DEONTOLOGY. ; 291 
are interpreted by patent facts which leaveno room for doubt 
what answers should be given. The thought which the 
word animal expresses can find no place within the minds of 
creatures that are animals and nothing more, nor is it possible 
to make them show that they are conscious of humiliating 
incongruity between conditions under which they find them- 
selves in simply taking for their guide an earthly nature, and 
any impulse or impression whatsoever which determines for 
them what is fittimg in their actions and their habits. Of 
that kind of shame which presupposes the capacity for 
aspiration towards a life superior to that of flesh and blood 
they are evidently unsusceptible; and, lacking thus essentially 
the needful stimulus, they cannot become subject to this sort 
of aspiration, no experience can avail to make them pant and 
thirst after a nobler state of bemg than has fallen to their lot. 
But man has in his self-unveiling consciousness, and in the 
sobering discoveries to which it opens up the way, the 
possibility of being raised above the state which he inherits 
as a creature that begins and ends a brief existence in this 
transitory world, and of becoming qualified for life eternal, 
and for the fulfilment of the highest hopes with which the 
Eternal Father, the Gop of the spirits of all Hesh, inspires His 
children. 
That discovery, however, of awaking consciousness, which, 
so long as man remains an animal, is indispensable to spiritual 
restoration, and to due development of spiritual perceptions, 
renders also possible a deeper and a much more perilous fall. 
The kind of consciousness in which, while shameful actions 
are distinctly known as such, the reverential and restraining 
sense of shame is wanting, of necessity tends greatly to 
accelerate the process of corruption in the soul. So far as it 
co-operates with sensuality, more mischief is effected than the 
degradation of mere psychic tendencies, and the habitual 
animalisation of the human ethos as a whole: a certain 
pleasurable consciousness is what impresses a. specific 
character upon the preference for moral evil, adding to 
animalistic pleasure, pure and simple, a peculiar zest, account- 
ing thus for the depravity which shows a morbid taste for 
such things as are base, impure, unseemly, morally repulsive, 
and therefore unmistak: ibly betraying spiritual wickedness. 
A wisdom which is earthly (émiyevos) and animal (auyexn) 
cannot but be demoniacal (da:uorimdys). (James i, 15.) 
Hence, in the eyes of those by whom this taste has been 
acquired, to be innocent is to be unknowing, uninitiated, green 
and raw. They glory in their shame. 
