The psychic conflict which is specially connected with moral emotion is the conflict of the egoistic and altruistic impulses. When in such a struggle sympathy prevails, we approve as objectively moral and right, but the existence of ethical emotion in determining the dominance of the altruism is not assured. Pity originally overcame hatred without the compulsion of duty. Altruistic impulses contest with egoistic in naïve and simple natures without any appearance of feeling for duty. The origin and nature of morality does not thus seem bound up with the earliest forms of egoistic-altruistic contests, though in later evolution it may come in as reinforcement of the altruistic. We may feel then, not merely like helping a man in distress at the expense of our own comfort, but we feel we ought to help him; the force of a general principle of conduct is felt in the form we term the ethical emotion, yet it is obvious that such a recognition of a general and universal law and such a feeling therefor is far later than the rise of altruism itself. Darwin alludes to the baulking of the social instinct as having special ethical significance. With the social instinct baulked, as with any other, there certainly results distress, but it is by no means made clear that this necessarily involves moral quality. When a savage in a fit of anger slays his pet child, the misery of baulked parental instinct may soon be felt, and he may bitterly regret the deed, but this does not involve moral feeling, a feeling of repentance for the essential wrongfulness of the act. He would regret in the same spirit the destroying his dinner by his own hand. If we say that he is stricken with remorse, we assert conscience violated. Remorse cannot explain conscience, but must be explained by it. Still, morality is not bound up necessarily with sociality. Sociality certainly arises and progresses to a considerable evolution before moral compulsion and the emotion of bare rightness arises to sanction and to stimulate social activities. And if moral emotion is not implied positively in altruism as an outgoing towards others, neither is it implied in the incoming of others upon the individual, either in respect of approbation or disapprobation, or in the more direct and essential way of rewards and penalties. Penalty is at bottom but a species of disadvantage brought to bear on the individual through fear of consequences. The desire to get even—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—and all exacting justice as an equivalence, whether as exacted by the individual or by persons delegated, the officers of justice, is plainly not in its origin and basis the ethical emotion. A system of mutual dues and rights may or may not have the sanction of morality, but they arise in advantage; and the motives which originate penalties and act with reference thereto, are far from being the pure moral emotion, a direct feeling for rightness as rightness.