ons, the
intuitions at a certain moment are found imagined, that is to say,
changed in their form, therefore the imagination has transformed them.
To this class of inventions belongs the _moral conscience_, which was
accepted as a postulate of the ethical estimates, which are always
conditioned. The moral conscience which really exists is an empirical
fact; it is an index or a summary of the relative ethical formation of
each individual. If there can be in it material for science, this cannot
explain the ethical relations by means of the conscience, but the very
thing it needs is to understand how that conscience is formed.

If volitions are derived, and if morality results from the conditions of
life, ethics, in its completeness, is but a formation; its problem is
altogether pedagogic.

There is a pedagogy which I will call individualistic and subjective,
which, granted the generic conditions of human perfectibility,
constructs abstract rules by which men, who are still in a period of
formation, may be led to be strong, courageous, truthful, just,
benevolent, and so on through the entire extent of the cardinal or
secondary virtues. But again, can subjective pedagogy construct of
itself a social background upon which all these beautiful things ought
to be realized? If it constructs it, it simply elaborates a Utopia.

And, in truth, the human race, in the rigid course of its development,
never had time nor occasion to go to the school of Plato or of Owen, of
Pestalozzi or Herbart. It has done as it has been forced to do.
Considered in an abstract manner, all men can be educated and all are
perfectible; as a matter of fact, they have always been perfected and
instructed as much as and in the measure that they could, granted the
conditions of life in which they were obliged to develop. It is here
precisely that the word environment is not a metaphor, and that the use
of the word compact is not metaphorical. Real morality always presents
itself as something conditioned and limited, which the imagination has
sought to outgrow, by constructing Utopias, and by creating a
supernatural pedagogue, or a miraculous redemption.

Why should the slave have had the ways of seeing and the passions and
the sentiments of the master whom he feared? How could the peasant
relieve himself of his invincible superstitions, to which he was
condemned by his immediate dependence upon nature and his mediate
dependence upon a social mechanism un