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INTRODUCTORY. What is the field of ethics? Why should we study ethics?

PROBLEMS OF CONDUCT

INTRODUCTORY

What is the field of ethics?

To know what exists, in its stark reality, is the concern of natural science and natural philosophy; to know what matters, is the field of moral philosophy, or ethics. The one group of studies deals with facts simply as facts, the other with their values. Human life is checkered with the sunshine and shadow of good and evil, joy and pain; it is these qualitative differences that make it something more than a meaningless eddy in the cosmic whirl. Natural philosophy , drawing its impartial map of existence, is interesting and important; it informs us about our environment and ourselves, shows us our resources and our powers, what we can do and how to do it. Moral philosophy asks the deeper and more significant question, What SHALL we do? For the momentous fact about life is that it has differences in value, and, more than that, that we can MAKE differences in value. Caught as we are by the irresistible flux of existence, we find ourselves able so to steer our lives as to change the proportion of light and shade, to give greater value to a life that might have had less. This possibility makes our moral problem. What shall we choose and from what refrain? To what aims shall we give our allegiance? What shall we fight for and what against?

For the savage practically all of his activity is determined by his imperative needs, so that there is little opportunity for choice or reflection upon the aims of his life. He must find food, and shelter, and clothing to keep himself warm and dry; he must protect himself from the enemies that menace him, and rest when he is tired. Nor are most of us today far removed from that primitive condition; the moments when we consciously choose and steer our course are few and fleeting. Yet with the development of civilization the elemental burdens are to some extent lifted; men come to have superfluous strength, leisure hours, freedom to do something more than merely earn their living. And further, with the development of intelligence, new ways of fulfilling the necessary tasks suggest themselves, moral problems arise where none were felt before. Men learn that they have not made the most of their opportunities or lived the best possible lives; they have veered this way and that according to the moment's impulse, they have been misled by ingrained habits and paralyzed by inertia, they have wandered at random for lack of a clear vision of their goal. The task of the moralist is to attain such a clear vision; to understand, first, the basis of all preference, and then, in detail, the reasons for preferring this concrete act to that. Here are a thousand impulses and instincts drawing us, with infinite further possibilities suggesting themselves to reflection; the more developed our natures the more frequently do our desires conflict. Why is any one better than another? How can we decide between them? Or shall we perhaps disown them all for some other and better way.

Man's effort to solve these problems is revealed outwardly in a multitude of precepts and laws, in customs and conventions; and inwardly in the sense of duty and shame, in aspiration, in the instinctive reactions of praise, blame, contentment, and remorse. The leadings of these forces are, however, often divergent, sometimes radically so. We must seek a completer insight. There must be some best way of solving the problem of life, some happiest, most useful way of living; its pursuit constitutes the field of ethics. Nothing could be more practical, more vital, more universally human.

Why should we study ethics?

The most obvious reason for the study of ethics is that we may get more light for our daily problems. We are constantly having to choose how we shall act and being perplexed by opposing advantages. Decide one way or the other we must. On what grounds shall we decide? How shall we feel assured that we are following a real duty, pursuing an actual good, and not being led astray by a mere prejudice or convention? The alternative is, to decide on impulse, at haphazard, after some superficial and one-sided reflection; or to think the matter through, to get some definite criteria for judgments, and to face the recurrent question, what shall we do? In the steady light of those principles.

In addition to the fact that we all have unavoidable problems which we must solve one way or another, a little familiarity with life, an acquaintance with the biographies of great and good men, should lead us to suspect that beyond the horizon of these immediate needs lie whole ranges of beautiful and happy living to which comparatively few ever attain. There are better ways of doing things than most of us have dreamed. The study of ethics should reveal these vistas and stimulate us to a noble discontent with our inferior morals. Such a forward look and development of ideals not only adds greatly to the worth of life but prepares a man to meet perplexities and temptations which may some day arise. It pays to educate one's self for future emergencies by meditating not only upon present problems but upon the further potentialities of conduct, right and wrong, that may lie ahead, and building up a code for one's self that will make life not only richer but steadier and more secure.

