Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: chapter{Section 4chapter{Section 5 PBEFACE A Preface is generally the most interesting, and not seldom the only interesting, part of a book. It is useful to the hasty critic who wishes to avoid the trouble of reading at all, and to the more serious student who wishes to have the clue to the author’s speculations put into his hands at the earliest possible period. I should be glad to be useful to both classes, to save some readers the trouble of getting through more than a couple of paragraphs, and to point out to others what is the kind of result which they may expect from a perusal of the whole work. My ethical theory, then, when I first became the conscious proprietor of any theory at all, was that of the orthodox utilitarians. J. S. Mill was the Gamaliel at whose feet I sat, and whose authority was decisive with me on this as on other matters. In this, of course, I was simply following the example of the majority of the more thoughtful lads of my own generation. At a later period my mind was stirred by the great impulse conveyed through Mr. Darwin’s Origin of Species. I shall always, I hope, be proud to acknowledge the great intellectual debt which I, in common with so many worthier disciples, owe to his writings.1 So far as ethical problems were concerned, I at first regarded Mr. Darwin’s principles rather as providing a new armoury wherewith to 1 It is with a pang of deep regret that I must add to-day (April 24, 1882) that I can no longer cherish the hope of fully acknowledging it to Mr. Darwin himself. I was withheld from speaking formerly by the feeling that anything like a compliment (sincere though it might be) seemed incongruous in presence of that exquisitely simple and modest nature. Yet I could wish that I had been less diffident. chapter{Section 6enco…