EVERYTHING DERIVED FROM ITS GERM. 1 83 



can fairly be called reason can any longer be dis- 

 tinguished. In the lowest forms of life there is 

 not only no reason, but hardly any feeling, to be 

 detected. It is only by the analogy of the higher 

 forms of life that we ascribe to protoplasm the 

 rudiments of thought and sensation. And what 

 is true of intellectual and sensory consciousness, 

 is still more conspicuous in the case of the moral 

 consciousness. There is no need here to go down 

 into animal life, for we find abundant examples in 

 what must be called human beings of what seems 

 a total absence of all moral feeling. We can all but 

 fix the date of the origin of the moral consciousness, 

 all but see how it differentiated itself out of the 

 other factors of savage life. Of the third result we 

 should obtain an example if by any chance we could 

 witness the creation or coming into being of any- 

 thing. 



§ 8. But let us consider what effect would be 

 produced upon the actual results of evolutionist 

 explanations, if the law of evolution could be really 

 and completely universalized. The first case will 

 evidently not bear universalizing. An evolution 

 which starts with an original datum is no^ com- 

 pletely successful in explaining a thing. On the 

 contrary, it is probable that we should attribute to 

 the original datum the germs at least of all the 

 qualities of the final product, and thereby render 

 the whole explanation illusory. For if we have 

 already got in the original germ all the differences 

 and difficulties we detect in the final product, the 

 whole explanation becomes a petitio principii, and 

 merely unfolds what we have taken care to put into 

 the thing beforehand. 



Neither can the second case be universalized. 



