The Conscience

Conscience is more a popular than a scientific term; in fact, in some books on Psychology you will not find it even in the index. For all that, it is a powerful word, with blood and bones inside it; and I should not be at all surprised if, some day, it were elevated to a position of great consequence in philosophy.

It does not occur in the Old Testament — that is, the word does not — but the thing for which the word stands occurs often enough. On almost the first page you have that scene which is one of the most graphic accounts of conscience in all literature — Adam and Eve, overwhelmed with shame and terror, hiding themselves among the trees of the garden — and, on the very next page, you have another great exhibition of the power of conscience in the flight of Cain after the murder of his brother Abel.

In the New Testament the word occurs with

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tolerable frequency; St. Paul alone employing it about a score of times. This might have been expected to secure for it a permanent place among the ethical terms of Christian instruction; but, while words like faith, love, hope, and others belonging to the Apostle’s ethical vocabulary always retained a foremost place, this good fortune did not fall to (TVPeLSr]crL<;. Nevertheless, Chrysostom places it, alongside of Nature, as one of the two books in which God reveals Himself outside the Bible. St. Augustine makes less use of it than might have been expected in such an ethical genius. But the Schoolmen began to discuss and define it; and Thomas Aquinas devotes to it one question in each part of his “Summa “. The peculiarity of his treatment is, that he identifies it with synderesis, a term which Origen appears to have employed — in the form of avPT7]p7)aL<; — to designate the remnant of the image of God left in man after the Fall; or rather, Aquinas distinguishes between synderesis and conscientia in this way, that he makes the one the faculty in the mind which supplies moral principles and the other the faculty which applies these to actual cases. The former is infallible, the latter fallible. Of course the example of Aquinas was long followed in the schools; but, after the Reformation, the Jesuit moralists dropped the former of Aquinas’ two elements, making the conscience a weak, hesitating, fallible thing, which had to fall back for support and guidance on the Church and the confessor — that is, on themselves — every person who could afford it keeping a Jesuit as a guide to his conscience. The Mystics of the Latin Church, however, made much of the element which the Jesuits had dropped, finding in the synderesis the point of contact at which the divine comes down to touch the human spirit.

At the Reformation the conscience — both name and thing — came very prominently to the front. The pangs of conscience, in the experience of Luther and others, were a negative preparation for the positive doctrine of justification; and it will be remembered how powerfully, at the Diet of Worms, the Reformer appealed to conscience as the ground on which he took his stand in resisting the authority of the Church. It was thoroughly in accordance with the juridical meaning attached by Protestantism to justification when one of the worthies of the period, Schoberlein, defined conscience as “the organ for the juridical relation of man to God “; and Luther himself defines it as “a witness touching those things in which man has to do with God “. Not dissimilar is Calvin’s definition — sensus divini judicii et imperii. Within Protestantism the rights of conscience have been a favourite subject not only of reflection but of testimony and courageous assertion; although it is a task of no little delicacy to define where exactly the freedom of conscience begins and ends.

In Post-reformation Theology the treatment of Ethics under the title of Cases of Conscience continued much longer than might have been expected as a practice even of Protestant moralists; but the fact is a straw showing how the wind was blowing. In Jeremy Taylor’s ‘’Ductor Dubitantium” the whole of the first book, extending to nearly three hundred pages, is devoted to the conscience, the several kinds of which are handled in great detail, such as the good conscience, the erroneous conscience, the scrupulous conscience, and so on. Indeed, such descriptions of different kinds of conscience formed a feature of the ethical productivity of the period, which continued till it became a weariness to the flesh. During the reign of English Deism the conscience was set up as a rival to revelation, its testimony to God, duty and immortality being considered sufficient without any higher source of enlightenment; and the same contention was made still more strenuously in Continental countries, when the English movement had crossed the German Ocean; the glorification of this faculty reaching a climax in Rousseau, who, however, characteristically wished the conscience to be only a source of self-approval and happiness, the old bad ideas of guilt and punishment being banished out of a philosophical world. Butler in England and Kant in Germany restored the conscience to its rightful position of authority, yet subordinating it to the will of God; but the tendency to dissolve its authority, through tracing its origin to mere association and heredity, has come in again with the advent of a naturalistic and developmental philosophy, which is at present so potent in England and on the Continent; not, however, without evoking powerful reaction in such thinkers as Martineau and Green.

