5 i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



by orderly development and natural process of causation, all that is 

 most vital and precious to humanity, all the seeds of man's present and 

 eternal future, came into existence ; but none the less is the darkness 

 so great that even the imagination refuses to move from its place. The 

 surrounding objects are there if the light would but dawn so as to ena- 

 ble us to see them. It is very necessary to remind ourselves of this, 

 lest we seem to be expressing ourselves with too much certainty in 

 doubtful matters. But however necessary this may be when we are 

 dealing with many other questions respecting the origin of man, it is, I 

 firmly believe, by no means so necessary in our present investigation. 

 That phenomenon, called conscience, which seemed at first sight the 

 most likely to resist analysis by way of evolution, proves upon experi- 

 ment to yield most readily to it. 



As usual in questions of this description, philosophy has been made 

 the slave, the victim, and finally the accomplice of language. The word 

 conscience has come to suggest a kind of special faculty, not exactly 

 thought and not exactly feeling, which presides over a specific depart- 

 ment of man's being, namely, his moral conduct. Whereas, reduced to 

 its simplest elements, conscience is merely the power which the mind 

 possesses of discerning rightness. Just as we discern something called 

 beautiful which we must admire, or something called pleasurable which 

 we must seek, so do we perceive something right which we must do. 

 And so our specific question comes to this, " How did the idea or the fact 

 of rightness enter into the world ? " 



There can, I think, be no doubt that the general tendency of the 

 teaching of evolution has been to reintroduce into philosophy the idea 

 that such things as virtue, goodness, happiness, right, are absolute and 

 fixed quantities, formed for man and not by him, existing independently 

 of him, and therefore the same to all men in all circumstances. They 

 are realized by the complete and harmonious adjustment of the self-con- 

 scious ego to the circumstances out of which it came and by which it is 

 surrounded. Can, then, evolution help us to perceive how the idea of 

 there being such a thing as absolute fixed rightness came into the world ? 



Let us transfer ourselves in thought as far back as the time when 

 the origin of man took place, and let us imagine a being slowly or sud- 

 denly arriving at the stage of self-conscious existence. For our present 

 purpose it matters little whether we attribute this to a gradual progress, 

 or (what is surely possible) to a sudden but natural leap in evolution, 

 or to a special act of creation adapting itself to materials already at 

 its disposal. (I mention this last alternative merely to show that this 

 theory of the origin of conscience does not conflict with any reasonable 

 hypothesis as to the origin of man.) Now this Being owed his origin 

 to the law or process of natural selection. He had been cradled, so to 

 speak, under conditions which prescribed a continual struggle for ex- 

 istence, and which permitted only the strongest and fittest to survive 

 and multiply. His " conduct " up to the moment or epoch when it be- 



