374 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



its action will affect. Step by step, as we advance, more 

 of the past and the future come within the scope of 

 intelligence, and we end at a point where all that has 

 made the race what it is is brought into the account and 

 made to prove what it has in it to be. At this stage the 

 mind of man is first fully self-conscious in the strict 

 sense conscious of its own nature, of the conditions 

 under which it lives and works, of the future to which it 

 may aspire. 



6. But a self-consciousness " of this kind is not attained 

 by scientific theory alone. It rests on a spiritual truth, 

 and must be applied by a moral force. Now moral force 

 is not a method of intellectual development, and spiritual 

 truth cannot be grasped by the intellect unaided. A race 

 devoid of moral feeling could not appreciate its own unity, 

 which is essentially a moral truth. Along with the intel- 

 lectual development of which we have spoken must there- 

 fore go a certain evolution of ethical conceptions which 

 we must attempt briefly to characterise. 



The moral conceptions of men rest in the end on the 

 moral impulses of human nature. This does not always 

 hold of the individual, for the conceptions which a man 

 accepts intellectually and follows more or less involuntarily 

 are in great part worked out for him by society, and im- 

 posed upon him first by his spiritual pastors and masters, 

 and then by the requirements of social life. Thus in 

 ordinary life we are painfully conscious at times of the 

 divorce between moral theory and practice. Nevertheless, 

 if we take human society as a whole, the Aristotelian posi- 

 tion holds true, that the conception of virtue rests on the 

 practice thereof. 1 That is to say, the whole system of 

 moral tradition governing the life of a society is evolved 

 from the practical impulses and feelings at work in the 

 past and in the present. It is from these as they operate 

 on each other, and are reacted upon in turn by the physical 

 conditions of life, that the social system with its complex 

 rights and duties and the moral traditions in which these 



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