first germ of the sense of obligation. I know of no fact that would prove the existence of any such sentiment in the primitive cast of our mental constitution. An artificial system of controlling the actions is contrived, adapted to our volitional nature-the system of using pain to deter from particular sorts of conduct. A strong line of distinction is drawn in every human mind between actions that bring no pain except what may arise out of themselves, as when we encounter a bitter taste or a scalding touch, and those actions that are accompanied with pains imposed by persons about us. These actions, and the circumstances attending them, make a deep and characteristic impression; we have a peculiar notion attaching to them, and to the individual persons, the authors of the attendant pains. A strong ideal avoidance, not unmixed perhaps with the perturbation of fear, is generated towards what is thus forbidden by penalties rising with transgression. The feeling inspired towards those that administer the pain is also of the nature of dread; we term it usually the feeling of authority. From first to last, this is the essential form and defining quality of the conscience, although mixed up with other ingredients. As duty is circumscribed by punishment, so the sense of obligation has no other universal property, except the ideal and actual avoidance of conduct prohibited by penalties. This discipline indoctrinates the newlyintroduced member of society with the sentiment of the forbidden, which by-and-bye takes root and expands into the sentiment of moral disapprobation; he then joins with the other members of the community in imposing and enforcing the prohibitions that have been stamped and branded in the course of his own education. Duty, then, may be said to have two prime supports in the more self-regarding parts of our nature-the sense of the common preservation and well-being operating upon a preponderating majority, and the sense of punishment brought to bear upon individuals (who must be the smaller number) not sufficiently prompted by the other sentiment. Order being once established in a society, that is to say, the practice of obedience being habitual to the mass of

NATURAL FEELINGS TENDING TO SOCIAL DUTY. 483

the community, it is only necessary to apply a disciplining process to the young to prepare them for the same acquiescence in the public morality. The imposition of penalties begets at once the sense and avoidance of the forbidden and the awe of authority, and this is retained through life as the basis of the individual conscience, the ever foremost motive to abstain from actions designated as wrong.

9. It is not implied that conscience is never anything else than the actual and ideal avoidance and dread of punishment. Other elements concur, sometimes so largely as to obliterate in the view the primary germ and characteristic type of the faculty. There are motives that supersede the operation of punishment in a variety of instances; as when we contract a positive sentiment of good-will towards those that the law forbids us to injure. Even then we do not lose the strong feeling implanted in us respecting the forbidden and the authoritative; we simply are no longer in the position of being moved by that alone. Our tender feelings, our sympathies, our sentiments of the fair, the equal, and the consistent, if liberally developed and well directed, impel us, as it were of our own accord, to respect those interests of our fellow-beings that are protected by the enactments of society. Moreover, as already said, there is a certain maturity of the well-disposed mind at which we enter the company of that majority, spontaneous in its own obedience from a recognition of the common safety, and compelling dissentient minorities by force or punishment. The conscience, which was at first derived and implanted, is now independent, or self-sustaining. The judgment of the individual approves of the common prohibitions against falsehood, injustice, breach of bargain, and other injuries, as a prohibition essential to his own security in company with the rest of the society; and conscience therefore passes into a higher grade of the prudential motive.

At this stage, however, it is hardly possible to exclude entirely the generous or disinterested impulses as elements in the case. The most consummate prudence would do no more

than make each man look to himself in the totality of his own interests. So long as his public duties coincided with his private welfare, he would perform them to the full, but, if the contrary, he would not necessarily do so. If he saw that by some act of violence to a neighbour, or some act of defiance to the supreme authority, he would, besides the risk of punishment, incur the chance of a state of things wherein his own security would perish, his prudential sense would be a restraint upon him. Not so when a crime would bring him large gain without either punishment to himself, or endangering the common security that he shares in. There are many cases where a man's social obedience-the fulfilment of his bargains, his justice, veracity, respect to other men's rights-costs him a sacrifice with no return, while the omission leads to no penalty. Simple prudence would at such a moment suggest the criminal course. We see men constantly evading obligations, because the law is not able to enforce them, not to mention the crimes committed in the belief of a shroud of secrecy. If each one were disposed to act on a strict calculation of what was for his own individual gratification, all social duties that brought no more good than repaid the outlay, would be surrendered, while no self-sacrifice for public objects would ever happen. Some virtues might be better attended to in a society of intelligent self-seekers than we actually find as men are constituted. It is often remarked, how a certain kind of truthfulness enables a man to prosper in his business, from the sense of confidence created thereby; not that any one need be a worshipper of truth in the abstract, or go all lengths with the maxim, that 'honesty is the best policy;' but that he should see clearly how far truth and honesty really served him, and there limit his devotion. On the whole, however, it may be fairly questioned, whether society could be maintained on the principle of a rigorous and far-seeing selfishness, if it were only for this circumstance, that each generation must pay some respect to the interests of those that are to follow. We must include in that sentiment of the mature mind, which adopts the social duties as its own approved conduct, a

