no man can open. A limit is no absolute limit to you because your very
consciousness of the limit involves your consciousness of the beyond
which makes it a limit. And therefore to you as a self-knowing
existence, with your being necessarily surrendered into your own hands,
two faculties have been given as a substitute for the unconscious
necessity of an animal nature: First, a self-judging faculty which we
call conscience, or a power of discerning between a lower and a higher,
and a sense of obligation to the higher which enables you to correlate
your faculties and functions in their true order of relative
excellence; and secondly, a spiritual will, capable of carrying the
decisions of conscience into practical execution and attaining to a
necessity of moral law. The true function of man's will is not,
therefore, to add itself on to any one of his instincts and give it a
disordered strength, but, while throwing its chief conscious energies
into the higher interests of life, to rule his instincts and appetites
according to those higher interests. This, when the condition of that
infinitely complex thing, modern civilized life, interferes, as at
times it must do, with the legitimate exercise of his instincts, and
his good has to be subordinated to the good of the greater number, may
occasionally involve a hard struggle, even when the instincts have been
left to their own healthy natural play; but at least it will be all the
difference between a struggle with a spirited animal and a maddened and
infuriated brute.

"But," asks Dr. Martineau, "if the animal instincts and appetites are to
be directed by conscience and ruled by the will in accordance with the
dictates of conscience, what becomes of the unconsciousness which is
necessary for their right action? Its place is gradually supplied by
habit, which is the unconsciousness of a self-conscious being." The
habit of plain living and spare food, so necessary to high thinking, at