Conscience also seems best explained as
a sum of principles of action which have in one's character the most
original, remote, undisputed, and authoritative position, and to which
questions of doubt are habitually referred. If these views are accepted,
we have in honor, common sense, and conscience other phenomena of the
folkways, and the notions of eternal truths of philosophy or ethics,
derived from somewhere outside of men and their struggles to live well
under the conditions of earth, must be abandoned as myths.

+495. Seemliness.+ Honor, common sense, and conscience can never be
predicated of groups except by a figure of speech. The case with
seemliness is different. That also is an individual trait. It is lighter
and less definable than honor and propriety. The individual alone must
decide what it is fitting for him to do or refuse to do. He will get his
standards for this decision from his nearest social environment.
Seemliness, however, can be predicated of a society. A civilized state
may act in a seemly or unseemly manner, that is, in a way worthy of its
history and character, or the contrary. Also the people of a group, in
their unorganized acts, can obey unworthy motives and yield to impulses,
groupwise, which are beneath the level of culture which they really have
obtained, or belong to policies which are narrower than those by which
they pretend to act.

+496. Cases of unseemliness.+ The Assyrians were fierce, cruel,
bloodthirsty, and pitiless. They have left, cut in the hardest
stone,--it must have been by immense labor,--pictures of cruel tortures
and executions and of immense slaughters. A king is represented putting
out the eyes of prisoners. What the pictures reveal is the lust of
conquest, the delights of revenge, and the ecstasy of tyranny. After
Assurbanipal took Susa he broke open the tombs of the old heroes of
Elam, who had in their day defeated the Assyrians. He desecrated the
tombs, insulted the monuments, and carried the bones away to Nineveh. It
was believed that the ghosts of these dead heroes would suffer the
captivity inflicted on their bones, and sacrifices were made to them
just sufficient to prolong their existence and suffering. This policy
was pursued with all the ingenious refinements which the dogmas
suggested, in order to glut the vengeance of the Assyrian king.[1636]
The Babylonians were peaceful and industrial, but the Persians combined
with great luxury and licentiousness a fi