But if he does not touch upon morality in the maxims, he nevertheless comes forth in the _theory_ of moral action, in the science of morality with reformatory claims,--namely, with the fact that reduces the whole moral life to those agencies which are already active in the preceding animalic stage. It is true, he makes, as we have seen, a distinction in the genetic derivation of morality. He wholly reduces love and sympathy to social instincts which man has in common with the animal; and he lets the formal motives of moral action, sense of duty and conscience, originate through the high development of intelligence and other spiritual forces, and to be increased and transmitted by custom and inheritance, if those are present. But, on the other hand, development of intelligence is to him an exclusive product of the preceding stage on which it was developed, and thus, in his opinion, entire morality, notwithstanding that double derivation, certainly has purely and exclusively the natural basis as its origin. If that is once the standpoint to which man sees himself led, he has, in order to reason logically, but a double choice. He must either say that a development out of a natural basis can possibly be consistent with the appearance of a new and higher principle, or must give up the autonomy of the moral law, and leave the moral action of {242} man, even in his maxims, to the unsteady flowing of development, or even of arbitrariness, and to the degree of education and intelligence of subjectivity. Neither the one nor the other is done by Darwin. It is true, on the one hand he shows that modesty, so often exhibited by him, of the investigator who does not wish to express any opinion on questions regarding which he has not yet attained a mature judgment; but on the other hand he also manifests the same aversion to going beyond purely naturo-historical speculations which, as we have seen in Part I, Book II, Chapter I, Sec. 1, hindered him from obtaining a clear conception of the importance of the question as to the origin of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination, and the same want of sequence in reasoning, which, as we have found in Chap. III, prevented him from giving an affirmative or negative decision in such an important question, as whether a divine end is to be observed in the processes of the world.