The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism;[223] and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes.  But the law of consciousness abides.  There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven.  You may fulfill your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way.  Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you.  But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself.  I have my own stern claims and perfect circle.  It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties.  But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code.  If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.  High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics.  The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers.  We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.  Our age yields no great and perfect persons.  We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force,[224] and do lean and beg day and night continually.  Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us.  We are parlor soldiers.  We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart.  If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined.  If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.  A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it,[225] peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.  He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.