whose will righteousness is of necessity identified. How the Hebrew branch of the Semitic family came by this belief (along with other peoples who, however, did not retain it) cannot at present be positively affirmed, but it is of exceeding interest to observe that the earliest idea of the moral will of God is connected with the instinct of self-preservation, to which we have traced the genesis of conscience. What in other races is the voice of tribal opinion condemning murder, is, among the Hebrews, regarded as the voice of God, "who at the hand of every man's brother will require the life of man." In this we see how records, old in themselves, and pointing back to tendencies and traditions lost in the mists of antiquity, identify the primitive rightness with the will of God, by whom first Nature, then man, then the family, then the society, had been established. And thus the will of the Creator has been by degrees definitely set up as the standard of right and wrong to which men must conform, so that the supreme effort of human morality is breathed in the prayer, "Thy will be done." And this accounts for the remarkable fact that the idea of conscience had little or no hold upon the Jewish mind. Modern theology bases religious belief mainly upon a supernatural origin of the conscience and a supernatural revelation as to the conditions of the future life. The Bible, for all practical purposes, has nothing to say about either of them.
To sum up, then, the result of our investigation, the conscience which we now possess is the primitive sense of a rightness due to one's self, resulting from the struggle for existence; extended to others as men entering into the social state perceived a likeness to themselves in their fellows; intensified and sanctioned by the urgent pressure of external law in the political state; becoming a law to itself as men became capable of forming abstract notions; and saved from egoism by the Christian development of the Hebrew monotheism.
Now the truth and adequacy of this statemant may be tested in two ways: Is it conformable to what we know to be true of evolution generally? and is it in harmony with the phenomena presented by the conscience now? It has been impossible to do more than here and there indicate an answer to the second question; but if opportunity offered it would be, I believe, easy to answer it at length by an examination of the operations of conscience in actual practice, and by surveying the conflicting forces, the curious survivals, the metaphysical theories, with which the word conscience is associated. Anyhow, the history of the conscience from an evolutionist point of view remains yet to be written.
But is this theory of its origin in harmony with evolution itself? How far, for instance, are we justified in using such words as "think," "say," "feel," or "law," "idea," and "consciousness," in describing the moral condition of primitive man? To this we must reply that the inchoate tendencies and slowly-deepening impressions which finally culminated in the phenomena described by words like the above, pre-
