we do not do so, is a question we shall discuss lower down. But first (the only one of many difficulties we can notice) there forces itself on us the problem, ‘How is the non-moral to pass into the moral?’ Apart from the question how the self-feeling, with its merely objective consciousness, passes into consciousness of self as an object, how is the genesis of the moral consciousness explicable? Have we not fallen into a vicious circle? do we not require knowledge of good as a prius for the knowledge of evil, and knowledge of evil as a prius for the knowledge of good? How is any beginning of morality possible?
We answer, in the first place, that there can be no priority in time, on the one hand or the other. The one side is implicated in the very meaning of the other; and it is one and the same act which gives the knowledge of both alike. Secondly, in answer to the difficulty of the origin of this double knowledge, we say that we do not pretend to trace the exact steps of the process, but that it consists in the gradually increasing specification of the two sides, one against the other, resulting in the increasing performance of actions improperly and relatively good and bad, until at last the two sides come at once to light as two contradictory wills in the self. Let us try to make this clearer.
No one, I believe, can remember the beginning of his moral perceptions, though no doubt a man may think he does so; but the beginning is probably something of this sort. After the good and bad selves are developed unconsciously by habit, the child does some evil act, and, after the performance, the felt pain of collision, however aroused, causes reflection. It is now seen that the act is opposed to good, and in that perceived contradiction the two wills come to light as contradictories, and, on occasion of the next temptation, the idea of the two opposing sides is present and qualifies the present opposing desires; and so the ensuing volition is done with consciousness of goodness or badness. We may represent the beginning so, but we can not bring before us the slow growth which has led up to it; any more than we can follow in its details the general evolution of human self-consciousness from the beginnings of mere animal feeling. We are forced to say ‘here you have this, and before only that,’ and may be able to see the nature of the transition; but mentally to reproduce and
