THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



SEPTEMBER, 1878. 



THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN EVOLUTION. 



By Eev. T. W. FOWLE. 



OF all the objections and difficulties that sprang into life the mo- 

 ment that the doctrine of evolution was propounded for our 

 acceptance, very few indeed (exclusive of the purely scientific ones) 

 now give evidence of persistent vitality. Time, which, if age and ex- 

 perience can give wisdom, ought to be so much wiser than any of us, 

 has consigned the greater part of them to oblivion, and evolution is 

 taking its place, one might say, as part of the furniture of the human 

 mind. Chief among these objections was the assertion that evolution 

 could give no satisfactory account of the origin of morality and the 

 genesis of conscience. 



Many persons, religious thinkers especially, among whom Mr. 

 Charles Kingsley may be cited as an instance, while willing to accept 

 any reasonable conclusion of science, as to the origin and constitution 

 of man, appeared determined to reserve conscience as something inex- 

 plicable by any effort of human thinking, and therefore as a direct gift 

 of God to his creatures ; others, again, have gone so far as to assert 

 that the idea of duty as of divine obligation must perish, if the nature 

 and growth of conscience could be explained, as part of the evolution 

 of the race, by natural causation. This feeling, natural and indeed 

 honorable, was strengthened by the fact that the explanation given of 

 the place of conscience in evolution seemed to unprejudiced minds 

 seemed also to that communis sensus which is, after all, the ultimate 

 court of arbitration in these matters on the whole inadequate to 

 account for the phenomenon for which explanation was desired. These 

 persistently averred that they were conscious of something within them 

 wdiich no considerations derived from utility or from social life, or from 

 the transference of external sanctions to the inward individual con- 

 vol. xiii. 33 



