f
r
Swartbmore Xccture,
, 1920
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tlbe Swartbmore Xecture, 8n0u0t, 1920
%
The Nature and
Authority of Conscience
RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., D.Litt
(Amtker /SW/ M Mjttictl Rtligi^
"Sfirinml Rtftrtncrt" ttt^ Mr.)
PUBLISH ID FOR THE WOOD BROOKE EXTENSION COMMITTII
BY
THE SWARTHMORE PRESS LTD.
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Reproduced by DUO PAGE process
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Synopsis of Contents
PAGE
I Introductory Considerations - - - 9
II The Moral Universe and the Individual - 16
III The Nature and Scope of Conscience - - 22
282
preface
The Swarthmore Lectureship was established
by the Woodbrooke Extension Committee,
at a meeting held December 9th, 1907 : the
minute of the Committee providing for " an
annual lecture on some subject relating to the
message and work of the Society of Friends."
The name " Swarthmorc " was chosen in
memory of the home of Margaret Fox, which was
always open to the earnest seeker after Truth,
and from which loving words of sympathy and
substantial material help were sent to fellow-
workers.
The Lectureship has a two-fold purpose :
first, to interpret further to the members of the
Society of Friends their Message and Mission ;
and, secondly, to bring before the public the
spirit, the aims and the fundamental principles
of the Friends.
The Lectures have been delivered on the
evening preceding the assembly of the Friends'
Yearly Meeting in each year. The present '
Lecture was delivered on the evening preceding
the Conference of all Friends in August, 1920.
A complete list of previous Lectures, as
published in book form, will be found at the
beginning of this volume*
THE NATURE AND AUTHORITY
OF CONSCIENCE
By RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., D.Litt.
INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS
" The sublime requires the unknown as an
element. A cathedral should never be finished.
A mountain should be partially hidden by
others or enveloped in clouds," wrote Horace
Bushnell many years ago. In other words, a
sense of the infinite and eternal must be aroused
in us before we call the object which moves us
sublime. It was precisely that aspect which
made Kant couple " the moral nature within
us " with " the stars in the infinite sky above
us," as the two most sublime things in the
universe. Both are incapable of boundary;
10 TEbe feature an&
both are enveloped in mystery; both emerge
from and forever suggest a deeper world of
reality; both are full of hints and prophecies
of more than appears.
I am not for the moment concerned with the
sublimity of the stars. I am thinking of that
other sublimity, nearer to us and yet even more
mysterious, the moral nature in us revealed in
personal conscience. We are just now made
very familiar with a persistent attempt to reduce
man, with all his inner furnishings, to a purely
naturalistic being " a forked radish " as
Shakespeare puts it, " with a head fantastically
carved." The only thing that concerns us,
naturalism asserts, in the study of man, is his
behaviour, i.e., what he does in response to his
environment, for this alone can be accurately
described and explained. Whenever we catch
him, he is doing something or he is preparing
to do something. A natural process is under
way, and this process is due to his native structure
plus the influence of his environment. His
motives all have a long history in the develop-
ment of the race behind him and in the social
influences that have shaped him. That exalted
thing in him which is named " moral nature," or
" moral consciousness," fades away under this
of Conscience xx
analysis into the phrase " accumulated habits
of the race," and ethics and religion become a
branch of anthropology, a study of behaviour
merely pushed back toward the historical
starting-point of our strange " forked radish."
There can be no debate about the importance
of exact description. We have no quarrel with
it. We are under immense obligation to science
for the conquests which it has made, and there
is no objection at all to the method of ignoring
temporarily certain concrete features of the
world and of life, as science does, in order to
facilitate the work of abstract description and
of conquest. But at the same time it is well
not to forget the fact that life and the world are
full of aspects and experiences which do not
permit of exact description or of scientific
formulation of the mathematical type. This
does not mean that they are not real, or that
they are supernatural ; it means rather that they
possess a type of reality which cannot be got at'
by the method of analysis and description.
