This intuition must not be confounded with what is sometimes mis-called ‘conscience.’ It is not mere individual opinion or caprice. It presupposes the morality of the community as its basis, and is subject to the approval thereof. Here, if anywhere, the idea of universal and impersonal morality is realized. For the final arbiters are the φρόνιμος, persons with a will to do right, and not full of reflections and theories. If they fail you, you must judge for yourself, but practically they seldom do fail you. Their private peculiarities neutralize each other, and the result is an intuition which does not belong merely to this or that man or collection of men. ‘Conscience’ is the antipodes of this. It wants you to have no law but yourself, and to be better than the world. But this tells you that, if you could be as good as your world, you would be better than most likely you are, and that to wish to be better than the world is to be already on the threshold of immorality.
This perhaps ‘is a hard saying,’ but it is least hard to those who know life best; it is intolerable to those mainly who, from inexperience or preconceived theories, can not see the world as it is. Explained it may be by saying that enthusiasm for good dies away—the ideal fades—
| Dem Herrlichsten, was auch der Geist empfangen, Drängt immer fremd und fremder Stoff sich an ; |
but better perhaps if we say that those who have seen most of the world (not one side of it)—old people of no one-sided profession nor of immoral life—know most also how much good there is in it. They are tolerant of new theories and youthful opinions that everything would be better upside down, because they know that this also is as it should be, and that the world gets good even from these. They are intolerant only of those who are old enough, and should be wise enough, to know better than that they know better than the world; for in such people they can not help seeing the self-conceit which is pardonable only in youth.
Let us be clear. What is that wish to be better, and to make the world better, which is on the threshold of immorality? What is the ‘world’ in this sense? It is the morality already existing