Another advantage of a systematic study of ethics is that it can make clearer to us WHY one act is better than another; why duty is justified in thwarting our inclinations and conscience is to be obeyed. Not only is this an intellectual gain, but it is an immense fortification to the will. There comes a time in the experience of every thinking man when a command not reinforced by a reason breeds distrust, and when until he can intelligently defend an ideal he will hesitate to give it his allegiance. Morality, to be depended upon, must be not a mere matter of breeding and convention, or of impulse and emotion, but the result of rational insight and conscious resolve. To many people morality seems nothing but convention, or an arbitrary tyranny, or a mysterious and awful necessity, something extraneous to their own desires, from which they would like to escape. To be able to refute these skeptics, expose the sophisms and specious arguments by which they support their wrongdoing, and show that they have chosen the lesser good, is a valuable help to the community and to one's own integrity of conduct. Too often the people perish for lack of vision; an understanding of the naturalness and enormous desirability of morality, together with an appreciation of its main injunctions, would enlist upon its side many restless spirits who now chafe under a sense of needless restraint and seek some delusory freedom which leads to pain and death. Morality is simply the best way of living; and the more fully men realize that, the more readily will they submit themselves to the sacrifices it requires.

Finally, a study of ethics should help us to see what are the prevalent sins and moral dangers of our day, and thus arouse us to put the weight of our blame and praise where they are needed. Widespread public opinion is a force of incalculable power, which is largely unused. Politics and business, and to a far greater extent than now private life, will become clean and honest and kind just so soon as a sufficient number of people wake up and demand it. We have the power to make sins which are now generally tolerated and respectable, so odious, so infamous, that they will practically disappear. There are certain of the older forms of sin which the race in its long struggle upward has so effectually blacklisted that only a few perverts now lapse into them; we have execrated out of existence whole classes of cruelty and vice. But with the changing and ever more complex relations of society new forms of sin continually creep in; these we have not yet come to brand with the odium they deserve. Leaders of society and pillars of the church are often, and usually without disturbance of conscience, guilty of wrongdoing as grave in its effects, or graver, than many of the faults we relentlessly chastise. On the other hand, many really useful reforms are blocked because they awaken old prejudices or cross silly and meaningless conventions. The air is full of proposals, invectives, causes, movements; how shall we know which to espouse and which to reject, or where best to lend a hand? We need a consistent and well-founded point of view from which to judge. To get such a sane and far-sighted moral perspective; to see the acts of our fellow men with a proper valuation; to be able to point out the insidious dangers of conduct which is not yet as generally rebuked as it ought to be; and at the same time to emancipate ourselves and others from the mistaken and merely arbitrary precepts that are intermingled with our genuine morality, and so attain the largest possible freedom of action, such should be the outcome of a thorough study of ethical principles and ideals.

PART I

THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY

THE ORIGIN OP PERSONAL MORALITY

In almost any field it is wise to precede definition by an impartial survey of the subject matter. So if we are to form an unbiased conception of what morality is, it will be safest to consider first what the morals of men actually have been, how they came into being, and what function they have served in human life. Thus we shall be sure that our theory is in touch with reality, and be saved from mere closet-philosophies and irrelevant speculations. Our task in this First Part will be not to criticize by reference to any ethical standards, but to observe and describe, as a mere bit of preliminary sociology, what it is in their lives to which men have given the name "morality," of what use it has been, and through the action of what forces it has tended to develop. With these data in mind, we shall be the better able, in the Second Part, to formulate our criteria for judging the different codes of morality; we shall find that we are but making explicit and conscious the considerations that, unexpressed and unrealized, have been the persistent and underlying factors in their development. How early in the evolutionary process did personal morality of some sort emerge? Of course the words and the explicit conceptions "morality," "duty," "right," "wrong," etc, are very late in appearance, presupposing as they do a power of reflection and abstraction which develops only in man and with a considerable civilization. Even in the Homeric poems, which reflect a degree of mental cultivation in some respects equal to our own, these concepts hardly appear. But ages earlier, far back in the course of animal evolution, there emerged phenomena which we may consider rudimentary forms of morality; and all early human history was replete writh unanalyzed and unformulated moral struggles. Concretely, we mean by personal morality courage, industriousness, self-control, prudence, temperance, and other similar phenomena, which have this in common, that they involve a crossing of earlier-developed impulses and redirection of the individual's conduct, with the result, normally, that his welfare is enhanced. Exceptions to this result will be considered later; but the point to be noted at the outset is that personal morality is not at first the outcome of reflection, or a purely human affair. If we were to take the term "morality" in a narrower sense, as meaning conscious obedience to a sense of duty or to the moral law, it would obviously be a late product. But morality in this sense is only an ultimate development of what in its less conscious and reflective forms dates far back in pre-human history.

