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ix LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION IN MAN 199seem that such feelings as those of abstract justice and benevolencecould never have been so acquired, because they areincompatible with the law of the strongest, which is theessence of natural selection. But this I is, think, an erroneousview, because we must look, not to individuals, but tosocieties ;and justice and benevolence exercised towards membersof the same tribe would certainly tend to strengthenthat tribe and give it a superiority over another in which theright of the strongest prevailed, and where, consequently, theweak and the sickly were left to perish, and the few strongruthlessly destroyed the many who were weaker.But there is another class of human faculties that do notregard our fellow-men, and which cannot, therefore, be thusaccounted for. Such are the capacity to form ideal conceptionsof space and time, of eternity and infinity the capacityfor intense artistic feelings of pleasure,in form, colour, andcomposition, and for those abstract notions of form andnumber which render geometry and arithmetic possible.How were all or any of these faculties first developed, whenthey could have been of no possible use to man in hisearly stages of barbarism How ? could natural selection, orsurvival of the fittest in the strugglefor existence, at allfavour the development of mental powers so entirely removedfrom the material necessities of savage men, and which evennow, with our comparatively high civilisation, are, in theirfarthest developments, in advance of the age, and appear tohave relation rather to the future of the race than to itsactual status 1 lDifficulty as to the Origin of the Moral SenseExactly the same difficultyarises when we endeavour toaccount for the development of the moral sense or consciencein savage man for; although the practice of benevolence,honesty, or truth may have been useful to the tribe possessingthese virtues, that does not at all account for the peculiarsanctity attached to actions which each tribe considers rightand moral, as contrasted with the very different feelings withwhich they regard what is merely useful.The utilitarian1 This argument is extended and some new illustrations given in Darwinism,pp. 461-471.