we must define what conscience is since we have
said what it is not: that it is not the voice of the Spirit in man, that
it is not the voice of God.

Conscience is the result of the accumulated experience gained by each
man in his previous lives. Each of us is an Immortal Spirit, a Divine
fragment, a Self: "A fragment of mine own Self, transformed in the
world of life into an immortal Spirit, draweth round itself the senses,
of which the mind is the sixth, veiled in Matter." Such is each man. He
evolves into manifested powers all the potentialities unfolded in him by
virtue of his divine parentage, and this is effected by repeated births
into this world, wherein he gathers experience, repeated deaths out of
this world into the other twain--the wheel of births and deaths turns
in the [T.]riloka, the three worlds--wherein he reaps in pain the
results of experiences gathered by disregard of law, and assimilates,
transforming into faculty, moral and mental, the results of experience
gathered in harmony with law. Having transmuted experience into faculty,
he returns to earth for the gathering of new experience, dealt with
as before after physical death. Thus the Spirit unfolds, or the man
evolves--whichever expression is preferred to indicate this growth.
Very similarly doth the physical body grow; a man eats food; digests it,
assimilates it, transmutes it into the materials of his body; ill food
causes pain, even disease; good food strengthens, and makes for growth.
The outer is a reflection of the inner.

Now conscience is the sum total of the experiences in past lives which
have borne sweet and bitter fruit, according as they were in accord or
disaccord with surrounding natural law. This sum total of _physical_
experiences, which result in increased or diminished life, we call
instinct, and it is life-preserving. The sum total of our interwoven
_mental and moral_ experiences, in our relations with others, is
moral instinct, or conscience, and it is harmonising, impels to
"good"--a word which we shall define in our fourth chapter.

Hence conscience depends on the experiences through which we have passed
in previous lives, and is necessarily an individual possession. It
differs where the past experience is different, as in the savage and the
civilised man, the dolt and the talented, the fool and the genius, the
criminal and the saint. The voice of God would speak alike in all; the
experience of the past speaks differently