ides upon
an important step, his action is directed not so much by any clear
knowledge of the right thing to do, as by an inner impulse--you may
almost call it an instinct--proceeding from the deepest foundations of
his being. If, later on, he attempts to criticise his action by the
light of hard and fast ideas of what is right in the abstract--those
unprofitable ideas which are learnt by rote, or, it may be, borrowed
from other people; if he begins to apply general rules, the principles
which have guided others, to his own case, without sufficiently
weighing the maxim that one man's meat is another's poison, then he
will run great risk of doing himself an injustice. The result will
show where the right course lay. It is only when a man has reached
the happy age of wisdom that he is capable of just judgment in regard
either to his own actions or to those of others.

It may be that this impulse or instinct is the unconscious effect of a
kind of prophetic dream which is forgotten when we awake--lending
our life a uniformity of tone, a dramatic unity, such as could never
result from the unstable moments of consciousness, when we are so
easily led into error, so liable to strike a false note. It is in
virtue of some such prophetic dream that a man feels himself called to
great achievements in a special sphere, and works in that direction
from his youth up out of an inner and secret feeling that that is his
true path, just as by a similar instinct the bee is led to build up
its cells in the comb. This is the impulse which Balthazar Gracian
calls _la gran sinderesis_[1]--the great power of moral discernment:
it is something that a man instinctively feels to be his salvation
without which he were lost.

[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note_.--This obscure word appears to be
derived from the Greek _sugtaereo_ (N.T. and Polyb.) meaning "to
observe strictly." It occurs in _The Doctor and Student_, a series of
dialogues between a doctor of divinity and a student on the laws of
England, first published in 1518; and is there (Dialog. I. ch. 13)
explained as "a natural power of the soule, set in the highest part
thereof, moving and stirring it to good, and abhoring evil." This
passage is copied into Milton's Commonplace Book, edit. _Horwood_, Sec.
79. The word is also found in the Dictionary of the Spanish Academy
(vol. vi. of the year 1739) in the sense of an innate discernment
of moral principles, where a quotation is given from Madre