It is as if the flow of the stream should create the principle of repression of flowing. The actual attempts of evolutionist writers to construct an ethical view which shall explain the phenomena of conscience and justify its authority, has added further evidence of the difficulty on this point. No such attempts have thus far been satisfactory. But the nature of the conscience, as has already been shown, is properly settled, not by the mode of its origin, but by an examination of its actual psychology and intrinsic powers. If this makes it clear, as it unquestionably does, that it is primarily intellectual and percipient in its function, then any failure of evolution or any other theory to explain its origin must much rather discredit the theory than disprove the nature of the endowment which stands as a fact. But an origin of the conscience by evolution, should it ever be proved, would introduce no trouble at this point in the science of ethics. For the faculty is competent for its office in virtue of what it is, and not by the mode through which the divine creative power worked in its formation. The necessity in the case would be met should the evolutionary mode be shown to be capable of evolving an intellectual endowment high enough in perceptive power to discern the ethical distinctions and bind their obligations on men. CHAPTER V. THE SUPREMACY OF CONSCIENCE. By the supremacy of conscience is meant its right to exercise moral control. It expresses its proper authority. This authority is not to be thought of as original or independent, but as resting on and revealing the absolute authority of God, who has constituted the moral relations of the world and has set the conscience, with its discerning and regulative function, in the human soul. The question involved is not the right of one merely subjective faculty to impose obligation on another faculty or on all the human capacities and powers--one part of the personal self playing the role of sovereign over the other parts. This would be a shallow and misleading notion of this authority. The whole conception of the conscience is theistic, and implies, as it also testifies to, an absolute law of righteousness over all the world, established by Him who is creator and sovereign of all. It is in the discernment of this principle of rightness, with its demand for obedience to it, that the conscience comes into its position of authority and its authority becomes _de jure_ supreme. =1.= But the proof that such authority rightly belongs to it needs to be more fully exhibited. It is explained and made unquestionable in the following facts: ==Its Sphere of Judgments.==