I was a good deal embarrassed and was getting reckless and was about to make the very serious mistake, in a club, of seeing if I could not rescue one idea by going out after it with another, when The Mysterious Person (who is the only man in our club whose mind ever really comes over and plays in my yard) in the goodness of his heart spoke up. “I have not heard anything in a long time,” he began (the club looked at him rather anxiously), “which has done—which has made me feel—less ashamed of myself than this paper. I——”
It seemed to me that this was not exactly a fortunate remark. I said I didn’t doubt I could do a lot of good that way, probably, if I wanted to—going around the country making people less ashamed of themselves.
“But I don’t mean that I feel really ashamed of myself about books I have not read,” said The Mysterious Person. “What I mean is, that I have a kind of slinking feeling that I ought to—a feeling of being ashamed for not being ashamed.”
I told The M. P. that I thought New England was full of people; just like him—people with a lot of left-over consciences.
The P. G. S. of M. wanted to know what I meant by that.
I said I thought there were thousands of people—one sees them everywhere in Massachusetts—fairly intelligent people, people who are capable of changing their minds about things, but who can’t change their consciences. Their consciences seem to keep hanging on to them, in the same set way—somehow—with or without their minds. “Some people’s consciences don’t seem to notice much, so far as I can see, whether they have minds connected with them or not.” “Don’t you know what it is,” I appealed to the P. G. S. of M., “to get everything all fixed up with your mind and your reason and your soul; that certain things that look wrong are all right,—the very things of all others that you ought to do and keep on doing,—and then have your conscience keep right on the same as it always did—tatting them up against you?”
The P. G. S. of M. said something about not spending very much time thinking about his conscience.
I said I didn’t believe in it, but I thought that if a man had one, it was apt to trouble him a little off and on—especially if the one he had was one of these left-over ones. “If you had one of these consciences—I mean the kind of conscience that pretends to belong to you, and acts as if it belonged to some one else,” I said “one of these dead-frog-leg, reflex-action consciences, working and twitching away on you day and night, the way I have, you’d have to think about it sometimes. You’d get so ashamed of it. You’d feel trifled with so. You’d——”
The P. G. S. of M. said something about not being very much surprised—over my case. He said that people who changed their minds as often as I did couldn’t reasonably expect consciences spry enough.
His general theory seemed to be that I had a conscience once and wore it out.