Conscience

“ It is still the mandate of conscience. But it is the mandate of a conscience whose search-light has been taken possession of by the aesthetic sense and has been fed by imagination, instinct and intuition. ”

“ This does not mean that conscience over-rules the understanding, or that the will can violate nature; but that conscience reveals another world, deeper and more real than nature, which is the proper sphere for the exercise of the will. ”

“ Our thought sets out on its course: have we solved one question? immediately new questions arise, which press, no less than the former, for an answer. Our conscience speaks: have we come in a certain degree to realize what is right and good? immediately conscience demands of us still more. Is our feeling for beauty awakened? ”

“ Have you studied the conscience of a savage? Have you made a comparative analysis of conscience among varying peoples and at various periods of history? Have you ever observed the conscience of a very little child? The dictates of conscience are purely and simply a matter of education. Conscience itself is neither more nor less than one's satisfaction in himself. A clear conscience is the pleasurable sense of self-approval; guilty conscience, the disquieting sense of self-censure. ”

“ And in this manner we explain to ourselves why the mysterious and inspired voice of conscience has at all times admonished man to worship Truth with that same intense earnestness, with those same scruples, with that identical personal energy, which we devote to every phase of our moral mission. ”

“ But the conscience, which consists in an inappellable bearing-witness to the truth and reality of our reason, may legitimately be construed with the term reason, so far as the conscience is prescriptive; while as approving or condemning, it is the consciousness of the subordination or insubordination, the harmony or discord, of the personal will of man to and with the representative of the will of God. ”

“ We learn, thus, from the teaching of both schools that conscience is at once the voice of man, the accumulated and concentrated moral experience of the race, but still more the voice of the eternal Reason which is revealed to our wondering eyes in the true, the good and the beautiful. ”

“ The study of psychology has opened the mind to inspection as we open the back of a watch-case and see the wheels go round; and this study lays its crown of victorious explorations at the feet of ethics.... His view is that conscience is the sense of conflict between bodily and mental desires ... therefore not a guide; it is only a sense of lostness in the woods, that wants a guide. Good sense and good religion are the guides to be consulted. ”

“ Let conscience be employed both to search and to try, and let it have leave to deal faithfully, to accomplish a diligent search and to make an impartial trial. Let us try our ways, that by them we may try ourselves, for we are to judge of our state not by our faint wishes, but by our steps, not by one particular step, but by our ways, the ends we aim at, the rules we go by, and the agreeableness of the temper of our minds and the tenour of our lives to those ends and those rules. ”

“ Hence, whatever science has to tell us about conscience will be enthusiastically acclaimed by us as true equally with what we learn from the masters of the higher experience, the philosophers who break unto us the bread of life. ”

“ There are some situations in life where conscience is more awakened by comparison, or perhaps we should say by the force of contrast, than by all the power of reason, religion, or philosophy, put together, and advancing against it in their proudest pomp and formality. ”

“ The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you. ”

“ Just here lies the value of any great love, or any intense devotion to a cause. As Royce says: "To have a conscience, then, is to have a cause; to unify your life by means of an ideal determined by this cause, and to compare this ideal and the life." ”

“ For it operates in its most intense fashion, and with results most blessed or most disastrous, in the inner life. The great example that I would adduce is conscience. Use it, obey it, listen for its voice, never thwart it, and it grows and grows and grows, and becomes more and more sensitive, more and more educated, more and more sovereign in its decisions. ”

“ Of these I have in my former Lectures analyzed and described the conscience as the moral instinct for right and wrong, when I named it the reason applied to the will, or, rather, as I preferred to consider it, as a peculiar and independent faculty, intermediate between reason and will, and being an immediate feeling and judgment as to what is good and evil in human desires and actions. Now, just as conscience is a mean between reason and will, so is memory intermediate between reason and understanding. ”

“ And as regards the mere fact that the working of conscience is independent of the will, surely this is not more than we find, in varying degrees, to be true of all our emotions; and conscience, according to the evolution theory, has its root in the emotions. ”

“ The conscience, in its essential perceptions and judgments, as appears from the analysis already given, is part of the rational intelligence. It designates the power and function of the intelligent ego, or personal self, for discernment in the sphere of right and duty—for insight into the reality of ethical law and obligation which belong to good conduct among rational, self-directing beings. ”

“ Yes, I reply, follow conscience; but see that it be a right and well-informed conscience, forming its judgments, not from impulse, passion, prejudice, the bias of habit, or of unreflecting custom, but from the clearest light of reason, and especially of the divine word. We are responsible for the judgments we form in morals, as much as for any class of our judgments; responsible, in other words, for the sort of conscience we have. ”

“ It was evident to me, that conscience, the most holy portion of the human being, must, if it continued the fountain of truth regarding God—contain also the fountain of truth and certainty in—every thing. ”

“ Thus, consciousness testifies that one is considering the performance of a certain act, conscience judges the morality, and permits or forbids; or consciousness testifies that a certain thing was done or not done in the past, conscience declares the morality—condemning, excusing, or approving what took place. ”

“ Here conscience acts spontaneously and anticipates experience, acts in advance of history, and spontaneously projects an ideal which is derived from the moral instinct of our nature. This is the transcendent way of learning the moral law. ”

“ But as without a Thou there can be no You, so without a You no They, These, or Those; and as all these conjointly form the materials and subjects of consciousness and the conditions of experience, it is evident that conscience is the root of all consciousness—à fortiori, the precondition of all experience—and that the conscience cannot have been in its first revelation deduced from experience. ”

