Conscience
I. 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.
II. ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE IN THE RACE AND IN THE
INDIVIDUAL
Of anthropologists some do and some do not accept the
Biblical account of man's origin; and the former class,
admitting that Adam's descendants might soon have lost
the traces of their higher descent, are willing to
hear, with no pledge of endorsing, what the latter
class have to say on the assumption of the human
development even from an animal ancestry, and on the
further assumption that in the use of evidences they
may neglect sequence of time and place. It is not
maintained by any serious student that the Darwinian
pedigree is certainly accurate: it has the value of a
diagram giving some notion of the lines along which
forces are supposed to have acted. Not, then, as
accepting for fact, but as using it for a very limited
purpose, we may give a characteristic sketch of ethical
development as suggested in the last chapter of Dr. L.
T. Hobhouse's "Morals in Evolution". It is a
conjectural story, very like what other anthropologists
offer for what it is worth and not for fully certified
science.
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.)
What is said of the race is applied to the individual,
as in him customary rules acquire ethical character by
the recognition of distinct principles and ideals, all
tending to a final unity or goal, which for the mere
evolutionist is left very indeterminate, but for the
Christian has adequate definition in a perfect
possession of God by knowledge and love, without the
contingency of further lapses from duty. To come to the
fullness of knowledge possible in this world is for the
individual a process of growth. The brain at first has
not the organization which would enable it to be the
instrument of rational thought: probably it is a
necessity of our mind's nature that we should not start
with the fully formed brain but that the first elements
of knowledge should be gathered with the gradations of
the developing structure. In the morally good family
the child slowly learns right conduct by imitation, by
instruction, by sanction in the way of rewards and
punishments. Bain exaggerates the predominance of the
last named element as the source whence the sense of
obligation comes, and therein he is like Shaftesbury
(Inquiry, II, n. 1), who sees in conscience only the
reprover. This view is favoured also by Carlyle in his
"Essay on Characteristics", and by Dr. Mackenzie in his
"Manual of Ethics" (3rd ed., III, 14), where we read:
"I should prefer to say simply that conscience is a
feeling of pain accompanying and resulting from our
non-conformity to principle." Newman also has put the
stress on the reproving office of conscience. Carlyle
says we should not observe that we had a conscience if
we had never offended. Green thinks that ethical theory
is mostly of negative use for conduct. (Prolegomena to
Ethics, IV, 1.) It is better to keep in view both sides
of the truth and say that the mind ethically developed
comes to a sense of satisfaction in right doing and of
dissatisfaction in wrongdoing, and that the rewards and
the punishments judiciously assigned to the young have
for their purpose, as Aristotle puts it, to teach the
teachable how to find pleasure in what ought to please
and displeasure in what ought to displease. The
immature mind must be given external sanctions before
it can reach the inward. Its earliest glimmering of
duty cannot be clear light: it begins by distinguishing
conduct as nice or as nasty and naughty: as approved or
disapproved by parents and teachers, behind whom in a
dim way stands the oft-mentioned God, conceived, not
only in an anthropomorphic, but in a nepiomorphic way,
not correct yet more correct than Caliban's
speculations about Setebos. The perception of sin in
the genuine sense is gradually formed until the age
which we roughly designate as the seventh year, and
henceforth the agent enters upon the awful career of
responsibility according to the dictates of conscience.
On grounds not ethical but scholastically theological,
St. Thomas explains a theory that the unbaptized person
at the dawn of reason goes through a first crisis in
moral discrimination which turns simply on the
acceptance or rejection of God, and entails mortal sin
in case of failure. (I-II:89:6)