Take courage, for example, which may be briefly defined as action in spite of the instinct of fear and contrary to its leading. Nearly all of the higher animals exhibit courage in greater or less degree, and there are many touching instances of it recorded to the credit of those we best know. Industriousness, again, is proverbial in the case of bees and ants "Go to the ant, thou sluggard!"--and noteworthy in the case of many birds, of beavers, and a long list of other animals. Prudence may be illustrated by the case of the camel who fills himself with water enough to last for many desert days, or that of the bird who builds her nest with remarkable ingenuity and pains out of the reach of invaders. Whether or not we shall attribute self-control to the lower animals is a mere matter of definition; in the looser sense we may credit with it the hungry fox who does not touch the bait whose dangerous nature he vaguely suspects. Temperance is probably one of the latest of the virtues, and is rather conspicuously absent in much of human history and biography; but perhaps students of animal psychology can guarantee instances to which the name might fairly be given.

In lesser degree, then, but unmistakably present, we find the same sort of conduct appearing in the animals to which we give in man the names courage, prudence, etc. Purely instinctive these acts usually are though we may see even in the animals the beginnings of mental conflicts, of reasoning, of reflection. But morality is none the less morality when it is instinctive and natural. Morality is a general name for certain KINDS of conduct, certain redirections of impulse. These redirections appeared in animal life long before the emergence of what we may call man from his ape-like ancestry; and all of our self-conscious moral idealism is but a continuation and development of the process then begun. Any theory of right and wrong must take account of the fact that morality, unlike art, science, and religion, is not an exclusively human affair. In contrast with these late and purely human innovations, it is hoary with antiquity and the possession, in some rudimentary form or other, of nearly the whole realm of organic life.

What were the main causes that produced personal morality?

How did these germinal forms of courage, prudence, industriousness, etc, first come into existence? The answer to this question will also show what are the main underlying causes that promote these virtues today.

They are in part due to certain organic needs and cravings which exist independently of the individual's environment. Hunger and thirst imperiously check the tendency to laziness, or heedlessness, and stimulate to industriousness and prudence. To this day the mere need of food and clothing and shelter is the main bulwark of these virtues. The acquisitive impulse, which is also rather early in appearance, has an increasing share in this sort of moralization. The craving for action, which is the natural result of abundant nervous and muscular energy, the combative instinct, the joy of conquest and achievement, and the sexual impulse, go far in counteracting cowardice and inertia. The artistic impulse, when it emerges in man, long before the dawn of history, makes against caprice for orderliness, self-control, and patience. Ambition is a potent force in human affairs. The desire for the approval of others, which is prehuman, makes for all the virtues.

But in addition to these inward springs of morality there is the constant pressure of a hostile environment. Cold, storms, rivers that block journeys, forests that must be felled, treacherous seas that lure with promise and exact toll for carelessness, arouse men out of their torpor and aid the development of the virtues we have been considering. The necessity of rearing some sort of shelter makes against laziness for industry and perseverance. The dangers of wind or flood check heedlessness in the choice of location for the home and foster prudence and foresight. In the harsher climates man is more goaded by nature; hence more moral progress has, probably, been effected in the temperate than in the tropical zones.

