Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/438

422 Every one finds within himself, then, a secret respect for some special mode of life. It may not be one which his character permits him to follow; he may be a coward and reverence bravery, or a clown and reverence manners and grace. But whether he lives up to it or not, whatever he yields a mental allegiance to as the supreme title of worth in conduct, forms the germ of his moral ideal. He may not call it his moral ideal, and commonly, unless he is a philosopher, he does not, for this is the standard that one lives by rather than speculates about. The ideal may be one of personal honor, or of chivalry, or of allegiance, or of love, or of religious devotion. Whatever it is, if it is the best thing in the man, we shall not be far out in calling the impulse to follow it his conscience. The word is commonly employed, of course, in other meanings, but we have done enough to guard it here against misconstruction. Conscience is often used to denote an automatic signal placed by the Creator in man's breast to inform him when he is following and when departing from the will of God; but as morality of divine origin is not our subject at the present moment, there can be no question of conscience in this sense. Even when I spoke above of religious devotion as among the ideals in this place to be discussed, I meant religious devotion on its subjective side without any question of external sanction,—the eagerness of an essentially devotional nature to surrender to what it believes to be the will of God, without thought of future reward or punishment. The disinterested impulse to immolate one's self upon a point of honor is emotionally the same sort of thing. If the former may be called conscience, so for convenience may the latter.

Understanding this, then, by the word conscience, the position is that that alone is morally good which is approved by one's conscience. Just as the eye is the final test of the color-quality of things, so the conscience is the test of the moral quality of things.

The deductions from this position are not obscure. The first of them is that this sets up at once as many standards of morality as there are individuals. If to call a thing morally