THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN EVOLUTION. 523 



We are now in a position to describe how man came by that social 

 modus vivendi which we call utility, and define as all that makes for 

 the continued existence and progressive welfare of the community. 

 Utility is scientifically " the result of the conflict of individual rights, 

 with survival of the fittest.' 1 '' The first right that passed away was the 

 right to kill my neighbor ; the first that survived was the right that my 

 neighbor should not kill me. And to these rights conscience paid an 

 intuitive deference (rendered perhaps all the more striking by the con- 

 trast presented by men's habitual practice) from the moment that the 

 mind conceived the possibility of social relations. Things being as 

 they were, it could not do otherwise. But then this right to one's self 

 soon passes, under the fostering nurture of social life, to mean not 

 merely bare animal existence, but all that conduces to make life 

 happy, free, good, and useful. During the long course of advancing 

 ages, rights are being conceded to the individual or being abandoned 

 by him according as experience shows what is possible and best for 

 human life and happiness. And all the while the conscience plays its 

 part in this upward progress by transferring to any recognized reason- 

 able rightness (alas ! also to a thousand wrongs, which, yet true to its 

 innate origin, the universal conscience persists in regarding as doomed 

 to pass away) the same intuitive deference that it could not help but 

 pay to the first moral inference evolved by the needs and the instincts 

 of social life, " If you have no right to kill me, then have I no right to 

 kill you." 



5. The Political Stage. The earliest and (in a certain sense) most 

 authentic records of the human race represent the murder of a brother 

 as the first crime, the murderer's fear of vengeance as the first idea of 

 punishment, and " Whoso sheddeth man's blood by man shall his blood 

 be shed " as the first effort of criminal law to curb the murderous in- 

 stincts. We have in this a very impressive representation of the next 

 stage in the history of conscience. At first the faint and shadowy idea 

 of my neighbor's right to existence must have been a poor and frail 

 defense indeed against the storms of innate passion, the cruel, selfish 

 lusts, the reckless and savage assaults of men just emerged from the 

 animals and beginning a social life, which, unlike theirs, involved a con- 

 scious sacrifice of the individual's will to the community. But no so- 

 ciety could have lasted for long without there growing up a distinct and 

 profound conviction that the indiscriminate taking of life cut at the 

 root of its own existence. There are many interesting (in a scientific 

 sense) survivals (blood-feuds, for instance, or the cheapness of human 

 life, which invariably accompanies the dissolution of society at revolu- 

 tionary epochs) of this primeval state of man, during which some of the 

 strongest sentiments we possess were engraved upon our mental and 

 moral constitution by the external action of laws and customs. It was 

 now that the voice of the community began to proclaim in no hesitating 

 tones to the individual conscience " Thou shalt not kill," and to take 



