Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap.  IV.  Hobhouse, op. cit, part ii, chaps.  II, VIII.  Westermarck, op. cit, chap.  VII.  Sutherland, op. cit, vol.  II, chaps.  XIX-xxi.  W. G. Sumner, Folkways, chaps.  I, ii, xi.  Sir H. Maine, Village Communities.  C. Darwin, Descent of Man, part I, chap. v.  J. G. Schurman, Ethical Import of Darwinism.  W. I. Thomas, Source Book for Social Origins, part vii.  C. Read, Natural and Social Morals, chap.  VI.  I. King, Development of Religion, chap.  XI.  On the question of moral progress:  Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, pp. 187-92.  W. Bagehot, Physics and Politics, chap.  VI.  H. G. Wells, New Worlds for Old, chap.I, secs. 2-4.  J. Bryce, in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. 100, p. 145.  E. Root, The Citizen’s Part in Government, pp. 96-123.  J. S. Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics (2d ed.), chap.  XV.  A. R. Wallace, Social Environment and Moral Progress.

CHAPTER IV

INWARD DEVELOPMENT—­CONSCIENCE

What are the stages in the history of moral guidance?

There may be said to be five stages in the history of moral guidance:  guidance by instinct, by custom, by law and precept, by conscience, and by insight.  No one of these guides is discarded with the development of the others; we rely today upon all of them in varying degree.  Their evolution overlaps; the alteration of instinct still goes on, changing laws and customs still bring their pressure to bear from without upon the individual; while our conscience and our insight have their roots far back in the past.  Yet the prominence of each of these factors in turn marks a successive stage in the evolution of moral control.  Inherited instinct, and then custom, unconsciously passed on by imitation and to some extent taught with a dimly conscious purpose, shape the crude morality of the animals though the other means of guidance are not wholly absent even in them.  Among savages legal codes, unwritten and perhaps not even clearly formulated, yet exacting and strictly enforced by penalties, come to form an important supplement to instinct, custom, and proverbial wisdom.  But quite as important is the gradual development of an inward guide—­those very various secondary impulses and inhibitions which we hump together because of their common function and call the moral sense or conscience.  We shall now consider briefly the origin of this internal steering-apparatus.  The latest and most mature guide of all, reflective insight, arises in marked degree only when abstraction and analysis.  There is no problem connected with its origin except the general problems of the development of human reason.  How moral insight may be trained and brought to bear upon conduct will, it is hoped, be clear to the student who patiently studies this volume.

Out of what has conscience developed?