THE E VOL UTION OF CONSCIENCE 377
it takes a long while to bring public sentiment or the social conscience back to the same position it held before.
The final stage, however, in the evolution of the moral sense carries us a long distance from its starting-point. It strikes me as perplexing that, when speaking of moral conduct, this is assumed to apply only to relations between one and another person. Many people would fancy that morality has no meaning save as it refers to conduct between human creatures in their relations to each other. In telling the story of morality, its growth or evolution, it is usual to describe how respect for rights took shape, and to what extent men refrained from murder, stealing, or telling lies ; as if lying, stealing, or murder practically made up the whole of what we call bad conduct, against which the ethical sense is supposed to set itself. In a word, the evolution of conscience is often supposed to be only another name for the evolution of what is termed altruism, fellow-feeling, mutual good- will, and the conduct which flows from such good-will. In dis- cussing the origin of morality, we are supposed to try to explain why man is not wholly a selfish being, or how it is to be accounted for that unselfishness got root in human nature. If we can account for this, it is often assumed that we have covered the whole subject.
But this is only half the story. The last phase in the evolu- tion of conscience is of another kind. We have built only half our bridges by sketching out the growth of altruistic sentiment and the recognition of the commands of the decalogue. Con- science at its highest stage would seem to take on a form of egoism instead of altruism, although of a peculiar kind. It would by no means be the same egoism which prevailed at the start, when the sympathies were first getting shape and fellow-feeling was arising. It would not mean the brute self- assertiveness, the struggle of might to conquer and absorb everything for one's self.
We must take into account that the soul or the spiritual life changes as the human creature goes on advancing, and as he is gradually emancipated from the social tissue or the social con- sciousness. When self-conscious personality arises, the experi-
