3. Emotions due to accidental associations. It is matter of common notice that the moral feelings are rarely wholly pure; that all sorts of sentiments, due to associations of time and place and person not strictly belonging to the acts themselves, cluster about them. While this is true, we should not forget the great difficulty there is in marking off any associations as _wholly_ external to the nature of the act. We may say that mere fear of punishment is such a wholly external feeling, having no place in moral emotion. Yet it may be doubted whether there is any feeling that may be called mere fear of punishment. It is, perhaps, fear of punishment by a parent, for whom one has love and respect, and thus the fear has partially a genuinely moral aspect. Some writers would call the æsthetic feelings, the feelings of beauty, of harmony, which gather about moral ends adventitious. Yet the fact that other moralists have made all moral feelings essentially æsthetic, as due to the perception of the fitness and proportion of the acts, should warn us from regarding æsthetic feelings as wholly external. About all that can be said is that feelings which do not spring from _some_ aspect of the content of the act itself should be extruded, with growing maturity of character, from influence upon conduct. LXIII. Conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is primarily the virtue of intelligence in regard to conduct. That is to say, it is the formed habit of bringing intelligence to bear upon the analysis of moral relations--the habit of considering what ought to be done. It is based upon the recognition of the idea first distinctly formulated by Socrates--that "an unexamined life is not one that should be led by man". It is the outgrowth of the customary morality embodied in usages, codes and social institutions, but it is an advance upon custom, because it requires a meaning and a reason. It is the mark of a "character which will not be satisfied without understanding the law that it obeys; without knowing what the good is, for which the demand has hitherto been blindly at work" (Green, Op. cit., p. 270). Conscientiousness, then, is reflective intelligence grown into character. It involves a greater and wider recognition of obligation in general, and a larger and more stable emotional response to everything that presents itself as duty; as well as the habit of deliberate consideration of the moral situation and of the acts demanded by it.