CONSCIENCE ims express some significant truth. What we want is a method of finding our way through the maze, a principle that shall unify our moral life, and that shall enable us to solve its paradoxes.
Such a centralizing and unifying principle we tried to propose at the last lecture. Our topic in the foregoing discussion was the question: By what criterion may we know that a proposed cause is one which is worthy of our loyalty? We answered the question by asserting that there is in any case one cause which is worthy of every man's loyalty. And that is the cause of loyalty itself. Do what you can to make men loyal, and to keep them in a loyal attitude; this was the sense of the general precept that we derived from our study of the value of loyalty to those who are loyal. W7hoever follows this precept inevi tably defines for himself a cause, and becomes loyal to that cause. His sovereign and central moral maxim may otherwise be stated thus: Be loyal to loyalty.
Our reasons for asserting that this maxim THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY is a sound guide to dutiful action were these: First, the primal fact that loyalty, in any man who possesses it, is his supreme good. Sec ondly, the further fact that such loyalty is not a good which only a few are able to get, — an aristocratic possession of a small company of saints; but it is, on the contrary, a good which is accessible to all sorts and conditions of men, so far as they have normal human interests and normal self-control. We saw that there is no sort of wholesome human life which does not furnish opportunities for loyalty. And whoever is loyal wins, whatever his social station, and precisely in so far as he is loyal, the same general form of spiritual fulfilment, namely, self-possession through self -surrender. The keeper of a lonely lighthouse and the leader of a busy social order, the housemaid and the king, have almost equal opportunities to devote the self to its own chosen cause, and to win the good of such devotion. In conse quence of these two considerations, whoever undertakes to further the general cause of loyalty, is certainly aiming at the supreme CONSCIENCE good of mankind at large. His cause, there fore, is certainly a worthy cause.
Nor is the undertaking to further the gen eral cause of loyalty itself an unpractical undertaking, --a vague philanthropy. On the contrary, of all the efforts that you can make on behalf of your fellow-men, the effort to make them loyal to causes of their own is probably the most generally and widely prac ticable. It is notoriously hard, by any direct philanthropic effort, to give good fortune to any man, except to some few of those with whose fortunes you are most closely linked. Certain forms of suffering can be relieved by the hospi tals, or by private skill and kindness. But when the sufferer is relieved, he stands once more merely on the threshold of life, and the question, What can you do to give him life it self? is not yet answered. If, hereupon, you try to make your fellow-man prosperous, by offer ing to him unearned good fortune, you may in fact merely teach him to be wasteful and in dolent. If you seek to deal out happiness to him by devices of your own, you find that he THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY generally prefers to look for happiness in his own way. If you attempt to give him content ment, you come into conflict with his insati able natural desires.
But if you undertake to make him loyal, there is indeed much that you can do. For, as I pointed out at the close of the last lecture, all of what common sense rightly regards as your ordinary duties to mankind may be viewed, and ought to be viewed, as prac tically effective ways of helping on the cause of general loyalty. Thus, you can speak the truth to your fellow, and can thereby help him to a better confidence in mankind. This confidence in mankind will aid him in turn to speak the truth himself. And in truth-speak ing there will be for him much real peace, for truth-speaking is a form of loyalty and will aid him to be otherwise loyal to his own. Pre cisely so, there are as many other ways of helping him to be loyal as there are other such obvious and commonly recognized du ties to be done in your ordinary and peaceful dealings with him.
CONSCIENCE CONSCIENCE Let me mention one further instance that was not used amongst our illustrations at the last meeting: The true value of courtesy in ordinary human intercourse lies in the fact that courtesy is one expression of loyalty to loyalty, and helps every one who either re ceives or witnesses courtesy to assume him self a loyal attitude towards all the causes that are represented by the peaceful and reasonable dealings of man with man. The forms of courtesy, in fact, are largely derived from what once were, or still are, more or less cere monious expressions of loyal devotion. Cour tesy, then, may be defined as an explicit assump tion of a loyal bearing. To adopt such a bearing with a real sincerity of heart is to express, in your passing actions, loyalty to universal loyalty. To act thus towards your individual fellow-man is then and there to help all who know of your act to be loyal. Courtesy, then, is a duty owed not so much to the individual to whom you are courteous, as to humanity at large.
