1. Conscience

A. Conscience an accompanying knowledge.—As already intimated, conscience is not a separate faculty, like intellect, sensibility, and will, but rather a mode in which these faculties act. Like consciousness, conscience is an accompanying knowledge. Conscience is a knowing of self (including our acts and states) in connection with a moral standard, or law. Adding now the element of feeling, we may say that conscience is man’s consciousness of his own moral relations, together with a peculiar feeling; in view of them. It thus involves the combined action of the intellect and of the sensibility, and that in view of a certain class of objects, viz.: right and wrong.

There is no separate ethical faculty any more than there is a separate æsthetic faculty. Conscience is like taste: it has to do with moral being and relations, as taste has to do with æsthetic being and relations. But the ethical judgment and impulse are, like the æsthetic judgment and impulse, the mode in which intellect, sensibility and will act with reference to a certain class of objects. Conscience deals with the right, as taste deals with the beautiful. As consciousness (con and scio) is a con-knowing, a knowing of our thoughts, desires and volitions in connection with a knowing of the self that has these thoughts, desires and volitions; so conscience is a con-knowing, a knowing of our moral acts and states in connection with a knowing of some moral standard or law which is conceived of as our true self, and therefore as having authority over us. Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 183–185—“The condemnation of self involves self-diremption, double consciousness. Without it Kant’s categorical imperative is impossible. The one self lays down the law to the other self, judges it, threatens it. This is what is meant, when the apostle says: ‘It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me’ (Rom. 7:17).”

B. Conscience discriminative and impulsive.—But we need to define more narrowly both the intellectual and the emotional elements in conscience. As respects the intellectual element, we may say that conscience is a power of judgment,—it declares our acts or states to conform, or not to conform, to law; it declares the acts or states which conform to be obligatory,—those which do not conform, to be forbidden. In other words, conscience judges: (1) This is right (or, wrong); (2) I ought (or, I ought not). In connection with this latter judgment, there comes into view the emotional element of conscience,—we feel the claim of duty; there is an inner sense that the wrong must not be done. Thus conscience is (1) discriminative, and (2) impulsive.

Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 173—“The one distinctive function of conscience is that of authoritative self-judgments in the conscious presence of a supreme Personality to whom we as persons feel ourselves accountable. It is this twofold personal element in every judgment of conscience, viz., the conscious self-judgment in the presence of the all-judging Deity, which has led such writers as Bain and Spencer and Stephen to attempt the explanation of the origin and authority of conscience as the product of parental training and social environment.… Conscience is not prudential nor advisory nor executive, but solely judicial. Conscience is the moral reason, pronouncing upon moral actions. Consciousness furnishes law; conscience pronounces judgments; it says: Thou shalt, Thou shalt not. Every man must obey his conscience; if it is not enlightened, that is his look-out. The callousing of conscience in this life is already a penal infliction.” S. S. Times, Apl. 5, 1902:185—“Doing as well as we know how is not enough, unless we know just what is right and then do that. God never tells us merely to do our best, or according to our knowledge. It is our duty to know what is right, and then to do it. Ignorantia legis neminem excusat. We have responsibility for knowing preliminary to doing.”

C. Conscience distinguished from other mental processes.—The nature and office of conscience will be still more clearly perceived if we distinguish it from other processes and operations with which it is too often confounded. The term conscience has been used by various writers to designate either one or all of the following: 1. Moral intuition—the intuitive perception of the difference between right and wrong, as opposite moral categories. 2. Accepted law—the application of the intuitive idea to general classes of actions, and the declaration that these classes of actions are right or wrong, apart from our individual relation to them. This accepted law is the complex product of (a) the intuitive idea, (b) the logical intelligence, (c) experiences of utility, (d) influences of society and education, and (e) positive divine revelation. 3. Judgment—applying this accepted law to individual and concrete cases in our own experience, and pronouncing our own acts or states either past, present, or prospective, to be right or wrong. 4. Command—authoritative declaration of obligation to do the right, or forbear the wrong, together with an impulse of the sensibility away from the one, and toward the other. 5. Remorse or approval—moral sentiments either of approbation or disapprobation, in view of past acts or states, regarded as wrong or right. 6. Fear or hope—instinctive disposition of disobedience to expect punishment, and of obedience to expect reward.

Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 70—“The feeling of the ought is primary, essential, unique; the judgments as to what one ought are the results of environment, education and reflection.” The sentiment of justice is not an inheritance of civilized man alone. No Indian was ever robbed of his lands or had his government allowance stolen from him who was not as keenly conscious of the wrong as in like circumstances we could conceive that a philosopher would be. The oughtness of the ought is certainly intuitive; the whyness of the ought (conformity to God) is possibly intuitive also; the whatness of the ought is less certainly intuitive. Cutler, Beginnings of Ethics, 163, 164—“Intuition tells us that we are obliged; why we are obliged, and what we are obliged to, we must learn elsewhere.” Obligation = that which is binding on a man; ought is something owed; duty is something due. The intuitive notion of duty (intellect) is matched by the sense of obligation (feeling).

Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 203, 270—“All men have a sense of right,—of right to life, and contemporaneously perhaps, but certainly afterwards, of right to personal property. And my right implies duty in my neighbor to respect it. Then the sense of right becomes objective and impersonal. My neighbor’s duty to me implies my duty to him. I put myself in his place.” Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 156, 188—“First, the feeling of obligation, the idea of a right and a wrong with corresponding duties, is universal.… Secondly, there is a very general agreement in the formal principles of action, and largely in the virtues also, such as benevolence, justice, gratitude.… Whether we owe anything to our neighbor has never been a real question. The practical trouble has always lain in the other question: Who is my neighbor? Thirdly, the specific contents of the moral ideal are not fixed, but the direction in which the ideal lies is generally discernible.… We have in ethics the same fact as in intellect—a potentially infallible standard, with manifold errors in its apprehension and application. Lucretius held that degradation and paralysis of the moral nature result from religion. Many claim on the other hand that without religion morals would disappear from the earth.”

Robinson, Princ. and Prac. of Morality, 173—“Fear of an omnipotent will is very different from remorse in view of the nature of the supreme Being whose law we have violated.” A duty is to be settled in accordance with the standard of absolute right, not as public sentiment would dictate. A man must be ready to do right in spite of what everybody thinks. Just as the decisions of a judge are for the time binding on all good citizens, so the decisions of conscience, as relatively binding, must always be obeyed. They are presumptively right and they are the only present guide of action. Yet man’s present state of sin makes it quite possible that the decisions which are relatively right may be absolutely wrong. It is not enough to take one’s time from the watch; the watch may go wrong; there is a prior duty of regulating the watch by astronomical standards. Bishop Gore: “Man’s first duty is, not to follow his conscience, but to enlighten his conscience.” Lowell says that the Scythians used to eat their grandfathers out of humanity. Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300—“Nothing is so stubborn or so fanatical as a wrongly instructed conscience, as Paul showed in his own case by his own confession” (Acts 26:9—“I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth”).

D. Conscience the moral judiciary of the soul.—From what has been previously said, it is evident that only 3. and 4. are properly included under the term conscience. Conscience is the moral judiciary of the soul—the power within of judgment and command. Conscience must judge according to the law given to it, and therefore, since the moral standard accepted by the reason may be imperfect, its decision, while relatively just, may be absolutely unjust.—1. and 2. belong to the moral reason, but not to conscience proper. Hence the duty of enlightening and cultivating the moral reason, so that conscience may have a proper standard of judgment.—5. and 6. belong to the sphere of moral sentiment, and not to conscience proper. The office of conscience is to “bear witness” (Rom. 2:15).

In Rom. 2:15—“they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness there with, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them”—we have conscience clearly distinguished both from the law and the perception of law on the one hand, and from the moral sentiments of approbation and disapprobation on the other. Conscience does not furnish the law, but it bears witness with the law which is furnished by other sources. It is not “that power of mind by which moral law is discovered to each individual” (Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 77), nor can we speak of “Conscience, the Law” (as Whewell does in his Elements of Morality, 1:259–266). Conscience is not the law-book, in the court room, but it is the judge,—whose business is, not to make law, but to decide cases according to the law given to him.

As conscience is not legislative, so it is not retributive; as it is not the law-book, so it is not the sheriff. We say, indeed, in popular language, that conscience scourges or chastises, but it is only in the sense in which we say that the judge punishes,—i. e., through the sheriff. The moral sentiments are the sheriff,—they carry out the decisions of conscience, the judge; but they are not themselves conscience, any more than the sheriff is the judge.

Only this doctrine, that conscience does not discover law, can explain on the one hand the fact that men are bound to follow their consciences, and on the other hand the fact that their consciences so greatly differ as to what is right or wrong in particular cases. The truth is, that conscience is uniform and infallible, in the sense that it always decides rightly according to the law given it. Men’s decisions vary, only because the moral reason has presented to the conscience different standards by which to judge.

