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The name

In English we have done with a Latin word what neither the Latins nor the French have done: we have doubled the term, making "conscience" stand for the moral department and leaving "consciousness" for the universal field of objects about which we become aware. In Cicero we have to depend upon the context for the specific limitation to the ethical area, as in the sentence: "mea mihi conscientia pluris est quam omnium sermo" (Att., XII, xxviii, 2). Sir W. Hamilton has discussed how far we can be said to be conscious of the outer objects which we know, and how far "consciousness" ought to be held a term restricted to states of self or self-consciousness. (See Thiele, Die Philosophie des Selbstbewusstseins, Berlin, 1895.) In the two words Bewusstsein and Gewissen the Germans have made a serviceable distinction answering to our "consciousness" and "conscience". The ancients mostly neglected such a discrimination. The Greeks often used phronesis where we should use "conscience", but the two terms are far from coincident. They also used suneidesis, which occurs repeatedly for the purpose in hand both in the Old and the New Testament. The Hebrews had no formal psychology, though Delitzsch has endeavoured to find one in Scripture. There the heart often stands for conscience.



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Ethics is conduct or regulated life; and regulation has a crude beginning in the lowest animal life as a response to stimulus, as reflex action, as useful adaptation to environment. Thus the amoeba doubles itself round its food in the water and lives; it propagates by self-division. At another stage in the animal series we find blind impulses for the benefit of life and its propagation taking a more complex shape, until something like instinctive purpose is displayed. Useful actions are performed, not apparently pleasurable in themselves, yet with good in the sequel which cannot have been foreseen. The care of the animal for its young, the provision for the need of its future offspring is a kind of foreshadowed sense of duty. St. Thomas is bold to follow the terminology of Roman lawyers, and to assert a sort of morality in the pairing and the propagating of the higher animals: "ius naturale est quod natura omnia animalia docuit". (It is the natural law which nature has taught all animals.--"In IV Sent.", dist. xxxiii, a. 1, art. 4.) Customs are formed under the pressures and the interactions of actual living. They are fixed by heredity, and they await the analysis and the improvements of nascent reason. With the advent of man, in his rudest state--however he came to be in that state, whether by ascent or descent--there dawns a conscience, which, in the development theory, will have to pass through many stages. At first its categories of right and wrong are in a very fluid condition, keeping no fixed form, and easily intermixing, as in the chaos of a child's dreams, fancies, illusions, and fictions. The requirements of social life, which becomes the great moralizer of social action, are continually changing, and with them ethics varies its adaptations. As society advances, its ethics improves. "The lines on which custom is formed are determined in each society by the pressures, the thousand interactions of those forces of individual character and social relationship, which never cease remoulding until they have made men's loves and hates, their hopes and fears for themselves and their children, their dread of unseen agencies, their jealousies, their resentments, their antipathies, their sociability and dim sense of mutual dependence all their qualities good and bad, selfish and sympathetic, social and anti-social." (Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 262.) The grasp of experience widens and power of analysis increases, till, in a people like the Greeks, we come upon thinkers who can distinctly reflect on human conduct, and can put in practice the gnothi seauton (know thyself), so that henceforth the method of ethics is secured for all times, with indefinite scope left for its better and better application. "Here we have reached the level of philosophical or spiritual religions, systems which seek to concentrate all experience in one focus, and to illuminate all morality from one centre, thought, as ever, becoming more comprehensive as it becomes more explicit". (ibid., p. 266.)

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What conscience is in the soul of man?

It is often a good maxim not to mind for a time how a thing came to be, but to see what it actually is. To do so in regard to conscience before we take up the history of philosophy in its regard is wise policy, for it will give us some clear doctrine upon which to lay hold, while we travel through a region perplexed by much confusion of thought. The following points are cardinal:

    The natural conscience is no distinct faculty, but the one intellect of a man inasmuch as it considers right and wrong in conduct, aided meanwhile by a good will, by the use of the emotions, by the practical experience of living, and by all external helps that are to the purpose.

    The natural conscience of the Christian is known by him to act not alone, but under the enlightenment and the impulse derived from revelation and grace in a strictly supernatural order.

