human nature that “ginger is hot in the mouth,” the assertion has as much foundation of truth as the other, though I think it would be expressed in needlessly pompous language.  I must confess that I have never been able to understand why there should be such a bitter quarrel between the intuitionists and the utilitarians.  The intuitionist is, after all, only a utilitarian who believes that a particular class of pleasures and pains has an especial importance, by reason of its foundation in the nature of man, and its inseparable connection with his very existence as a thinking being.  And as regards the motive of personal affection:  Love, as Spinoza profoundly says, is the association of pleasure with that which is loved.[1] Or, to put it to the common sense of mankind, is the gratification of affection a pleasure or a pain?  Surely a pleasure.  So that whether the motive which leads us to perform an action is the love of our neighbour, or the love of God, it is undeniable that pleasure enters into that motive.

[Footnote 1:  “Nempe, Amor nihil aliud est, quam Laetitia, concomitante idea causae externae.”—­Ethices III. xiii.]

Thus much in reply to Mr. Mivart’s arguments.  I cannot but think that it is to be regretted that he ekes them out by ascribing to the doctrines of the philosophers with whom he does not agree, logical consequences which have been over and over again proved not to flow from them:  and when reason fails him, tries the effect of an injurious nickname.  According to the views of Mr. Spencer, Mr. Mill, and Mr. Darwin, Mr. Mivart tells us, “virtue is a mere kind of retrieving;” and, that we may not miss the point of the joke, he puts it in italics.  But what if it is?  Does that make it less virtue?  Suppose I say that sculpture is a “mere way” of stone-cutting, and painting a “mere way” of daubing canvas, and music a “mere way” of making a noise, the statements are quite true; but they only show that I see no other method of depreciating some of the noblest aspects of humanity, than that of using language in an inadequate and misleading sense about them.  And the peculiar in appropriateness of this particular nickname to the views in question, arises from the circumstance which Mr. Mivart would doubtless have recollected, if his wish to ridicule had not for the moment obscured his judgment—­that whether the law of evolution applies to man or not, that of hereditary transmission certainly does.  Mr. Mivart will hardly deny that a man owes a large share of the moral tendencies which he exhibits to his ancestors; and the man who inherits a desire to steal from a kleptomaniac, or a tendency to benevolence from a Howard, is, so far as he illustrates hereditary transmission, comparable to the dog who inherits the desire to fetch a duck out of the water from his retrieving sire.  So that, evolution, or no evolution, moral qualities are comparable to a “kind of retrieving;” though the comparison, if meant for the purposes of casting obloquy on evolution, does not say much for the fairness of those who make it.