Such profound nonsense cannot lay claim to serious treatment. It is a counterpart to the belief that events in the history of mankind, like war and pestilence, are foretold by heavenly signs such as fiery comets. The stars revolve, the clockwork of the universe continues undisturbed, as though the earth were still uninhabited, as it was when it was a glowing fluid globe or, earlier still, a nebular mass; and this although man's self-esteem be hurt by such a lack of consideration. If we care to call the (so far as we know) unalterable laws, according to which the forces of Nature act and the mechanism of the world works, the Morality of the Universe, that may pass. Only we must in that case clearly realize that we are speaking metaphorically, that we are making use of a poetic simile, that we are anthropomorphically attributing human traits to the universe. Morality is a phenomenon restricted to mankind, or, to be strictly accurate, a phenomenon which occurs only among living beings; for the beginnings of Morality may be traced in creatures of a lower order than man, and it develops simultaneously with the consciousness and the mentality of living beings. Morality is a function of life, dependent upon it, begotten and developed by it, to meet life's needs and serve its interests. The existence of Morality apart from life is as unthinkable as that of hunger, ambition, or gratitude. Morality is a collection of laws and prohibitions which Reason opposes to organic instincts, by means of which the former forces the latter into actions from which they would like to refrain, or prevents them from carrying out that which they yearn to do. The existence of Morality, therefore, presupposes in the first place that of an intelligence sufficiently developed to form a clear idea of something that is still in the future, namely, an image of the consequences resulting from an action. Guided by this inner contemplation of the image of the consequences of an action, Reason decides to carry out or prevent the action. This gives us the lowest plane upon which Morality can occur as the cause of action and of abstention from action. It implies, above all things, foresight, and can therefore only exist in a consciousness which is sufficiently developed to grasp the idea of the future and form a picture of it. This consciousness must be capable of extracting the elements of a conception from memory according to the laws of the association of ideas, and be able to group them logically in a new order. In other words, as long as the mind cannot visualize the past and from it build up a picture of the future, Morality can find no place in it.