Note 17 — Chapter VIII · CONCLUSION

Too much prominence cannot be given to the later conclusions of modern thought so eloquently set forth by Prince Kropotkin. Much as I appreciate all Mr. S. Laing’s writings, and especially, perhaps, the chapter on “Practical Life” with which he closes his admirable work, Modern Science and Modern Thought, I cannot agree with him when he says (p. 113 of the R. P. A. Cheap Reprint): “For practical purposes it is comparatively unimportant how this [the moral] standard got there.” It is, in my humble opinion, very important, for the reasons that are clearly demonstrated by Prince Kropotkin and other modern ethicists. So soon as the Darwinian theory of the origin of morals is fully accepted, great strides in the development of an improved morality will surely follow. In fine, “science, far from destroying the foundations of ethics, as it is so often accused of doing, gives to evolutionist ethics a philosophical certitude where the transcendental thinker had only a vague intuition to rely upon.”17