y than the
remembered one, and its satisfaction no less true. Temptation has the
same basis as duty. The difference is one of volume and permanence in
the rival satisfactions, and the attitude conscience will assume toward
these depends more on the representability of the demands compared than
on their original vehemence or ultimate results.

[Sidenote: Conscience and reason compared.]

A passionate conscience may thus arise in the play of impulses differing
in permanence, without involving a judicial exercise of reason. Nor does
such a conscience involve a synthetic ideal, but only the ideal presence
of particular demands. Conflicts in the conscience are thus quite
natural and would continually occur but for the narrowness that commonly
characterises a mind inspired by passion. A life of sin and repentance
is as remote as possible from a Life of Reason. Yet the same situation
which produces conscience and the sense of duty is an occasion for
applying reason to action and for forming an ideal, so soon as the
demands and satisfactions concerned are synthesised and balanced
imaginatively. The stork might do more than feel the conflict of his two
impulses, he might do more than embody in alternation the eloquence of
two hostile thoughts. He might pass judgment upon them impartially and,
in the felt presence of both, conceive what might be a union or
compromise between them.

This resultant object of pursuit, conceived in reflection and in itself
the initial goal of neither impulse, is the ideal of a mind occupied by
the two: it is the aim prescribed by reason under the circumstances. It
differs from the prescription of conscience, in that conscience is often
the spokesman of one interest or of a group of interests in opposition
to other primary impulses which it would annul altogether; while reason
and the ideal are not active forces nor embodiments of passion at all,
but merely a method by which objects of desire are compared in
reflection. The goodness of an end is felt inwardly by conscience; by
reason it can be only taken upon trust and registered as a fact. For
conscience the object of an opposed will is an evil, for reason it is a
good on the same ground as any other good, because it is pursued by a
natural impulse and can bring a real satisfaction. Conscience, in fine,
is a party to moral strife, reason an observer of it who, however, plays
the most important and beneficent part in the outcome by suggesting the
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