In order for a person to feel shame, it must be a religious feeling, because the trampling of shame clears the way for sacrilege, sin, or rather, a complete insensitivity towards sin. A synonym for spiritual shame, i.e., its positive source, is awe or reverence before what is holy, fear to offend it. Vladimir Soloviev distinguishes three fundamental feelings which characterize the moral foundation of the individual. This moral orientation, he writes, permeates all spheres of the personality, including the subconscious. To possess spiritual shame means to stand firm in purity.
Animals have only a feeling of guilt.
Below shame and propriety is the feeling of guilt, which is a trait found also among animals. Vulgarity is the loss of a feeling of shame. Professor Sikorsky maintains that the erosion of conscience signals the beginning of a general atrophy of all the most noble feelings. Thus, one cannot expect mercy from a person who has no conscience. In illustration, he again turns to the works of Gogol, who characterized vulgarity as the atrophy of the feeling of shame and as the psychological debasement of a person to the level of a brute beast, who is capable only of a sense of guilt.