This brief sketch shows that the conscience has, during the course of the centuries, been making, if not a steady, yet an ever renewed advance to philosophical recognition; and, as I have hinted, I expect it, some day, to be adopted by a philosophical genius, who will vindicate for it aprominent place in the vocabulary of Psychology/

1 On the history of the doctrine of Conscience the books on the History of Ethics, such as Luthardt’s and Gass’, may

The aspect of conscience on which the popular mind has principally fastened, and to which, accordingly, the literature of the world has given the amplest expression, is that which is technically called the Sequent Conscience — that is to say, the action of conscience which follows the formation of a decision or the commission of an act. No sooner is a decision come to or a deed done than there ensues a judgment favourable or adverse, a sentence of guilty or not-guilty. Conscience has often been compared to a court-oflaw, in which there are culprit, judge, jury and witnesses; only all of these are in the individual’s own breast. Thus in ‘’ Sea Dreams” Lord Tennyson says:

He that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more; and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemned; And that drags down his life.

be consulted. Schmidt, in “Das Gewissen,” is very full. Gass’ note on “The Scholastic Term Synderesis,” in “Die Lehre vom Gewissen,” is a fine morsel of scholarship. For the more popular and literary aspects of the subject, reference may be made to the second series of the late Joseph Cook’s “Boston Monday Lectures”. It is a pity that this author is being so soon forgotten; because not only has he big ideas, but his volumes abound with illustrations novel, original and illuminating.

In the individual’s own breast is, besides, the executioner; because, on the back of the sentence of condemnation or acquittal, there immediately follows the pain of a wounded or the satisfaction of an approving conscience; and of all human miseries or blisses this is the most poignant. Especially has the remorse of an evil conscience impressed the human imagination, in such instances as Cain and Judas, Saul and Herod; and the greatest of the poets have found some of their most moving pictures in the representation of this aspect of human experience; the ancient poets representing the terrors of conscience under such figures as the Erinnyes or Furies, who with swift, silent, unswerving footstep track the criminal and pull him down, while Shakspeare, in such dramas as ‘’Macbeth” and ‘’Richard the Third,” has burnt the same lesson into the imagination of all readers of the English tongue.

The satisfaction of a good conscience may stamp itself on the habitual serenity of a face, while the accusations of an evil conscience may impart a hunted look even to the external appearance. This contrast is powerfully given in the picture of the Bishop and the Burglar, in the

same room at midnight, in “Les Miserables “:

“He was sleeping peacefully, and was wrapped in a long garment of brown wool, which covered his arms down to the wrists. His head was thrown back on the pillow in the easy attitude of repose, and his hand, which had done so many good deeds, hung out of the bed. His entire face was lit up with a vague expression of satisfaction, hope and beatitude — it was more than a smile and almost a radiance. There was almost a divinity in this unconsciously august man. The burglar, on the contrary, was standing in the shadow, with his crowbar in his hand, motionless and terrified by this luminous old man. He had never seen anything like this before, and this confidence horrified him. The moral world has no greater spectacle than this — a troubled, restless conscience, which is on the point of committing a bad action, contemplating the sleep of a just man.”

It is to be observed, however, that not only does a man’s own conscience thus pass sentence on his conduct but the consciences of others pass sentence on it too; and to this may be due a great intensification of the consequent sensations. Thus, a crime may be hidden in a man’s memory, and the pain of its guilt may be assuaged by the action of time, when suddenly and unexpectedly it is found out by the public; and only when the force of the public conscience breaks out on the culprit, driving him from society, does he feel his guilt in all its hideousness. The Day of Judgment, as it is represented in Scripture, is an application of this principle on a vast scale: it is the submission of the character and conduct of everyone to the conscience of all. On the other hand, a friend may be to a man a second conscience, by which his own conscience is kept alive and alert; and this approval from without may, in some cases, be, even more than the judgment within, an encouragement to everything that is good or a protection against temptation.

There is a third activity of the Sequent Conscience, in addition to the judicial and the retributive — namely, the predictive. Not only does conscience reward and punish now, but it hints of ampler and more perfect rewards and punishments still to come. Human beings are instinctively aware that they will have to answer for the deeds done in the body, when they pass within the veil. Thus is the anticipation of immortality a part of conscience.

