This analysis of Mill’s reveals that what the intuitionists loosely termed _conscience_ is a far more complex phenomenon than they had suspected, and with this revelation the whole logical structure of intuitionism breaks down. For if conscience is not the simple, innate, infallible principle or faculty which the intuitionists postulated it to be, the deductions they made from this hypothesis become more and more untenable the longer they are scrutinized. Mill’s analysis of the psychological factors in conscience, together with Locke’s discovery of the cultural and geographical limitations of any moral sense make it necessary to define this ethical phenomenon in purely empirical terms. Such a definition as we seek, however, could only be obtained by securing an elaborate census of cases in which the words “conscience” or “moral sense” were used. The census-taker would have to roam over the whole earth, ask questions all day long, and even become an eavesdropper at night, in order to gain the information he desired. Even this method would hardly be exhaustive, since perhaps far more “pangs of conscience” are felt than are ever expressed in language; and so our census-taker, were he as thorough as we might desire him to be, would have to be equipped with a sort of ultra-stethoscope,—one that could elevate a blush into an audible phenomenon,—in order to return with a full and complete report. The lack of such exhaustive statistics must, of course, be permanent; not only for want of census-takers, and for want of accuracy and sincerity on the part of those giving their introspection, but also because the concept of conscience may be slowly evolving, so that the end of the census might not harmonize with its beginning. Granting, indeed, that such an evolution exists, it does not now appear to be either uniform or universal. For while, as we have recently shown, the concept of conscience first attained a philosophic importance in the XVIII century, and was thereafter variously modified and developed, yet the popular notion of a moral sense,—of “this deity within my bosom,” as some have even expressed it,—has actually degenerated into something unworthy of a place among the positive ethical values. Our quotation from James Murray’s account of the behavior of the Adelie penguin is extremely pertinent here. “_The fear of being found out_” is, we venture to say, the very nucleus and core of the consciences of the majority of men. And while without doubt some forms of fear are well-grounded, as, for example, the farmer’s fear lest the oncoming storm wash out his seedlings, yet when fear tends to limit prudence, or take the place of prevision, the organism in which that fear arises is sub-normal and unsound. Conscience, then, in so far as it is identical with this degrading emotion of fear, and in so far as it begins and ends in a withdrawing reaction, is nothing but a blight.