    As to the order of nature, which does not exist but which might have existed, St. Thomas (I-II:109:3) teaches that both for the knowledge of God and for the knowledge of moral duty, men such as we are would require some assistance from God to make their knowledge sufficiently extensive, clear, constant, effective, and relatively adequate; and especially to put it within reach of those who are much engrossed with the cares of material life. It would be absurd to suppose that in the order of nature God could be debarred from any revelation of Himself, and would leave Himself to be searched for quite irresponsively.

    Being a practical thing, conscience depends in large measure for its correctness upon the good use of it and on proper care taken to heed its deliverances, cultivate its powers, and frustrate its enemies.

    Even where due diligence is employed conscience will err sometimes, but its inculpable mistakes will be admitted by God to be not blameworthy. These are so many principles needed to steady us as we tread some of the ways of ethical history, where pitfalls are many.

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In the Christian Fathers

The patristic treatment of ethics joined together Holy Scripture and the classical authors of paganism; no system was reached, but each Father did what was characteristic. Tertullian was a lawyer and spoke in legal terms: especially his Montanism urged him to inquire which were the mortal sins, and thus he started for future investigators a good line of inquiry. Clement of Alexandria was allegoric and mystic: a combiner of Orientalism, Hellenism, Judaism, and Christianity in their bearing on the several virtues and vices. The apologists, in defending the Christian character, dwelt on the marks of ethical conduct. St. Justin attributed this excellence to the Divine Logos, and thought that to Him, through Moses, the pagan philosophers were indebted (First Apology 44). Similarly Origen accounted for pre-Christian examples of Christian virtue. As a Roman skilled in legal administration St. Ambrose was largely guided by Latin versions of Greek ethics, as is very well illustrated by his imitation in style of Cicero's "De Officiis", which he made the title of his own work. He discusses honestum et utile (I, ix); decorum, or to prepon as exhibited in Holy Scripture (x); various degrees of goodness, mediocre and perfect, in connection with the text, "if thou wilt be perfect" (xi); the passions of hot youth (xvii). Subsequent chapters dwell on the various virtues, as fortitude in war and its allied quality, courage in martyrdom (xl, xli). The second book opens with a discussion of beatitude, and then returns to the different virtues. It is the pupil of St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, who is, perhaps, the most important of the Fathers in the development of the Christian doctrine of conscience, not so much on account of his frequent discourses about moral subjects, as because of the Platonism which he drank in before his conversion, and afterwards got rid of only by degrees. The abiding result to the Scholastic system was that many writers traced their ethics and theology more or less to innate ideas, or innate dispositions, or Divine illuminations, after the example of St. Augustine. Even in St. Thomas, who was so distinctly an Aristotelean empiricist, some fancy that they detect occasional remnants of Augustinianism on its Platonic side.

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In Scholastic times

It will help to make intelligible the subtle and variable theories which follow, if it be premised that the Scholastics are apt to puzzle readers by mixing up with their philosophy of reason a real or apparent apriorism, which is called Augustinianism, Platonism, or Mysticism.

    As a rule, to which Durandus with some others was an exception, the Schoolmen regarded created causes as unable to issue in any definite act unless applied or stimulated by God, the Prime Mover: whence came the Thomistic doctrine of proemotio physica even for the intellect and the will, and the simple concursus of the non-Thomists.

    Furthermore they supposed some powers to be potential and passive, that is, to need a creative determinant received into them as their complement: of which kind a prominent example was the intellectus possibilis informed by the species intelligibilis, and another instance was in relation to conscience, the synteresis. (St. Thomas, De Verit., Q. xvi, art. 1, ad 13.)

    First principles or habits inherent in intellect and will were clearly traced by St. Thomas to an origin in experience and abstraction; but others spoke more ambiguously or even contradictorily; St. Thomas himself, in isolated passages, might seem to afford material for the priorist to utilize in favour of innate forms. But the Thomistic explanation of appetitus innatus, as contrasted with elicitus, saves the situation.

