528 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



whose will righteousness is of necessity identified. How the Hebrew 

 oranch of the Semitic family came by this belief (along with other 

 peoples who, however, did not retain it) cannot at present be positively 

 affirmed, but it is of exceeding interest to observe that the earliest idea 

 of the moral will of God is connected with the instinct of self-preser- 

 vation, to which we have traced the genesis of conscience. What in 

 other races is the voice of tribal opinion condemning murder, is, among 

 the Hebrews, regarded as the voice of God, " who at the hand of every 

 man's brother will require the life of man." In this we see how records, 

 old in themselves, and pointing back to tendencies and traditions lost 

 in the mists of antiquity, identify the primitive rightness with the will 

 of God, by whom first Nature, then man, then the family, then the so- 

 ciety, had been established. And thus the will of the Creator has been 

 by degrees definitely set up as the standard of right and wrong to which 

 men must conform, so that the supreme effort of human morality is 

 breathed in the prayer, " Thy will be done." And this accounts for 

 the remarkable fact that the idea of conscience had little or no hold 

 upon the Jewish mind. Modern theology bases religious belief mainly 

 upon a supernatural origin of the conscience and a supernatural revela- 

 tion as to the conditions of the future life. The Bible, for all practical 

 purposes, has nothing to say about either of them. 



To sum up, then, the result of our investigation, the conscience 

 which we now possess is the primitive sense of a rightness due to one's 

 self, resulting from the struggle for existence ; extended to others as 

 men entering into the social state perceived a likeness to themselves in 

 their fellows ; intensified and sanctioned by the urgent pressure of ex- 

 ternal law in the political state ; becoming a law to itself as men be- 

 came capable of forming abstract notions ; and saved from egoism by 

 the Christian development of the Hebrew monotheism. 



Now the truth and adequacy of this statemant may be tested in 

 two ways : Is it conformable to what we know to be true of evolution 

 generally ? and is it in harmony with the phenomena presented by the 

 conscience now ? It has been impossible to do more than here and 

 there indicate an answer to the second question ; but if opportunity 

 offered it would be, I believe, easy to answer it at length by an exami- 

 nation of the operations of conscience in actual practice, and by sur- 

 veying the conflicting forces, the curious survivals, the metaphysical 

 theories, with which the word conscience is associated. Anyhow, the 

 history of the conscience from an evolutionist point of view remains yet 

 to be written. 



But is this theory of its origin in harmony with evolution itself? 

 How far, for instance, are we justified in using such words as " think," 

 "say," "feel," or "law," "idea," and "consciousness," in describing 

 the moral condition of primitive man? To this we must reply that the 

 inchoate tendencies and slowly-deepening impressions which finally 

 culminated in the phenomena described by words like the above, pre- 