The second aspect of conscience is what is technically called the Antecedent Conscience; and this designates a function of conscience which precedes moral decision or action. When the will stands at the parting of the ways, seeing clearly before it the right course and the wrong, conscience commands to strike into the right and forbids to choose the wrong. This is its imperative; and — to employ the language of Kant — it is a categorical imperative. What conscience commands may be apparently against our interest, and it may be completely contrary to our inclinations; it may be contrary to the advice of friends or the solicitations of companions; it may be opposed to the decrees of principalities and powers or to the voices of the multitude; yet conscience in no way withdraws or modifies its claim. We may fail to obey, giving way to passion or being overborne by the allurements of temptation; but we know that we ought to obey; it is our duty; and this is a sublime and sacred word.

The great crises of life arise when conscience is issuing one command and self-interest or passion or authority another, and the question has to be decided which of the two is to be obeyed. The interpreters of human life have known how to make use of such moments, and many of the most memorable scenes in imaginative literature are of this nature; a fine example being the scene in “The Heart of Midlothian,” in which Jeanie Deans, with a heart bursting with love for her frail sister, yet will not deviate from the truth by a hairsbreadth, though a lie would save Effie’s life. But the actual history of mankind has been dignified with numerous scenes, in which confessors and martyrs, standing on the same ground, have faced death rather than contravene the dictates of the authority within; and, we have good reason to believe, there is never an hour that passes but the All-seeing Eye beholds someone on earth putting aside the bribes of self-interest or the menaces of authority and paying tribute to the voice of conscience by doing the right and taking the consequences.

As to the aspects of conscience discussed up to this point there is little difficulty or diff”erence of opinion; but I have now to mention one about which this cannot be said. It was remarked above, that, when anyone stands at the parting of the ways and sees clearly the right course and the wrong, conscience imperatively commands him which to take and which to avoid; but how does anyone know which of the two alternatives is the right and which the wrong? does conscience come to his help at this point, or is he dependent on some other faculty? Here the Intuitional and the Associational, or — speaking broadly — the Scotch and the English, the German and the French Schools of Ethics widely diverge; those on the one side holding that conscience has still essential guidance to give, while those on the other hold that the guidance must now be undertaken by other faculties. The Sensational or Experimental School hold that we are dependent on the authority of society or on our own estimate of the consequences of action; while the opposite school teach that in the conscience there is a clear revelation of certain moral laws, approving certain principles of action and disapproving others.

The strong point of the former view is the diversity existing among human beings in different ages and in different latitudes as to what is right and what is wrong. What was virtuous in Athens might be sinful in Jerusalem; what is admired as heroism in Britain may be despised as imprudence in Japan. The answer to this is, first, that this diversity has been grossly exaggerated, the unanimity of the human conscience under all skies being greater than is allowed by philosophers of this school. “Let any plain honest man,” says Butler, “before he engages in any course of action, ask himself, Is this I am going about right? or is it wrong? is it good or is it evil? and I do not in the least doubt but that this question would be answered agreeably to truth and virtue by almost any fair man in almost any circumstances.” Further, there may be error in the application to actual cases of the laws revealed in conscience; such application being a merely logical procedure, where the intellect is liable to all the mistakes into which it may fall when dealing in the same way with any other kind of material. What conscience is responsible for, in every case, is only the major premiss. So argues Calderwood; and this is very much the position of Aquinas, who, as has been mentioned, attributed to an infallible synderesis the oracular issuing of principles but to a fallible conscientia the application of these to particular instances.

The strong point of the Intuitional School is the right of the individual to break away from the habits of society and, in defiance of the verdicts of authority or the voices of the multitude, to follow a course of his own. When he does so, is it a logical conclusion as to the consequences of action he is obeying or a higher “Handbook of Moral Philosophy.”

intuition? When, for example, Christianity, at its entrance into the world, preached the sinfulness of fornication, in opposition to the laxity of Greece and Rome, was it an argument about consequences with which she operated successfully, or an instinct of purity, which she divined at the back of the actions and opinions of heathendom? The lettering of the moral law may have to be picked out and cleansed from the accumulations of time, but the inscription is there all the same.