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As forming a transition from the Franciscan to the Dominican School we may take one whom the Servite Order can at least claim as a great patron, though he seems not to have joined their body, Henry of Ghent. He places conscience in the intellect, not in the affective part--"non ad affectivam pertinet"--by which the Scholastics meant generally the will without special reference to feeling or emotion as distinguished in the modern sense from will. While Nicholas of Cusa described the Divine illumination as acting in blind-born man (virtus illuminati coecinati qui per fidem visum acquirit), Henry of Ghent required only assistances to human sight. Therefore he supposed:

    an influentia generalis Dei to apprehend concrete objects and to generalize thence ideas and principles;

    a light of faith;

    a lumen speciale wherewith was known the sincera et limpida veritas rerum by chosen men only, who saw things in their Divine exemplars but not God Himself;

    the lumen gloriæ to see God.

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    While St. Augustine did excellent service in developing the doctrine of grace, he never so clearly defined the exact character of the supernatural as to approach the precision which was given through the condemnation of propositions taught by Baius and Jansenius; and in consequence his doctrine of original sin remained unsatisfactory. When Alexander of Hales, without distinction of natural and supernatural, introduced among the Scholastics the words of St. Jerome about synteresis as scintilla conscientia, and called it lumen innatum, he helped to perpetuate the Augustinian obscurity.

    As regards the intellect, several Scholastics inclined to the Arabian doctrine of intellectus agens, or to the Aristotelean doctrine of the Divine nous higher than the human soul and not perishable with it. Roger Bacon called the intellectus agens a distinct substance. Allied with this went Exemplarism, or the doctrine of archetypic ideas and the supposed knowledge of things in these Divine ideas. [Compare the prolepseis emphutoi of the Stoics, which were universals, koinai ennoiai]. Henry of Ghent distinguished in man a double knowledge: "primum exemplar rei est species eius universalis causata a re: secundum est ars divina, continens rerum ideales rationes" --"the first exemplar of a thing is universal species of it caused by the thing: the second is the Divine Art containing the ideal reasons (rationes) of things" (Theol., I, 2, n. 15). Of the former he says: "per tale exemplar acquisitum certa et infallibilis notitia veritatis est omnino impossibilis"--"through such an acquired exemplar, certain and infallible knowledge of truth is utterly impossible" (n. 17); and of the latter: "illi soli certam veritatem valent agnoscere qui earn in exemplari (aeterno) valent aspicere, quod non omnes valent"--"they alone can know certain truth who can behold it in the (eternal) exemplar, which not all can do" (I, 1, n. 21;). The perplexity was further increased when some, with Occam, asserted a confused intuition of things singular as opposed to the clearer idea got by the process of abstraction: "Cognitio singularis abstractiva praesupponit intuitivam ejusdem objecti"--"abstractive cognition of a singular presupposes intuitive cognition of the same object" (Quodlib., I, Q. xiii). Scotus also has taught the confused intuition of the singulars. Here was much occasion for perplexity on the intellectual side, about the knowledge of general principles in ethics and their application when the priority of the general to the particular was in question.

    The will also was a source of obscurity. Descartes supposed the free will of God to have determined what for conscience was to be right and what wrong, and he placed the act of volition in an affirmation of the judgment. Scotus did not go thus far, but some Scotists exaggerated the determining power of Divine will, especially so as to leave it to the choice of God indefinitely to enlarge a creature's natural faculties in a way that made it hard to distinguish the natural from the supernatural. Connected with the philosophy of the will in matters of conscience is another statement open to controversy, namely, that the will can tend to any good object in particular only by reason of its universal tendency to the good. This is what Alexander of Hales means by synteresis as it exists in the will, when he says that it is not an inactive habit but a habit in some sense active of itself, or a general tendency, disposition, bias, weight, or virtuality. With this we might contrast Kant's pure noumenal will, good apart from all determinedly good objects.

