ABSTRACT
Nietzsche spent most of his life attacking that same 'severity, tyranny, stupidity and idiocy' of which he had complained, things that have so often accompanied the 'morality of custom' that it is impressive to find him doing such thorough justice here to the importance of the morality itself. Darwin was trying to grasp how something as complex as actual human motivation, including moral sensibility, could possibly have evolved. He looked at both people and the various kinds of animals in their actual bewildering complexity. He points out that the particular repertoire of natural feelings from which a species starts can always pose grave problems in this way to the project of harmonization. He started his enquiry from one of the most puzzling human traits, namely morality, because he thought it so central. The central peculiarity of humans is not, then, just their improved power of calculation. It is their wider perspective, their more comprehensive viewpoint.
