Now it appears to us that, in quite an analogous way, Darwin overlooks or contests the fact that with free moral self-determination something specifically new comes into existence. He certainly discusses the origin of the moral qualities of man more in detail than he does the origin of his intellectual qualities. He derives them, in their first beginnings, from the fixity, transmission and increase of the social impulses and instincts. These, being the basis of the whole moral development, and leading in their more mature form to love and to sympathy, originated by natural selection; and the other moral qualities, such as moral sense and conscience, progressed more by the effect of custom, by the power of reflection, instruction, and religion, than by natural selection. Higher and lower, common and special, permanent and transitory instincts come into collision
with one another. The dissatisfaction of man when any of the lower, special, and transitory instincts have overcome the higher, common and permanent, and the resolution to act differently for the future, is conscience. Darwin considers that one a moral being who is capable of comparing with one another his past and future actions and motives, of approving some of them and of disapproving others; and the fact that man is the only creature who can with certainty be ranked as a moral being is, according to Darwin, the greatest of all differences between man and animals.
Here, again, the whole central point of the investigation as to the origin of man does not lie in the question of the origin of the instincts between which the moral subject, acting in moral self-determination, has to choose. For it is clear that the beginnings of these instincts are also present in the animal world. But the main question is, how did this faculty and necessity of choosing, this conscience and responsibility, this "moral sense," as Darwin calls it, originate? Now to this question we have a plain answer in the before-mentioned utterances of Darwin: It originated not as a product of the social instincts—it only has these instincts for its preceding condition, object and instrument; but it originated as a product of other agencies, which act upon these impulses and instincts, operate with them, choose between them; and as these other agencies Darwin mentions the high development of the intellectual powers. That this is his opinion, we can clearly see from an expression with which he introduces his essay on the origin of "moral sense": "The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that
any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man." These intellectual powers which moral feeling and conscience require at their birth, are certainly, according to Darwin the power to distinguish oneself as subject from one's impulses and instincts, and to choose between them; i.e., self-consciousness. We shall have to admit fully this intimate connection between moral self-determination and self-consciousness; but we must admit, at the same time, that moral self-determination—this new form of activity in which moral activity distinguishes itself from all merely instinctive activity—finds its sufficient explanation in the previous stage of the animal world as little as self-consciousness; and that moral self-determination has the condition and presupposition, but not the cause, of its existence in that which is also found in the previous stage of the animal world. The proof that the origin of moral self-determination finds its sufficient explanation in that which the previous stage of the animal world also has, would appear to have been given by Darwin only when he had succeeded in explaining the origin of self-consciousness from animal intelligence; but that he did not succeed in it, we think we have clearly shown. On the other hand, we willingly admit that the study of the social and all other instincts and impulses which are common to man and animals, and which in man form the object and instrument of his moral activity, has for us the highest interest, inasmuch as the only problem is to explain the conditions and prerequisites of moral self-determination—or, historically speaking, the conditions
and prerequisites of the origin of morally acting beings. Furthermore we have to say here also that condition and prerequisite are not identical with cause, and it is precisely the cause of moral responsibility and of the origin of such morally responsible beings, which has not yet been discovered by the Darwinian theory.
The followers of Darwin enter still less into the discussion of the question as to the origin of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination. Häckel—who, in his "Natural History of Creation" and in his "Anthropogeny," expounds his whole evolution theory in all its antecedent conditions and consequences—has, indeed, much to say of the different faculties of the soul of man and animals. He traces these faculties in the case of man down to the lowest state of the most degraded races, and in the case of animals from the kermes up to the bee, from the lancelet-fish to the dog, ape, elephant and horse; and he also treats of the so-called a priori knowledge which "arose only by long-enduring transmission, by inheritance of acquired adaptations of the brain, out of originally empiric or experiential knowledge a posteriori," (Vol. II, 345). But we look in vain in his works for a treatment of the question as to the origin of the Ego—of self-consciousness. Nowhere does he enter into the analysis of the psychological ideas; he only compares the psychical utterances of different creatures, and thinks the whole problem solved when he says: "The mental differences between the most stupid placental animals (for instance, sloths and armadillos) and the most intelligent animals of the same group (for instance dogs and apes) are, at any rate, much more considerable than the differences in the
intellectual life of dogs, apes, and men." Or: "If these brutish parasites are compared with the mentally active and sensitive ants, it will certainly be admitted that the psychical differences between the two are much greater than those between the highest and lowest mammals—between beaked animals, pouched animals and armadillos, on the one hand, and dogs, apes, men, on the other." The fact that in the human individual consciousness and self-consciousness are gradually developed, is to him a proof that in the organic kingdom also consciousness and self-consciousness came into existence gradually, and, indeed, hand-in-hand with the development of the nervous system; and with this result he thinks that he has relieved himself from the task of showing the "how" of the origin of self-consciousness. This becomes clearly evident from a remark about the origin of consciousness, in his "Anthropogeny," where he says that, if DuBois-Reymond had thought that consciousness is developed, he would no longer have held its origin to be a thing beyond the limits of human capacity. Häckel likewise seems to regard the question of the origin of moral self-determination as solved or rejected, if only freedom is denied—which, indeed, is repeatedly done by him.
A similar defect in the treatment of this question by evolutionists we find in the works of Oscar Schmidt, Gustav Jäger, and others. Even Emil DuBois-Reymond, who, in his celebrated and eloquent lecture on "The Limits of the Knowledge of Nature," given before the assembly of scientists at Leipzig, 1872, asserts so energetically that the origin of sensation and consciousness is inexplicable (see next section), seems to
take the origin of self-consciousness for granted, and as needing no further explanation, if only consciousness is once present.
Since, then, the scientists leave us without a sufficient answer to the question respecting the origin of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination, we shall have to turn to the philosophers. Here, indeed, we find rich definitions and genetic analyses, but none that lead us any farther than to the information that consciousness is the necessary condition of self-consciousness; that animal instinct is the necessary antecedent condition of moral self-determination. Yet in the works of these very philosophers who are inclined to a mechanical and "monistic" view of the world, we find that they directly avoid the question as to the origin of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination. As soon as they are led near it, in the course of reasoning in their works, they suddenly turn aside again to the quite different questions of the connection between brain and soul, between physical and psychical, external and internal processes, etc. Evidently they feel that with this question they have arrived at the weak point of their system. That here is a weak point, we clearly see in the case of D. F. Strauss, a leading advocate of modern naturalism, and the greatest philosophic scholar of that school. It is true, in his "Postscript as Preface," as we saw before, he mentions the origin of self-consciousness as one of the points which need special explanation; but he seems to have made this acknowledgment more with the purpose of showing that DuBois-Reymond, in admitting the origin of self-consciousness to be explainable, has no longer any reason to contest the explicability of the