They must be dealt with as integral wholes-
rather than as things made up by the aggregation
of many smaller units. All our values of life are
of this sort. Beauty cannot be reduced to
elemental parts, described and causally explained.
M TTbe "Nature ant)
Our consciousness of the worth of persons who
are precious to us cannot be dissected into the
original items which compose it. The certainty
of conviction which attaches to our insights of
truth defies all analysis. The goodness of a
pure moral life admits of no adequate analytic
description. We have passed out of the sphere
of molecular currents where things result from
the congeries of atoms, and we are in a world
now which includes creative spirit and so has
sublimities in it.
The world of the senses is indeed a very real
world. It touches us at every point. It knocks
a i all the outer doors of our being. It stands
all the tests by which we try its reality. It is
surely there. It is foolish to deny it or to call it
illusion. If it is not real then we have no
certainty that anything is real. But it cannot
be the whole of reality. It is forever a fragment
of a more comprehensive reality, an outer
periphery which is never self-explanatory and
which demands an inner spiritual centre to
complete and explain it. This does not mean,
however, that there are two worlds alongside
of, or outside of, each other a material
or sensuous world occupying its sphere
and ending where the fringes of the spiritual
authority of Conscience 13
begin. We shall never return again to
a theory of " nature " set over against a
foreign and exclusive " supernatural," parted
by an impassable chasm. One soon discovers
at sea that the horizon which divides the visible
part of the ocean from the larger, invisible part
of the same ocean is an unreal and only imaginary
line of boundary. It alters every moment.
The sky, too, turns out to be just as unreal.
The sky dome is only our way of seeing the upper
air space. There is no dome of crystal up there
yonder, bounding the world of nature below and
beginning the realm of the supersensuous world,
the ethereal demesne where God dwells in His
unapproachable glory. That two-world scheme
has gone by and was annihilated when Ptolemaic
astronomy was exploded. No journey upward
into space brings one to God, however far one
may travel. Not thus can we supply the defects
of " naturalism." No ladder goes up from the
top of " nature " to the " supernatural " above 1 )
it, as though they were arranged in tiers.
11 The Beyond is within." It is through the,
soul of man, the inner self, that the way lies to
God. It is close at hand, within us, that the
two levels are found a conscious self! always
aware of, always confronted with, a More, a
M ttbe "Nature ant>
Beyond. We are forever double. We are
woefully limited and finite, and yet we are
inextricably bound in and conjoined with the
infinite. Eternity is in our hearts. We meet
every finite object of sense with a universal
through which we interpret it and name it to
our common fellowship a universal which no
sense experience ever gave us, or ever could
give us. From some deeper inner world of
Mind, we draw those inevitable compulsions of
mathematics and logic to which all facts of
experience must conform. Something in us,
but derived from Something beyond us, enables
us to gather up the fleeting and contingent
under eternal and necessary forms, so that we
can declare that " this truth is true, not only
for me but for all men everywhere and
forever."
It is also because of this inner junction with
the infinite and eternal that we are moved by
objects of beauty, and exalted and raised beyond
ourselves by the sense of awe and sublimity.
Here, too, in this meeting of our own deepest
nature with That-which-is-beyond-ourselves, is
born our ineradicable sense of moral obligation,
which makes conscience such an august and
unanalysable voice when it lays its command
HutborttB of Conscience 15
upon us and says " thou must." It is because of
this deepest feature of our being that we
always live by ideals, and judge each fact or
event or experience in the light of a goodness
which we do not see with our eyes and which
does not, perhaps, yet exist on sea or land a
Beyond within us which our moral act endeavours
to achieve.
The two worlds are never sharply divided and
sundered. They merge and mingle. Each
needs the other and each reveals the other.
The outer world is more or less transparent to
the clairvoyant soul that sees through and dis-
covers the eternal breaking through it, and the
most spiritual reality in the universe needs a
temporal and visible manifestation and revela-
tion to express and translate it. The soul of
man is thus amphibious. It lives in two worlds
at once. It lives outward and has its world of
sense ; but it always remains in undivided
contact with Spirit, and so transcends and \
passes beyond all the facts and things and
happenings in the thin fragment of reality that
is tangible to sense.
