=5.= These proofs of conscience as a distinct endowment of the human mind are independent of the whole question of the mode of its origin. For they consist of facts, as clear, peculiar, indisputable and irreducible as are the facts that guarantee any particular science whatever. They are capable of verification under perpetual tests, as they have been verified in the consentient experience of mankind in all its normally developed conditions. And the logic of the facts is altogether irrespective of any theory of the mode of the origin of conscience. It is needful that this point should be clearly fixed in mind, especially in view of the wide favor at present shown to the hypothesis of an evolutionary genesis of man. Except in the materialistic and atheistic form of the hypothesis the theory distinctly presents evolution not as the cause, but only as the mode of the creation of man with all his now given endowments. It is, of course, incumbent on the supporters of the hypothesis, in any form whatever, in order to vindicate its scientific claims, to show its competency to account for the existence and action of the moral faculty with its ethical discernment and law. An hypothesis that fails to solve any of the involved phenomena discredits itself, not the facts. So far as the materialistic, non-teleological form of evolutionism is concerned, which proposes matter and force as the full cause and account of man, it is condemned by its own utter inadequacy to explain the genesis of conscience with its moral law, as well as of the other great psychical realities in the nature and life of man. It is helpless before the task. Its only resource is to seek to resolve both the ethical fact and the ethical faculty into illusion. With respect to theistic evolutionism, which stands simply as an hypothesis of the mode of creation by God, the existence of the moral faculty may still be admitted, as having its all-sufficient cause in the divine creative power as the source of all things. If, instead of an immediate creation of man, the idea of his gradual creation from the inferior animal orders be maintained as the actual method of the divine work, then the law of evolution must be regarded as having been adjusted and used for the production of man with the faculty of moral discernment. The teleological principle, everywhere illuminating the structure of organisms and the constitution of life, must, from the first, have guided the development for this enthronement of right in the human personality. Asserting its method of a progressive genesis of conscience, this kind of evolutionism confesses its existence. Whether or not its account is satisfactory is another question, to be decided according to the evidence furnished. It is more than doubtful if it has yet succeeded in making clear the possibility of its origin under the hypothesis. Some serious difficulties have still to be overcome.[14] If