1 68 Conscience. 



between the mind of the lowest man and that of 

 the highest ape is more than a difference of 

 degree. The moral sense, however, he acknowl 

 edges is peculiar to man, and it affords, he main 

 tains, the &quot; best and highest distinction between 

 man and the lower animals.&quot; But even this 

 faculty turns out not to be beyond the genetic 

 power of natural selection. For the awful voice 

 of conscience, which silenced the scepticism of 

 Immanuel Kant and compelled him to a belief 

 in the moral communion of man with a super 

 sensible world that pure reason knows not, 

 seemed to the scientific epigon of British utili 

 tarianism only the articulate utterance of the 

 dumb social instincts of the animal world as, in 

 the evolution of animal intelligence, they have 

 been developed, partly by expression in language, 

 but especially by the ever-deepening conscious 

 ness, inevitable to an advancing intellect, of the 

 greater persistency of social instincts in compari 

 son with all other impulses to action. The so 

 cial instincts of the animal are by the purging 

 rays of ascending intelligence transmuted into a 

 conscience. That sensibility of honor which 

 feels a stain like a wound is only the far-off 

 tremor of a sympathetic chord whereby some an 

 cestral group of animals, in the dissonant strug- 



