le passages in any book. Here is a
question worthy to be answered. What is in thy mind? What is the
utterance of your inmost self when, in a quiet hour, it can be heard
intelligibly? It is something beyond the compass of your thinking,
inasmuch as it is yourself; but is it not of a higher spirit than you
had dreamed betweenwhiles, and erect above all base considerations? This
soul seems hardly touched with our infirmities; we can find in it
certainly no fear, suspicion, or desire; we are only conscious--and that
as though we read it in the eyes of some one else--of a great and
unqualified readiness. A readiness to what? to pass over and look beyond
the objects of desire and fear, for something else. And this something
else? this something which is apart from desire and fear, to which all
the kingdoms of the world and the immediate death of the body are alike
indifferent and beside the point, and which yet regards conduct--by
what name are we to call it? It may be the love of God; or it may be an
inherited (and certainly well concealed) instinct to preserve self and
propagate the race; I am not, for the moment, averse to either theory;
but it will save time to call it righteousness. By so doing I intend no
subterfuge to beg a question; I am indeed ready, and more than willing,
to accept the rigid consequence, and lay aside, as far as the treachery
of the reason will permit, all former meanings attached to the word
righteousness. What is right is that for which a man's central self is
ever ready to sacrifice immediate or distant interests; what is wrong is
what the central self discards or rejects as incompatible with the fixed
design of righteousness.

To make this admission is to lay aside all hope of definition. That
which is right upon this theory is intimately dictated to each man by
himself, but can never be rigorously set forth in language, and never,
above all, imposed upon another. The conscience has, then, a vision like
that of the eyes, which is incommunicable, and for the most part
illuminates none but its possessor. When many people perceive the same
or any cognate facts, they agree upon a word as symbol; and hence we
have such words as _tree_, _star_, _love_, _honour_, or _death_; hence
also we have this word _right_, which, like the others, we all
understand, most of us understand differently, and none can express
succinctly otherwise. Yet even on the straitest view, we can make some
steps towards comprehen