370 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
Mount as an ideal, even if we may not practice it. The struggle for existence surely would have tended to develop, if anything, a feeling of contempt on the part of human nature for such an ideal. It is only explainable on the supposition of the existence of a spiritual element in man, which does not exist in the brute.
There comes a time in the development of the subjective life when man begins to see his conduct in its relations. It is no longer wholly a matter of sentiment. He is not acting merely by instinct or habit. He reaches the point where he reflects on his conduct, and may ask himself what will be the influ- ence of his acts on those around him, or on himself. At this point he is at the verge of reaching the conception of law, ethical law. And the strange part of it is that, when he does come to the stage of thought, and sees conduct in such relations, his sagacity does not lead him to cast aside even the scruples he may have had before. At first, what we seem to come upon in the primitive mind is just the faint consciousness of distinction between the two kinds of conduct, the bad and the good, with the most extraor- dinary confusion as to what kind is the good conduct and what kind the bad conduct. The rudimentary distinction shows itself perhaps long before there is any consensus of opinion or feeling in the way it is applied. In fact, what we observe is that cus- tom or conventionality has a great deal to do in determining how this distinction between right and wrong shall be applied; and the story of the evolution of conscience or the moral sense is per- haps less a series of stages of advance in the emphasis on the dis- tinction between right and wrong, than it is a series of changes in the method of its application.
We need only instance the respect for life which exists at the present day. If ever there was a race of advanced intelligence in early times, it was the Greek people. They were much given to debating about good and evil, and to analyzing the experi- ences of conscience. Ethical philosophy began at Athens. Yet those who talked most about conscience, believed in it most fully, giving it such importance, seem to have had no profound respect for life as such. It was usual, for instance, as we know, where a father had more children then he wished, for him to put
