ose of sense-experience--and that is all
the word metaphysic means--it would be absolutely impossible to
formulate a single scientific generalisation. What is the very concept
of law, or system, but a metaphysical idea? To cease to be
metaphysical would be to cease to be rational, to have no higher or
wider conceptions than those of a dog. Hence, like M. Jourdain, who
had been talking prose all his life without knowing it, some of our
most daring anti-metaphysicians have been philosophising by the very
method they had in their ignorance so contemptuously denounced.

Therefore, when we hear from Mr. Spencer that conscience, so far from
being the voice of God, is but "the capitalised instinct of the tribe,"
an empirical fact established by heredity, just like fan-tails in
pigeons; when Mr. Clifford popularises this teaching in St. George's
Hall by announcing that conscience is the voice "of man bidding us to
live for man," and Mr. Leslie Stephen tells us that the Socratic
conception of conscience "is part of an obsolete form of speculation,"
we know precisely what judgment to pass upon their assertions. They
are speaking, one and all, of the historical growth or natural
evolution of that rational faculty in man which they, equally with
their opponents, describe as the conscience. And keeping within those
limits they are strictly accurate in what they say. Who is there that
does not know that time was when the inhabitants of Europe were as
destitute of moral instincts, and therefore of a conscience, as the
Tonga islanders? Who does not know that man, instead of beginning at
the top and tumbling headlong to the bottom, really began at the bottom
and learnt everything by a very severe discipline in the hardest of all
schools, that of experience? Certainly, we are ignorant of none of
those things, and therefore readily assent to Mr. Spencer's teaching
that conscience is not a fixed criterion of morality, but a faculty in
a ceaseless state of transformation, "in a perpetual state of
becoming," that its dicta are, in a certain sense, constantly changing
and improving with the progress and development of the race.
Certainly, as scientists and anthropologists, we should say precisely
the same thing. We should recognise the developed conscience in man as
obedient to the law of growth equally with his physical organisation,
because we know of men now existent in whom the faculty is still in a
very rudimentary state. Every