A third and very important source lies in the mutual hostility of the animal species and of men. Slothfulness and recklessness mean for the great majority of animals the imminent risk of becoming the prey of some stronger animal. Among tribes of men the ceaseless struggles for supremacy have pricked cowardice into courage, demanded self-control instead of temper, supplanted gluttony and drunkenness by temperance. Cruel as has been the suffering caused by war, and deplorable as most of its effects, it did a great deal in the early stages of man's history to promote the personal virtues, alertness, moderation, caution, courage, and efficiency.

In the latest stages of man's development, conscious regard for law and custom, the fear of gods, the explicit recognition of duty and conscience, and the direct pursuit of ideals-all the reflective considerations that we may lump together under the word "conscientiousness"-play their ever increasing part and complicate the psychological situation. But even in modern civilized man the underlying animal forces count for far more. And without them the later self-conscious forces would not have come into play at all. There is a small class of people who are dominated throughout their activities by consciously present ideals or obedience to religious injunctions. But the average man still acts mainly under the pressure of the more primitive forces which we have enumerated.

How far has the moralizing process been blind and how far conscious?

To a very large extent the moralizing process has been a merely mechanical one. Through slight differences in nerve-structure individuals have varied a little in their response to the pressure of inward cravings and outward perils. The braver, the more prudent, the more industrious have had a better chance of survival. So by the process which we have come to call natural selection there has been a continual weeding-out of the relatively lazy, cowardly, reckless, and imprudent. Much of our morality is the result of tendencies thus long cultivated by the ruthless methods of nature; we inherit a complex nervous organization, the outcome of ages of molding and selection, which now instinctively and easily responds to stimuli with a certain degree of inbred morality. This is the case much more than is apparent upon the surface. The child seems very unmoral, the mere prey of passing impulses; but latent in his brain are many aptitudes and tendencies which will at the proper time ripen and manifest themselves. The period of adolescence is that during which the changes in mental structure which were effected during the later stages of evolution are being made in the mind of this new individual; he reenacts, as it were, in a few years, the history of the race, and emerges without any conscious effort, the possessor of the fruits of that long struggle of which he was always the heir.

In all the later stages of animal evolution, however, moral development is largely conscious, or semi-conscious. Besides our inner inheritance of altered brain-paths there is a social inheritance of habits which each generation adopts by imitation of its predecessors. Without any deliberate intention, the young of every species imitate their parents, and then the older members of the flock or herd. "Suggestion" is said by some to be the chief means of moralization; we are brave or industrious because we see others practicing these virtues and naturally do as they do. At any rate, whichever are more important, the inherited tendencies or those acquired by contagion, both of these factors play a large part in the development of the individual's morals.

The third method of moral development is that which we call "learning by experience." The pain or dissatisfaction which a wrong impulse brings in its train, the satisfaction which follows a moral act, are remembered, and recur with the recurrence of a similar situation, becoming perhaps the decisive factors in steering the animal or man toward his true welfare. Many animals quite low in the organic scale learn by experience; and though of course the degree of consciousness that accompanies these readjustments varies enormously, this method of moralization may be said to be always, like the preceding, a more or less conscious process. Learning by experience is subject, of course, to many mistaken judgments; the fallacy of post hoc propter hoc leads many learners to avoid perfectly innocent acts as supposedly involving some evil result with which they were once by chance connected; and the true causes of the evils are often overlooked. Even when dimly conscious readjustments become highly conscious deliberation, the results of that deliberation may be less forwarding morally than the unconscious and merciless grinding of natural selection.

More and more, of course, as men grew in power of reflection, did they consciously shape their morals; and this intelligent selection, which has as yet played a comparatively small role, is bound, as men become more and more rational, to supersede in importance the other factors in moral evolution. But in the later phases of evolution all three of these processes blend together; and it would be impossible for the keenest analyst to tell how much of his conduct was determined in each of these ways.

THE ORIGIN OF SOCIAL MORALITY

How early was social morality developed?

