THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN EVOLUTION. 527 



Mr. Herbert Spencer finds the origin of the sense of justice to self in 

 the egoistic sentiment known as the love or instinct of personal free- 

 dom. Carry the analysis one step further back, to the innate demand 

 for personal existence, and, like finding a diamond in a coal-mine, we 

 come upon just that element of absolute, all-pervading, essential light- 

 ness for which we might otherwise search in vain. 



No wonder, then, that men have almost deified the power they 

 possess of discerning right and wrong, to which they owe in the last 

 resort the possession of themselves. But, unhappily, egoism is easily 

 overdone, and egoism, identifying itself with liberty and duty, is liable 

 to all kinds of mischievous exaggerations and delusions. Conscience 

 comes to be regarded as a special faculty instead of being an ordinary 

 operation of thought directed to special objects. It is ascribed to a 

 divine origin and erected into a test of religion and truth. The chief 

 stress of practical exhortation is laid not upon finding out the right, 

 but upon doing what we believe to be right, very often irrespective of 

 advice, common-sense, and obvious consequences. Nay, men go so far 

 as to assign to conscience a sort of lordship or supremacy over them- 

 selves, and so, by a roundabout way, only end at last in doing what they 

 please. Like Arthur, they "reverence their conscience as their king," 

 and, like that excellent but unprosperous monarch, they contrive, with 

 the best intentions in the world, to make a bad business of life. In 

 short, they glorify not the sun which gives the light, but the eye which 

 perceives it, and thus give rise to a reaction against the pretensions, 

 nay, the very existence of conscience, which causes whole volumes of 

 philosophy to be written with barely so much as the mention of its 

 name. To redress the balance, recourse must be had to the good genius 

 of philosophy evolution. 



7. The Religious Stage. I have placed this stage last because the 

 association, much more the identification, of religion with morality 

 comes so late in the history of man, that religion has but little to do 

 with the conscience in its elementary state. Among savages, religion 

 can hardly be called moral at all, although the gods might, on the 

 whole, be believed to be on the side of what the tribe thought to be 

 right subject, however, to the very important qualification that the 

 gods of another tribe held different views. Still, so far as primitive 

 man believed that the gods would visit him with rewards and punish- 

 ments by an exercise of superhuman power, to that extent there was 

 added to the conscience a feeling of responsibility and solemnity togeth- 

 er with an awful imperativeness which must have considerably modified 

 llis moral constitution. Moreover, by calling attention to a will exter- 

 nal to our own, something was done to counteract the egoistic tendency 

 which I have just described. And so it was that morality did not take 

 final refuge in stoicism until religious belief had died away. 



The truth, of course, is that religion can and does become definitely 

 moral when the human mind rises to a belief in one Almighty God with 



