Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/666

648. Is not this lack rather a return to normal conditions by the removal of that favorable environment which holds in check the lower instincts, and helps to develop the higher capabilities, of man's nature? Is not that juvenile monstrosity Pomeroy a sort of moral atavism? In short, did the primitive man have a conscience?

And, lest the mere question should shock some good people, let it be premised that the foundations of the Christian religion do not rest upon a belief or disbelief in an innate conscience any more than the popular fallacy of an innate and universal idea of God is a necessary tenet of orthodox faith. These theories form no essential part of religion. They are simply some of the outposts which theologians and schoolmen have erected to strengthen, as they imagine, the citadel of Biblical truth, but forming no part of the citadel itself. These needless defenses have been multiplied in the course of centuries till the thing defended has sometimes been lost sight of. The Fathers have usurped the authority of the Apostles; ancient interpretation ranks revelation. Milton has come to substitute Moses to that degree that so learned a man as Professor Huxley has considered it worth his while to apply the tests of a scientist to the visions of a poet. It must be confessed that time and tradition have lent a sanctity to many articles of popular creed that have little authority in Holy Writ, and the so called conflict between Science and Religion will have served no ill purpose if in its heat the rubbish of ages is burned away. In this conflict man's fictions may suffer—God's truth, never.

In the language of theology the conscience is a separate and distinct faculty of the mind—a sort of Supreme Court to which all cases involving the principles of right and wrong are immediately referred for adjudication and intuitively settled. It is generally asserted that this faculty is congenital—chief justice by birth and divine right. I believe, on the contrary, that this mind faculty is not innate, but, if it exists at all, it is born of the other faculties, is educated to its functions, and, like the late Electoral Commission, reflects its training in all its decisions.

A conscience to justify the popular notions of its origin and authority ought to be infallible, and must be universal. If this faculty is an innate and essential part of man's being, it should be in every man, and exercise its functions everywhere. It is admitted that isolated and sporadic cases of deficient moral sensibility do not authorize the logical conclusion that there is no such thing as conscience, any more than the inmates of a blind-school prove that there is no such thing as sight; but if there are found whole tribes of people who not only lack all evidence of a conscience, but whose language has no words to express moral distinctions or ideas of right and wrong; if, in addition, we find that where higher races give evidence in language and life that they have certain moral perceptions, yet that the decisions of conscience always follow local tradition and custom—it seems a fair