an 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 {122} 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 cl