With the growth of large cities and the development of individual interests we come to live less and less in one another's eyes. In primitive life it is almost impossible for a man to indulge in any vice or sin without its being immediately known to his fellows; but today millions live such isolated lives in the midst of crowded communities that all sorts of immorality may flourish without detection. Under early conditions foodstuffs or other goods were consumed if not by the producer, at least by his neighbors; and any adulteration or sham was a dangerous matter. Today we seldom know who slaughtered the meat or canned the fruit we eat, who made the clothing or utensils we use; shoddy articles and unwholesome food can be sold in quantity with little fear of the consumer's anger. All sorts of intangible and hardly traceable injuries can be wrought today by malicious or careless men injuries to reputation, to credit, to success. In a city the criminal can hide and escape far more easily, can associate with his own kind, have a certain code of his own , and more completely escape the pangs of conscience, than under the surveillance of village life. In a hundred ways there are increased opportunities for doing evil with impunity.

With the gentler conditions of civilized life there is a general tendency toward the relaxing of social restraints. The harsh penalties of early days would shock us by their cruelty; and early codes are full of prohibitions and injunctions on matters which are now left to the individual conscience. Needlessly cramping and cruel as these primitive laws often were, they were powerful deterrents, and their lapse has often been followed by greater moral laxity. The passionate pursuit of liberty, which has been so prominent in modern times, though on the whole of great advantage to man, has not been without its ill effects.

The monotonously specialized and unnatural work, which confines a large proportion of our men, women, and youths today, promotes restlessness and the craving for excitement. The normal all-round occupations of primitive men tended to work off their energies and satisfy their natural impulses. But the dulled and tired worker released from eight or ten hours' drudgery in a factory is apt to be in a psychological state that demands variety, excitement, pleasure at any cost. It does not pay to repress human nature too much, or to try to make out of a red-blooded young man or woman a mere machine. Gambling, drunkenness, prostitution, and all sorts of pathological vices flourish largely as a reaction from the dullness and monotony of the day's work. We are paying this heavy penalty for our increase of material efficiency at the expense of normal human living.

With the increased possibilities of undetected sin, above mentioned, and the opportunity which criminals now have of forming within a city a little community of their own which permits them fellowship without rebuke for their sins, there have arisen whole classes of vice-caterers. These men and women make their living by tempting others to sin; the allurements which they set before the young constitute a great check to moral advance, and even threaten continually a serious moral degeneration. The keepers of gambling houses, saloons, and houses of prostitution, the venders of vile pictures and exciting reading matter, the proprietors of indecent dance-halls and theaters, of the "shows" of all sorts that flourish chiefly through their offering of sexual stimulation these are the worst sinners of our times, for they cause thousands of others to sin, and deliberately undermine the moral structure so laboriously reared, and at such heavy cost. Conspicuous in commercialized vice-catering is the Casino of Monte Carlo, where thousands of lives have been ruined. The business of seducing and kidnapping girls-the "white slave trade" flourishes secretly in our great cities. Associations of liquor producers and sellers are very powerful social and political forces. One of the greatest problems before the race is how to exterminate these human beasts of prey that live at the expense of the moral deterioration and often utter ruin of their victims.

While the older racial and national barriers between peoples are breaking down, so that the possibilities of human brotherhood and cooperation are laterally increasing, and the wretched fratricidal wars between peoples coming toward an end, Other barriers, between upper and lower classes, are thickening, new antagonisms and antipathies that threaten yet much friction and unhappiness and a retardation of moral progress. Rich are becoming farther and farther consciousness is on the increase, class-wars in the form of strikes, riots, and sabotage, are ominous symptoms. Masses of the laboring class believe that a great class-war is not only inevitable but desirable. Such conflicts, however, besides their material losses, engender hatred, cruelty, lust, greed, and all sorts of other forms of immorality. No one can predict how far such struggles may go in the future toward undoing the socializing process which at best has so many obstacles to meet and moves so slowly. Many forces are at work, however, for moral uplift. The spread of education, teaching men to think, to discern evils, and to comprehend the reasons for right conduct, the increasing influence of public opinion through newspapers and magazines, the growing number of organizations working to eradicate evils, the gradual increase of wise legislation, the reviving moral pressure of the Christian Church such signs of the times should give us courage as well as show us where we can take hold to help. Morality is not static, a cut-and-dried system to be obeyed or neglected, but a set of experiments, being gradually worked out by mankind, a dynamic, progressive instrument which we can help ourselves to forge. There is room yet for moral genius; we are yet in the early and formative stage of human morality. We should not be content with past achievement, with the contemporary standards of our fellows. If we give our keenest thought and our earnest effort, there is no knowing what noble heights of morality we may be helping the future to attain.

