eory has done
in calling attention to the place and function of experience and social
environment in the development of the moral life, and in showing that
moral judgment, like every other capacity, must participate in the
gradual unfolding of personality, as a conclusive explanation of
conscience it must be pronounced insufficient. Press the analysis of
sensation as far back as we please, and make an analysis of instincts
and feelings as detailed as possible, we never get in man a mere
sensation, as we find it in the lower animal; it is always sensation
related to, and modified by, a self. In the simplest human instincts
there is always a spiritual element which is the basis of the
possibility at once of knowledge and morality. 'That countless
generations,' says Green, 'should have passed during which a
transmitted organism was progressively modified by reaction on its
surroundings, by struggle for existence or otherwise, till its
functions became such that an eternal consciousness could realise or
produce itself through them--might add to the wonder with which the
consideration of what we do and are must always fill us, but it could
not alter the results of that consideration.'[7]

No process of evolution, even though it draws upon illimitable ages,
can evolve what was not already present in the form of a spiritual
potency. The empiric treatment of conscience as the result of social
environment and culture leads inevitably back to the assumption of some
rudimentary moral consciousness without which the development of a
moral sense would be an impossibility. The history of mankind,
moreover, shows that conscience, so far from being merely the reflex of
the prevailing customs and institutions of a particular age, has
frequently {76} closed its special character by reacting upon and
protesting against the recognised traditions of society. The
individual conscience has often been in advance of its times; and the
progress of man has been secured as much by the champions of liberty as
by those who conform to accepted customs. In all moral advance there
comes a stage when, in the conflict of habit and principle, conscience
asserts itself, not only in revealing a higher ideal, but in urging men
to seek it.

III. _The Validity and Witness of Conscience_.--It is not, however,
with the origin of conscience, but with its capacities and functions in
its developed state that Ethics is primarily concerned. The beginning