It will be found by a study of those persons who have attained the power to view the world in a purely objective and empirical manner; of those persons who treat their own and other peoples’ actions as experiments in the great laboratory of time, rather than as timid ventures to be apologized for on the slightest provocation; of those persons who have evolved to that point where their knowledge determines their sentiments, and not their sentiments their knowledge; and of those who, having by this means chosen their dependable goods, learn the right methods to attain them, and thereafter employ plain judgments of fact in estimating the success which they acquire and the quality of the virtue which they achieve. In such persons the positive, constructive, liberalizing type of conscience exists,—a conscience which, through being built up of objectively tested judgments, becomes the outstanding ethical asset of the personality. This type of conscience is not a myth, for it may be acquired in the same way as any other skill is acquired. The objective knowledge which it presupposes can be gained where every natural curiosity of a child or an adult is developed into a frank acquaintance with the object of curiosity; where fear is turned into intrepidity by a bold analysis of its cause and by a frontal attack upon the exciting stimulus; where one learns that ethical problems are always solved by forming serviceable habits and never by the cultivation of permanent anxieties; and where, finally, all the entangling alliances forced upon one by unprofitable acquaintances are boldly, but politely, annihilated. Even though many strongly entrenched traditions and institutions of the world would decay were the type of conscience we here describe to become wide-spread, yet this cannot deter the wise man from making it his life work to add as many new names to the list of those possessing ethical insight as it is within his power to do. Indeed, whenever this list becomes so large as to be generally regarded by autocrats as dangerous, we shall have come to that place in the course of civilization where the first real ethical advance is to be made. CHAPTER IX THE MITIGATION OF THE CONFLICT BETWEEN FREEDOM AND OBLIGATION “There is a phrase ‘liberty of conscience’ which well expresses the modern conception of moral obligation. It recognizes that duty in the last analysis is imposed upon the individual neither by society nor even by God, but by himself; that there is no authority in moral matters more ultimate than a man’s own rational conviction of what is best.” R. B. PERRY, “The Moral Economy,” p. 34.