Of Conscience

Suppose you owned a little grey marble, the size you can keep in your pocket at all times. When you bought it, you played with it, got bored of it and tossed it into a drawer rarely opened. Many weeks later, you open that drawer again to find that there's now a white marble sitting there. You know you put a grey marble there, but put down the difference to a faulty memory and since you have bigger things to attend to, the marble is absentmindedly slipped into your pocket again. At a party that evening, you get very drunk and in this inebriated state, you say a lot of not-so-nice things to lots of people, most of them good friends. When you wake up the next morning and empty your pockets, you find a black marble. Puzzled, you keep the marble with you the whole day and keep checking it at different times to find that its color keeps changing. Sometimes black, sometimes white and sometimes a shade in between. This continues for a few days before it hits you. The little marble mirrors your conscience. When you do something good, it turns a brighter shade and when you do something not-so-good, it turns a darker shade. This way, a white marble indicates a highly virtuous act, while a black marble just the opposite. The grey areas are still the grey areas.

Now, ask yourself a question. If you owned such a marble, would it change anything about you? Would it affect your behavior or the way you lived your life?

For most people, I think the answer to the above question would depend on the nature of the morality of the marble. If it changed color by judging my actions on the basis of my virtues, I would pay heed to it. But if the judgement was based on an external set of virtues and vices, chances are that it would remain in that drawer, dusty and forgotten.

I think of this after reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The book is wonderful and it's a pity Wilde never wrote any other complete novels. It quite brilliantly raises some very interesting questions about morality and conscience. If one knew what one's conscience felt, would it matter?