INWARD DEVELOPMENT--CONSCIENCE

What are the stages in the history of moral guidance?

THERE may be said to be five stages in the history of moral guidance: guidance by instinct, by custom, by law and precept, by conscience, and by insight. No one of these guides is discarded with the development of the others; we rely today upon all of them in varying degree. Their evolution overlaps; the alteration of instinct still goes on, changing laws and customs still bring their pressure to bear from without upon the individual; while our conscience and our insight have their roots far back in the past. Yet the prominence of each of these factors in turn marks a successive stage in the evolution of moral control. Inherited instinct, and then custom, unconsciously passed on by imitation and to some extent taught with a dimly conscious purpose, shape the crude morality of the animals though the other means of guidance are not wholly absent even in them. Among savages legal codes, unwritten and perhaps not even clearly formulated, yet exacting and strictly enforced by penalties, come to form an important supplement to instinct, custom, and proverbial wisdom. But quite as important is the gradual development of an inward guide--those very various secondary impulses and inhibitions which we hump together because of their common function and call the moral sense or conscience. We shall now consider briefly the origin of this internal steering-apparatus. The latest and most mature guide of all, reflective insight, arises in marked degree only when abstraction and analysis. There is no problem connected with its origin except the general problems of the development of human reason. How moral insight may be trained and brought to bear upon conduct will, it is hoped, be clear to the student who patiently studies this volume.

Out of what has conscience developed?

The "conscience" of our moralizing and religious literature figures as a sharply defined and easily recognizable "faculty," like "will" or "reason." But this classification, though useful, is misleading by its simplicity. If we observe by introspection what goes on in our minds when we "will" or "reason" or "listen to conscience," we shall find all sorts of emotions, ideas, impulses, surging back and forth, altering from moment to moment, never twice the same. At another period of our lives, or in another man's mind, the psychological stuff pigeonholed under these names may be almost entirely different. A great many diverse mental elements have at one time or other taken the role of, or formed an ingredient in, the function we label "conscience." We will enumerate the more important:

Experience quickly teaches her pupils that certain acts to which they feel a strong impulse will lead to an aftermath of pain or weariness, or will stand in the way of other goods which they more lastingly desire or more deeply need. The memory of these consequences of acts remains as a guide for future conduct, not so often in the form of a clearly recognized memory as in a dim realization that the dangerous act must be avoided, a vague pressure against the pull of momentary inclination, or an uncomprehended feeling of impulsion toward the less inviting path. This residuum of the moral experience of the individual is one ingredient in what we call his conscience.

But there is much more than this. The individual is a member of a group. The customs and expectations of this group not only bear upon him from without but find a reflection in his own motor mechanism. He hears the voice of the community in his heart, an echo of the general condemnation and approval. This acquired response, the reverberation of the group judgment, may easily supplant his personal inclinations. Primitive man is sensitive to the judgments and emotional reactions of his fellows; the tribal point of view is unquestioned and authoritative over him. So important is this pressure in his mental life, though not understood or recognized for what it is, that conscience is denned by many moralists as the pressure of the judgment of the tribe in the mental life of its members, or in similar terms. Paulsen calls it "the existence of custom in the consciousness of the individual." This is to neglect unjustly the other sources of the sense of duty; but certainly the pulls and pushes arising from these two sources, which we may call the inner aspect of individual moral experience and of loyalty to the community-morals, reinforcing one another as they generally do, produce a very powerful form of conscience.

