THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN EVOLUTION. 525 



ercise powerful effect upon the mental and moral modes of thought 

 long before they become articulate in language: " Why am I restricted 

 from doing what I please? Why does law or custom pronounce it 

 wrong to kill one man, right to kill another ? Why would my fellow- 

 men think it right to kill me under certain circumstances ? Why is the 

 law on this and other points so unfair, so irregular, so incomplete, that 

 were I to fashion my conduct by it alone, I should be always doing 

 something of which I did not approve ? Above all, am not I, the unit 

 of which society is composed and for whose benefit it exists, in danger 

 of losing my right to myself and becoming merged in a mere aggregate 

 mass of my fellow-units ? Is right and wrong to be determined for me 

 without effort or remonstrance, or even cooperation of my own?" x 



Now the answer which man has made for himself to such questions 

 is, by common confession, the discovery and the assertion that there is 

 an absolute lightness belonging to society as such, with which individ- 

 ual rights may be harmonized, but which they can never supersede. 

 How did he come to make this discovery and assert it with so unhesi- 

 tating a conviction ? Of justice in the abstract (for this is what we call 

 the social lightness) it is true that primitive man could have no con- 

 ception ; that idea has been generalized from experience. Now we 

 have seen that the first man was dominated by the consciousness of a 

 primitive rightness due to himself. We have seen also that, compelled 

 by the instincts of forming a social life, he extended the same Tightness 

 to individual men like himself. We are now to see that, under the 

 stress of questions such as the above, and strengthened by the growing 

 power of forming general ideas, the mind transferred to society, to Nature, 

 nay, to inanimate matter, the same idea of absolute Tightness which it 

 claimed for itself. Man perceived right everywhere and in all things 

 just as he had done at first then in the simple concrete form of the 

 right to his own existence, 11010 in the highly-abstract form of every- 

 thing having its own right and wrong. At first all Nature is indebted 

 to him, now he is indebted to all Nature. Utility prescribed in what 

 rio-ht and wrong consisted, but did not give the idea of it ; or, to speak 

 more accurately, if we are willing to define utility as that which makes 

 for the existence of anything, then just as utility or the needs of his own 

 existence had suggested to man the idea of primitive Tightness, so did 

 it impress upon him the idea of Tightness as inherent in the constitu- 



1 The relation between the power of law in enforcing rights and the power of con- 

 science in detecting Tightness is well illustrated by a sentence of Sir Henry Maine's, de- 

 scribing the action of English law upon Indian modes of thought: " Unfortunately for us, 

 we have created the sense of legal right before we have created a proportionate power of 

 distinguishing good from evil in the law upon which the legal right depends" ("Village 

 Communities," lect. iii.). I may add that the history of village communities presents a 

 curious illustration of the way in which the conflicting rights of egoism and society were 

 preserved in early times, i. e., by what would now be considered an exaggerated expres- 

 sion of them side by side. See his remarks on the isolation of households and the secrecy 

 of family life, in the fourth lecture. 



