CONSCIENCE will be urged as checking us for such breaches, and so the
internal obligation and establishment of the rule be preserved.


8. Conscience no Proof of any innate Moral Rule.

To which I answer, that I doubt not but, without being written on their
hearts, many men may, by the same way that they come to the knowledge of
other things, come to assent to several moral rules, and be convinced
of their obligation. Others also may come to be of the same mind,
from their education, company, and customs of their country; which
persuasion, however got, will serve to set conscience on work; which is
nothing else but our own opinion or judgment of the moral rectitude
or gravity of our own actions; and if conscience be a proof of innate
principles, contraries may be innate principles; since some men with the
same bent of conscience prosecute what others avoid.


9. Instances of Enormities practised without Remorse.

But I cannot see how any men should ever transgress those moral rules,
with confidence and serenity, were they innate, and stamped upon
their minds. View but an army at the sacking of a town, and see what
observation or sense of moral principles, or what touch of conscience
for all the outrages they do. Robberies, murders, rapes, are the sports
of men set at liberty from punishment and censure. Have there not been
whole nations, and those of the most civilized people, amongst whom the
exposing their children, and leaving them in the fields to perish by
want or wild beasts has been the practice; as little condemned or
scrupled as the begetting them? Do they not still, in some countries,