Conscience as a form of fear is so strong and so wide-spread for two reasons. The first is already familiar to us, and is briefly repeated. It is that the flexor system is originally stronger than the extensor system. And so in the great majority of men whose natures are less evolved, fear is almost a daily experience,—not only the fear of nature and of the unknown, but also the fear of the group by whose tolerance they exist. Moreover, sentiment and not knowledge is the great group asset, by which we imply no such educated sentiments as are derived from analytical inquiry, or from an open search after the facts, but rather that kind of sentiment which passively bars and actively hinders the enlargement of the understanding. The group really never explains. When offended, it simply becomes suspicious, and its gossips freely translate this suspicion into rumor and inuendo. It is small wonder, then, that the conscience-stricken individual, as a product of his group, has as his first, and sometimes his only reaction, the tendency to shrink and become unresilient when he realizes that his acts, or worse still, his thoughts, have transgressed the taboos of his tribe. It is a case of like master, like man; the group does not usually know what its purposes are, much less does it ask to have those purposes examined and revealed; and so the conscience-stricken individual,—the sentimental child of the group,—reacts to his realization of estrangement from the group in a manner that makes his last state worse than his first. This cannot be taken to imply that it is a sign of intellectual maturity to transgress all the taboos of the group. Yet the argument still holds that the influences produced by the exclusive use of this negative form of conscience are baleful. Very early in the life of the average child the expressions: “Don’t,” “If you dare to do that again, I’ll whip you,” “What would people say?” and a score of other negations are employed by his parents and teachers on the principle that ethical guidance is achieved by such means. As a result, says Edwin Holt, “The parent has set a barrier between the child and a portion of reality; and forever after the child will be in some measure impeded in its dealings” with those things which have become taboo, always first feeling the prohibition, rather than the urgency to act discriminatively upon a knowledge which a close contact with the reality should produce. Such a parent has not “trusted the truth,” and the final result is that the child has actually become “a second-rate mind, not in harmony with itself,” since not in creative touch with the environment.