There are, then, many ways of aiding your THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY fellow-man to be loyal. Now, as we also set forth at the last lecture, one of the most effective of these ways lies in being loyal your self to some personally chosen and determi nate social cause which constitutes your busi ness. This special cause need not be one in which the particular fellow-man whom you are just now to help is, at the moment, directly interested. Your very loyalty to your own cause will tend to prove infectious. Who ever is loyal to his own therefore helps on the cause of universal loyalty by his every act of devotion, precisely in so far as he refrains from any hostile attack upon the loyalty of other people, and simply lets his example of loyalty work. Whoever makes the further ance of universal loyalty his cause, lacks, therefore, neither practical means nor pres ent opportunity for serving his cause.
To each man our principle therefore says: Live in your own way a loyal life and one subject to the general principle of loyalty to loyalty. Serve your own cause, but so choose it and so serve it that in consequence of your CONSCIENCE life loyalty amongst men shall prosper. For tune may indeed make the range of your choice of your calling very narrow. Neces sity may bind you to an irksome round of tasks. But sweeten these with whatever loy alty you can consistently get into your life. Let loyalty be your pearl of great price. Sell all the happiness that you possess or can get in disloyal or in non-loyal activities, and buy that pearl. When you once have found, or begun to find, your personal cause, be as stead ily faithful to it as loyalty to loyalty henceforth permits. That is, if you find that a cause once chosen does indeed involve disloyalty to loyalty, as one might find who, having sworn fidelity to a leader, afterwards discov ered his leader to be a traitor to the cause of mankind, you may have altogether to abandon the cause first chosen. But never abandon a cause except for the sake of some higher or deeper loyalty such as actually requires the change.
Meanwhile, the principle of loyalty to loyalty obviously requires you to respect loyalty THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY in all men, wherever you find it. If your fellow's cause has, in a given case, assailed your own, and if, in the world as it is, conflict is inevitable, you may then have to war with your fellow's cause, in order to be loyal to your own. But even then, you may never assail whatever is sincere and genuine about his spirit of loyalty. Even if your fellow's cause involves disloyalty to mankind at large, you may not condemn the loyalty of your fellow in so far as it is loyalty. You may condemn only his blindly chosen cause. All the loyal are brethren. They are children of one spirit. Loyalty to loyalty involves the active furtherance of this spirit wherever it appears. Fair play in sport, chivalrous respect for the adversary in war, tolerance of the sincere beliefs of other men, — all these virtues are thus to be viewed as mere variations of loy alty to loyalty. Prevent the conflict of loyal ties when you can, minimize such conflict where it exists, and, by means of fair play and of the chivalrous attitude towards the opponent, utilize even conflict, where it is CONSCIENCE CONSCIENCE inevitable, so as to further the cause of loyalty to loyalty. Such maxims are obvious conse quences of our principle. Do we not gain, then, a great deal from our principle in the way of unifying our moral code?
II But next, as to those just-mentioned para doxes of popular morality, do we not gain from our principle a guide to help us through the maze? "Be just; but also be kind." These two precepts, so far as they are sound, merely emphasize, as we pointed out at the close of our last lecture, two distinct but inseparable aspects of loyalty. My cause links my fellow and myself by social ties which, in the light of our usual human inter pretation of life, appear to stand for super- personal interests, — for interests in property rights, in formal obligations, in promises, in various abstractly definable relations. If I am loyal, I respect these relations. And I do so since, from the very definition of a cause to which one can be loyal, this cause will become THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY nothing unless these ties are preserved intact. But to respect relations as such is to be what men call just. Meanwhile, our common cause also personally interests both my fellow and myself. So far as we both know the cause, we love it, and delight in it. Hence in being loyal to our cause, I am also being kind to my fellow. For hereby I further his delight in just so far as I help him to insight. But kindness which is not bound up with loyalty is as a sounding brass and as a tinkling cymbal, a mere sentimentalism. And abstract justice, apart from loyalty, is a cruel formalism. My fellow wants to be loyal. This is his deepest need. If I am loyal to that need, I therefore truly delight him. But kindness that is not bound up with loyalty may indeed amuse my fellow for a moment. Yet like "fancy," such kindness "dies in the cradle where it lies." Even so, if I am loyal, I am also just. But justice that is no aspect of loyalty has no reason for existence. The true relations of benevolence and justice can therefore be best defined in terms of our conception of loyalty.