It may be, however, that what is required for the solution of this riddle is a more exhaustive analysis of the Antecedent Conscience. Between the categorical imperative, which commands to choose the right path and avoid the wrong, and the indicative, which declares that this is the right way and that the wrong, there ought perhaps to be assumed, as a separate aspect of conscience, the intuition that one of the alternative ways is right and must be pursued at all hazards, while the other is wrong and must be abandoned at whatever cost. This perception, that moral distinctions exist, contrasted with each other as heaven and hell, is the peculiarity of conscience; but it does not exclude the necessity for taking time to ascertain, in every instance, which of the alternatives has the one character and which the other, or for employing a great variety of knowledge to make this certain. Those who would limit conscience to the function of uttering the major premisses of moral reasoning are wont to hold that it cannot err and does not admit of being educated; but such a use of the term is too remote from common usage; and there must be room left at some point for the conscience to enlighten itself by making acquaintance with such objective standards as the character of God, the example of Christ and the teaching of Scripture, as well as with the experience of the good and the maxims of the wise.

To sum up — the conscience may be divided into the Antecedent and the Sequent; and each of these has three aspects; for in the Antecedent Conscience we distinguish three activities — the Deliberative, the Indicative and the Imperative — and in the Sequent Conscience three also — the Judicial, the Retributive and the Predictive.

There is one other question of great interest about the conscience; and this is the question, whether it involves an intuition of God. When the conscience is suffering the punishment of remorse, who is it that inflicts the punishment? is it only the conscience itself, or is man, in such experiences, aware of the existence of a Being outside of and above himself? When the will is about to act, it receives the command to choose the right and refuse the wrong, but who issues this command? is it only itself, or does the imperative come with a sanction and solemnity betokening a higher origin? Conscience is an intuition of moral law — the reading, so to speak, of a luminous writing, which hangs, outside of man, on the bosom of nature — but who penned that writing? It used to be believed that the word Conscience implies, in its very structure, a reference to God, meaning, literally, knowledge along with another, the other being God. This derivation may be uncertain; but many are of opinion that it exactly expresses the truth. Probably there are few persons with an ethical experience of any depth who have not sometimes been overwhelmingly conscious of the approval or disapproval of an unseen Being; and, if there be any trustworthy argument for the existence of a Deity prior to supernatural revelation, it would seem to be this.

It may be only the same question in another form when the inquiry is raised, whether conscience and the religious faculty are identical.

Historically, they have been separated; it being a well-known characteristic of pagan religions that they have little or no connexion with morality, a pagan being frequently a great cultivator of the gods and at the same time abandoned to every species of immorality. Even in professors of the Christian religion the moral sense has sometimes been very faintly developed; an Italian bandit, for example, being able to combine the business of highway-robbery and murder with devotion to the Virgin, whose shrine he may enrich out of the proceeds of his adventures. Nevertheless, it will be remembered that the Mystics of the Middle Ages looked upon the synderesis as the point of contact with the Divine; and it is not only true that conscience testifies of God, but also that the highest religion has morality for its aim. Fully developed religion and fully developed morality would very nearly coincide; and it may be that, in the future, the religious faculty and the ethical faculty will be identified.

With what has just been said about conscience as the common centre of both the ethical and the religious life it will harmonize not amiss if we now add — not so much by way of concluding the present chapter as by way of epilogue to the whole foregoing argument — that the perfection of human nature is not only the task of man but the gift of God. We have seen that in the very structure of our nature there is a prophecy which craves for fulfilment; and this is a strong motive, inspiring those to whom has been granted a vision of themselves as they yet may be. At every stage of progress this prophecy becomes more compelling; because the landscape widens, as we advance, and the goal becomes more clear. But the whole transformation is in Scripture ascribed to a divine causality. The “new man “is derived directly from the Father in heaven; he is created in Christ Jesus; and the transition from the ‘’ old man” to the new is, at all its stages, referred to the Holy Spirit, working through the agencies which He employs in the Church — the Word, the sacraments and prayer. Here are motives not less potent than those inherent in man’s own nature and destiny — the motive of gratitude, the motive of imitation, the motive of co-operation. These are felt in all their force and blessedness when the human subject of sanctification is most sensible of his own inadequacy for the task owing to the heavy weight of an evil past, the violence of passion, and the impotence of a demoralised will. It is this sense of personal unworthiness and unfitness that most of all distinguishes Christian Psychology from Philosophical or even Religious Psychology; although the pessimism of such penitential emotion is more than redressed by the spring and buoyancy with which the new man rises anew to face the task after casting himself in faith on the mercy of the Saviour, who has said not only, ‘’Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” but also, ‘’ I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly “.