Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/379

 THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIENCE 363

for existence, and the survival of the strongest, as we ordinarily understand those terms, do not explain such approval on our part. They do not account for the fact that any human creature should have uttered such words. In substance, we have what is called a "variation." But the why and wherefore of it we cannot explain. It just came. A variation has set in, leading to a moral sense, conscience, ethical impulses ; and the higher or highest forms of these were not to be anticipated or foretold, so far as we can see, by what had gone before in the earlier stages of evolution.

This, too, would apply to the finest bit of ethical analysis we have, probably, in the world's literature in the chapters from Victor Hugo's Les Miserable*, where the hero Jean Valjean is debating whether he shall give himself up and go back to prison for the sake of saving a miserable, low-down, but innocent creature.

For my own part, I look for a reaction in ethical philosophy from its conciliatory attitude toward the conventional doctrine of evolution. It has yielded too much. For a time it was on the point of surrendering the spiritual element in human nature altogether. The discovery of the earlier stages in the appear- ance of conscience may have led us carelessly into assuming that in its final form it was a form of animal sympathy, only much enlarged. The time has come when we should reassert the fact of the spiritual element in human nature, and the new features which this element introduces.

Does all this mean, then, that evolution has nothing to say with regard to conscience or the moral sense ? On the contrary, until this theory appeared, it has been practically impossible to have any intelligible understanding with regard to what con- science amounted to or what the sense of duty involved. This new standpoint has simply transformed ethical philosophy, just as it has given birth to the social sciences and transformed the science of biology. People have had the fact of conscience before them for a long while. It was talked about in the days of Rome. Men have been aware of it as a part of their spiritual experiences ; but, owing to a lack of a theory of evolution, they have gone utterly astray as to what it meant.