CONSCIENCE CONSCIENCE If any one says, "I will show thee my justice or my kindness without my loyalty," the loyal man may rightly respond, " I will show thee my kindness and my justice by my loyalty."
In a similar fashion, the moral problems regarding the right relations of strictness to generosity, of prudent foresight to present confidence, of self-surrender to self-assertion, of love to the righteous resistance of enemies, - all these moral problems, I say, are best to be solved in terms of the principle of loyalty to loyalty. As to the problem of the true concern and regard for the self, the loyal man culti vates himself, and is careful of his property rights, just in order to furnish to his cause an effective instrument; but he aims to forget precisely so much of himself as is, at any time, an obstruction to his loyalty; and he also aims to be careless of whatever about his private fortunes may be of no importance to his ser vice of the cause. When he asserts himself, he does so because he has neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak save as his cause commands; and it is of precisely such self-sacrificing self- THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY assertion that the foes of his cause would do well to beware. All the paradoxes about the care of self and the abandonment of self are thus soluble in terms of loyalty. Whoever knows and possesses the loyal attitude, ipso facto solves these paradoxes in each special case as it arises. And whoever comprehends the nature of loyalty to loyalty, as it is ex pressed in the form of fair play in sport, of chivalry in war, of tolerance in belief, and of the spirit that seeks to prevent the conflict of loyalties where such prevention is possible, — whoever, I say, thus comprehends what loyalty to loyalty means, holds the key to all the familiar mysteries about the right relation of the love of man to the strenuous virtues, and to the ethics of conflict.
Ill As you see, it is my deliberate intention to maintain that the principle of loyalty to loyalty is a sufficient expression of what common sense calls "the dictates of conscience." When I state this thesis, it leads me, however, to a CONSCIENCE somewhat new question, which the title of this lecture is intended to emphasize.
Stated practically, this our next question takes the form of asking: Is the principle of loyalty to loyalty not only a means of solving certain perplexities, but an actually general, safe, and sufficient test of what is right and wrong in the doubtful moral situations which may arise in daily life? We have shown that the well-recognized duties and virtues, such as those which have to do with truth-speak ing, with courtesy, with fair play in sport, and with chivalrous regard for enemies, can indeed be regarded, if we choose, as special forms of loyalty to loyalty. But it is indeed one thing (as you may now interpose) to interpret in terms of our principle certain virtues or duties that we already recognize. It is another thing to use the concept of loyalty to loyalty as an universal means of finding out what it is right to do when one is otherwise in doubt. Is our principle always a serviceable prac tical guide? Or, to use the well-known term, does our principle adequately express what THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY people usually mean by the "dictates of con science"?
The word "conscience," which here becomes important for our philosophy of loyalty, is a term of many uses. The problem as to the true nature of the human conscience is a com plicated and difficult one. I shall here deal with the matter only in so far as is necessary for our own distinctly practical purpose. In expounding my precept, Be loyal to loyalty, I have set forth what does indeed pretend to be a general guiding maxim for conduct. But most of us, when we say, " My conscience dic tates this or this sort of conduct," are not disposed to think of conscience as definable in terms of any one maxim. Our conscience seems to us to represent, in our ordinary lives, a good many related but nevertheless dis tinct motives, such as prudence, charity, reasonableness, piety, and so on. Conscience also seems to us somewhat mysterious in many of its demands, so that we often say, "I do not precisely know why this or this is right; but I feel sure that it is right, for my CONSCIENCE CONSCIENCE conscience tells me so." Since, then, con science seems so complex and sometimes so mysterious a power, you may naturally hesi tate to accept the views of a moralist who attempts, as you may think, to simplify too much the requirements of conscience. You may still insist that the moral doctrine which I have so far set forth is in one respect like all other philosophies of conduct that fill the history of ethical thought; because, as you may insist, this theory is powerless to tell any one what to do when a really perplexing case of conscience arises.