A number of primitive emotions join forces with them. Sympathy is generally on their side, and the instinctive glow of patriotism or pride in the tribe's success. The shrinking from disapproval, the craving for esteem, the very early emotions of shame and vanity, help to pull away from the self-indulgent or selfish impulse. The spontaneous admiration of others for their virtues and anger at them for their sins is applied involuntarily by a man to himself; contempt for his own weakness and joy in his superiority according to the generally accepted code are powerful deterrents. The consciousness of the resentment that others will feel if he does evil, the instinctive application to himself of a trace of the resentment he would feel toward him or toward these fellow tribesmen of is-such complex states of mind complicate his mental processes and help check his primary instincts.

To these ingredients we must early add the more or less conscious fear of the penalties of the tribal law, of the vengeance of chiefs or powerful members of the tribe, of the tribal gods and their jealous priests. These fears may be but dimly felt and not clearly discriminated; but however subconscious they may be in a given case of moral conflict, they play a large part. The peace of mind that accompanies a sense of conformity to the will of rulers or of gods, contrasted with the anxiety that follows infraction, gives a greatly increased weight to that growing pressure of counter instincts which comes so largely to override a man's animal nature. Most of the sources of conscience thus date far back beyond the dawn of history. But they can be pretty safely inferred from the earliest records, from a study of existing savage races, and from the study of childhood. The definite conception of "conscience" is very late, scarcely appearing until very modern times. And the fact that conscience itself, even in its rudimentary forms, was much later in growth than the underlying animal instincts which it developed to control and guide, is shown by its late development in the child-not, normally, until the beginning of the third year. The early life of the individual parallels the evolution of the race; and the later-developed faculties in the child are those which arose in the later stages of human progress. But the existence of our well-defined moral sense, with its significant role in modern life, needs no supernatural explanation. It has grown up and come to be what it is as naturally as have our language, our customs, and our physical organs.

What is conscience now? It is a valuable exercise in introspection to observe a case of "conscience" in one's own life and note of what mental stuff it is made. When a number write down their findings without mutual suggestion, the results are usually widely divergent. Any of the original ingredients hitherto mentioned may be discovered, or other personal factors. There may be present to consciousness only a vague uneasiness or restlessness, or there may be a sophisticated recurrence of the concepts of "conscience," "duty," etc. The one universal fact is that there is a conflict between some primitive impulse or passion and some maturer mental checks. Any sort of mental stuff that serves the purpose of controlling desire will do; we must define conscience in terms not of content but of function. There is no such unity in the material as the single name seems to imply; and whether or not that name shall be given to a given psychological state is a matter of usage in which there is considerable variation.

In general, we reserve the name "conscience" for the vaguer and more elusive restraints and leadings, the sense of reluctant necessity whose purpose we do not clearly see although we feel its pressure, the accumulated residuum of long inner experience and many influences from without. Our minds retain many creases whose origin we have forgotten; we veer away from many a pleasant inclination without knowing why. These unanalyzed and residual inhibitions that grip us and will not let us go, form a contrasting background to our more explicit motives and often count for more in our conduct. The very lack of comprehension serves in less rational minds to enhance their prestige with an atmosphere of awe and mystery. These strange checks and promptings that well up in a man's heart are which he must not dare to disobey. The voice of God in our hearts we may, indeed, well conceive them to be. The attempt to analyze into its psychological elements and trace the natural genesis of conscience, as of morality in general must not be taken as an attempt to discredit it or to read God out of the world. For God works usually, if not universally, through natural laws; and the historical viewpoint, that sees everything in our developed life as the outcome of ages of natural evolution, is not only rich in fruitful insight, but entirely consistent with a deep religious feeling. For hortatory or inspirational purposes we do not need to make this analysis; it has, indeed, its practical dangers. It tends to rob the glory from anything to analyze it into its parts and study the natural causes that produced it. The loveliest painting is but a mess of pigments to the microscope, the loveliest face but a mess of cells and hairs and blood vessels. There is something gruesome and inhuman about embryology and all other studies of origins.

