preclude a realization of the awfulness of obligation, the sacredness of duty, any more than a geologist must cease to thrill at the grandeur and beauty of the Grand Canyon because he has studied the composition of the rocks and understands the causes that have slowly, through the ages, wrought this miracle.  So we need feel no sense of duty is not something imposed upon human nature from without; it is of its very substance, it has developed step by step with our other faculties, slowly crystallizing through millenniums of human and pre-human experience.  In the abstract, then, we may say that conscience is a name for any secondary impulses or inhibitions which check and redirect man’s primary impulses, for A greater good; any later developed aversions or inclinations, judgments of value or feelings of constraint, which guide a man in the teeth of his animal nature toward a better way of life provided that these superimposed impulses are not explicit enough to be classified under some other head.  For example, we may be pulled up sharply from a course of self-indulgence by a conscious realization of the harm we are doing to others thereby; this bridling state of mind, whether chiefly emotional or more intellectual, we may call sympathy, or an altruistic instinct, or love.  But when we feel the pressure from these same mental states incipiently aroused, when our motor-mechanism half automatically steers us away from the selfish act, without our consciously formulating a specific name for the new impulse or recognizing any articulate motive, we are apt to give this mental push the more general name of conscience.  So if we consciously reckon up, balance advantages, and decide on the less inviting act in recognition of its really greater worth to us, we say we act from prudence or insight, we are reasonable about it; while if the grumbling of the prudential motives remain subterranean, subconscious, they play the role of conscience.  Conscience is, on such occasions, but inarticulate common sense.  Usually, however, prudential and altruistic motives would both be discovered if the dumb driving of conscience were to be made articulate.  The reverberation of parental teachings, of sermons heard and books read, of the opinions and emotions of our fellows, might be found, all bent and fused into a combined “suggestion,” a mental push, a “must” or “ought,” from whose influence we find it difficult to escape.

The detailed psychological analysis of cases of conscience and the study of its genesis are of no essential ethical interest, except as they show us that the sense of duty is not an ultimate, irreducible element in our consciousness, or make clearer to us its function and value.  Conscience is the general name for coercion upon conduct from within the mind.  The important thing to note is the useful purpose, which, in its so widely varying forms, it serves.  Whatever its sources or its exact nature in contemporary man, it is one of the most valuable of our assets.  To a more explicit statement of its value we must now turn.  What is the value of conscience?