The reproach that moral philosophers have fine-sounding principles to report, but can never tell us how these principles practically apply, except when the cases are such as common sense has already decided, --this is an old objection to philosophical ethics. I want to show you how I myself meet that objection, and in what way, and to what extent, as I think, the principle of loyalty to loyalty does express the true dictates of conscience, and does tell us what to do in doubtful cases.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY What is conscience? You will all agree that the word names a mental possession of ours which enables us to pass some sort of judgment, correct or mistaken, upon moral questions as they arise. My conscience, then, belongs to my mental equipment, and tells me about right and wrong conduct. More over, my conscience approves or disapproves my conduct, excuses me or accuses me. About the general nature and office of the conscience we all of us, as I suppose, so far agree. Our differences regarding our con science begin when questions arise of the following sort: Is our conscience inborn? Is it acquired by training? Are its dictates the same in all men? Is it God-given? Is it infallible? Is it a separate power of the mind? Or is it simply a name for a collection of habits of moral judgment which we have acquired through social training, through reasoning, and through personal experience of the con sequences of conduct?
CONSCIENCE IV CONSCIENCE IV In trying to meet these questions so far as they here concern us, it is important next to note a few fundamental features which char acterize the personal life of all of us. The first of these features appears if one, instead of stopping with the question, "What is my conscience?" goes deeper still and asks the question, "Who and what am I?" This latter question also has indeed countless as pects, and a complete answer to it would con stitute an entire system of metaphysics. But for our present purpose it is enough to note that I cannot answer the question, "Who am I?" except in terms of some sort of statement of the plans and purposes of my life. In re sponding to the question, "Who are you?" a man may first mention his name. But his name is a mere tag. He then often goes on to tell where he lives, and where he comes from. His home and his birthplace, however, are already what one may call purposeful aspects of his personality. For dwelling-place, coun- THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY try, birthplace, and similar incidental facts about a man tend to throw light upon his per sonality mainly because they are of importance for a further knowledge of his social relations, and so of his social uses and activities.
But the answer to the question, "Who are you?" really begins in earnest when a man mentions his calling, and so actually sets out upon the definition of his purposes and of the way in which these purposes get expressed in his life. And when a man goes on to say, "I am the doer of these and these deeds, the friend of these friends, the enemy of these opposing purposes, the member of this family, the one whose ideals are such and such, and are so and so expressed in my life," the man expresses to you at length whatever is most ex pressible and worth knowing in answer to the question, "Who are you?"
To sum up, then, I should say that a person, an individual self, may be defined as a human life lived according to a plan. If a man could live with no plan at all, purposelessly and quite passively, he would in so far be an organism, CONSCIENCE CONSCIENCE and also, if you choose, he would be a psycho logical specimen, but he would be no per sonality. Wherever there is personality, there are purposes worked out in life. If, as often happens, there are many purposes connected with the life of this human creature, many plans in this life, but no discoverable unity and coherence of these plans, then in so far there are many glimpses of selfhood, many fragmen tary selves present in connection with the life of some human organism. But there is so far no one self, no one person discoverable. You are one self just in so far as the life that goes on in connection with your organism has some one purpose running through it. By the terms " this person " and " this self," then, we mean this human life in so far as it expresses some one purpose. Yet, of course, this one purpose which is expressed in the life of a single self need not be one which is defined by this self in abstract terms. On the contrary, most of us are aware that our lives are unified, after a fashion, by the very effort that we more or less vaguely make to assert ourselves somehow as individ- THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY uals in our world. Many of us have not yet found out how it would be best to assert our selves. But we are trying to find out. This very effort to find out gives already a certain unity of purpose to our lives.
But in so far as we have indeed found out some cause, far larger than our individual selves, to which we are fully ready to be loyal, this very cause serves to give the required unity to our lives, and so to determine what manner of self each of us is, even though we chance to be unable to define in abstract terms what is the precise nature of this very cause. Loyalty may be sometimes almost dumb; it is so in many of those obscure and humble models of loyalty of whom I have already spoken. They express their loyalty clearly enough in deeds. They often could not very well formulate it in words. They could not give an abstract account of their business. Yet their loyalty gives them a business. It unifies their activities. It makes of each of these loyal beings an individual self, — a life unified by a purpose. This purpose may in such CONSCIENCE CONSCIENCE cases come to consciousness merely as a willing hunger to serve the cause, a proud obedience to the ideal call. But in any case, wherever loyalty is, there is selfhood, personality, indi vidual purpose embodied in a life.
