which constrains him toward the right line of conduct when he has discerned it. That it only operates in coincidence with his perception of the line of right—that men, in other words, have no conscience with respect to wrongful deeds which they have not yet recognized as wrongful—appears to be shown by all the facts of human history. If it were otherwise, the Greek should have had a conscience to protest against infanticide; the Roman should have had a conscience to protest against slavery and against the bloody games of the arena; the Jew should have had a conscience to protest against the slaughter of women and children in war; Calvin should have had a conscience to protest against the burning of Servetus, and Cotton Mather a conscience to protest against the witch-hunting deviltries at Salem. This conscience, then, must be something that is only made active by the development of a moral intelligence which reveals to men the line of right in one particular of conduct after another. Need we try to account for it any otherwise than by calling it a law of feeling analogous in kind to that law of motion which operates to constrain the obedience of matter to right lines of motion? We know that, when we throw a stone into the air, it would move forever in the straight line of its projection if other forces, more potent than the projecting one, did not interfere to overcome the proper law of its motion. If, now, we might imagine a state of consciousness in this clod of matter, by virtue of which it could feel the resistance in itself to the perturbing forces that are swerving it from the line of rectitude, we should have the perfect analogue of what I conceive to be the conscience of the human being; a persistent law of feeling, that is, in man, which resists deviation from the right lines of conduct whenever he has become conscious of them. Such an implanted law of moral feeling in human nature is no more difficult of conception, nor any less so, than the rectilinear law of material motions.
But if the moving stone were conscious of the commanding law which resists all perturbing influences, it would still be irresponsible for its deviations from the right line of motion; whereas the acting man is not, because all the forces, of projection and perturbation alike, are in himself, and within the control of his own volition. He has but to bring his will into conjunction with the resisting vis inertiæ in his moral consciousness to make the resistance always efficient.
And this brings to light the third element in morals: which is the discipline of obedience in man to the law of feeling which constrains him toward the right line of conduct when he has perceived it. This discipline is very obviously the final end and final fruit of human culture. We need not wonder that it is slowly attained, when we think of the powerful animality in man which has to be struggled with in the process. It may be that our modern civilization has accomplished little as yet beyond the older in this direction, of moral discipline. It may be that men have acquired larger perceptions of right without
