Practically, what the Kantian viewpoint amounts to is an exaltation of conscience-a much more concrete (and variable) thing than this abstract formula. Do your duty, at any cost! Our hearts respond to such preaching, but our intellects remain perplexed, if the practical apotheosis of goodness is not supplemented by an adequate theoretic justification thereof. What evils may go with conscientiousness? At this point it may repay us to note more carefully the inadequacy of that mere blind conscientiousness which is the practical burden of the Kantian teaching. One would think that the only source of our troubles lay in our lack of desire to do right! As a matter of fact, there is a vast amount of good will in the world which effects no good, or does serious harm, for want of wise direction. Much of the tragedy of life consists of the clashes between wills equally consecrated and pure. Conscientious cranks and blunderers are perhaps even more of a nuisance than out-and-out villains; they hurt every good cause they espouse and bring noble ideals into ridicule; they provoke discouragement and cynicism. There is hardly a folly or a crime that has not been committed prayerfully and with a clear conscience; the saint and the criminal are sometimes psychologically indistinguishable indeed, by which name we call a fanatic may depend upon which side we are on. We may discriminate among the types of perverted conscience: (1) The fanatical conscience, the meddling conscience, that feels a mission to stir up trouble. Under this head come the parents who interfere needlessly with their children's ways when different from their own, the breakers-up of love-affairs, the fault-finders, the militantly religious, all that great multitude of men who with prayer and tears have felt it their duty to override others' wills and impose their codes upon the world. (2) The obstructive conscience, that has become set and will not suffer change. Here we can put all the earnest "stand-patters," who resist innovation of every sort. Slaves of the particular standards that they happen to have grown up in, unable to conceive that their individual brand of religion may not be the ultimate truth, horror-struck at the suggestion that we should forsake the ways of our fathers, their conscientious conservatism stands like a rock in the way of progress. (3) The ascetic conscience, that overemphasizes the need of sacrifice, and deletes all the positive joy of life for the sake of freedom from possible pain. This particular misdirection of conscience is not prominent in contemporary life; but at certain periods, as among some of the mediaeval saints, or the early Puritans, this hypertrophy of conscience has been a serious blight.