And now, further, if the argument of our first and second lectures is right, wherever a human selfhood gets practically and consciously unified, there is some form of loyalty. For, except in terms of some sort of loyal purpose, as we saw, this mass of instincts, of passions, of social interests, and of private rebellious ness, whereof the nature of any one of us is originally compounded, can never get any effective unity whatever.
To sum up so far, — a self is a life in so far as it is unified by a single purpose. Our loyalties furnish such purposes, and hence make of us conscious and unified moral per sons. Where loyalty has not yet come to any sort of definiteness, there is so far present only a kind of inarticulate striving to be an indi vidual self. This very search for one's true self is already a sort of life-purpose, which, as THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY far as it goes, individuates the life of the person in question, and gives him a task. But loyalty brings the individual to full moral self-con sciousness. It is devoting the self to a cause that, after all, first makes it a rational and uni fied self, instead of what the life of too many a man remains, — namely, a cauldron of seeth ing and bubbling efforts to be somebody, a cauldron which boils dry when life ends.
V But what, you may now ask, has all this view of the self to do with conscience? I answer that the nature of conscience can be under stood solely in terms of such a theory of the self as the one just sketched.
Suppose that I am, in the foregoing sense, a more or less completely unified and loyal self. Then there are two aspects of this selfhood which is mine. I live a life; and I have, as a loyal being, an ideal. The life itself is not the ideal. They are and always remain in some sense distinct. For no one act of my life, and no limited set of acts of mine, can ever CONSCIENCE CONSCIENCE completely embody my ideal. My ideal comes to me from my cause, as the ideal of the Speaker of the House of Commons, in the story that we have already used to illustrate loyalty, came to him from the House. My cause, how ever, is greater than my individual life. Hence it always sets before me an ideal which de mands more of me than I have yet done, — more, too, than I can ever at any one instant accomplish. Even because of this vastness of my ideal, even because that to which I am loyal is so much greater than I ever become, even because of all this can my ideal unify my life, and make a rational self of me.
Hence, if I am indeed one self, my one ideal is always something that stands over against my actual life; and each act of this life has to be judged, estimated, determined, as to its moral value, in terms of the ideal. My cause, therefore, as it expresses itself to my own con sciousness through my personal ideal, — my cause and my ideal taken together, and viewed as one, perform the precise function which tra dition has attributed to conscience. My cause, THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY then, for our philosophy of loyalty, is my con science, — my cause as interpreted through my ideal of my personal life. When I look to my cause, it furnishes me with a conscience; for it sets before me a plan or ideal of life, and then constantly bids me contrast this plan, this ideal, with my transient and momentary impulses.
To illustrate: Were I a loyal judge on the bench, whose cause was my official function, then my judicial conscience would be simply my whole ideal as a judge, when this ideal was contrasted with any of my present and nar rower views of the situation directly before me. If, at a given moment, I tended to lay unfair stress upon one side of a controversy that had been brought into my court, my ideal would say: But a judge is impartial. If I were dis posed to decide with inadvised haste, the ideal would say: But a judge takes account of the whole law bearing on the case. If I were offered bribes, my judicial conscience would reject them as being once for all ideally intol erable. In order to have such a judicial con- CONSCIENCE CONSCIENCE science, I should, of course, have to be able to view my profession as the carrying out of some one purpose, and so as one cause. This pur pose I should have learned, of course, from the traditions of the office. But I should have had willingly to adopt these traditions as my own, and to conceive my own life in terms of them, in order to have a judicial conscience of my own. Analogous comments could be made upon the conscience of an artist, of a states man, of a friend, or of a devoted member of a family, of any one who has a conscience. To have a conscience, then, is to have a cause, to unify your life by means of an ideal determined by this cause, and to compare the ideal and the life.
If this analysis is right, your conscience is simply that ideal of life which constitutes your moral personality. In having your conscience you become aware of your plan of being your self and nobody else. Your conscience pre sents to you this plan, however, in so far as the plan or ideal in question is distinct from the life in which you are trying to embody your THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY plan. Your life as it is lived, your experi ences, feelings, deeds, — these are the embodi ment of your ideal plan, in so far as your ideal plan for your own individual life as this self, gets embodied at all.
