30 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. i 



men into closer relations with their fellows, and 

 increases the importance of the pleasures and pains 

 derived from sympathy. We judge the acts of 

 others by our own sympathies, and we judge our 

 own acts by the sympathies of others, every day 

 and all day long, from childhood upwards, until 

 associations, as indissoluble as those of language, 

 are formed between certain acts and the feelings 

 of approbation or disapprobation. It becomes 

 impossible to imagine some acts without dis- 

 approbation, or others without approbation of 

 the actor, whether he be one's self, or any one else. 

 We come to think in the acquired dialect of morals. 

 An artificial personality, the " man within," as 

 Adam Smith * calls conscience, is built up beside 

 the natural personality. He is the watchman of 

 society, charged to restrain the anti-social ten- 

 dencies of the natural man within the limits 

 required by social welfare. 



XI. 



I have termed this evolution of the feelings 

 out of which the primitive bonds of human 

 society are so largely forged, into the organized 

 and personified sympathy we call conscience, 

 the ethical process, f So far as it tends to 



* " Theory of the Moral Sentiments," Part iii. chap. 3. 

 On the influence and authority of conscience. 



t Worked out, in its essential features, chiefly by 

 Hartley and Adam Smith, long before the modern doc- 

 trine of evolution was thought of. See 2iote below, p. 45. 



