And, finally, in view of the fact that those who thus express themselves in their works showed but rarely, or not at all, some of the noblest fruits of moral education, such as respectful treatment of adversaries, humbleness and tact, they could not themselves reasonably complain that there was ascribed to their doctrine an influence detrimental to moral education. All this we find abundantly confirmed in the publications of Buechner and Haeckel, and in many articles of the "Ausland." But the question is, whether those Darwinians who drew these conclusions were by their scientific investigations obliged to draw them, or whether they did not rather reach their religious and ethical view of the world by quite other ways, and whether they did not in a wholly arbitrary and irresponsible manner make extensive use of Darwinism in this anti-religious and ethically objectional direction--a fact which we shall try to prove in the last part of our investigation. Of course the Darwinians who spoke thus, did not intend to injure the moral principle, but only to purify and reform it; and therefore we shall have to speak of them in the following section. * * * * * {233} CHAPTER V. REFORM OF MORALITY THROUGH DARWINISM. Sec. 1. _The Materialists and Monists. Darwin and the English Utilitarians. Gustav Jaeger._ Among those who ascribe to Darwinism a morally reforming influence, we have to mention in the first place the _materialists_. It is true that even before the appearance of Darwinism they established their own moral principle of naturalistic determinism and of the education of man only by science and enlightenment, in opposition to a morality which rests on the principle of the eternal value of the individual, of full moral responsibility, of the holiness of the moral law, and of a divine author of it; they stigmatized the ethical requirement of aiming at the eternal welfare of the soul as a lower stage of morality in comparison with their own, which carries in itself the reward of virtue; and they declared Christianity and humanity, Christian morality and the morality of humanity, two things irreconcilably opposed to one another. But in having taken possession of Darwinism as their monopoly, they have made it the basis of new attacks upon the present moral principle of Christendom; and therefore we have here to mention them with their moral system.