Of Conscience

During our civil wars, I was one evening at an inn with a gentleman of good family. The hour was late and the wine had been at the table long enough to loosen what is usually kept fast. He began to speak with some bitterness of the cruelties that were being committed on all sides, and then — almost without noticing the shift — he began to speak of his own. He had done things, he said, that he could not leave behind him. They followed him into his sleep. I did not press him; I only listened. When he left in the morning he seemed a smaller man than the one who had arrived.

A guilty conscience is its own instrument of torture. The executioner with his devices is clumsy compared to what the mind can do to itself in silence. Epicurus knew this, and said that a man who lives wickedly lives in agony, whatever appearance he presents to the world. The worst of it is not the possibility of punishment — that might at least be weighed and calculated. It is the certainty of the self’s judgment, from which there is no appeal and no recess.

A bad conscience is an enemy that never sleeps, and needs no other accuser.

I have noticed too how much the body reveals of what the mind would conceal. A man whose hands are unsteady when you mention a certain name, whose eyes go elsewhere when the subject turns to a certain event — he carries his confession on his face whether he speaks it or not. The flesh is a poor dissembler. I have seen men go pale at a word spoken in perfect innocence, and known by that paleness what they thought the word might mean. We cannot lie from the inside out without the lie eventually showing through. The face is the involuntary mirror of the soul, and the soul has no vanity — it shows what it is.