, and conscience seem to belong to the individual domain. They
are reactions produced in the individual by the societal environment.
Honor is the sentiment of what one owes to one's self. It is an
individual prerogative, and an ultimate individual standard. Seemliness
is conduct which befits one's character and standards. Common sense, in
the current view, is a natural gift and universal outfit. As to honor
and seemliness, the popular view seems to be that each one has a
fountain of inspiration in himself to furnish him with guidance.
Conscience might be added as another natural or supernatural "voice,"
intuition, and part of the original outfit of all human beings as such.
If these notions could be verified, and if they proved true, no
discussion of them would be in place here, but as to honor it is a
well-known and undisputed fact that societies have set codes of honor
and standards of it which were arbitrary, irrational, and both
individually and socially inexpedient, as ample experiment has proved.
These codes have been and are imperative, and they have been accepted
and obeyed by great groups of men who, in their own judgment, did not
believe them sound. Those codes came out of the folkways of the time and
place. Then comes the question whether it is not always so. Is honor, in
any case, anything but the code of one's duty to himself which he has
accepted from the group in which he was educated? Family, class,
religious sect, school, occupation, enter into the social environment.
In every environment there is a standard of honor. When a man thinks
that he is acting most independently, on his personal prerogative, he is
at best only balancing against each other the different codes in which
he has been educated, e.g. that of the trades union against that of the
Sunday school, or of the school against that of the family. What we
think "natural" and universal, and to which we attribute an objective
reality, is the sum of traits whose origin is so remote, and which we
share with so many, that we do not know when or how we took them up, and
we can remember no rational selection by which we adopted them. The same
is true of common sense. It is the stock of ways of looking at things
which we acquired unconsciously by suggestion from the environment in
which we grew up. Some have more common sense than others, because they
are more docile to suggestion, or have been taught to make judgments by
people who were strong and wise.