If its authority goes, and its advice continues, it may indeed molest, but it will no longer direct us.

Now, though the voice of conscience may, as the positive school say, survive their analysis of it, its authority will not.

That authority has always taken the form of a menace, as well as of an approval; and the menace at any rate, upon all positive principles, is nothing but big words that can break no bones.

As soon as we realise it to be but this, its effect must cease instantly.

The power of conscience resides not in what we hear it to be, but in what we believe it to be.