Now, the positive school itself will say that such men have all they need. They confessedly have conscience left to them--the supernatural moral judgment, that is, as applied to themselves--which has been analysed, but not destroyed; and the position of which, we are told, has been changed only by its being set on a foundation of fact, instead of a foundation of superstition. Mill said that having learnt what the sunset clouds were made of, he still found that he admired them as much as ever; '_therefore_,' he said, '_I saw at once that there was nothing to be feared from analysis_.' And this is exactly what the positive school say of conscience. A shallower falsehood, however, it is not easy to conceive. It is true that conscience in one way may, for a time at least, survive any kind of analysis. It may continue, with undiminished distinctness, its old approvals and menaces. But that alone is nothing at all to the point. Conscience is of practical value, not only because it says certain things, but because it says them, as we think, with authority. If its authority goes, and its advice continues, it may indeed molest, but it will no longer direct us. Now, though the voice of conscience may, as the positive school say, survive their analysis of it, its authority will not. That authority has always taken the form of a menace, as well as of an approval; and the menace at any rate, upon all positive principles, is nothing but big words that can break no bones. As soon as we realise it to be but this, its effect must cease instantly. The power of conscience resides not in what we hear it to be, but in what we believe it to be. A housemaid may be deterred from going to meet her lover in the garden, because a howling ghost is believed to haunt the laurels; but she will go to him fast enough when she discovers that the sounds that alarmed her were not a soul in torture, but the cat in love. The case of conscience is exactly analogous to this.