III. 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.
IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONSCIENCE CONSIDERED
HISTORICALLY
(1) In pre-Christian times
The earliest written testimonies that we can consult
tell us of recognized principles in morals, and if we
confine our attention to the good which we find and
neglect for the present the inconstancy and the
admixture of many evils, we shall experience a
satisfaction in the history. The Persians stood for
virtue against vice in their support of Ahura Mazda
against Ahriman; and it was an excellence of theirs to
rise above "independent ethics" to the conception of
God as the rewarder and the punisher. They even touched
the doctrine of Christ's saying, "What doth it profit a
man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
when to the question, what is the worth of the whole
creation displayed before us, the Zend-Avesta has the
reply: "the man therein who is delivered from evil in
thought, word, and deed: he is the most valuable object
on earth." Here conscience was clearly enlightened. Of
the moral virtues among the Persians truthfulness was
conspicuous. Herodotus says that the youth were taught
"to ride and shoot with the bow", and "to speak the
truth". The unveracious Greeks, who admired the wiles
of an Odysseus, were surprised at Persian veracity
(Herodotus, I, 136, 138); and it may be that Herodotus
is not fair on this head to Darius (III, 72). The
Hindus in the Vedas do not rise high, but in Brahminism
there is something more spiritual, and still more in
the Buddhist reform on its best side, considered apart
from the pessimistic view of life upon which its false
asceticism was grounded. Buddhism had ten prohibitive
commandments: three concerning the body, forbidding
murder, theft, and unchastity; four concerning speech,
forbidding lying, slander, abusive language, and vain
conversation; and three concerning the mind internally,
covetousness, malicious thoughts, and the doubting
spirit. The Egyptians show the workings of conscience.
In the "Book of the Dead" we find an examination of
conscience, or rather profession of innocence, before
the Supreme Judge after death. Two confessions are
given enunciating most of the virtues (chap. cxxv):
reverence for God; duties to the dead; charity to
neighbours; duties of superiors and subjects; care for
human life and limb; chastity, honesty, truthfulness,
and avoidance of slander; freedom from covetousness.
The Assyro-Babylonian monuments offer us many items on
the favourable side; nor could the people whence issued
the Code of Hammurabi, at a date anterior to the Mosaic
legislation by perhaps seven hundred years, be
ethically undeveloped. If the Code of Hammurabi has no
precepts of reverence to God corresponding with the
first three Commandments of the Mosaic Law, at least
its preface contains a recognition of God's supremacy.
In China Confucius (c. 500 B. C.), in connection with
an idea of heaven, delivered a high morality; and
Mencius (c. 300 B. C.) developed this code of
uprightness and benevolence as "Heaven's appointment".
Greek ethics began to pass from its gnomic condition
when Socrates fixed attention on the gnothi seauton in
the interests of moral reflection. Soon followed
Aristotle, who put the science on a lasting basis, with
the great drawback of neglecting the theistic side and
consequently the full doctrine of obligation. Neither
for "obligation" nor for "conscience" had the Greeks a
fixed term. Still the pleasures of a good conscience
and the pains of an evil one were well set forth in the
fragments collected by Stobaeus peri tou suneidotos.
Penandros, asked what was true freedom, answered: "a
good conscience" (Gaisford's Stobaeus, vol. I, p. 429).
(2) 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 (Apol., I, xliv). 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.
Before leaving the Fathers we may mention St. Basil as
one who illustrates a theorizing attitude. He was sound
enough in recognizing sin to be graver and less grave;
yet in the stress of argument against some persons who
seemed to admit only the worst offenses against God to
be real sins, he ventured without approving of Stoic
doctrine, to point out a sort of equality in all sin,
so far as all sin is a disobedience to God (Hom. de
Justitia Dei, v-viii). Later Abelard and recently Dr.
Schell abused this suggestion. But it has had no
influence in any way like that of St. Augustine's
Platonism, of which a specimen may be seen in St.
Bonaventure, when he is treating precisely of
conscience, in a passage very useful as shedding light
on a subsequent part of this article. Some habits, he
says, are acquired, some innate as regards knowledge of
singulars and knowledge of universals. "Quum enim ad
cognitionem duo concurrant necessario, videlicet
praesentia cognoscibilis et lumen quo mediante de illo
judicamus, habitus cognoscitivi sunt quodammodo nobis
innati ratione luminis animo inditi; sunt etiam
acquisiti ratione speciei"--"For as two things
necessarily concur for cognition, namely, the presence
of something cognoscible, and the light by which we
judge concerning it, cognoscitive habits are in a
certain sense innate, by reason of the light wherewith
the mind is endowed; and they are also acquired, by
reason of the species." ("Comment. in II Lib. Sent.",
dist. xxxix, art. 1, Q. ii. Cf. St. Thomas, "De
Veritate", Q. xi, art. 1: "Principia dicuntur innata
quae statim lumine intellectus agentis cognoscuntur per
species a sensibus abstractas".--Principles are called
innate when they are known at once by the light of the
active intellect through the species abstracted from
the senses.) Then comes the very noticeable and easily
misunderstood addition a little later: "si quae sunt
cognoscibilia per sui essentiam, non per speciem,
respectu talium poterit dici conscientia esse habitus
simpliciter innatus, utpote respectu upote respectu
hujus quod est Deum amare et timere; Deus enim non
cognoscitur per similitudinem a sensu, immo `Dei
notitia naturaliter est nobis inserta', sicut dicit
Augustinus"--"if there are some things cognoscible
through their very essence and not through the species,
conscience, with regard to such things, may be called a
habit simply innate, as, for example, with regard to
loving and serving God; for God is not known by sense
through an image; rather, `the knowledge of God is
implanted in us by nature', as Augustine says" ("In
Joan.", Tract. cvi, n. 4; "Confess.", X, xx, xxix; "De
Lib. Arbitr.", I, xiv, xxxi; "De Mor. Eccl.", iii, iv;
"De Trin.", XIII, iii, vi; "Joan. Dam. de Fide", I, i,
iii). We must remember that St. Bonaventure is not only
a theologian but also a mystic, supposing in man oculus
carnis, oculus rationis and oculus contemplationis (the
eye of the flesh, the eye of reason, and the eye of
contemplation); and that he so seriously regards man's
power to prove by arguments the existence of God as to
devote his labour to explaining that logical conviction
is consistent with faith in the same existence (Comm.
in III Sent., dist. xxiv, art. 1, Q. iv). All these
matters are highly significant for those who take up
any thorough examination of the question as to what the
Scholastics thought about man having a conscience by
his very nature as a rational being. The point recurs
frequently in Scholastic literature, to which we must
next turn.
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.
Abelard, in his "Ethics", or "Nosce Teipsum", does not
plunge us into these depths, and yet he taught such an
indwelling of the Holy Ghost in virtuous pagans as too
unrestrictedly to make their virtues to be Christian.
He placed morality so much in the inward act that he
denied the morality of the outward, and sin he placed
not in the objectively disordered deed but in contempt
for God, in which opinion he was imitated by Prof.
Schell. Moreover he opened a way to wrong opinions by
calling free will "the free judgment about the will".
In his errors, however, he was not so wholly astray as
careless reading might lead some to infer. It was with
Alexander of Hales that discussions which some will
regard as the tedious minutiae of Scholastic
speculation began. The origin lay in the introduction
from St. Jerome (in Ezech., I, Bk. I, ch. 1) of the
term synteresis or synderesis. There the commentator,
having treated three of the mystic animals in the
Prophecy as symbolizing respectively three Platonic
powers of the soul -- to epithumetikon (the
appetitive), to thumikon (the irascible), and to
logikon (the rational) -- uses the fourth animal, the
eagle, to represent what he calls sunteresis. The last,
according to the texts employed by him to describe it,
is a supernatural knowledge: it is the Spirit Who
groans in man (Rom., viii, 26), the Spirit who alone
knows what is in man (I Cor., ii, 11), the Spirit who
with the body and the soul forms the Pauline trichotomy
of I Thess., v, 23. Alexander of Hales neglects this
limitation to the supernatural, and takes synteresis as
neither a potentia alone, nor a habitus alone but a
potentia habitualis, something native, essential,
indestructible in the soul, yet liable to be obscured
and baffled. It resides both in the intelligence and in
the will: it is identified with conscience, not indeed
on its lower side, as it is deliberative and makes
concrete applications, but on its higher side as it is
wholly general in principle, intuitive, a lumen innatum
in the intellect and a native inclination to good in
the will, voluntas naturalis non deliberativa (Summa
Theologica I-II:71 to I-II:77). St. Bonaventure, the
pupil, follows on the same lines in his "Commentarium
in II Sent." (dist. xxxix), with the difference that he
locates the synteresis as calor et pondus in the will
only distinguishing it from the conscience in the
practical intellect, which he calls an innate habit--
"rationale iudicatorium, habitus cognoscitivus moralium
principiorum"-- "a rational judgment, a habit
cognoscitive of moral principles". Unlike Alexander he
retains the name conscience for descent to particulars:
"conscientia non solum consistit in universali sed
etiam descendit ad particularia deliberativa" --
"conscience not only consists in the universal but also
descends to deliberative particulars". As regards
general principles in the conscience, the habits are
innate: while as regards particular applications, they
are acquired (II Sent., dist xxxix, art. 1, Q; ii).
