Page 3. This airy monster, this half-natural changeling.

Monsters and changelings were pointed to by Locke with a certain controversial relish:  they proved that nature was not compressed or compressible within Aristotelian genera and species, but was a free mechanism subject to indefinite change.  Mechanism in physics is favourable to liberty in politics and morals:  each creature has a right to be what it spontaneously is, and not what some previous classification alleges that it ought to have been.  The Protestant and revolutionary independence of Locke’s mind here gives us a foretaste of Darwin and even of Nietzsche.  But Locke was moderate even in his radicalisms.  A human nature totally fluid would of itself have proved anarchical; but in order to stem that natural anarchy it was fortunately possible to invoke the conditions of prosperity and happiness strictly laid down by the Creator.  The improvidence and naughtiness of nature was called to book at every turn by the pleasures and pains divinely appended to things enjoined and to things forbidden, and ultimately by hell and by heaven.  Yet if rewards and punishments were attached to human action and feeling in this perfectly external and arbitrary fashion, whilst the feelings and actions spontaneous in mankind counted for nothing in the rule of morals and of wisdom, we should be living under the most cruel and artificial of tyrannies; and it would not be long before the authority of such a code would be called in question and the reality of those arbitrary rewards and punishments would be denied, both for this world and for any other.  In a truly rational morality moral sanctions would have to vary with the variation of species, each new race or individual or mode of feeling finding its natural joy in a new way of life.  The monsters would not be monsters except to rustic prejudice, and the changelings would be simply experiments in creation.  The glee of Locke in seeing nature elude scholastic conventions would then lose its savour, since those staid conventions themselves would have become obsolete.  Nature would henceforth present nothing but pervasive metamorphosis, irresponsible and endless.  To correct the weariness of such pure flux we might indeed invoke the idea of a progress or evolution towards something always higher and better; but this idea simply reinstates, under a temporal form, the dominance of a specific standard, to which nature is asked to conform.  Genera and species might shift and glide into one another at will, but always in the authorised direction.  If, on the contrary, transformation had no predetermined direction, we should be driven back, for a moral principle, to each of the particular types of life generated on the way:  as in estimating the correctness or beauty of language we appeal to the speech and genius of each nation at each epoch, without imposing the grammar of one language or age upon another.  It is only in so far as, in the midst of the flux, certain tropes