SCIENCE AND ITS ACCUSERS. 377 



he disapproves ? It no more occurs to us to think that the Deity 

 has specially enlightened him on the point in question, than it 

 occurs to him to pay our conscientious conviction a similar com- 

 pliment. We get over the difficulty, not improbably, by hinting 

 that he is a " crank,'' and the same mode of escape is open to him 

 in relation to us. The criticism of conscience, as Miss Cobbe must 

 well know, antedates Darwin by at least three centuries. The 

 philosopher whose motto was " Que sais-je ?" expounded its weak- 

 nesses more fully than Darwin ever did; and Locke defines it 

 very briefly as " our own opinion of the moral rectitude or prav- 

 ity of our own actions." Dugald Stewart shows that the senti- 

 ment of the sacredness of property varies from country to coun- 

 try, according to the amount of labor requisite to produce articles 

 of value ; and that in other respects local accidents decide to a 

 great extent the form that moral opinion takes. Hartley ex- 

 plained the phenomena of conscience by association ; and, since 

 his day, to go no further back, the idea of conscience as a special 

 organ uttering the voice of the Deity has been weakening among 

 thinking men. The evolutionists of to-day have simply suc- 

 ceeded in giving a wider basis to views that were in the world 

 long before their time; but to say that they have in any way 

 lowered the dignity of man's moral nature is to state what is not 

 the case. Miss Cobbe is pleased to suggest that the old ideas gave 

 a basis for moral effort " as firm as the law of the universe itself " ; 

 but that henceforth our only fulcrum will be " the sand-heap of 

 hereditary experiences." If anything could less deserve the des- 

 ignation of " sand-heap " than our accumulated hereditary expe- 

 riences, we should like to know what it is. In the case of the 

 sand-heap there is an utter lack of cohesion ; in the case of heredi- 

 tary experiences cohesion is of their very nature. Miss Cobbe 

 understands this perfectly ; it is a pity she should have written as 

 though she did not. 



We are very far, therefore, from admitting that " the scientific 

 spirit " has " sprung a mine under the deepest foundations of mo- 

 rality " ; or that it is as impossible for a man who holds the evo- 

 lutionary idea of the origin of conscience "to cherish a great 

 moral ambition as it is for a stream to rise above its source." If, 

 on the one hand, science moderates ambition by keeping before 

 the mind the limits of the possible, on the other it stimulates am- 

 bition by producing the conviction that certain things are not 

 only possible, but certain of attainment if the right means are 

 used. There was a time in the history of science when men were 

 laboring to transmute the baser metals into gold ; that particular 

 ambition has been abandoned with others equally chimerical ; but 

 it surely can not be said that science to-day discourages effort in 

 the field of chemistry ? Precisely so in the moral region : we no 



