From the point of view of the individual it is usually more an emotion than a reasoned judgment; and it is much more of the nature of prejudice than of an argumentative conclusion. When people talk about conscientious objections to obeying the law, it is always quite impossible to distinguish between their prejudice and their conscience; there is no standard by which to determine. But the fact that it is unreasoned in the individual does not mean that it is irrational, or without reason in itself. What has been built up by the steady pressure of whole centuries of experience has enormous weight of pure reason behind it, even though the individual cannot himself give the reason, and even though there may be no individual alive who can give it; it has come out of the logic of experience; it has been built up in the strictly scientific way by a whole series of facts. There is an enormous inductive background, an enormous scientific basis for the moral convictions of the better, more self-controlled members of any civilised society. The moral verdict of society, and the conscience of the individual, which is his own echo, for the most part, of that moral verdict, is a thing of quite enormous authority. But, it will be urged, the authorities clash. The verdict of European civilisation is for monogamy; the verdict of certain other civilisations is quite as emphatically against it. Does this mean that the whole distinction of right and wrong is a mere matter of convention? No, it does not. But even if it did, the thing would not be as bad as people often imagine, because convention is not something artificial in the sense of contrary to nature or fictitious; a convention is simply the expression of human nature working on a large scale. Man is a being whose nature it is to set up conventions, and a convention is a product of human nature, a property and mark of human nature, just as much gravitation is a property and mark of mechanical nature; and it only becomes contrary to nature and a nuisance when it has survived the purpose for which it originally grew up. But none the less there is something more than any convention or social growth about the distinction of right and wrong; the distinction in itself is absolute and fundamental. It is the distinction between recognising oneself as member of a community and not so recognising oneself. Morality is always recognition of a claim on the part of other persons, the recognition that their point of view and their interests have to be taken into account in the determination of my conduct. As man is by nature social, as by nature he is designed to live in communities, the distinction of right and wrong, that is the recognition of the claim of the community and of the members in it, is absolute and final.