ssion among many,
ever got itself unified and synthesized into the form of "impression"
at all.

In other words the problem is not how the attributes of the soul
arose from the chemistry of the brain and the nerves; but how the
brain and the nerves together with the whole stream of material
phenomena from the star-dust upwards, ever got themselves unified
and focussed into any sort of intelligibility or system. The average
human mind which feels a shock of distrust and suspicion directly
we suggest that the thing we name "conscience," defined as the
power of response to the ideal vision, is an inalienable aspect of
what we call "the soul" wherever the soul exists, feels no sort of
shock or surprise when we appeal to its own "conscience," or when
it appeals to the "conscience" of its child or its dog or even of its
cat, or when it displays anger with its trees or its flowers for
their apparent wilfulness and errancy.

Kant found in the moral sense of humanity his door of escape from
the fatal relativity of pure reason with its confounding antinomies.
Huxley found in the moral sense of humanity a mysterious,
unrelated phenomenon that refused to fall into line with the rest of
the evolutionary-stream. But when, in one hold act of faith or of
imagination, we project the content of our own individual soul into
the circle of every other possible "soul," including the "souls" of
such phenomenal vortices of matter as those from which historic
evolution takes its start, this impossible gulf or "lacuna" dividing
the human scene from all previous "scenes" is immediately bridged;
and the whole stream of material sense-impression flows forward, in
parallel and consonant congruity, with the underlying creative
energy of all the complex visions of which it is the expression.

Therefore, there is no need for us, in our consideration of the basic
attribute of the soul which we call conscience, to tease ourselves
with the fabulous image of some prehistoric "cave-man" supposedly
devoid of such a sense. To do this is to employ a trick of the
isolated reason quite alien from our real human imagination.

Our own personality is so constructed that it is impossible for us to
realize with any sort of intelligent sympathy what the feelings of
this conscience-less cave-man would be. To contemplate his
existence at all we have to resort to pure rationalistic speculation.
We have to leave our actual human experience completely behind.
But the