demonstration.  Those, moreover, who are invested with this serious responsibility, ought to feel morally bound to inflict no superfluous suffering, and ought, consequently, to employ anaesthetics, wherever they would not unduly interfere with the conduct of the experiment; to resort, as far as possible, to the lower rather than the higher organisms, as being less susceptible of pain; and to limit their experiments, both in number and duration, as far as is consistent with the objects for which they are permitted to perform them.  This whole question, however, of our relation to the lower animals is one which is fraught with much difficulty, and supplies a good instance of the range of subjects within which the moral sentiment is probably in the course of development.  Recent researches, and, still more, recent speculations, have tended to impress us with the nearness of our kinship to other animals, and, hence, our sympathies with them and our interest in their welfare have been sensibly quickened.  The word philanthropy no longer expresses the most general of the sympathetic feelings, and we seem to require some new term which shall denote our fellow-feeling with the whole sentient creation.

Such is a sample, and I must repeat that it is intended only as a sample, of the class of questions to which, as it seems to me, the moral test still admits of further application.  Morality, or the science and art of conduct, had its small beginnings, I conceive, in the primeval household and has only attained its present grand proportions by gradual increments, derived partly from the semi-conscious operations of the human intelligence adapting itself to the circumstances in which it is placed, partly from the conscious meditations of reflective men.  That it is likely to advance in the future, as it has done in the past, notwithstanding the many hindrances to its progress which confessedly exist, is, I think, an obvious inference from experience.  We may not unreasonably hope that there will be a stricter sense of justice, a more complete realisation of duty, more delicacy of feeling, a greater refinement of manners, more kindliness, quicker and wider sympathies in the coming generations than there are amongst ourselves.  I have attempted, in this Essay, briefly to delineate the nature of the feelings on which this progress depends, and of the considerations by which it is guided, as well as to indicate some few out of the many directions which it is likely to take in the future.  In the former part of my task, I am aware that I have run counter to many prejudices of long standing, and that the theories which I consider to be alone consistent with the fact of the progress of morality, may by some be thought to impair its authority.  But if morality has its foundations in the constitution of human nature, which itself proceeds from the Divine Source of all things, I conceive that its credentials are sufficiently assured.  In the present chapter, I have, in attempting to illustrate