WHAT IS CONSCIENCE?

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 24, 27 July 1929, Page 17

WHAT IS CONSCIENCE?

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —What is "conscience"? Everyone knows ,llie answer (sue Shakespeare's "Richard III."). "It fills one full of obstacles; it made mo once restore » purse of gold, that by chance I found; it beggars any man that keeps it" (query, keeps the conscience or keeps the gold?). The above sentences are consecutive, following one another. Shakespeare hits the nail on the head squarely. Speaking of conscience, Forlong's "Faiths of Jfau" says: "Conscience is not an entity, or infallible counsellor, due to an infallible intelligence, or god that 'changcth not'; but is due to an experience becoming ever more enlightened and enlightening. Conscience is the inherited experience of the race." Max Muller ("Natural Religion") says: "Nothing is more common than to speak of conscience as the arbitrator o£ right and wrong, nay, even as the source of all truth and the highest witness of the existence of God. But all this is philosophical mythology. If we possessed within us a faculty or an oracle, or a deity, to tell us what is true, and what is right and wrong, how could Pascal have said that good and evil, truth and falsehood, differ within a few degrees of latitude? How could there be that infinite diversity of opinion as to what is true, and what is right and wrong. We must learn that from other sources—from our teachers, and our own experience and judgment." Thus speaks "The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics": "The myth of the chariot with the two steeds represents Plato's conception of the moral nature. Plato's distinction was between 'rational' and 'irrational' conduct, by which he j meant the distinction between intelligent' and ignorant conduct. Irrational action was [under the influence of desire and passion, two unruly steeds which in their behaviour never looked before and alter, but rushed into action without deliberation or reflection. Reason was the charioteer whose function it was to direct these two steeds or impulses towards an end which represented knowledge of what the subject docs, instead of blind passion. In this conception, however, reason furnishes light, but not power. The motive agency was in the desires and passions, and reason only gave counsel or directed them, without providing any other end than these impulses offered. "It took a more spiritual age to supply an end which waa distinct from that of sense and passion, and so to modify the conception which gave rise to the more modern idea of conscience. The distinction between right and wrong with Plato, and- for that matter with all Greece, was that between the prudent and the imprudent, between what was best for the individual and what was injurious to him, and the judge of this was intelligence, not conscience in our use of the term. The nearest conception to ours was the Stoic obedience to law, a law, too, which sacrificed the impulses and started the reflective mind towards the later. Christian doctrine. But it was still an appeal to reason, and tried to reconcile its opposition to passion by insisting upon traditional ethics in details. But other Greek thinkers conceived reason as the director, not the commander, of the impulses, and so the Greek point o£ view was not that of the supremacy of conscience, but the supremacy of reason, thus making prudence instead of law its standard of morality. The emotional element of conscience the ancients did not recognise. The influence which introduced this factor into the conception was partly the Christian idea of sacrifice, and partly the idea of respect for an inner law of life and conduct, suggested by the Stoic ethics. . . ." I atn, etc., H.E.R, ,