DEONTOLOGY. 287 
betokening depravity, for ii is the form the moral sense must 
needs assume in its most rudimentary phase; and little else 
of ethical significance can be discovered in the opening mind 
of early childhood, or, in fact, until development admits of 
intellectual distinctness in perceptions of a spiritual kind. 
But with strictly scientific propriety it may be affirmed 
that spiritual things are spiritually discerned ; and therefore, 
seeing that in that process of ethical development which 
differentiates our true humanity alongside the progressive 
manifestation of merely psychic attributes, the authority 
apprehended is spiritual, this epithet, if applied to the 
susceptibility which is presupposed, declares its nature, and 
suggests that the specifically human sense of duty should be 
called a pnewnatic rather than a psychic affection, at the same 
time leaving it to be assumed that, through the medium of 
the psychic sense, the indications of the pneumatic gather 
more or less of colour and complexion. ‘The distinction I am 
pointing out does not necessitate the notion that the imma- 
terial principle, which through all changes constitutes a man, 
is not in theory an indivisible personality, but made up of a 
spirit (7vedwa) and a soul (vy); I am simply using terms 
respectively appropriate to certain sensible affections that are 
plainly diverse in regard to nature, and incapable of adequate 
description otherwise than by the help of words which thus 
essentially distinguish them. Accordingly, if I am justified 
in thus discriminating them, that is to say, if the distinction 
which necessitates a difference in denotation is essential in 
reality, we are of course precluded from admitting that the 
Psychic may become through evolution the Pneumatic, 
consequently from expecting to be able to detect in any 
actions of the most advanced among the lower animals the 
merest rudimentary development or promise of that sense of 
duty which is indispensable to a conception of the funda- 
mental principles of Deontology. _ 
In sketching out what seems to me to be the line along 
which we may trace a certain evolution of this human sense 
of duty, I shall avail myself of a familiar illustration to be 
found in Holy Scripture; not, however, as requiring for 
the basis of my argument events on record, or divinely 
sanctioned utterances, but just because I neither know nor 
can imagine any other illustration so exactly pertinent, so 
carefully adapted to prevent all misconceptions as to the 
fundamental truth to which it is apparently intended to give 
prominence, so vividly, yet so comprehensively, precise, in 
short so luminous and so profound. 
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