1876.] 
Conscience in Animals . 
149 
It is evident that conscience, as we find it in ourselves, is 
distinct from love of approbation and fear of disapprobation. 
Nevertheless, if our hypothesis concerning the development 
of the moral sense is the true one, we should expeCt that 
during the early phases of that development love of appro- 
bation and fear of disapprobation should have played a large 
part in the formation of conscience. For although, by the 
hypothesis, it is sympathy and not self-love that constitutes 
the seat of the moral sense, still the particular manifesta- 
tions of self-love with which we are now concerned — viz., 
desire of approbation and dislike of the reverse — would 
clearly be impossible but for the presence of sympathy. 
“ Mr. Bain has clearly shown that the love of praise, and 
the strong feeling of glory, and the still stronger horror of 
scorn and infamy, ‘ are due to the workings of sympathy.’ ”* 
I think, therefore, that in testing — by observations upon the 
lower animals — the truth of Mr. Darwin’s theory concerning 
the genesis of conscience, it would be no valid objection to 
any satisfactory instances of conscientious aCtion in an 
animal to say that such aCtion is partly due to a desire of 
praise or a fear of blame. This would be no valid objection, 
because, in the first place, it would in most cases be impos- 
sible to say how far the implication is true — how far the 
animal may have aCted from pure sympathy or regard for 
the feelings of others, and how far from an admixture of 
sympathy with self-love ; and in the next place, even if the 
implication be conceded wholly true, it would not tend to 
disprove the theory in question. If an animal’s sympathies 
are so powerful that, even after being reflected through self- 
love, they still retain force enough to prompt a course of 
aCtion which is in direCt opposition to the more immediate 
dictates of self-love, then the sympathies of such an animal 
are hereby proved to be sufficiently exalted to constitute the 
beginnings of a conscience, supposing the theory which we 
are testing to be the true one. 
Similarly, there is an obvious distinction in ourselves be- 
tween injured conscience and injured pride. But if conscience 
has been developed in the way here supposed, it follows that 
in the rudimentary stages of such development the distinc- 
tion in question cannot be so well defined. Pride presup- 
poses consideration for the opinion of others, and this in 
turn — as we have just seen — presupposes sympathy, which 
is the foundation-stone of conscience. Now it is certain 
that long before we reach, in the ascending scale of animal 
psychology, intellectual faculties sufficiently exalted to admit 
* Descent of Man, p. 109 (1874). Mental and Moral Science, p. 254 (i868) a 
