5 i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tinuing to be, before he called the two by the names right and wrong. 

 But as the mere fact that the contrast was there, and always had been 

 there, at the very root of things, produced at once the appropriate feel- 

 ing in the first mind, so did the feeling produce in due time the words 

 in which it is expressed. Take the first and commonest action in the 

 struggle for existence. The meanest creature that lives seeks instinc- 

 tively to escape from its enemy by flight. But man alone can think, as 

 t he flies from his pursuer, with an energy quickened by his knowledge 

 of what death is and means : " All this is unutterably wrong. I have a 

 right to save my life, this thing or creature has no right to take it from 

 me." Such, or something like this, were the first thoughts of the first 

 conscience, the first expression of the conviction that there was a Tight- 

 ness in the world. 



"Whatever else may be urged against this account of the origin of 

 conscience, it seems to me certain that those phenomena, upon which 

 intuitionalists have particularly relied as being beyond the reach of 

 analysis, and therefore of discovery, are fully and precisely accounted 

 for. Take, for instance, the word creation, which men have used be- 

 cause of their feeling that there were things in the world of instanta- 

 neous, and therefore of specially divine, origin a feeling which gave 

 rise to the most sublime utterance of antiquity : " God said, Let there 

 be light, and there was light." Now the poetical beauty and religious 

 truth of such phrases are surely not in the least degree prejudiced by 

 the scientific statement that these "creations" correspond to those 

 critical epochs in the progress of evolution when, by the union or mar- 

 riage of one set of conditions with another, a third is instantaneously, 

 and for the first time, called into being. Such an epoch, resulting in 

 the origin of conscience, was that in which a being conscious of him- 

 self said, or thought, or felt, "I am," and then, confronted with a world 

 of opposing and destructive forces, added, " and I have a right to be." 



So, too, the truth contained in the assertion that conscience is 

 innate, intuitional, and imperative, is seen to be in harmony with the 

 foregoing account of its origin. It is innate in the sense that, though 

 undoubtedly impressed from without during long periods upon man in 

 his animal state y it was not gradually impressed upon him in his intelli- 

 gent state, but was, from the first, part of the mental furniture with 

 which as a rational being he commenced his life upon earth. It is, in 

 short, not a composition, i. e., the result of various tendencies such as 

 pleasure, utility, and the like, but, in the sense explained above, a cre- 

 ation, coeval with man himself, the inheritance of the first human being 

 no less than of the last. 



Again, it is intuitional in the sense that it has a direct necessary and 

 immediate perception of an external something, named Tightness, with 

 which it is correlated. Man, by virtue of his conscience, is obliged to 

 believe that there is right and wrong, just as by virtue of his eye he is 

 obliged to believe there is light and darkness. And this belief exists 



