CONSCIENCE IN ANIMALS. 81 



analytically, to the satisfaction of all competent and impartial thinkers, 

 that the moral sense is rooted in " the greatest amount of happiness 

 principle" as its sustaining source. In other words, John Stuart Mill, 

 by examining conscience as he found it to exist in man, showed that 

 it depends upon the very principle upon which it ought to depend, 

 supposing Mr. Darwin's theory elaborated, be it remembered, with- 

 out any reference to Mr. Mill's analysis, and arrived at by a totally 

 different line of inquiry concerning the causes of its evolution to be 

 the true one. 



Stronger evidence, then, as to the physical causes whose operation 

 has brought human conscience into being, we could scarcely expect, 

 in the present condition of physical science, to possess. It is unneces- 

 sary, however, in this place to enter into the details of this evidence, 

 as almost every educated person must be more or less acquainted 

 with them. I shall therefore pass on to the next point which con- 

 cerns us namely, supposing the causes of our moral sense to have 

 had their origin in the social instincts, where and to what extent 

 should we expect to find indications of an incipient moral sense in 

 animals? First, then, what do we mean by conscience? We mean 

 that faculty of our minds which renders possible remorse or satisfac- 

 tion for past conduct, which has been respectively injurious or bene- 

 ficial to others. 1 This, at least, is what I conceive conscience to be in 

 its last resort. No doubt, as we find it in actual operation, the faculty 

 in question has reference to ideas of a higher abstraction than that of 

 the fellow-man whom we have injured or benefited. In most cases 

 the moral sense has reference to the volitions of a Deity, and in others 

 to the human race considered as a whole. But, if the moral sense has 

 been developed in the way here supposed, its root-principle must be 

 that which has reference to ideas of no higher abstraction than those 

 of parent, neighbor, or tribe. Now, even in this its most rudimentary 

 phase of development, conscience presupposes a comparatively high 

 order of intelligence as the prime condition of its possibility. For 

 not only does the faculty as above defined require a good memory as 

 a condition essential to its existence, but what is of much greater 

 importance it also requires the power of reflecting upon past con- 

 duct ; and this, it is needless to say, appears to be a much rarer 

 quality in the psychology of animals than is mere memory. 



Thus, if Mr. Darwin's theory concerning the origin and develop- 

 ment of the moral sense is true, we should not expect to find any in- 

 dications of this faculty in any animals that are too low in the psy- 

 chological scale to be capable of reflecting upon their past conduct. 

 Whether this limitation does not exclude all animals whatever is a 

 question with which I am not here concerned. I merely assert that, 

 if the theory in question is the true one, and if no animals are capable 



1 For reasons which may easily be gathered from the next succeeding sentences, I 

 omit conscientious ideas of what is due to self. 

 vol. ix. 6 