16 tbe feature anfc
II
THE MORAL UNIVERSE AND THE
INDIVIDUAL
Some years ago experts, by clever scientific
devices, made an accurate calculation of the
avoirdupois weight of Mount Schiehallion, in
Scotland. When this peak of earth and rocks
was weighed as in the balances, it became a
fairly easy problem to calculate from it the
gross weight of the entire globe . Any good book
on physical geography will now give this weight
in billions of tons, but it is important to remember
that the immense total was arrived at by first
discovering the actual weight of one particular
mountain.
Somewhat so the moral nature of the cosmic
universe can be discovered only by a study of
the moral nature of man, for it is in fact here,
in this strange finite-infinite human being, and
in his relations with other men, that the deepest
moral meaning of the universe comes to revela-
tion here or nowhere. It is sometimes hastily
assumed that the cosmic universe below the
level of human life, i.e., with man excluded,
would be without moral implication. But
there is no real universe with man excluded.
HutborttB of Conscience
We know only of a universe which includes man.
The inevitable process of our world leads up to
a being who is self-conscious, who has experi-
ence of values, and who reveals moral preferences.
Creation is not creation without this achieve-
ment reached. When we talk of the cosmic
universe, we must include in it the emergence
of man and the processes of history. |
Amos, the earliest literary prophet of Israel,
was the first to insist upon the fundamental
moral character of the universe. He announced
the discovery of a universal law of moral
gravitation, as sweeping as Newton's law of
physical gravitation. " I saw," this spiritual
genius declared, " I saw the Lord holding a
plumb-line in his hand." Every nation, accord-
ing to the prophet's vision, had to meet this
plumb-line test. Nothing could save or buttress
a ramshackle moral structure, an unplumb
life. The way of the transgressor was seen to
be not only hard but impossible. The stars in
their courses were allied against that nation
which was not morally foursquare. But this
herdsman of Tekoa, with his plumb-line, had
almost nothing to say of individual conscience.
He thought of men in the mass. The nation
was the unit. His law of moral gravitation was
t
x8 TTbe Mature anfc
revealed in national catastrophes. By an
insight which he could not have analysed, he
leaped to a general truth that the universe is
morally constructed, and that all the time men
play their miserable games, the dice on the other
side are always loaded the universe is sensitive
to all deviations from the moral perpendicular,
and it executes its own laws. It remained for
later men to discover in their own souls the
unescapable evidence that the universe at its
highest peaks/ where life comes to self -conscious-
ness, does reveal a moral law which, like gravita-
tion, is grounded on the eternal nature of things
and can be verified.
There is no finer pre-Christian instance of
this discovery, the cardinal one which the race
has made, than that revealed in the life of .
Socrates. His exterior was uncouth. But the
moral character of his soul was sublime. His
deepest prayer, if we can trust Plato, was that
he might be beautiful and harmonious within.
He lived and died in constant awe of a voice
in his own soul which always seemed to him to
be from God.
" You have often heard me speak," said
Socrates at his trial, " of an oracle or sigii
which comes to me as a divine thing. This
Butbortts ot Conscience 19
sign I have had ever since I was a child.
It is a voice which comes to me and always
forbids me when I am going to do something
wrong/' " I am sent," he adds, " by God,
to do the greatest possible service to the
city of Athens. For I do nothing but go
about persuading you all, old and young
alike, not to take thought for your persons
or your properties, but first and chiefly to
care about the improvement of the soul."
" A man who is good for anything," this
moral leader concludes, " ought not to
calculate the chance of living or dying ;
he ought only to consider whether in doing
anything he is doing right or wrong acting
the part of a good or a bad man."
He awoke his greatest disciples, and, through
them, the world forever, to the meaning of
individual conscience as a moral guide and as a
key to the real nature of the universe.
