Higher Conscience Is Heroic; Lower Conscience, Cowardly

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 15 pages

Fifteen pages with a contents page of central ideas. *Its method is comparison*: after an opening section on moral strength, the two kinds of conscience are set out one after another under their own headings, so a reader can hold them side by side.

The opening distinguishes two virtues that are easily confused — moral strength, or freedom from selfish passions, which is the virtue of individuals; and security, which is the virtue of the state. That separation matters because it prevents the argument that follows from being read as political. The title of the first section takes its cue from Hamlet: conscience makes cowards — and, the file adds, heroes — of us all, which is the whole thesis in a phrase. What follows is the comparison. Higher conscience is treated as the voice of the Inner Man, the faculty that makes a person capable of acting against their own interest; lower conscience is treated as something quite different despite the shared name — the anxious, self-protective calculation that dresses fear as principle, and which is what Shakespeare's line is usually taken to mean. A third short section, headed conscience-smitten, deals with the state of being troubled by the lower sort. Because the file is built from Coleridge as much as from Blavatsky, it reads more like moral philosophy than like theosophy, and it is one of the files in this library a reader with no interest in the doctrine could still take something from. A page of suggested reading closes it.

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