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 gloriae to see God. For our purpose we
specially note this: "conscientia ad partem animae
cognitivam non pertinet, sed ad affectivam"--
"conscience belongs not to the cognitive part of the
mind, but to the affective" (Quodlibet., I, xviii). St.
Thomas, leading the Dominicans, places synteresis not
in the will but in the intellect, and he applies the
term conscience to the concrete determinations of the
general principle which the synteresis furnishes: "By
conscience the knowledge given through synteresis is
applied to particular actions". ("De Verit.", Q. xvii,
a. 2.; Cf. Summa Theologica, Q. lxxix, a. 13; "III
Sent.", dist. xiv, a. 1, Q. ii; "Contra Gent.", II,
59.) Albertus agrees with St. Thomas in assigning to
the intellect the synteresis, which he unfortunately
derives from syn and hoerere (haerens in aliquo) (Summa
Theol., Pt. II, Q. xcix, memb. 2, 3; Summa de
Creaturis, Pt. II, Q. lxix, a. 1). Yet he does not deny
all place to the will: "Est rationis practicae . . .
non sine voluntate naturali, sed nihil est voluntatis
deliberativae (Summa Theol., Pt. II, Q. xcix, memb. 1).
The preference of the Franciscan School for the
prominence of will, and the preference of the Thomistic
School for the prominence of intellect is
characteristic. (See Scotus, IV Sent., dist. xlix, Q.
iv.) Often this preference is less significant than it
seems. Fouill�e, the great defender of the id�e force--
idea as the active principle--allows in a controversy
with Spencer that feeling and will may be involved in
the idea. Having shown how Scholasticism began its
research into conscience as a fixed terminology, we
must leave the matter there, adding only three heads
under which occasion was given for serious errors
outside the Catholic tradition:
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
Anti-Scholastic Schools
The history of ethics outside the Scholastic
domain, so far as it is antagonistic, has its extremes
in Monism or Pantheism on the one side and in
Materialism on the other.
Spinoza
Spinoza is a type of the Pantheistic opposition. His
views are erroneous inasmuch as they regard all things
in the light of a fated necessity, with no free will in
either God or man; no preventable evil in the natural
course of things; no purposed good of creation; no
individual destiny or immortality for the responsible
agent: indeed no strict responsibility and no strict
retribution by reward or punishment. On the other hand
many of Spinoza's sayings if lifted into the theistic
region, may be transformed into something noble. The
theist, taking up Spinoza's phraseology in a converted
sense, may, under this new interpretation, view all
passionate action, all sinful choice, as an "inadequate
idea of things", as "the preference of a part to the
detriment of the whole", while all virtue is seen as an
"adequate idea" taking in man's "full relation to
himself as a whole, to human society and to God".
Again, Spinoza's amor Dei intellectualis becomes
finally, when duly corrected, the Beatific Vision,
after having been the darker understanding of God
enjoyed by Holy men before death, who love all objects
in reference to God. Spinoza was not an antinomian in
conduct; he recommended and practiced virtues. He was
better than his philosophy on its bad side, and worse
than his philosophy on its good side after it has been
improved by Christian interpretation.