Conscience can be educated only in the sense of acquiring greater facility and quickness in making its decisions. Education has its chief effect, not upon the conscience, but upon the moral reason, in rectifying its erroneous or imperfect standards of judgment. Give conscience a right law by which to judge, and its decisions will be uniform, and absolutely as well as relatively just. We are bound, not only to “follow our conscience,” but to have a right conscience to follow,—and to follow it, not as one follows the beast he drives, but as the soldier follows his commander. Robert J. Burdette “Following conscience as a guide is like following one’s nose. It is important to get the nose pointed right before it is safe to follow it. A man can keep the approval of his own conscience in very much the same way that he can keep directly behind his nose, and go wrong all the time.”

Conscience is the con-knowing of a particular act or state, as coming under the law accepted by the reason as to right and wrong; and the judgment of conscience subsumes this act or state under that general standard. Conscience cannot include the law—cannot itself be the law,—because reason only knows, never con-knows. Reason says scio; only judgment says conscio.

This view enabled us to reconcile the intuitional and the empirical theories of morals. Each has its element of truth. The original sense of right and wrong is intuitive,—no education could ever impart the idea of the difference between right and wrong to one who had it not. But what classes of things are right or wrong, we learn by the exercise of our logical intelligence, in connection with experiences of utility, influences of society and tradition, and positive divine revelation. Thus our moral reason, through a combination of intuition and education, of internal and external information as to general principles of right and wrong, furnishes the standard according to which conscience may judge the particular cases which come before it.

This moral reason may become depraved by sin, so that the light becomes darkness (Mat. 6:22, 23) and conscience has only a perverse standard by which to judge. The “weak” conscience (1 Cor. 8:12) is one whose standard of judgment is yet imperfect; the conscience “branded” (Rev. Vers.) or “seared” (A. V.) “as with a hot iron” (1 Tim. 4:2) is one whose standard has been wholly perverted by practical disobedience. The word and the Spirit of God are the chief agencies in rectifying our standards of judgment, and so of enabling conscience to make absolutely right decisions. God can so unite the soul to Christ, that it becomes partaker on the one hand of his satisfaction to justice and is thus “sprinkled from an evil conscience” (Heb. 10:22), and on the other hand of his sanctifying power and is thus enabled in certain respects to obey God’s command and to speak of a “good conscience” (1 Pet. 3:16—of single act; 3:21—of state) instead of an “evil conscience” (Heb. 10:22) or a conscience “defiled” (Tit. 1:15) by sin. Here the “good conscience” is the conscience which has been obeyed by the will, and the “evil conscience” the conscience which has been disobeyed; with the result, in the first case, of approval from the moral sentiments, and, in the second case, of disapproval.

E. Conscience in its relation to God as law-giver.—Since conscience, in the proper sense, gives uniform and infallible judgment that the right is supremely obligatory, and that the wrong must be forborne at every cost, it can be called an echo of God’s voice, and an indication in man of that which his own true being requires.

Conscience has sometimes been described as the voice of God in the soul, or as the personal presence and influence of God himself. But we must not identify conscience with God. D. W. Faunce: “Conscience is not God,—it is only a part of one’s self. To build up a religion about one’s own conscience, as if it were God, is only a refined selfishness—a worship of one part of one’s self by another part of one’s self.” In The Excursion, Wordsworth speaks of conscience as “God’s most intimate presence in the soul And his most perfect image in the world.” But in his Ode to Duty he more discreetly writes: “Stern daughter of the voice of God! O Duty! if that name thou love, Who art a light to guide, a rod To check the erring, and reprove, Thou who art victory and law When empty terrors overawe, From vain temptations dost set free And calmst the weary strife of frail humanity!” Here is an allusion to the Hebrew Bath Kol. “The Jews say that the Holy Spirit spoke during the Tabernacle by Urim and Thummim, under the first Temple by the Prophets, and under the second Temple by the Bath Kol—a divine intimation as inferior to the oracular voice proceeding from the mercy seat as a daughter is supposed to be inferior to her mother. It is also used in the sense of an approving conscience. In this case it is the echo of the voice of God in those who by obeying hear” (Hershon’s Talmudic Miscellany, 2, note). This phrase, “the echo of God’s voice,” is a correct description of conscience, and Wordsworth probably had it in mind when he spoke of duty as “the daughter of the voice of God.” Robert Browning describes conscience as “the great beacon-light God sets in all.… The worst man upon earth.… knows in his conscience more Of what right is, than arrives at birth In the best man’s acts that we bow before.” Jackson, James Martineau, 154—The sense of obligation is “a piercing ray of the great Orb of souls.” On Wordsworth’s conception of conscience, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 365–368.

