only a vague uneasiness or restlessness, or there may be a sophisticated recurrence of the concepts of “conscience,” “duty,” etc.  The one universal fact is that there is a conflict between some primitive impulse or passion and some maturer mental checks.  Any sort of mental stuff that serves the purpose of controlling desire will do; we must define conscience in terms not of content but of function.  There is no such unity in the material as the single name seems to imply; and whether or not that name shall be given to a given psychological state is a matter of usage in which there is considerable variation.

In general, we reserve the name “conscience” for the vaguer and more elusive restraints and leadings, the sense of reluctant necessity whose purpose we do not clearly see although we feel its pressure, the accumulated residuum of long inner experience and many influences from without.  Our minds retain many creases whose origin we have forgotten; we veer away from many a pleasant inclination without knowing why.  These unanalyzed and residual inhibitions that grip us and will not let us go, form a contrasting background to our more explicit motives and often count for more in our conduct.  The very lack of comprehension serves in less rational minds to enhance their prestige with an atmosphere of awe and mystery.  These strange checks and promptings that well up in a man’s heart are which he must not dare to disobey.  The voice of God in our hearts we may, indeed, well conceive them to be.  The attempt to analyze into its psychological elements and trace the natural genesis of conscience, as of morality in general must not be taken as an attempt to discredit it or to read God out of the world.  For God works usually, if not universally, through natural laws; and the historical viewpoint, that sees everything in our developed life as the outcome of ages of natural evolution, is not only rich in fruitful insight, but entirely consistent with a deep religious feeling.  For hortatory or inspirational purposes we do not need to make this analysis; it has, indeed, its practical dangers.  It tends to rob the glory from anything to analyze it into its parts and study the natural causes that produced it.  The loveliest painting is but a mess of pigments to the microscope, the loveliest face but a mess of cells and hairs and blood vessels.  There is something gruesome and inhuman about embryology and all other studies of origins.

While we are analyzing an object, or tracing its genesis, we are not responding to it as a whole or feeling its beauty and power.  The mystery, the spell, vanishes; we cease to thrill when we dissect.  But knowledge proceeds by analysis, and gains by a study of origins and causes.  And the temporary emotional loss should be more than balanced by the value of the insight won.  We need not linger too long at our dissecting.  The discovery that conscience is an explicable and natural development does not