While we are analyzing an object, or tracing its genesis, we are not responding to it as a whole or feeling its beauty and power. The mystery, the spell, vanishes; we cease to thrill when we dissect. But knowledge proceeds by analysis, and gains by a study of origins and causes. And the temporary emotional loss should be more than balanced by the value of the insight won. We need not linger too long at our dissecting. The discovery that conscience is an explicable and natural development does not preclude a realization of the awfulness of obligation, the sacredness of duty, any more than a geologist must cease to thrill at the grandeur and beauty of the Grand Canyon because he has studied the composition of the rocks and understands the causes that have slowly, through the ages, wrought this miracle. So we need feel no sense of duty is not something imposed upon human nature from without; it is of its very substance, it has developed step by step with our other faculties, slowly crystallizing through millenniums of human and pre-human experience. In the abstract, then, we may say that conscience is a name for ANY SECONDARY IMPULSES OR INHIBITIONS WHICH CHECK AND REDIRECT MAN'S PRIMARY IMPULSES, FOR A GREATER GOOD; any later developed aversions or inclinations, judgments of value or feelings of constraint, which guide a man in the teeth of his animal nature toward a better way of life PROVIDED THAT THESE SUPERIMPOSED IMPULSES ARE NOT EXPLICIT ENOUGH TO BE CLASSIFIED UNDER SOME OTHER HEAD. For example, we may be pulled up sharply from a course of self-indulgence by a conscious realization of the harm we are doing to others thereby; this bridling state of mind, whether chiefly emotional or more intellectual, we may call sympathy, or an altruistic instinct, or love. But when we feel the pressure from these same mental states incipiently aroused, when our motor-mechanism half automatically steers us away from the selfish act, without our consciously formulating a specific name for the new impulse or recognizing any articulate motive, we are apt to give this mental push the more general name of conscience. So if we consciously reckon up, balance advantages, and decide on the less inviting act in recognition of its really greater worth to us, we say we act from prudence or insight, we are reasonable about it; while if the grumbling of the prudential motives remain subterranean, subconscious, they play the role of conscience. Conscience is, on such occasions, but inarticulate common sense. Usually, however, prudential and altruistic motives would both be discovered if the dumb driving of conscience were to be made articulate. The reverberation of parental teachings, of sermons heard and books read, of the opinions and emotions of our fellows, might be found, all bent and fused into a combined "suggestion," a mental push, a "must" or "ought," from whose influence we find it difficult to escape.

The detailed psychological analysis of cases of conscience and the study of its genesis are of no essential ethical interest, except as they show us that the sense of duty is not an ultimate, irreducible element in our consciousness, or make clearer to us its function and value. Conscience is the general name for coercion upon conduct from within the mind. The important thing to note is the useful purpose, which, in its so widely varying forms, it serves. Whatever its sources or its exact nature in contemporary man, it is one of the most valuable of our assets. To a more explicit statement of its value we must now turn. What is the value of conscience?

It would seem, at first glance, as if the development of reason should make conscience unnecessary. When we are able to discern the consequences of our acts, formulate and weigh our motives and aims, what need of these vague pre-rational promptings and inhibitions? Why not train men to supplant a blind sense of duty by a conscious insight, a rational valuation of ends and means? Is not reason, as it has been recently called, "the ultimate conscience"?

Conscience is valuable on account of our ignorance. Individually we have not had experience enough to guide us in our crises; conscience is the representative in us of the wisdom of the race. In many cases we should never reason out the right solution of a problem; we lack the data. But we can lean upon the racial experience. Many past experiences, now forgotten, have gone to the molding of this faculty. The need of action is often imminent, there is no time for the long study of the situation which alone could form a sure insight into the conduct it demands. We need readymade morals. Moreover, we are subject to bias, to individual one sidedness, and to the distortion of passion; in the stress of temptation we are not in a mood to reason judicially, even if we have the necessary data. Altogether, insight, though in the long run the critic of conscience, is not a practical substitute. What conscience tells us is more apt to be true than what at the moment seems a rational judgment.

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