So that if the Reviewer’s new definition of reason be correct, the majority of men, even among the most civilized nations, are devoid of that supreme characteristic of manhood.  And if it be as absurd as I believe it to be, then, as reason is certainly not self-consciousness, and as it, as certainly, is one of the “actions to which the nervous system ministers,” we must, if the Reviewer’s classification is to be adopted, seek it among those four faculties which he allows animals to possess.  And thus, for the second time, he really surrenders, while seeming to defend, his position.

The Quarterly Reviewer, as we have seen, lectures the evolutionists upon their want of knowledge of philosophy altogether.  Mr. Mivart is not less pained at Mr. Darwin’s ignorance of moral science.  It is grievous to him that Mr. Darwin (and nous autres) should not have grasped the elementary distinction between material and formal morality; and he lays down as an axiom, of which no tyro ought to be ignorant, the position that “acts, unaccompanied by mental acts of conscious will directed towards the fulfilment of duty,” are “absolutely destitute of the most incipient degree of real or formal goodness.”

Now this may be Mr. Mivart’s opinion, but it is a proposition which, really, does not stand on the footing of an undisputed axiom.  Mr. Mill denies it in his work on Utilitarianism.  The most influential writer of a totally opposed school, Mr. Carlyle, is never weary of denying it, and upholding the merit of that virtue which is unconscious; nay, it is, to my understanding, extremely hard to reconcile Mr. Mivart’s dictum with that noble summary of the whole duty of man—­“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength; and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”  According to Mr. Mivart’s definition, the man who loves God and his neighbour, and, out of sheer love and affection for both, does all he can to please them, is, nevertheless, destitute of a particle of real goodness.

And it further happens that Mr. Darwin, who is charged by Mr. Mivart with being ignorant of the distinction between material and formal goodness, discusses the very question at issue, in a passage which is well worth reading (vol. i.p. 87), and also comes to a conclusion opposed to Mr. Mivart’s axiom.  A proposition which has been so much disputed and repudiated, should, under no circumstances, have been thus confidently assumed to be true.  For myself, I utterly reject it, inasmuch as the logical consequence of the adoption of any such principle is the denial of all moral value to sympathy and affection.  According to Mr. Mivart’s axiom, the man who, seeing another struggling in the water, leaps in at the risk of his own life to save him, does that which is “destitute of the most incipient degree of real goodness,” unless, as he strips off his coat, he says to himself, “Now mind, I am going to do this because it is my duty and