The fact that the judgment of right is likely to present itself to people of emotional temperament as an imagined voice, admonishing them what they ought to do, is an illustration of that essentially social or interlocutory character of thought, spoken of in an earlier chapter. Our thoughts are always, in some sort, imaginary conversations; and when vividly felt they are likely to become quite distinctly so. On the other hand, people whose moral life is calm perceive little or no distinction, in this regard, between the conclusions of conscience and other judgments. Of course, the view that the right is the rational would be untrue, if by rational were meant merely the result of formal reasoning. The judgment of right and the conclusion of formal thought are frequently opposed to each other, because, I take it, the latter is a comparatively narrow, partial, and conventional product of the mind. The former is rational and mentally authoritative in a larger sense; its premises are immeasurably richer; it deals with the whole content of life, with instincts freighted with the inarticulate conclusions of a remote past, and with the unformulated inductions of individual experience. To set the product of a superficial ratiocination over the final output, in conscience, of our whole mental being, is a kind of pedantry. I do not mean to imply that there is usually an opposition between the two—they should work harmoniously together—but only to assert that when there is, conscience must be regarded as of a profounder rationality. On the other hand, the wrong, the immoral, is, in a similar sense, the irrational. It is that which, after the mind has done its full work upon the matter, presents itself as the mentally isolated, the inharmonious, that which we cannot follow without having, in our more collected moods, a sense of having been untrue to ourselves, of having done ourselves a harm. The mind in its fullest activity is denied and desecrated; we are split in two. To violate conscience is to act under the control of an incomplete and fragmentary state of mind; and so to become less a person, to begin to disintegrate and go to pieces. An unjust or incontinent deed produces remorse, apparently because the thought of it will not lie still in the mind, but is of such a nature that there is no comfortable place for it in the system of thought already established there.