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in a battle, and the involuntary migration of that defeated community to a less favored region, then the shame resting on the sinning member would be very heavy, and would no doubt so deeply impress him as to change the structure of his brain, while the effect of his disgrace on the rest of the tribe would be so great as to surely induce many feats of heroism thereafter. These feats would be in answer to the dictates of moral duty, for the individual might frequently perish that the tribe might prosper. There is little doubt but that these feelings would slowly become instinctive.

But why should the brain impel an individual to do one thing now, and afterward wish it had forced its agent to a less pleasant action, thus using what is called moral sense? This natural question Darwin meets in this manner: Let us suppose the member of a tribe to be the inheritor of strong moral instincts. At the same time, he is impelled to other acts by another set of still more despotic impulses. Let these two sets of instincts call on him at one and the same time for action, and it is clear that he can respond to but one set of them. He may be suffering from the pangs of hunger, all his instincts of eating being aroused, and yet the duty which he owes his tribe may forbid the gratification of his desire. For a while, under the force of two impulses, the individual hesitates. Then the pangs of hunger again set in, and the choice falls in favor of following the instinct to eat. The individual eats to repletion, and the instincts which were a short time before so importunate, now exercise no direct power over his Whatever influence of this kind there may exist is caused from the remembrance of how necessary it was to respond to the calls of the instincts of hunger when they were keenest.

acts.

Every one knows that the remembrance of the urgency of an instinct is never retained in the mind, even now-a-days, with any degree of the vividness with which it was really presented to the mind at the moment of its greatest force. Every lover who has written the passionate outpourings of his soul, consecrating his every future act to her whom he loved so earnestly at the moment of inscribing his thoughts on paper,

knows how thoroughly those same sentences will startle him ten years afterward when they again catch his eye. Let him understand ever so well the eagerness of his past affection, still, with the fires of expectation dampened by the fullness of realization, he cannot conceive how he should have "slopped over" to such an amazing extent. His remembrance of the

strength of his instinct of love has faded, and his instincts of dignity and moderation now hold sway.

So with the recusant member of the early community. Having eaten, and retaining but a remembrance of the pangs of hunger, he naturally reflects that he would have satisfied his nature far more thoroughly by doing his duty to his tribe. Here the outlasting instinct holds the reins, and Man thus lays the foundation for the action of the moral sense, which is a slow growth, and even now, as developed among men, has its only logical explanation in the doctrine of gradual develop

ment.

Darwin thus believes that a moral sense would certainly follow a social condition of life, but he believes that the moral sense would vary greatly under differing influences. He believes, for instance, that the moral sense of Man, had he been a Bee, would have consisted in believing that it is right for the unmarried females to kill their brothers in the family, and for the mothers to strive to kill their married daughters, while all of the members of the family would have concurred morally in the consummation of this idea. This would be so, supposing the conditions surrounding Man were such as those surrounding the queen-bees, the worker-bees, and the drones.

The variation of moral sense in the human being as it really exists is quite as striking as that between Bees and Men. In Japan, no matter how heinous may have been the crime of a member of society, a custom has existed for centuries allowing him, if he choose to publicly plough a sword into his entrails, to escape all the odium attaching to a great crime, and the relatives of him who thus commits the admired act of hari-kari, instead of inheriting the disdain of their acquaintances, acquire a certain prestige through their connection with the self-immolated criminal. Again, in the Orient, in past

times, the wife has regularly ascended the pyre of her dead husband, and the moral sense of the community has not revolted at the sight of her agonies. The barbaric Kings of Africa, when they do honor to the white explorer, right here, to-day, dig a trench and fill it full of the bodies of their subjects, and the moral sense of the kingdom moves the whole people to applaud the act. This feeling may have had its foundation in the great necessity which may have existed, at some former epoch, of conciliating the pride of a neighboring nation, and thus averting acts of hostility between whole races, which would have been infinitely more costly, measured either by the sacrifice of greater numbers or of individuals of superior importance to the common safety.

It is, therefore, not difficult to admit that conscience may differ in the highest degree with us, depending for its general cast and character wholly upon the conditions surrounding the brain in which it has its seat.