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 aesthetic
delight.
Kant
Kant may stand midway between the Pantheistic and the
purely Empirical ethics. On the one side he limited our
knowledge, strictly so called, of things good to sense-
experiences; but on the other he allowed a practical,
regulative system of ideas lifting us up to God. Duty
as referred to Divine commands was religion, not
ethics: it was religion, not ethics, to regard moral
precepts in the light of the commands of God. In ethics
these were restricted to the autonomous aspect, that
is, to the aspect of them under which the will of each
man was its own legislator. Man, the noumenon, not the
phenomenon, was his own lawgiver and his own end so far
as morality went: anything beyond was outside ethics
proper. Again, the objects prescribed as good or
forbidden as bad did not enter in among the
constituents of ethical quality: they were only
extrinsic conditions. The whole of morality
intrinsically was in the good will as pure from all
content or object of a definite kind, from all definite
inclination to benevolence and as deriving its whole
dignity from respect for the moral law simply as a
moral law, self-imposed, and at the same time
universalized for all other autonomous individuals of
the rational order. For each moral agent as noumenal
willed that the maxim of his conduct should become a
principle for all moral agents.
We have to be careful how in practice we impute
consequences to men who hold false theories of
conscience. In our historical sketch we have found
Spinoza a necessarian or fatalist; but he believed in
effort and exhortation as aids to good life. We have
seen Kant assert the non-morality of Divine precept and
of the objective fitness of things, but he found a
place for both these elements in his system. Similarly
Paulsen gives in the body of his work a mundane ethics
quite unaffected by his metaphysical principles as
stated in his preface to Book II. Luther logically
might be inferred to be a thorough antinomian: he
declared the human will to be enslaved, with a natural
freedom only for civic duties; he taught a theory of
justification which was in spite of evil deeds; he
called nature radically corrupt and forcibly held
captive by the lusts of the flesh; he regarded divine
grace as a due and necessary complement to human
nature, which as constituted by mere body and soul was
a nature depraved; his justification was by faith, not
only without works, but even in spite of evil works
which were not imputed. Nevertheless he asserted that
the good tree of the faith-justified man must bring
forth good works; he condemned vice most bitterly, and
exhorted men to virtue. Hence Protestants can depict a
Luther simply the preacher of good, while Catholics may
regard simply the preacher of evil. Luther has both
sides.
V. 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.
Conscience as a matter of education and perfectibility
As in all other concerns of education, so in the
training of conscience we must use the several means.
As a check on individual caprice, especially in youth,
we must consult the best living authorities and the
best traditions of the past. At the same time that we
are recipient our own active faculties must exert
themselves in the pursuit with a keen outlook for the
chances of error. Really unavoidable mistakes will not
count against us; but many errors are remotely, when
not proximately, preventable. From all our blunders we
should learn a lesson. The diligent examiner and
corrector of his own conscience has it in his power, by
long diligence to reach a great delicacy and
responsiveness to the call of duty and of higher
virtue, whereas the negligent, and still more the
perverse, may in some sense become dead to conscience.
The hardening of the heart and the bad power to put
light for darkness and darkness for light are results
which may be achieved with only too much ease. Even the
best criteria will leave residual perplexities for
which provision has to be made in an ethical theory of
probabilities which will be explained in the article
PROBABALISM. Suffice it to say here that the theory
leaves intact the old rule that a man in so acting must
judge that he certainly is allowed thus to act, even
though sometimes it might be more commendable to do
otherwise. In inferring something to be permissible,
the extremes of scrupulosity and of laxity have to be
avoided.
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, v, 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.
JOHN RICKABY
Transcribed by Rick McCarty
[New Advent Catholic Website]
http://www.knight.org/advent
From the Catholic Encyclopedia, copyright � 1913 by the
Encyclopedia Press, Inc. Electronic version copyright �
1996 by New Advent, Inc., P.O. Box 281096, Denver,
Colorado, USA, 80228. (
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If you would like to contribute to this worthwhile
project, please contact Kevin Knight by e-mail at
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