being better nourished, were finally changed into men.  Whether this theory is ancient or modern, it is eminently Chinese, and it shows the natural tendency of men to ascribe the germs of life to spontaneous generation, because they fail to see the Great First Cause who produces them.  The one thing which is noticeable in nearly all human systems of religion and philosophy, is that they have no clear and distinct idea of creatorship.  They are systems of evolution; in one way or another they represent the world as having grown.  Generally they assume the eternity of matter, and often they are found to regard the present cosmos as only a certain stage in an endless circle of changes from life to death and from death to life.  The world rebuilds itself from the wreck and debris of former worlds.  It is quite consistent with many of these systems that there should be gods, but as a rule they recognize no God.  While all races of men have shown traces of a belief in a Supreme Creator and Ruler far above their inferior deities, yet their philosophers, if they had any, have sooner or later bowed Him out.

2.  Most systems of philosophic speculation, ancient and modern, tend to weaken the sense of moral accountability.  First, the atomic theory, which we have just considered, leads to this result by the molecular, and therefore purely physical, origin which it assigns to moral acts and conditions.  We have already alluded to Herbert Spencer’s theory of intuition.  In the “Data of Ethics,” page 123, he says:  “I believe that the experiences of utility, organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding nervous modifications, which by continued transmission and accumulation have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition, certain emotions corresponding to right and wrong conduct which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility.”

It appears from this statement that, so far as we are concerned, our moral intuitions are the results of “nervous modifications,” if not in ourselves, at least in our ancestors, so that the controlling influence which rules, and which ought to rule, our conduct is a nervous, and therefore a physical, condition which we have inherited.  It follows, therefore, that every man’s conscience or inherited moral sense is bound by a necessity of his physical constitution.  And if this be so, why is there not a wide door here opened for theories of moral insanity, which might come at length to cast their shield over all forms and grades of crime?  It is easy to see that, whatever theory of creation may be admitted as to the origin of the human soul, this hypothesis rules out the idea of an original moral likeness of the human spirit to a Supreme Moral Ruler of the universe, in whom righteousness dwells as an eternal principle; and it finds no higher source for what we call conscience than the accumulated experience of our ancestors.