In the dramatic struggle between the later
civilisation of Greece and the Hebrew ideals,
which was brought to its most acute stage in
the Maccabean struggle against Antiochus
Epiphanes, the note of individual conscience
was once more clearly sounded as finely sounded
as anywhere in literature, and forever afterwards
made an essential part of the true Hebrew
character. The moral issue is put in the form
of a demand, made to selected individuals of
20 TTbe nature an&
the Hebrew race, to fall down and worship a'
golden image, embodying ideals foreign to their
faith, or as a consequence of refusal, to be cast
into a glowing, red-hot furnace. The answer is
a thrilling one : " If it be so, our God whom we
serve is able to deliver us from the burning,
fiery furnace, and he will deliver us. But if
not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will
not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image
which thou hast set up."
The loftiest illustration, however, of individual
loyalty to a guidance within the soul is to be
found in the life of the great Galilean, and
nowhere else in history has the ultimate moral
nature of the universe been revealed through
an individual conscience in such adequate
measure. Not only at the opening of his ministry
but throughout the entire period of his public
mission, he was subject to peculiarly acute
temptation in the choice of the means for the
establishment of the kingdom, which it was his
mission to inaugurate. He powerfully felt the
popular patriotic appeal to be the Messiah of
the nation's hope, and to fulfil the age-long
expectations of His people and His race. On
the other hand he saw with an unparalleled
clarity cf insight what was involved in the
Hutbortts of Conscience 21
essential nature of the spiritual life. He under-
stood, as no one else has done, what are the
ultimate forces which shape and fashion the
moral world, and what constitutes the real
goodness and blessedness of life. He came to
realise that there could be no true kingdom of
God that was not formed in the inner spirit
and will of man, that love and grace and faith
and good-will and patience and purity of heart
are the essential qualities of the enduring king-
dom of the spirit : that sovereign power and
military triumph, and even miraculous achieve-
ments, are weak and futile as compared with
the inherent power of gentleness, goodness,
sacrifice of self, and dedication to the way of
love. In the great test which came as the
crisis developed, alone with his soul and God,
he settled the momentous issue. The word
conscience is never used in the gospels, but that
inner tribunal which we name by that word
is nowhere more clearly in evidence than in thei
stages of the decision that carried Jesus to the
cross, in dedication to the untried but ultimately
irresistible power of redeeming love. He
emphasises at every point the nearness of the
divine to the human in man, the infinite precious-
ness of the individual soul, the dramatic issues
22 tTbe nature ant>
of the inner life, the fateful decisiveness of moral
choices, the fact that the kingdom of God is an
interior spirit and not an external power. It is
just because these truths are true that con-
science can be the mighty force which it is.
Ill
THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF
'CONSCIENCE
The best account of conscience with which
I am acquainted is not in a learned book, but it
is from the experience of a little child. He had
done wrong and had suddenly discovered through
his act a new fact within himself. He came to
his mother, and, before making the confession,
which something within urged him to make, he
naively said : " I've got something inside me I
can't do what I want to with." Theodore Parker
has given a touching account of a similar experi-
ence. It is as follows: "When a little boy in
petticoats in my fourth year, one fine day in
spring my father led me by the hand to a distant
part of the farm, but soon sent me home alone.
On the way I had to pass a little ' pond-hole ' then
Hutboritg of Conscience 23
spreading its waters wide. A rhodora in full
bloom, a rare flower in my neighbourhood, which
grew only in that locality, attracted my attention
and drew me to the place. I saw a little spotted
tortoise sunning himself in the shallow water
at the root of the flaming shrub. I lifted the
stick I had in my hand to strike the harmless
reptile ; for though I had never killed any
creature, yet I had seen other boys out of sport
destroy birds, squirrels, and the like, and I felt
a disposition to follow their wicked example.
