Alfred Wallace - Social Environment and Moral Progress

It is because the higher intellectual or moral powers are so rarely of life-preserving value, and are not unfrequently the reverse, that they are not cumulative , though they are hereditary .

With this explanation we will now proceed to examine somewhat closely our moral position as a nation; what is the nature of our social environment; how it came to be what it is, and what lessons we may learn from it.

During the eighteenth century our material civilisation, which had long been almost stationary, began to advance with the growth of the physical sciences, but at first with extreme slowness. The earliest steps were made by the application of machinery to some of the domestic arts. Some refinements were made in the manners and customs of our daily life; but there were few, if any, indications of permanent or widespread change, either for better or worse, in our intellectual or moral nature.

The nineteenth century, however, saw the initiation of a great change in the economic environment due to the rapid invention of labour-saving machinery; which, with the equally rapid application of steam power, led to an increase of wealth production such as had never been known on the earth before. During the same period new modes of locomotion were brought into daily use, the facilities for inter-communication were increased a hundred-fold, scientific discoveries opened up to us new and unthought-of mysteries of the universe, and the whole earth was ransacked for its treasures, both vegetable and mineral, to an extent that surpassed all that had been accomplished since the dawn of civilisation.

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See Character and Life , edited by P. L. Parker, pp. 19-31. (Williams and Norgate; November, 1912.)

See my Australia and New Zealand , Chap. V., "The Australian Aborigines," where this view was first set forth. (Stanford, 1893.) For cases of morality among savages see my Natural Selection and Tropical Nature , pp. 199-201.