Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/381

 THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIENCE 365

has come ; it is evolving now, rather than completely evolved. There is more conscience in the average citizen of this country today, by a great deal, than was manifest in the average citizen of Athens two thousand years ago. It is still in one way com- paratively feeble, in contrast with what we may expect it to become by and by.

The stories which have come home to us from travelers among savage races, telling us of the moral state of such people, are anything but pleasing or suggestive of a developed ethical sense. And it is such facts which have upset the old theories with regard to a moral sense. If it had not been for this new stand- point of evolution, ethical philosophy would have come to a standstill, or the whole doctrine of conscience would perhaps have been abandoned in despair.

I believe it is true that the moral sense starts in the feelings. But one clue to the confusion prevailing on the subject lies in the fact that people have not understood or appreciated that real conscience, in the truest sense of the word, does not come until self-conscious, independent personality appears. Until this later phase in soul-life develops, moral sense is sporadic ; hardly, in the strict meaning of the word, a moral sense at all.

At the start it is a story of the rise of what we may term scruples. We can faintly conceive of animals having scruples, as we understand the word. The dog, for instance, may get it into his consciousness somehow that he must not take food from the table, even if he is left in a room alone. Yet with such creatures it is a sense of indefinite fear bred into them, rather than a picture of the act and its consequences rising before them. When the dog overcomes the fear, swallows the food, and then cringes seemingly in shame, I fancy that what develops in his consciousness is more an indefinite dread of punishment, taking on only the appearance of a conscience, rather than being the actual scruples I speak of.

But, on the other hand, when a savage, in a fit of violent anger, kills the dog he has been fond of, and which has been fond of him, and then has a gnawing sense of regret, as if wishing he had not done it, in this there may be the dawn