private conscience. It is just possible that his conscience may be, in Buskin's phrase, "the conscience of an ass." Or he may be taking for the verdict of conscience what is simply an unexamined prejudice. A man has no right to a private conscience in any matter which he has not taken pains to understand. A man's first duty, then, is to examine the judgment of his conscience, and to make quite certain that he has acquired sufficient knowledge of the question at issue. But if he is satisfied, after full reflection on all the circumstances, that the verdict of his private conscience is right, then he must at all costs obey it.
§ 7. The Education of Conscience. The aim of the education of conscience is the removal of such conflicts as these. In an ideal condition of society each man's conscience would function always and everywhere consistently with itself, and harmoniously with the public or universal conscience. With a view to such an ideal as this, how is conscience to be educated?
(1) The individual conscience should be organised harmoniously. In other words, the self as a whole should be systematised in an all-round development, in which each aspect of the self is allowed an opportunity to grow. Thus it should be possible to do something to overcome the tendency of conscience to be slack in some directions, and excessively scrupulous in others. Here, as everywhere else, a harmonious moral life depends on the development of the self in accordance with a comprehensive and worthy moral ideal.
(2) Conscience must be enlightened. Ethics rests on the assumption that if all men had the same
