" Many standard comments on Mozart that we meet in this context, assertions such as "Mozart simply did not understand himself", reinforce the idea that artistic conscience is one of the inborn functions of a person, and therefore of Mozart. But conscience, whatever its specific form, is innate to no one. At most the potential for forming a conscience is a natural human endowment. This potential is activated and shaped into a specific structure through a person's life with others. The individual conscience is society-specific. "

― Norbert Elias , Mozart: Portrait of a Genius