But all at once something checked my little arm,
and a voice within me said, clear and loud, ' It
is wrong 1 ' I held back my uplifted stick in
wonder at the new emotion, the consciousness
of an involuntary but inward check upon my
actions, till the tortoise and the rhodora both
vanished from my sight. I hastened home and
told the tale to my mother, and asked what it
was that told me it was wrong. She wiped a
tear from her eye with her apron, and taking me
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 to and obey it, then it
will speak clearer and clearer, and always
guide you right ; but if you turn a deaf ear or
disobey then it will fade out little by little and
24 Gbe nature anb
leave you all in the dark and without a
guide. Your life depends on heeding this little
voice.' "
I propose to deal, all too briefly, with that
strange, inevitable, irrepressible "something
inside us " which, with a voice of authority,
rules orer our instincts and propensities. What-
ever else it may be, it is something " we cannot
do what we want to with." Its very owner and
possessor cannot suppress it, cannot evade it,
cannot brush it -aside, cannot bribe it, cannot
eliminate it. It is not an instinct, for an instinct
is a specific way of acting to a specific external
situation, while conscience is capable of the same
endless variations of response that mark our
appreciation of beauty ; and it has no fixed set
of reactions, determined by some mechanism
in the physical structure. It is not a " special
sense," for a sense must have a definite " end-
organ " in the body, which is aroused by a
specific stimulus and provided with a specific
brain centre in the cerebral cortex.
Conscience has been thought of as " an
oracle in the breast," and therefore as something
alien to ourselves as finite persons. But, on
1 For a similar story in the experience of John
Woolman, see his Journal (Whittier Id.) p. 53.
Butbortts of Conscience 25
the other hand, it obviously tallies with the rest
of our experience. It is not something apart
or independent or unattached. It is embedded
in our actual, concrete life. It harmonises and
is consistent with our everyday human experi-
ence. It does not stand aloof above our life,
as the rainbow stands above the onward flood
of water at Niagara ; it is rather a binding,
organising principle which makes life stable and
coherent. It attaches to the original capacity
of self-consciousness, the capacity to create
ideals, to look before and after, to out-span and
overarch its own states and processes, and to
review and judge, value and revise its own
operations. Conscience is not an affair of some
isolated part of us, the function of some fragment
of our being. It appears rather to belong to
our entire self and to underlie all the activities
that are essential to personality. It is the whole
integral self, becoming awake and active
whenever the deepest issues of life are put in
jeopardy or are at stake. It is the affirmation 1
of our innermost character, the arousal in us
of those ideal values which constitute our proper
self. We move along unconcerned and uncon-
scious until our centra] aspirations are threatened,
or until the innermost ideals of our soul are
26 Ube feature an&
challenged, or until the end or aim that forms
the submerged ground-swell of our life is exposed
to danger. Until the crisis came, we may have
lived almost unaware of these deep-lying currents
of our being. We could not have answered
perhaps easily, quickly and without halting,
if some one had challenged us with the query,
what do you want ? what does life mean ? what,
after all, is your aim ? It had not been thought
through or explicitly envisaged. But now a
situation emerges which calls for decision and
action, and suddenly we see revealed the fact
that our choice between the alternatives will
settle irrevocably the kind of person we are to
be. That inarticulate ideal which all our previous
life had been weaving now becomes alive and
vocal. The ayes and noes are called for, and we
vote to express and at the same time to guard
and preserve what constitutes the permanent
trend of our character as a person. That which
we are, the whole of ourself, asserts itself and
stands for its sacred rights of being. Conscience
is thus the inner man's recognition of what is
essential for the preservation and development
of that which constitutes his real life. Not to
have it would mean not to have consciousness
of onward direction, or of any values to preserve,
Hutbortts ot Conscience 27
or of any worth to life, or of any integrity to
maintain. Whatever we may finally conclude
about the nature of conscience we shall not be
able to detach it from the soul's central ideal.
It is at least the revelation of the kind of person
we propose to be. 1
" An erring conscience is a chimera," wrote
Immanuel Kant, a little more than a hundred
years ago. Conscience, he means to say, when it
speaks with its true imperial -authority, is
magisterial, absolute and infallible. It cannot
err. It is the voice of a supreme reason uttering
itself out of eternity into time. Bishop Joseph
Butler, writing half a century earlier, like Kant,
gave conscience imperial authority. He said :
Conscience is " a faculty in kind and in nature
supreme over all others, and which bears its
own authority of being so." He continues :
" This is a constituent part of the idea of con-
science, that is of the faculty itself, to be superior
and to take the superintendency : to preside
and govern, from the very economy and con-
stitution of man, belongs to it. Had it strength
as it has right, had it power as it has manifest
1 See Professor Blocking's interesting position in
Human Nature and its Re-making. Yale Press, 1918,
p. 99.
28 bc Mature
authority, it would absolutely govern the world." 1
Another great churchman, almost in our own
time, John Henry Newman, emphatically took
the absolutist position for conscience : " Con-
science," he declared in 1875, " is the aboriginal
Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations,
a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its
blessings and anathemas."*
Thomas Carlyle in England, and Ralph
Waldo Emerson in America, were powerful
exponents in the nineteenth century of this
majestic and authoritative conscience. Carlyle
in Past and Present said : " Thus does the
conscience of man project itself athwart what-
ever of knowledge or., surmise, of imagination,
understanding, faculty, acquirement or natural
disposition he has in him, and, like light through
coloured glass, paint strange pictures on the rim
of the horizon and elsewhere. Truly this same
sense of the infinite nature of duty is the central
1 Kant's Preface to his Metaphysical Elements of
Ethics. Butler's Sermons, Sermon II. Henry More,
the Cambridge Platonist made Reason and Conscience
synonymous with what he calls " the light within," and
he held, like these other absolutists, that conscience
stamps with the Great Seal of God all acts that are right.
Reason then always countersigns the acts thus stamped
with this royal seal.
In A Letter to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, on
occasion of Mr. Gladstone's Recent Expostulation (1875).
Hutboritg of Conscience 29
part of all within us ; a ray as of eternity and
immortality immured in dusky many-coloured
time and its deaths and births."
Emerson expresses as strongly as does Kant
the ausserordentlich, absolute character of duty.
" Within this erring passionate mortal self,"
he says, " sits a supreme, calm, immortal mind."
"It is stronger than I ; it is wiser than I ; it
never approved me in any wrong ; I seek counsel
of it in my doubts ; I repair to it in my dangers ;
I pray to it in my undertakings. It seems to
me the face which the Creator uncovers to his
child."
Twice in his poems Emerson has given as
lofty expression to this august inner voice, as
appears anywhere in modern literature.
" So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When duty whispers low, ' Thou must/
The youth repl'cs, ' I can.'
" Though love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply, L
'Tis man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die."
It would be easy to go on increasing, almost
without limit, the testimony from great writers
and distinguished thinkers to the unique and
authoritative character of the moral voice within
30 TIbe nature anfc
the soul. If there were no counter-testimony,
no other side to the question, there \vould be
no problem of conscience. There might still
be a mystery about it, as there is about all the
deep, bottomless realities of human life ; but
if all men agreed that the soul of man is supplied
with an unvarying, unmistakable, oracular,
inerrant, absolute moral voice, the baffling,
tragic problem, so familiar to the serious modern
man, would largely vanish. Unfortunately there
is " another side." Good men as devout as
Bishop Butler, and great men as conversant
with the nature of man as Immanuel Kant,
deny that the human soul is furnished with an
infallible moral organ or faculty, by which the
eternal right is revealed here in our finite,
temporal world of mutability. They insist that
there are variations in moral pronouncements,
as there are in all other b'nes of human striving
and in all other fields of man's endeavour.
Whatever finite instrument man may possess,
they tell us, is subject to mistake and error, and
the moral insight is no exception the trail of
finitude marks all his faculties, even the highest
ones.
