=Withdrawal from the Social Order.=--The development of reflection tends to set up a moral opposition between the individual and society. Sometimes "conscience" goes beyond the need of criticizing, of discriminating, of interpreting social customs, of following their spirit rather than their letter; it takes the form of an assertion of a purely inner, personal morality, so distinct from the conditions of social life that the latter are conceived to be totally lacking in positive moral significance. The prescriptions of morality are thought to be revealed in conscience, as a faculty of pure intuition or revelation, receiving neither material nor warrant from social conditions. The distinction already spoken of between the moral and the economic, legal, or conventional, is conceived as a complete separation; customs and institutions are external, indifferent, irrelevant, or even hostile to the ideal and personally perceived demands of morality. Such a conception of morality is especially likely to arise in a period when through the clash of ways and standards of living, all customs, except those maintained by force and authority, are disintegrating or relaxing. Such a state existed in the early years of the Roman empire when, for the first time in history, local boundaries were systematically overstepped; when the empire was a seething mixture of alien and unlike gods, beliefs, ideals, standards, practices. In the almost universal flux and confusion, _external_ order was maintained by the crystallized legislation and administration of Rome; but personal aims and modes of behavior had to be ascertained by the individual thrown back upon himself. Christian, Stoic, Epicurean, alike found the political order wholly external to the moral, or in chronic opposition to it. There was a withdrawal into the region of personal consciousness. In some cases the withdrawal was pushed to the point where men felt that they could be truly righteous only by going by themselves into the desert, to live as hermits; or by forming separate communities of those who agreed in their conceptions of life; mental and moral aloofness from prevailing social standards and habitudes was preached by all.