Since the activity of the immanent God reveals itself in the normal operations of our own faculties, conscience might be also regarded as man’s true self over against the false self which we have set up against it. Theodore Parker defines conscience as “our consciousness of the conscience of God.” In his fourth year, says Chadwick, his biographer (pages 12, 13, 185), young Theodore saw a little spotted tortoise and lifted his hand to strike. All at once something checked his arm, and a voice within said clear and loud: “It is wrong.” He asked his mother what it was that told him it was wrong. She wiped a tear from her eye with her apron, and taking him in her arms said: “Some men call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and will always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear and disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and will leave you all in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends on your hearing this little voice.” R. T. Smith, Man’s Knowledge of Man and of God, 87, 171—“Man has conscience, as he has talents. Conscience, no more than talent, makes him good. He is good, only as he follows conscience and uses talent.… The relation between the terms consciousness and conscience, which are in fact but forms of the same word, testifies to the fact that it is in the action of conscience that man’s consciousness of himself is chiefly experienced.”

The conscience of the regenerate man may have such right standards, and its decisions may be followed by such uniformly right action, that its voice, though it is not itself God’s voice, is yet the very echo of God’s voice. The renewed conscience may take up into itself, and may express, the witness of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 9:1—“I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing witness with me in the Holy Spirit”; cf. 8:16—“the Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God”). But even when conscience judges according to imperfect standards, and is imperfectly obeyed by the will, there is a spontaneity in its utterances and a sovereignty in its commands. It declares that whatever is right must be done. The imperative of conscience is a “categorical imperative” (Kant). It is independent of the human will. Even when disobeyed, it still asserts its authority. Before conscience, every other impulse and affection of man’s nature is called to bow.

F. Conscience in its relation to God as holy.—Conscience is not an original authority. It points to something higher than itself, The “authority of conscience” is simply the authority of the moral law, or rather, the authority of the personal God, of whose nature the law is but a transcript. Conscience, therefore, with its continual and supreme demand that the right should be done, furnishes the best witness to man of the existence of a personal God, and of the supremacy of holiness in him in whose image we are made.

In knowing self in connection with moral law, man not only gets his best knowledge of self, but his best knowledge of that other self opposite to him, namely, God. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 236—“The conscience is the true Jacob’s ladder, set in the heart of the individual and reaching unto heaven; and upon it the angels of self-reproach and self-approval ascend and descend.” This is of course true if we confine our thoughts to the mandatory element in revelation. There is a higher knowledge of God which is given only in grace. Jacob’s ladder symbolizes the Christ who publishes not only the gospel but the law, and not only the law but the gospel. Dewey, Psychology, 344—“Conscience is intuitive, not in the sense that it enunciates universal laws and principles, for it lays down no laws. Conscience is a name for the experience of personality that any given act is in harmony or in discord with a truly realized personality.” Because obedience to the dictates of conscience is always relatively right, Kant could say that “an erring conscience is a chimæra.” But because the law accepted by conscience may be absolutely wrong, conscience may in its decisions greatly err from the truth. S. S. Times: “Saul before his conversion was a conscientious wrong doer. His spirit and character was commendable, while his conduct was reprehensible.” We prefer to say that Saul’s zeal for the law was a zeal to make the law subservient to his own pride and honor.

Horace Bushnell said that the first requirement of a great ministry is a great conscience. He did not mean the punitive, inhibitory conscience merely, but rather the discovering, arousing, inspiring conscience, that sees at once the great things to be done, and moves toward them with a shout and a song. This unbiased and pure conscience is inseparable from the sense of its relation to God and to God’s holiness. Shakespeare, Henry VI, 2d Part, 3:2—“What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted? Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just; And he but naked, though locked up in steel, Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.” Huxley, in his lecture at Oxford in 1893, admits and even insists that ethical practice must be and should be in opposition to evolution; that the methods of evolution do not account for ethical man and his ethical progress. Morality is not a product of the same methods by which lower orders have advanced in perfection of organization, namely, by the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. Human progress is moral, is in freedom, is under the law of love, is different in kind from physical evolution. James Russell Lowell: “In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing: The ten commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.”

