know of no separate and independent organ
called conscience. Man must not be divided against himself. Reason
and feeling enter into all acts of will, since these are not processes
different in kind, but elements of voluntary activity itself and
inseparable from it. It is impossible for a man to be determined in
his actions or judgments by a mere external formula of duty, a
'categorical imperative,' as Kant calls it, apart from motives.
Moreover, all endowments may be regarded as divine gifts, and it is a
precarious position to claim for one faculty a spiritually divine or
supernatural origin which is denied to others. Man is related to God
in his whole nature. The view which regards the law of duty as
something foreign to man, stern and unchangeable in its decrees, and in
nowise dependent upon the gradual development and growing content of
the moral life is not consistent either with history or psychology.

2. _Evolutionalism_, which since the time of Darwin has been applied
by Spencer and others to account for the growth of our moral ideas,
holds that conscience is the result of a process of development, but
does not limit the process to the life of the individual. It extends
to the experience of the race. While admitting the existence of
conscience as a moral faculty in the rational man of to-day, it holds
that it did not exist in his primitive ancestors. Earlier individuals
accumulated a certain amount of experience and moral knowledge, the
result of which, as a habit or acquired capacity, was handed down to
their successors. From the first man has been a member of society, and
is what he is in virtue of his relation to it. All that makes him man,
all his powers of body and mind, are inherited. His instincts and
desires, which are the springs of action, are themselves the creation
of heredity, association and environment. The individual takes its
shape at every point from its relation to the social organism of which
it is a part. What man really seeks from the earliest is satisfaction.
'No school,' says Mr. Spencer, 'can avoid taking for the ultimate moral
aim a desirable {75} state of feeling.'[6] Prolonged experience of
pleasure in connection with actions which serve social ends has
resulted in certain physiological changes in the brain and nervous
system rendering these actions constant. Thus, according to Spencer,
is begotten conscience.

While acknowledging the service which the evolutionary th