary of the modern approach to evolutionary problems, is mitigated by the selective powers of the human will, which can mould the forces governing human development to such ends as the ethical standard—the ideals of justice, truth, beauty, sympathy—may formulate. Nor does it affect materially the argument of either that the end to which the selective process is directed may vary with time, place and circumstance. Its virtue lies in the control which it exercises over material forces to make man potentially master of his fate.