work aright when left to their own unconscious activity?  Fix your consciousness long enough on the tip of your little finger, and you will feel a pricking sensation in it.  The mind directed intently to any part of the frame will produce a flow of blood there.  Any physician will tell you that this is one of the greatest difficulties he has to contend with in his patients; the mind being steadily directed to some disordered spot increases the congestion which is the result of disease.

Unconsciousness, therefore, is the very channel in which our animal nature works healthily and undisturbed according to its own laws.  But you are a self-conscious being, and not as the animals.  God keeps the keys of their nature in His own hands.  They are shut up to certain ends which are in His purpose rather than in their minds.  They are locked within limits of their nature, which are absolute, and cannot, therefore, be transgressed.  But man, in virtue of his self-consciousness, is emphatically “he who hath the keys, who openeth and no man shutteth, and who shutteth and no man openeth.”  All the secret recesses of your being lie open to you, and no man can close it to your vision.  You can voluntarily shut the door of salvation and hamper the lock, and no man can open.  A limit is no absolute limit to you because your very consciousness of the limit involves your consciousness of the beyond which makes it a limit.  And therefore to you as a self-knowing existence, with your being necessarily surrendered into your own hands, two faculties have been given as a substitute for the unconscious necessity of an animal nature:  First, a self-judging faculty which we call conscience, or a power of discerning between a lower and a higher, and a sense of obligation to the higher which enables you to correlate your faculties and functions in their true order of relative excellence; and secondly, a spiritual will, capable of carrying the decisions of conscience into practical execution and attaining to a necessity of moral law.  The true function of man’s will is not, therefore, to add itself on to any one of his instincts and give it a disordered strength, but, while throwing its chief conscious energies into the higher interests of life, to rule his instincts and appetites according to those higher interests.  This, when the condition of that infinitely complex thing, modern civilized life, interferes, as at times it must do, with the legitimate exercise of his instincts, and his good has to be subordinated to the good of the greater number, may occasionally involve a hard struggle, even when the instincts have been left to their own healthy natural play; but at least it will be all the difference between a struggle with a spirited animal and a maddened and infuriated brute.