-depending life? But increased conversance with
nature and art constantly reveals new capacities of comfort and happiness
in life, and that, not for the strong alone, but for the feeble, the
suffering, the helpless, so that there are none to whom humanity knows not
how to render continued life desirable. At the same time, a higher culture
has made it manifest that the frailest body may be the seat of the
loftiest mental activity, moral excellence, and spiritual aspiration, and
that in such a body there is often only a surer and more finished
education for a higher state of being. Filial piety and parental love,
therefore, do all in their power to prolong the flickering existence of
the age-worn and decrepit, and to cherish with tender care the life which
seems born but to die. There is, then, to the limited view of the savage,
an apparent fitness in practices which in their first aspect seem crimes
against nature; while increased knowledge develops a real and essential
fitness, in all the refinements and endearments of the most persevering
and skilful love.

These examples, which might be multiplied indefinitely, show *the
dependence of conscience on knowledge*, not for relatively right
decisions, but for verdicts in accordance with the absolute right. There
is no subject that can be presented for the action of conscience, on
which, upon precisely the same principles, divergent and often opposite
courses of conduct may not be dictated by more or less accurate knowledge
of the subject and its relations.

It will be seen, also, that *with the growth of knowledge, conscience has
a constantly wider scope of action*. The number of indifferent acts is
thus diminished; the number of positively right or wrong acts, increased.
An _indifferent_ act is one for the performance of which, rather than its
opposite, no reason, involving a question of right or wrong, can be given.
Thus, if the performance or the omission of a specific act be equally
fitted to the time, place, circumstances, and persons concerned, the act
is an indifferent one; or, if two or more ways of accomplishing a desired
end be equally fitted to time, place, circumstances, and persons, the
choice between these ways is, morally speaking, a matter of indifference.
But with a knowledge both more extensive and more minute of the nature,
relations, and fitnesses of beings and objects, we find an increasing
number of instances in which acts that seemed indifferent have