CIVILIZATION AND MORALS. 563 



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 wrong- 

 ful 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 

 ao^ainst 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 par- 

 ticular 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 

 risfht lines of motion ? We know that, when Ave 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 tliis clod of matter, by virtue of which it 

 could/ee? the resistance in itself to the perturbing forces that are swerv- 

 ing 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 persist- 

 ent law of feeling, that is, in man, w^hich 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 ma- 

 terial motions. 



But if the moving stone were conscious of the commanding law 

 v/hich 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 pei'turbation alike, 

 are in himself, and within the control of his own volition. He has but 

 to bring his will into conjunction with the resisting ms inertioi in his 

 moral consciousness to make the resistance always efficient. 



And this brings to licjht 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 cult- 

 ure. 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 tlie older in this direction, of moral discipline. It 

 may be that men have acquired larger perceptions of right without 



