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 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.
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