THE CITIZEN CONSCIENCE.

485

mixture of prudence as regards self, and of generosity as regards others. The element of generosity-which, as I have often said, is in the final analysis, Sympathy-may be almost entirely wanting, and then we should have a member of the ideal society of intelligent self-seekers conceived above. Or the generous impulses may have a high and ascendant development, giving birth to acts of self-sacrifice and devotion. In actual experience, neither extreme is the usual case. The mass of civilized men as we find them-Englishmen, Frenchmen, Turks, Chinese, &c.—are constituted by a certain balanced mixture of the self-regarding and the vivre pour autrui, with that peculiar element of disinterested antipathy formerly alluded to, which rarely permits either a total selfannihilation, or a total disregard to every interest beyond self. The conscience of the average individual of the commanding majority of each society, contains in it, therefore, a certain concurrence in the social duties, partly for his or her own sake, and partly for the sake of relatives, friends, fellowcitizens, humanity generally, and future generations. We adopt, as it were, into self the interests, more or less, of a greater or smaller number of other beings that awaken our tender regards, or our sympathies. The decisions we come to are influenced by these adopted interests, which sometimes entirely submerge the interests of the isolated self. It is enough for us, under these circumstances, to know that a breach of social duty will injure some individual, or class, that we are generously disposed to. We refrain from the act in ourselves, and join in disapproving and punishing it in others. Such, I conceive, is the nature of the citizen conscience, as distinguished from the conscience of the child, or the criminal and rebel, who know nothing but the avoidance of punishment. We must all pass through our novitiate in this last-named form, and we may never be able to rise above it. Yet there must be in society a preponderating number, who at last adopt the social duties as agreeable to their own judgment and sentiment, who need not the fear of punishment themselves, and who are sufficiently strong to punish where

punishment is needed. In a free and equal society, a clear majority of the full-grown members must be of this mind. In many societies, a government once in the ascendant, and residing in a very limited number of persons, has been able to keep up a sentiment of authority and a dread of punishment, without the concurrence of the rest of the community. Temporal and spiritual despotisms have established themselves, and maintained a sense of law and dispositions to obedience, which the general community, freely consulted and not overawed, would never have responded to. The conscience of a Russian serf, as of a subject of Xerxes or Tiberius, is a sentiment of pure dread; the conscience of an Englishman, or an Anglo-American, must contain a certain approval of the laws he is called on to obey.

10. Having thus distinguished two leading modes of the sentiment of moral obligation-the Slavish Conscience and the Citizen Conscience-it is proper further to recognise a third mode of rarer occurrence, namely, the Independent, Self-originating, or Idiosyncratic Conscience. When an individual dissents from the notions of duty entertained in the community that he belongs to, either renouncing what they impose, or constituting for himself new obligations, he may be said to have a conscience purely his own. That such consciences are very uncommon, proves in the strongest manner how little this part of our nature is innate. It is generally a superabundance of study and reflection—that is, a more than ordinary exercise of the mature observation and intelligence-that developes the dissenting conscience, when not simply a spirit of rebellion against social restraints. The man that obeys all the laws in force in his society, while adopting obligations of his own in addition, certainly does not exemplify the ordinary type of the moral sense. Still he takes the sentiment of authority engendered by his education as the model of those self-originating obligations. If a European came to the conclusion that the destruction of animal life in any shape is sinful or wrong, it would be by finding in this a case of exactly the same nature as the destruction of human life;