Excerpt from The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 4: A Monthly Review; July-December, 1878 As usual in questions of this description, philosophy has been made the slave, the Victim, and finally the accomplice of language. The word conscience has come to suggest a kind Of special faculty, not exactly thought and not exactly feeling, which presides over a specific department Of man's being, namely, his moral conduct. Whereas, reduced to its Simplest elements, conscience is merely the power which the mind possesses of discerning rightness. Just as we discern something called beautiful which we must admire, or some thing called pleasurable which we must seek, so do we perceive something right which we must do. And so our specific question comes to this, How did the idea or the fact Of rightness enter into the world? There can, I think, he no doubt that the general tendency of the teaching Of evolution has been to reintroduce into philosophy the idea that such things as virtue, goodness, happiness, right, are absolute and fixed quantities, formed for man and not by him, existing independently of him, and therefore the same to all men in all circumstances. They are realised by the complete and harmonious adjustment of the self-conscious ego to the circumstances out of which it came and by which it is surrounded. Can, then, evolution help us to perceive how the idea of there being such a thing as absolute fixed rightness came into the world? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.