energetically good, that moral training could signify, even for its
youngest, neither more nor less than waste of precious time.



To the Evolutionist such facts necessarily suggest that the value of our
moral idealism is but temporary; and that something better than virtue,
better than kindness, better than self-denial,-- in the present human
meaning of those terms,-- might, under certain conditions, eventually
replace them. He finds himself obliged to face the question whether a world
without moral notions might not be morally better than a world in which
conduct is regulated by such notions. He must even ask himself whether the
existence of religious commandments, moral laws, and ethical standards
among ourselves does not prove us still in a very primitive stage of social
evolution. And these questions naturally lead up to another: Will humanity
ever be able, on this planet, to reach an ethical condition beyond all its
ideals,-- a condition in which everything that we now call evil will have
been atrophied out of existence, and everything that we call virtue have
been transmuted into instinct;-- a state of altruism in which ethical
concepts and codes will have become as useless as they would be, even now,
in the societies of the higher ants.



The giants of modern thought have given some attention to this question;
and the greatest among them has answered it -- partly in the affirmative.
Herbert Spencer has expressed his belief that humanity will arrive at some
state of civilization ethically comparable with that of the ant:--