It is believed that, at one point in the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, probably the greatest man who ever lived, certainly one of the most thoroughly detestable, when he had become imbued with the belief that Fortune had no favors she would not grant at his asking, and when the whole world stood aghast at the colossal power which had already been placed in his hands, he contemplated the fulmination of an entirely new code of morals, placing himself as the judge to say whether a certain act were right or wrong, without reference to the generally-accepted belief of mankind. The consuming fires of ambition in his haughty soul had already anticipated the easy overthrow of the whole material world and leaped upward into the spiritual. He would, with success, have demanded and laid claim to nothing less than the honors and the attributes of a god.

Darwin noticed a migrating Bird which had been confined in a cage follow its instinct to change its habitation at the proper time so pertinaciously as to tear the whole front of its body by beating against the cage. He speculates upon the case of a parent bird which he once saw compelled to abandon its young at the command of the mighty migrating instinct.

All the marks of a painful inward struggle were apparent, and the little one was left with the greatest manifestation of affliction. At the end of this journey of migration the tyrannical instinct which impelled it in the brain of the parent Bird, he believes, has wholly abated, and the parental impulses assuming, with steadier but weaker force, the control of her actions, she reviews her conduct and is dissatisfied with it, thus suffering the pangs of conscience. Of course, the bird cannot "think back," and again see in the mind the parting from her offspring; but, what is exactly equal for the purposes of this argument, she gives way to the one desire to again see her little ones, without perhaps knowing what created the dissatisfaction which she feels in not seeing them.

This would be a case of conscience far down in the scale of life, and would not present the complicated aspect of a martyr dying at the stake for an opinion which is not general among his people. The martyr's moral attributes, to follow the Darwinian idea, nourished by the inheritance of ages, would become enormously developed, and be capable of withstanding the most formidable of the natural instincts tending to self-preservation. Should he transfer the allegiance he owed his community to some unseen higher power, and should he in addition be imbued with a belief that he served the cause of his people best by dying and thus not for a moment obscuring the truth, without which all would perish eternally, it is then possible to trace the moral faculty in Man from the pinnacle which it reaches at the martyr's stake to the very low phases which it exhibits in the joyous scalping of the helpless infant of the common enemy, and the casting out of the lame and the sickly from the tribe or the camp.

Darwin sums up his belief regarding the moral faculty by the observation that Man, in this respect, differs profoundly from the lower animals, but that the reason for this difference is not beclouded with mystery, but can be seen with some degree of clearness. He, therefore, regards the existence of the conscience-principle or instinct in Man, as the certain result of an order of things which has always tended to such actions, on the part of the members of a community of any

kind, as should secure the welfare and security of the greatest number, sacrificing all other things to the maintenance of this one line of conduct. As reason develops and communities coalesce and become more of one particular manner of thinking, the sympathies should also become enlarged, and then a second and neighboring community, instead of furnishing subjects to be scalped, rather participates in the good wishes of the first one. Darwin cannot but see the development of this law in the fact that Man, in his highest state, having already adopted into his sympathies all of his fellow-creatures, extends the mantle of a still higher charity in organized and powerful efforts for the prevention, all over the world, of cruelty to animals.

The Apostle of Evolution, in response to a demand to point out the exact point in the ascending scale of living creatures at which an animal exercises a faculty akin to that which would be termed moral in Man, immediately admits his powerlessness to do so satisfactorily, but, in return, at once. requests his critic to point out the exact moment when an infant, increasing in intellectual strength, first possesses the power of reflecting on its own existence. He will be satisfied with nought but an admission, equally unreserved, of utter inability to so judge of the infant's mental condition at any given

moment.

In the progress of Man by Natural Selection, the part played by the moral faculty as it gradually enlarged will be seen to have been a very important one, and the subject is here dropped as a chief topic of thought, to reappear hereafter as an element in the general theme, where the reader can draw from it conclusions at any length to suit himself.

Man, having arrived at the summit of terrestrial existence, is found to exhibit, as is necessary for this argument, a marvelous degree of variability. If all human beings were alike, and had retained this perfect similarity under the shifting tides of circumstances surrounding them, there would be an immediate end of your Evolution. So it is, that, of the billion of persons inhabiting the earth, no two possess faces quite alike. No two, perhaps, are exactly of the same size and

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