Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/385

 THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIENCE 369

On the whole, taking, it as a fact of history over the last twenty-five hundred or three thousand years, we have reason to believe that with the growth of intelligence there has been an advance on the conscience side as well as on the side of the sympathies. And I fail to see how natural selection, acting by itself as a law of evolution, should necessarily work out such a result. The final statement of ethical philosophy has been that every man should be treated as an end in himself. This we take to be the culmination in the evolution of conscience or moral sense ; and I cannot conceive how any of those tendencies which have been at work evolving life for the last ten million years should ever have led to such a conception. It establishes a new standard in the survival of the fittest, from what has been the standard up to the appearance of the human race.

At the last stage, when sympathy extends to man as man, there is a new ideal element appearing, suggestive of something more than sympathy. It is a spiritual law. Adding up units of sympathy will not necessarily give us the recognition of man as an end in himself, as a law of conscience, any more than adding up what we know about the various elements in chemistry will give us the new features appearing in the compound when those elements are brought together. The appearance of sympathy and the expansion of the circle to which it applies may be a necessary step in the process, but this does not imply that the new factor is the same thing as sympathy.

If all that we are today has been a product of the struggle for existence in the animal kingdom, then I fail to see why it is that the standpoint of Nietzsche should not have received a spontaneous and universal welcome as soon as it was put forth. Conscience is in the way, and we should get rid of it. This is precisely the attitude we should expect would have appeared, according to the doctrine of natural selection. Why is it, then, that this standpoint should affect many of us with positive loath- ing or disgust ? We say : This will do very well for a brute, but not for man. How is it that we should have any such feeling ? Natural selection fails to account for the fact that somehow, in spite of ourselves, we admire the standpoint of the Sermon on the