Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/88

72 SOPHIE BRYANT. for a sound maxim. Now the defeat of reason by an instinct, as such, is demoralising, even when the instinct is better than the narrow view of life it overturns. Such a defeat is the beginning of a bad habit : if one instinct may defeat reason so may another. Hence it is actually true that such innocent Sabbath breaking as in a Catholic country would be the order of the day (led by the ministers of religion, with the county brass band), may be the beginning of moral perdition in Sabbatarian Scotland. The defeat of the instinct by reason, on the other hand, is the common case of resisting temptation. Yet it may be that the in- stinct, as judged by a higher intelligence, is more reason- able than the half-awakened reason with which it conflicts, and then there is need for some process by which the instinct, making its pressure felt, comes to be translated into an idea and to gain acceptance as a principle among other principles of action. This is the function which self-consciousness performs ; and probably its de- velopment is greatly forwarded by a life full of much ethical demand and difficulty, requiring frequent readjust- ment of principle to include the wisdom and exclude the unwisdom of instinct. Even in our full blossom of practical wisdom we differ curiously, though within limits, from one another. On the same plane of wisdom our first principles may be the same, and even then the distribution of emphasis the emphasis of instinctive individuality among them may be so different as to make the totals differ widely. My practical wisdom is, relative to me, the best formula I can find to include all the better impulses of my nature, some of which would fail to thrill in response to some other formula ideally better. The variety of these formulae is as the variety of tunes that can be played with the seven notes of the musical scale. Thus, though we conceive the moral law as one, the in- dividual conscience hears it as a melody varying with the unconscious nature of the individual. The perspective of reason varies with the instinctive point of view. Our original differences do not vanish with growing self-consciousness though they become less acute. We are here concerned, not with this unconscious but with another kind of diversity, the extent, namely, to which self has become conscious. On this depends the ex- tent of the united as compared with the dual self. It can- not be doubted that most persons, if not all, are in this sense more or less dual : there is a something or other of instinct left over in them of which they could give no