But no one act of yours ever expresses your plan of life perfectly. Since you thus always have your cause beyond you, there is always more to do. So the plan or ideal of life comes to stand over against your actual life as a gen eral authority by which each deed is to be tested, just as the judicial conscience of the judge on the bench tests each of his official acts by comparing it with his personal ideal of what a judge should be. My conscience, therefore, is the very ideal that makes me this rational self, the very cause that inspires and that unifies me. Viewed as something within myself, my conscience is the spirit of the self, first moving on the face of the waters of natural desire, and then gradually creating the heav ens and the earth of this life of the individual man. This spirit informs all of my true self, yet is nowhere fully expressed in any deed.
CONSCIENCE So that, in so far as we contrast the ideal with the single deed, we judge ourselves, condemn ourselves, or approve ourselves.
Our philosophy of loyalty thus furnishes us with a theory of a certain kind of conscious ness which, in any case, precisely fulfils the functions of the traditional conscience. I need hardly say that the conscience which I have now described is not in its entirety at all innate. On the contrary, it is the flower rather than the root of the moral life. But unquestionably we should never get it unless we possessed an innate power to become reasonable, unless we were socially disposed beings, unless we were able so to develop our reason and our social powers as to see that the good of mankind is indeed also our own good, and, in brief, unless we inherited a genuine moral nature.
With this view of the nature of conscience, what can we say as to the infallibility of such a conscience? I answer: My conscience is pre cisely as fallible or as infallible as my choice of a cause is subject to error, or is of such nature as to lead me aright. Since loyalty, in so far THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY as it is loyalty, is always a good, the conscience of any loyal self is never wholly a false guide. Since loyalty may be in many respects blind, one's conscience also may be in many respects misleading. On the other hand, your con science, at any stage of its development, is unquestionably the best moral guide that you then have, simply because, so far as it is viewed as an authority outside of you, it is your ideal, your cause, set before you; while, in so far as it is within you, it is the spirit of your own self, the very ideal that makes you any rational moral person whatever. Apart from it you are a mere pretence of moral personality, a manifold fermentation of desires. And as you have only your own life to live, your con science alone can teach you how to live that life. But your conscience will doubtless grow with you, just as your loyalty and your cause will grow. The best way to make both of them grow is to render up your life to their service and to their expression.
Conscience, as thus defined, is for each of us a personal affair. In so far as many of us CONSCIENCE are fellow-servants of the same cause, and, above all, in so far as all of us, if we are en lightened, are fellow-servants of the one cause of universal loyalty, we do indeed share in the same conscience. But in so far as no two of us can live the same life, or be the same indi vidual human self, it follows that no two of us can possess identical consciences, and that no two of us should wish to do so. Your con science is not mine; yet I share with you the same infinite realm of moral truth, and we are subject to the same requirement of loyalty to loyalty. This requirement must interpret itself to us all in endlessly varied ways. The loyal are not all monotonously doing the same thing. Yet they individually partake of the one endlessly varied and manifold spirit of loyalty. As to whether conscience is in any sense divine, we shall learn something in our closing lecture upon the relations of Loyalty and Religion.
VI So far as is needful for our present practical purpose, the theory of the conscience which our THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY philosophy of loyalty requires is now before you. We needed this theory in order to pre pare the way for answering the question: In how far does the law, Be loyal to loyalty, enable us to decide cases of moral doubt? In how far does this principle furnish a means of discovering these special precepts about single cases which common sense calls the "dictates of conscience"?
How do moral doubts arise in the mind of a loyal person? I answer: Moral doubts arise in the loyal mind when there is an apparent conflict between loyalties. As a fact, that cause, which in any sense unifies a life as com plex as my human life is, must of course be no perfectly simple cause. By virtue of my nature and of my social training, I belong to a family, to a community, to a calling, to a state, to humanity. In order to be loyal to loyalty, and in order to be a person at all, I must indeed unify my loyalty. In the meantime, however, I must also choose special causes to serve; and if these causes are to interest me, if they are to engross and to possess me, they must be CONSCIENCE