524 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



very decisive steps indeed to make its decrees heard and obej'ed. And 

 so the word duty began to be in the air. 



Now, I hold it to be quite impossible that any such external com- 

 mand could create in the mind the sense that it is a matter of duty to 

 obey it ; nay, all law must have presented itself to the individual 

 merely as part of that very external force which was originally, and is 

 still liable at any moment to become, the natural enemy of his personal 

 rights. And if I (that is to say, my ancestor of thousands of years 

 ago) am merely forced by laws acting upon my fear of punishment to 

 surrender my desire to slay another man, I may of course yield to su- 

 perior force, but I cannot possibly thereby acquire the sense of duty, 

 which may be defined as the pleasure resulting from intelligent acqui- 

 escence in self-sacrifice that makes self-sacrifice possible. But when the 

 law appeals to a sense of right and wrong already existing, when the 

 command " Thou shalt not kill " is met by a response in the conscience, 

 "I know that this is true, for I had the thought before, or rather at the 

 moment when, I became a social being," then there results the joyful 

 sense of duty which makes obedience pleasant. "Wherefore," the 

 conscience cries, " the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, 

 and good." It is welcomed as the interpreter of conscience, as that 

 which explains a man to himself. And so through countless avenues 

 of utility, and through as many sanctions of social opinion embodied in 

 law, custom, or tradition, the conscience advances toward the percep- 

 tion of the rights of men and of a corresponding internal sense of duty 

 toward them. And thus, as I think, we get an explanation of the 

 pleasurable element in duty. For while the law is becoming more and 

 more imperative, and sacrifice of self more and more exacting, and our 

 personal rights more and more circumscribed, there goes along with us 

 the sense that we are but finding our true selves and expressing our 

 own convictions and obeying our own highest wills, and are thus en- 

 abled to experience the greatest possible delight in doing our duty. 

 For what is this, after all, but the satisfaction of finding our life when 

 we were willing to lose it? 



6. The Ideal or Moral Stage. The next step in the history of con- 

 science carries us a long way forward in the course of man's mental evo- 

 lution, because it brings us to the time when he became capable of 

 forming abstract notions. But it must be borne in mind that long be- 

 fore these notions were formed, the tendencies and impressions in which 

 they culminated were busily, if silently, at work ; hence it is possible 

 to trace the line of advance along which the conscience passed from the 

 primitive sense of rightness to the complete ideal state. 



It is natural for men, under the pressure of social obligations, to fall 

 back upon their personal rights and innate egoism, and to question the 

 authority to which they have submitted more from a gregarious irstinct 

 than from any exercise of their reasoning powers. Questions like the 

 following lie deep down in the nature and necessity of things, and ex- 



