DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE. 120 



as great a mystery as what we call life. Even on 

 his theory, however, conscience must have been in- 

 volved in the original capacities of the first living 

 matter out of which, according to Darwinism, all 

 animal forms have been evolved. You may be an 

 evolutionist of an extreme type, — I will not say of 

 the extremest or materialistic sort, — and yet you 

 may hold that conscience is in the constitution drawn 

 up in the cabin of " The Mayflower " before the ship 

 landed ; and I, for one, shall have no great quarrel 

 with you, if that is the form of your evolutionistic 

 philosophy. But Darwin has put forth a special the- 

 ory of conscience. He has endeavored to show how 

 the moral sense; as it exists in man, may have been 

 developed exclusively from the faculties possessed by 

 animals. He makes conscience only another name 

 for the operation of the social instincts conjoined 

 with the intellectual powers. 



Whenever an instinct is not satisfied, a feeling of 

 unrest arises. If, for instance, the desire for food is 

 not satisfied, we are left in unrest. Every instinct 

 has a pleasure connected with its gratification, and a 

 pain in the absence of its proper food. Just so the 

 social instincts have pain behind them when they are 

 not gratified. Darwin's central proposition in his 

 discussion of the moral sense (Descent of 3fan, vol. i. 

 chap, iii.) is, that he thinks it " in a high degree 

 probable that any animal whatever, endowed with 

 well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire 

 a moral sense or conscience as soon as its intellectual 

 powers had become as well developed, or nearly as 