“ Further, while thus the summit point in the rational intelligence, the conscience employs for its perceptions and judgments the data of all the other functions of the mind. Its discernments are made in the light of all the truth which in any way illuminates the understanding. This explains why and how the conscience is educable. It is dependent on all the other intellectual powers for a knowledge of the relations105 of life which develop duties and in view of which every duty is to be determined and judged. ”

“ But what of the voice and judgment of conscience? The difficulty is that we have a conscience behind our conscience, an intellectual one behind the moral. We can tell that the judgment of So-and-So's conscience has a past history in his instincts, his original sympathies or antipathies, his experience or want of experience. We can see quite well that our opinions of what is noble and good, our moral valuations, are powerful levers where action is concerned; ”

“ They were meant to know, to act, and to feel—to know everything which the mind is able to contemplate, to name, and to classify; to do everything which the will, prompted by the passions and guided by the conscience, can undertake; and, subject to the same guidance, to feel in its utmost vigor every emotion which the contemplation of the various persons and objects which surround us can excite. ”

“ As the eye corresponds to things visible, the ear to things audible, the reason to things intelligible, so conscience must correspond to a judgment which implies some one to pronounce it, and to a retribution which implies some one to inflict it. ”

“ Starting from the universal phenomenon of moral distinctions in life, it determines the conscience psychologically, as a rationally intuitive power discerning the moral distinction and the reality and authority of moral law. ”

“ In other words, we understand the mind of God and attain to the illumination of the conscience, through sympathetic response to the will so far as we have seen it. And each new response, in its turn, carries us to a deeper and clearer understanding of the will. That is to say, our conscience, by habitual response to God's will, so far as it knows it, is so illumined as to be able to make trustworthy judgments on new material submitted to it. ”

“ In the supernatural interpretation of the facts, the whole stress of the argument comes upon the character of conscience as a spontaneously admonishing influence which acts independently of our own volition. ”

“ Thus it has been asserted that conscience is an original faculty of illumination which (if it has not been dimmed by indulgence in sin) shines upon moral truths and objects and reveals them without effort for precisely what they are. ”

“ The capacity for such feelings is conscience, as this may manifest itself in entirely isolated individuals. Conscience, in the broadest sense of the word, is a feeling of relations, and requires only a relation between central and peripheral feelings,—feelings of wider, and feelings of narrower thought-connection. The single moment and the single act are judged according to their worth as parts of the individual life as totality. ”

“ These duties are present to conscience, which itself arises from a doubling of consciousness. “We have the empirical person with his experience of the past, and we have the ideal person—that is to say, that which we wish to be,” [12] our ideal character. ”

“ I know, however, that there were words in it which found their way to my conscience; and, let men of science or philosophy say what they will, the rousing of a man’s conscience is the greatest event in his existence. ”

“ Observation and experience teach us, those scorning to swerve from a direct line of duty, or vainly to stoop to personal aggrandizement at the sacrifice of conscience, and make popularity paramount to Truth, are traduced by many whom that line of duty touches. ”

“ Both the intellectual and emotional action of the soul are, therefore, included in what is named the conscience—the perceptive action, here as everywhere else, being primary and conditional for the emotional. If there were no ethical distinction perceived, none would be felt. The conscience, taken in its totality, thus includes both sides of the human psychology, the intellect and the sensibility, and it addresses its behests of duty to the will in its own peculiar way of moral law for conduct. ”

“ But conscience—even a small boy's conscience—is the most potent of all moral forces, and he suffered a poignant pang for every mill of the half dollar which was the price of his appropriate seat among the gallery gods. ”

“ Think upon this, O ye great ones of the world, who live in pleasure! remember that there is a conscience, and that there is a God, and that thou hast a precious and immortal soul; which if thy conscience, witness against, shall be thrown into hell. You that eat the fat and sweet of the earth, and drink wine in bowls, and clothe yourselves in silk, remember this, that conscience takes notice of all thy ways, of the pride of thy heart of the vanity of thy life, and setteth all down in his Black Book.’ You that, like the harlot, Prov. ”

“ God, if he believed in Him, his conscience if he had one—these were the only judges to whom he was answerable. ”

“ in many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance, than a wife or a carriage; ”

“ THE conscience of every man recognizes courage as the foundation of true manliness, and manliness as the perfection of human character, and if Christianity runs counter to conscience in this matter, or indeed in any other, Christianity will go to the wall. ”

“ The range of a fine conscience covers more good and evil than the range of conscience which may be called, roughly, not fine; a conscience, less troubled by the nice discrimination of shades of conduct. A fine conscience is more concerned with essentials; its triumphs are more perfect, if less profitable, in a worldly sense. ”

“ The vagaries of the uninstructed conscience [Pg 332] are so familiar as to have given rise to popular proverbs: ‘Honour among thieves,’ ‘To strain out the gnat and swallow the camel,’ point to cases of misguided conscience; while ‘The wish is father to the thought,’ ‘None is so blind as he who won’t see,’ point to the still more common cases, in which a man knowingly tricks his conscience into acquiescence. ”

“ That phenomenon, called conscience, which seemed at first sight the most likely to resist analysis by way of evolution, proves upon experiment to yield most readily to it.
As usual in questions of this description, philosophy has been made the slave, the victim, and finally the accomplice of language. The word conscience has come to suggest a kind of special faculty, not exactly thought and not exactly feeling, which presides over a specific department of man's being, namely, his moral conduct. ”

“ Now then, if there be such a thing in man as conscience, and that this conscience; shall either justify or condemn him, then let every man take heed how he orders his conversation in the world. Do not give leave to yourselves to think, say or do any thing, but what you are willing to own before the Lord at the last day. ”