EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS. There is no warrant for calling animals moral agents, though a few highly endowed types, such as dog and horse, which have become man's partners, may have some glimpse of the practical meaning of responsibility. Cases are known where an animal's natural reaction is inhibited, apparently because of previously established habits, possibly in some cases because ideas are beginning to emerge. But if a truly ethical action implies control in reference to a moral ideal, even those who are inclined to be generous to animals must allow that this is practically man's prerogative. Animals have behaviour, which hardly ever touches the level of conduct ; man has always the possibility of conduct, though he often subsides into mere behaviour.
There are among animals many illustrations of what may be called the raw materials of morals. Thus, they are devoted to their offspring, sympathetic to their kindred, affectionate to their mates, self-subordinating in their community, courageous beyond praise. Many a mother animal, such as a stoat, will defend her offspring to the death. A male hornbill will wear himself to a skeleton in forag ing for his brooding mate, imprisoned in a hole in a tree. A male baboon in a retreating troup will return in the teeth of danger to rescue a youngster accidentally left behind. Animals may not be ethical, but they are often virtuous. Many animals are faith fully monogamous, as in the case of ravens, eagles, cranes, swans, rhinoceros, oryx antelope, white whale, and orang. When higher animals act in concert, as when beavers cut a canal, or monkeys make a raid, or pelicans combine in fishing, or wolves hunt in a pack in winter, there is some degree of controlled self-subordina tion, which almost sounds the ethical note ; and there are many instances of impulsive mutual aid beyond the bounds of the habit uated and the instinctive. No one dreams of calling a plant altruis tic because much of its energy is devoted to filling the seeds with nutritive legacy, and one must be restrained in one's appreciation of the instinctive other-regarding activities of ants and bees. Among some ants it is instinctive on the part of a well-fed indi vidual to give food to a hungry beggar of the same species, and though we may agree with those who maintain that conscious kin sympathy was at work in the racial establishment of that instinct, and that some awareness still remains, we would for our present purpose evade the difficulty by looking for evidence of good feel ing among animals that illustrate an intelligent or a predominantly intelligent mode of life. Among mammals, for instance, there are many cases of behaviour that expresses not self-gratification, but devotion to the welfare of others.
For man there is evolutionary interest in these springs of sym pathy and courage among animals, for he must have inherited im pulses of this type from his pre-human ancestors. Man cannot be a moral Melchisedec, "without descent," and we look among the higher animals for illustrations of the fine strands of kindness, affection, self-subordination, loyalty, courage and control, which were 'afterwards woven into a distinctively human pattern. Regarding man as a new synthesis, making all things new we willingly admit that he did not simply carry on and raise to a higher power the kin-sympathy, let us say, of the wolf ; for evolu tion does not proceed in this simple fashion. But our point is that there must have been definite pre-human strands which were transformed in the new synthesis of man.
The evolutionist question thus becomes : What was there in the early Hominoids to foster further progress in the direction of the raw materials of goodness? An answer cannot as yet be much more than groping. The ancestors of Homo supposedly diverged from a big-brained anthropoid stock of social disposition which had served a long arboreal apprenticeship. About the Miocene time, when the Himalayas were uplifted and the great forests began to shrink, the ancestors of tentative men were forced into a terrestrial environment and were subjected to sifting by predatory competitors from whom they had been previously in some measure isolated by their arboreal habits. Thus we picture the ancestors of men descending to terra firma, with more brains than brawn, with little chance against the large beasts of prey except by outwitting them, and with predispositions towards gentleness which had been engendered in part by the prolonged infancy with its appealing helplessness. Such pre-men, no doubt in obedience to their engrained promptings in favour of mutual aid and sociality, found safety in uniting their families into sim ple societies. For isolated human families the struggle for exist ence would be too keen when they ventured beyond the sanctuary of the trees; and thus there probably arose a self-preservative linkage of families, perhaps a million years ago. The fallacy must be avoided of supposing that our ancestors combined their families because they foresaw possible advantages, for this is not the way in which unsophisticated evolution works. They obeyed their social promptings and then discovered, more or less dimly at first, that there was a new strength in their old weak ness. The experiments in society-making would give man a firmer foothold in the struggle for existence, and variations in the direction of increased sociality would tend to survive. Pre cious individuals, such as the pioneer artists and thinkers, would have a chance to survive under the society aegis; permanent products with their useful and educative enregistrations would increase ; life would be more secure for adventurous children whose new departures form an important part of the raw ma terials of evolution, and the growth of tradition would be helped by the increasing care of the aged. Too of ten, in the things pertaining to man, the evolutionist relapses into creationism, try ing to make faculties out of nothing; our point is that we must in our reconstruction make the most of the pre-human strands and of the cradle-influences of early experiments in society f orming.
But here it is necessary to introduce a saving-clause which expresses the divergence of the modern from the Spencerian out look. As a convinced Lamarckian, Spencer believed that qualities directly induced by new functions and surroundings may be added to the racial repertory by hereditary entailment, and that they may be cumulatively increased by contributions made by indi vidual parents. To many biological evolutionists this possibility appears unproven and even improbable.