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Hobbes

Hobbes stands for ethics on a Materialistic basis. Tracing all human action to self-love, he had to explain the generous virtues as the more respectable exhibitions of that quality when modified by social life. He set various schools of antagonistic thought devising hypotheses to account for disinterested action in man. The Cambridge Platonists unsatisfactorily attacked him on the principle of their eponymous philosopher, supposing the innate noemata to rule the empirical aisthemata by the aid of what Henry More called a "boniform faculty", which tasted "the sweetness and savour of virtue". This calling in of a special faculty had imitators outside the Platonic School; for example in Hutcheson, who had recourse to Divine "implantations" of benevolent disposition and moral sense, which remind us somewhat of synteresis as imperfectly described by Alexander of Hales. A robust reliance on reason to prove ethical truth as it proved mathematical truths, by inspection and analysis, characterized the opposition which Dr. Samuel Clarke presented to Hobbes. It was a fashion of the age to treat philosophy with mathematical rigour; but very different was the "geometrical ethics" of Spinoza, the necessarian, from that of Descartes, the libertarian, who thought that God's free will chose even the ultimate reasons of right and wrong and might have chosen otherwise. If Hobbes has his representatives in the Utilitarians, the Cambridge Platonists have their representatives in more or less of the school of which T. H. Green is a leading light. A universal infinite mind seeks to realize itself finitely in each human mind or brain, which therefore must seek to free itself from the bondage of mere natural causality and rise to the liberty of the spirit, to a complete self-realization in the infinite Self and after its pattern. What this pattern ultimately is Green cannot say; but he holds that our way towards it at present is through the recognized virtues of European civilization, together with the cultivation of science and art. In the like spirit G.E. Moore finds the ascertainable objects that at present can be called "good in themselves" to be social intercourse and æsthetic delight.

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Conscience in its practical working

The supremacy of conscience

The supremacy of conscience is a great theme of discourse. "Were its might equal to its right", says Butler, "it would rule the world". With Kant we could say that conscience is autonomously supreme, if against Kant we added that thereby we meant only that every duty must be brought home to the individual by his own individual conscience, and is to this extent imposed by it; so that even he who follows authority contrary to his own private judgment should do so on his own private conviction that the former has the better claim. If the Church stands between God and conscience, then in another sense also the conscience is between God and the Church. Unless a man is conscientiously submissive to the Catholic Church his subjection is not really a matter of inner morality but is mechanical obedience.

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The approvals and reprovals of conscience

The office of conscience is sometimes treated under too narrow a conception. Some writers, after the manner of Socrates when he spoke of his doemon as rather a restrainer than a promoter of action, assign to conscience the office of forbidding, as others assign to law and government the negative duty of checking invasion upon individual liberty. Shaftesbury (Inquiry II, 2, 1) regards conscience as the consciousness of wrongdoing, not of rightdoing. Carlyle in his "Essay on Characteristics" asserts that we should have no sense of having a conscience but for the fact that we have sinned; with which view we may compare Green's idea about a reasoned system of ethics (Proleg., Bk. IV, ch. ii, sect. 311) that its use is negative "to provide a safeguard against the pretext which in a speculative age some inadequate and misapplied theories may afford our selfishness rather than in the way of pointing out duties previously ignored". Others say that an ethics of conscience should no more be hortatory than art should be didactic. Mackenzie (Ethics, 3rd ed., Bk. III, ch. I, sect. 14) prefers to say simply that "conscience is a feeling of pain accompanying and resulting from nonconformity to principle". The suggestion which, by way of contrary, these remarks offer is that we should use conscience largely as an approving and an instigating and an inspiring agency to advance us in the right way. We should not in morals copy the physicists, who deny all attractive force and limit force to vis a tergo, a push from behind. Nor must we think that the positive side of conscience is exhausted in urging obligations: it may go on in spite of Kant, beyond duty to works of supererogation. Of course there is a theory which denies the existence of such works on the principle that every one is simply bound to the better and the best if he feels himself equal to the heroic achievement. This philosophy would lay it down that he who can renounce all and give it to the poor is simply obliged to do so, though a less generous nature is not bound, and may take advantage --if it be an advantage--of its own inferiority. Not such was the way in which Christ put the case: He said hypothetically, "if thou wilt be perfect", and His follower St. Peter said to Ananias "Was not [thy land] thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? . . . Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God." (Acts 5:4) We have, then, a sphere of duty and beyond that a sphere of free virtue, and we include both under the domain of conscience. It is objected that only a prig considers the approving side of his conscience, but that is true only of the priggish manner, not of the thing itself; for a sound mind may very well seek the joy which comes from a faithful, generous heart, and make it an effort of conscience that outstrips duty to aim at higher perfection, not under the false persuasion that only after duty has been fulfilled does merit begin, but under the true conviction that duty is meritorious, and that so also is goodness in excess of duty. Not that the eye is to be too narrowly fixed on rewards: these are included, while virtue for virtue's sake and for the sake of God is carefully cultivated. -- http://www.newadvent.org/

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