e Empiricist, the more suspect.
They are evidences of the effectiveness of our early education,
or of our high degree of sensitiveness to our fellows. Conscience
is thus reduced to habitual emotional reactions produced
by the contact of a given individual temperament with
a given environment.

Thus acts come by the individual to be recognized as right
or wrong, according to the tradition to which he has been
educated and the contacts with other people to which he is
continually exposed. The Empiricist does not deny that
there are intuitions, or apparent intuitions. He denies their
ultimacy, their unquestionable validity.

When ... we find ourselves entertaining an opinion about the
basis of which there is a quality of feeling which tells us that to
inquire into it would be absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable,
undesirable, bad form, or wicked, we may know that that opinion is
a non-rational one, and probably, therefore, founded upon inadequate
evidence.[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter: _Instincts of the Herd_, p. 44.]

These so powerful convictions are the immediate promptings
of instincts, or of the habits into which they have been modified.
The humane Christian, had he been brought up in the
Eskimo tradition, would with the most tender solicitude
slaughter his aged parents, just as the humane Christian in
the Middle Ages thought it his duty to slay heretics. There
is no limit to the excesses to which men have gone on the
dictates of conscience. To put actions on the basis of conscience
is to put them beyond the control of reflection or the check
of inquiry. It is to reduce conduct to caprice; to exalt
impulse into a moral command. And the results of accepting
blind intuitions as rational knowledge have been in many
cases catastrophic.

If reason has slain its thousands, the acceptance of instinct as
evidence has slain its tens of thousands. Day by day, in the ordinary
direction of their lives, men have learned during hundreds of
generations how untrustworthy is the interpretation of fact which
Instinct offers, and how bitter is the truth contained in such proverbs
as "Anger is a bad counsellor," or "Love is blind." ... Wars
are often started and maintained, neither from mere blind anger,
nor because those on either side find that they desire the results
which a cool calculation of the conditions makes them regard as
probable, but largely because men insist on treating their feelings as
evidence of fact and r