"Unquestionably, when considering the majority of men, it is possible to doubt the reality of the moral idea. The examples we see daily enable the pessimist to ask himself if the chasm between the animal and man is as deep as we thought. The answer is that we are still at the dawn of human evolution, and that, if only one man out of a million were endowed with a conscience, this would suffice to prove that a new degree of liberty had appeared. Many important steps in the hist