In England and the United States reprobation of untruthfulness is strongly expressed, alike by the gentleman and the laborer.  In many parts of the world it is not so.  In Blantyre, for example, according to MacDonald, “to be called a liar is rather a compliment.”  Once more:  English sentiment is such that the mere suspicion of incontinence on the part of a woman is enough to blight her life; but there are peoples whose sentiments entail no such effect, and, in some cases, a reverse effect is produced:  “Unchastity is, with the Wetyaks, a virtue.”  It seems, then, that in respect of all the leading divisions of human conduct, different races of men, and the same races at different stages, entertain opposite beliefs, and display opposite feelings.

In Mr. Spencer’s opinion, the evidence here brought to a focus ought to dissipate once for all the belief in a moral sense, as commonly entertained.  A long experience of mankind, however, prevents him from indulging in such an expectation.  Among men at large, lifelong convictions are not to be destroyed either by conclusive arguments or multitudinous facts.  Only to those who are not by creed or cherished theory committed to the hypothesis of a supernaturally created human species will the evidence above summed up prove that the human mind has no originally implanted conscience.  Mr. Spencer himself at one time espoused the doctrine of the intuitive moralists, but it has gradually become clear to him that the qualifications required practically obliterate the doctrine as enunciated by them.  It has become clear to him, in other words, that if among civilized folk the current belief is that a man who robs and does not repent will be eternally damned, while an accepted proverb among the Bilochs is, that “God will not favor a man who does not steal and rob,” it is impossible to hold that men have in common an innate perception of right and wrong.

At the same time, while the inductions drawn by Mr. Spencer from the data of ethics show that the moral-sense doctrine in its original form is not true, they also show that it adumbrates a truth, and a much higher truth.  For the facts cited, chapter after chapter, unite in proving that the sentiments and ideas current in each society become adjusted to the kinds of activity predominating in it.  A life of constant external enmity generates a code in which aggression, conquest, revenge, are inculcated, while peaceful occupations are reprobated.  Conversely, a life of settled internal amity generates a code inculcating the virtues conducing to harmonious co-operation,—­justice, honesty, veracity, regard for others’ claims.  The implication is that, if the life of internal amity continues unbroken from generation to generation, there must result not only the appropriate code, but the appropriate emotional nature,—­a moral sense adapted to the moral requirements.  Men so conditioned will acquire to the degree needful for complete guidance that innate conscience which the