[160] "The Science of Ethics," pp. 91, 92.
[161] Ibid., p. 432. The italics are mine.
[162] Ibid., pp. 72, 73.
[163] P. 121.
[164] See above, p. 400.
CHAPTER VI.
CONSCIENCE
The exact circumstances which led, in any particular line of descent, to the final production of self-conscious altruism we cannot know. We may, perhaps, as has been hinted, trace the whole development to the original union of the sexes in lower, asexual species, and of mother and offspring; and we may suppose the final self-conscious altruism to have been led up to gradually by habit, in any case, the history of all function being gradual evolution. Thus we may suppose it possible that, in some cases, the care of offspring may have been preceded by a habit of care, on the part of the female animal, for her eggs, which, as habit, was pleasurable, but was connected with no consciousness of the offspring produced from the eggs until some new circumstance of environment brought them within ken. Of the development of habit in general and of pleasure in it, we have plenty of illustrations in our own individual experience, and we can even watch, in our own case, the process of the increase of altruism along old lines as well as its growth in new directions; and we may thus gain a conception of what must have been the general nature of its earliest development, in any case.