The materialistic view recently presented by Dr. Henry Maudsley, in an article entitled, “The Physical Basis of Mind”—­an article which seems to follow Mr. Spencer very closely—­would break down all moral responsibility.  His theory that true character depends upon what he calls the reflex action of the nerve-cells; that acts of reason or conscience which have been put forth so many times that, in a sense, they perform themselves without any exercise of consciousness, are the best; that a man is an instinctive thief or liar, or a born poet, because the proper nervous structure has been fixed in his constitution by his ancestors; that any moral act, so long as it is conscious, is not ingrained in character, and the more conscious it is, the more dubious it is; and that “virtue itself is not safely lodged until it has become a habit”—­in other words, till it has become an automatic and unconscious operation of the nerve-cells, such a doctrine, in its extreme logical results, destroys all voluntary and conscious loyalty to principle, and renders man a mere automatic machine.

On the other hand Mr. A.R.  Wallace, in combating the theory that the moral sense in man is based on the utility experienced by our ancestors, relates the following incident:  “A number of prisoners taken during the Santal insurrection were allowed to go free on parole, to work at a certain spot for wages.  After some time cholera attacked them and they were obliged to leave, but everyone of them returned and gave up his earnings to the guard.  Two hundred savages with money in their girdles walked thirty miles back to prison rather than break their word.  My own experience with savages has furnished me with similar, although less severely tested, instances; and we cannot avoid asking how it is that, in these few cases ‘experience of utility’ have left such an overpowering impression, while in others they have left none....  The intuitional theory which I am now advocating explains this by the supposition that there is a feeling—­a sense of right and wrong—­in our nature antecedent to, and independent of, experiences of utility."[188]

3.  Theories which confound the origin of man with that of brutes, whether in the old doctrine of transmigration or in at least some of the theories of evolution, involve a contradiction in man’s ethical history.  The confusion shown in the Buddhist Jatakas, wherein Buddha, in the previous existences which prepared him for his great and holy mission, was sometimes a saint and sometimes a gambler and a thief, is scarcely greater, from an ethical point of view, than that which evolution encounters in bridging the chasm between brute instinct and the lofty ethics of the perfected man.