CONSCIENCE AND MORALITY 133 



Onde pognam che di necessitate 

 Surga ogni amor che dentro a voi s accende, 

 Di riternerlo e in voi la potestate \ l 



The usual opinion undoubtedly is that duties are painful ; 

 but the unpleasantness need not always arise from inhibition. 

 The obligation may be to reprove a friend, to write an un 

 welcome letter, to pronounce a sentence of death, and the pain 

 in those cases is directly derived from sympathy intensified 

 by the knowledge that it is our own action through which 

 the pain is inflicted on another. Nor are duties always 

 unpleasant. Duty and moral action are coextensive, 

 and the most determined opponent of Hedonism would stop 

 short of the assertion that all moral acts are painful. The 

 reciprocal domestic duties of wife and husband, and between 

 parents and children, are the source of an intense gratifica 

 tion, which is quite independent of the rewards of a satisfied 

 conscience. The inhibitive action of the conscience is usually 

 called forth by primitive classes of impulse, such as gluttony, 

 drunkenness, lust, envy, hatred, and revenge ; its positive 

 action is exerted in support of the social impulses, truthful 

 ness, patriotism, and the desire to help those who are in need. 

 Ease and sloth it condemns ; toil and endurance of hard 

 ship are encouraged by its approval. Still more generally, 

 it is opposed to those tendencies which oppose forward 

 evolution, and is in accordance with those which promote 

 it. That there has been a tendency to dwell exclusively 

 on the painful and inhibitory aspects of conscience may be 

 due to the fact that they suggest the need of an explanation, 

 which is not called for when the conscience is in harmony 

 with the primary impulse. 



The sense of attraction or repulsion, which is the funda 

 mental fact of conscience, continues, and sometimes arises 

 for the first time, after the action has been performed or 

 neglected, and is then accompanied by a feeling tone of 

 peculiar intensity. If the action has been in accordance 

 with the primary dictate, the feeling is one of satisfaction 

 or happiness, to which no special term has as yet been 



1 Purg. 18. 70. 



