activities of man and of his stupendous success as a species; but a spectator watching the process at its outset, had he been interested in the destiny of the race, might have felt a pang of apprehension when he realized how momentous was the divorce which had been accomplished between instinct and individual desire. Instinctive acts are still done because they are based on “a priori syntheses of the most perfect sort,” but they are no longer necessarily pleasant. Duty has first appeared in the world, and with it the age-long conflict which is described in the memorable words of Paul: “I delight in the law of God after the inward man; but I see another law in my members {49} warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.”
Into the features and consequences of this conflict it is now necessary for us to probe a little farther.
The element of conflict in the normal life of all inhabitants of a civilized state is so familiar that no formal demonstration of its existence is necessary. In childhood the process has begun. The child receives from the herd the doctrines, let us say, that truthfulness is the most valuable of all the virtues, that honesty is the best policy, that to the religious man death has no terrors, and that there is in store a future life of perfect happiness and delight. And yet experience tells him with persistence that truthfulness as often as not brings him punishment, that his dishonest playfellow has as good if not a better time than he, that the religious man shrinks from death with as great a terror as the unbeliever, is as broken-hearted by bereavement, and as determined to continue his hold upon this imperfect life rather than trust himself to what he declares to be the certainty of future bliss. To the child, of course, experience has but little suggestive force, and he is easily consoled by the perfunctory rationalizations offered him as explanations by his elders. Yet who of us is there who cannot remember the vague feeling of dissatisfaction, the obscure and elusive sense of something being wrong, which is left by these and similar conflicts?