But with our resources
of analysis and reflection, it is not difficult to discern that the
various forces at work have been such as to preserve, in general,
habits which made for the welfare of individual or tribe and discard
the harmful ones. It is, then, not merely habits, but habits that
matter, moral habits, with whose growth and alteration we are here
concerned. What, in general, has been the direction of moral progress?
We have noted the main causes at work in the production of morality;
we now ask in what general direction these forces push. We have in
mind the concrete virtues which have been developed; but what common
function have these habits of conduct, so produced, had in human life?
What has been the net result of the process? At first sight a
generalized answer seems impossible. All sorts of chance causes bring
about local alterations in morals. The momentary dominance of an
impulse ordinarily weak, the whim of a ruler, the self-interest of
classes, superstitious interpretation of omens, the attribution of
some success to a prior act which may have had nothing to do with it
such accidental and irrational sources of morals, and the resulting
codes, are numberless. But as in the process of organic evolution the
various obscure physiological alterations which produce variations
of type are all overruled and guided in a few directions of value to
the species by the law of natural selection, so in the evolution of
in all directions are subject to the law of the survival of the fittest.
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