R. T. Smith, Man’s Knowledge of Man and of God, 161—“Conscience lives in human nature like a rightful king, whose claim can never be forgotten by his people, even though they dethrone and misuse him, and whose presence, on the seat of judgment can alone make the nation to be at peace with itself.” Seth, Ethical Principles, 424—“The Kantian theory of autonomy does not tell the whole story of the moral life. Its unyielding Ought, its categorical Imperative, issues not merely from the depths of our own nature, but from the heart of the universe itself. We are self-legislative; but we reënact the law already enacted by God; we recognize, rather than constitute, the law of our own being. The moral law is an echo, within our own souls, of the voice of the Eternal, ‘whose offspring we are’ (Acts 17:28).”

Schenkel, Christliche Dogmatik, 1:135–155—“The conscience is the organ by which the human spirit finds God in itself and so becomes aware of itself in him. Only in conscience is man conscious of himself as eternal, as distinct from God, yet as normally bound to be determined wholly by God. When we subject ourselves wholly to God, conscience gives us peace. When we surrender to the world the allegiance due only to God, conscience brings remorse. In this latter case we become aware that while God is in us, we are no longer in God. Religion is exchanged for ethics, the relation of communion for the relation of separation. In conscience alone man distinguishes himself absolutely from the brute. Man does not make conscience, but conscience makes man. Conscience feels every separation from God as an injury to self. Faith is the relating of the self-consciousness to the God-consciousness, the becoming sure of our own personality, in the absolute personality of God. Only in faith does conscience come to itself. But by sin this faith-consciousness may be turned into law-consciousness. Faith affirms God in us; Law affirms God outside of us.” Schenkel differs from Schleiermacher in holding that religion is not feeling but conscience, and that it is not a sense of dependence on the world, but a sense of dependence on God. Conscience recognizes a God distinct from the universe, a moral God, and so makes an unmoral religion impossible.

Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 283–285, Moral Science, 49, Law of Love, 41—“Conscience is the moral consciousness of man in view of his own actions as related to moral law. It is a double knowledge of self and of the law. Conscience is not the whole of the moral nature. It presupposes the moral reason, which recognizes the moral law and affirms its universal obligation for all moral beings. It is the office of conscience to bring man into personal relation to this law. It sets up a tribunal within him by which his own actions are judged. Not conscience, but the moral reason, judges of the conduct of others. This last is science, but not conscience.”

Peabody, Moral Philos., 41–60—“Conscience not a source, but a means, of knowledge. Analogous to consciousness. A judicial faculty. Judges according to the law before it. Verdict (verum dictum) always relatively right, although, by the absolute standard of right, it may be wrong. Like all perceptive faculties, educated by use (not by increase of knowledge only, for man may act worse, the more knowledge he has). For absolutely right decisions, conscience is dependent upon knowledge. To recognize conscience as legislator (as well as judge), is to fail to recognize any objective standard of right.” The Two Consciences, 46, 47—“Conscience the Law, and Conscience the Witness. The latter is the true and proper Conscience.”

H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theology, 178–191—“The unity of conscience is not in its being one faculty or in its performing one function, but in its having one object, its relation to one idea, viz., right.… The term ‘conscience’ no more designates a special faculty than the term ‘religion’ does (or than the ‘æsthetic sense’).… The existence of conscience proves a moral law above us; it leads logically to a Moral Governor;.… it implies an essential distinction between right and wrong, an immutable morality;.… yet needs to be enlightened; … men may be conscientious in iniquity; … conscience is not righteousness; … this may only show the greatness of the depravity, having conscience, and yet ever disobeying it.”

On the New Testament passages with regard to conscience, see Hofmann, Lehre von dem Gewissen, 30–38; Kähler, Das Gewissen, 225–293. For the view that conscience is primarily the cognitive or intuitional power of the soul, see Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 77; Alexander, Moral Science, 20; McCosh, Div. Govt., 297–312; Talbot, Ethical Prolegomena, in Blap. Quar., July, 1877:257–274; Park, Discourses, 260–296; Whewell, Elements of Morality, 1:259–266. On the whole subject of conscience, see Mansel, Metaphysics, 158–170; Martineau, Religion and Materialism, 45—“The discovery of duty is as distinctly relative to an objective Righteousness as the perception of form to an external space”; also Types, 2:27–30—“We first judge ourselves; then others”; 53, 54, 74, 103—“Subjective morals are as absurd as subjective mathematics.” The best brief treatment of the whole subject is that of E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 26–78. See also Wayland, Moral Science, 49; Harless, Christian Ethics, 45, 60; H. N. Day, Science of Ethics, 17; Janet, Theory of Morals, 264, 348; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 62; cf. Schwegler, Hist. Philosophy, 233; Haven, Mor. Philos., 41; Fairchild, Mor. Philos., 75; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 71; Passavant, Das Gewissen; Wm. Schmid, Das Gewissen.