108 Trans. Acad. Sci. oj St. Louis. 



purpose of tracing the genesis and growth of this sentiment 

 from the earliest forms of the animal kingdom. With him it 

 is simply to account for *' methodized sympathy." The 

 Association School, under the leadership of such a mind as 

 Alexander Bain, may assume that they have explained it all in 

 his statement: "Whenever an action is associated with dis- 

 approbation and punishment, there grows up in reference to 

 it a state of mind indistinguishable from moral sentiment." 



It is in such a treatise, however, as **Die Entstehung des 

 Gewissens," by Paul Ree, that we have this derivative 

 attitude worked outmost completely. With him it is customs 

 which develop moral feelings rather than moral feelings which 

 develop customs. And the two heavy volumes by Jhering 

 are written more than anything else to refute the position of 

 Lotze, and to establish this main point: '* Nicht die Natur, 

 sondern die Geschichte ist die Urheberin des Sittlichen." 



In sum and substance it means that the preservation of 

 society required that some kind of a moral code should de- 

 velop, and that this code should become fixed in the feelings; 

 and therefore it came. It would not have developed if the 

 individual had not required the existence of society for the 

 sake of the preservation of his own existence. 



This might be considered the attitude of such evolutionists 

 as Guyau, Cliferd, Carneri, Ree, Sutherland and others. In 

 connection with this whole subject of the relation of conscience 

 to evolution, the exciting moment came, however, when Hux- 

 ley, the great biologist and disciple of Darwinism, gave his 

 Romanes Lecture at Oxford on '* Ethics and Evolution," and 

 astonished nearly the whole world of scholars by his assertion 

 that the ethical process and the cosmic process were opposed 

 to each other, and that if we desire the development of the 

 ethical process we must fight the cosmic process at every step 

 of the way. It was the most important utterance, to my 

 mind, in the science of ethics since the publication of *' The 

 Descent of Man," by Darwin. It was an assertion not that 

 conscience had not been evolved, but that it had not come 

 through the '' struggle for existence," or by means of the 

 same law according to which animal organisms had developed. 