Robert Barclay, who gave in the seventeenth
century the classical interpretation of the Quaker
Hutbortts of Conscience 31
view of conscience, accepted the fact that there
are great variations in human conscience. He
accounted for this unhappy fluctuation of the
standard by supposing that conscience is a
natural faculty, and subject to the warping
influence of instinct, nurture and casuistry.
His solution of this obvious difficulty was that,
while the natural conscience is variable and
uncertain, there is something vastly superior
to conscience within reach of man's soul. This
superior guide, Barclay called " the light within."
This light is, he held, absolutely divine, of a
wholly " different nature from the soul of man and
its faculties." It is " not any part of man's nature,
nor any relic of any good which Adam lost by
his fall." It is distinct and separate from man's
nature a super-added, supernatural "gift."
Being divine and spiritual, it cannot be corrupted
or influenced by the impact of this imperfect
world. It forever, through all mutations of
space and time, remains pure and unaltered.^
When conscience is " informed and enlightened "
by this superior light it becomes purified and
rectified. The blindness of natural judgment is
removed, and the false opinions of the under-
standing are dispelled. Conscience is thus to
be compared to a lantern, and this light within
3* Vbe nature anfc
is the candle which illuminates it. " The lantern
is useful when a dear candle burns and shines
in it ; but it is otherwise of no use." 1 We have
a lantern of our own, but it is inadequate until
a mysterious torch is lighted in it and burns
with a light not our own, from a world beyond
this finite one.
This became for many generations the gener-
ally accepted Quaker view. The Friend who held
this position formed the conviction that he was
the direct recipient of the will of God, and he
believed that his oracular voice within was the
absolute word of God to him. This interpreta-
tion of conscience produced, as one would expect,
a body of people who felt confident that they
were in possession of the truth, and who unhesi-
tatingly believed that the ultimate principles
of righteousness were unveiled to them. That
faith gave them an undoubted moral force.
" Individual faithfulness " became the supreme
watchword, and " obedience to the light " was
felt to be the most sublime and awful duty that
this world could know.
Almost exactly this position was held by many
of the scholastic theologians, especially by the
great mystics. There is, they believed, an
1 See Barclay's Apology, Prop V., Sec, 16.
Butbortts of Conscience 33
uncreated essence within the soul of man, a
spark of light, the seed or ground from which all
spiritual activity springs. They called this
basic foundation " synteresis " (sometimes
incorrectly spelled " synderesis "). It is a
divine centre, or substratum of the soul, a
provision of the constitution of the soul by which
man recognises moral distinctions and assents
to the appeal of obligation. It is the function
of conscience, on the other hand, they held, to
decide what particular act in the complications
of life is right or wrong. This decision
involves judgment, and judgment often errs.
It includes an emotional factor, too, and the
emotions swerve us from the true aims of life.
Conscience, as the guide in the maxes of this
earthly life, is thus subject to error and mistake ;
it may go right or it may go wrong. But the
synteresis, the unsundered basis of the soul,
which has the illumination of God in its very
structure, is absolute and infallible.
One trouble with this scholastic theory, as
with Barclay's, is that it introduces us to an
infallible resource, but at once informs us that
in all emergencies of life we must use a poorer
device. It is slight satisfaction to know that
we possess an absolute provision, if, the moment
34 TEbe Nature anfc
we come to act, we must " change our gear"
and serve ourselves with a more clumsy human
contrivance. All our moral acts and decisions
lie in the sphere of the concrete and particular,
and we are not greatly assisted by a provision
which applies only to goodness in the glorious
abstract. This theory will, I am sure, help us
to explain the origin of conscience when we come
to that problem, but it does not work in the
practical task of finding out what is the right
course of action just here and now, where the
many paths of the way deviate.
This account of conscience was no doubt a
valuable interpretation at the time when it
was formulated, and it served a good purpose
in the period when it was customary sharply to
separate the divine and the human into duaiistic
compartments. Under systems of thought which
once prevailed there seemed no way to maintain
the divinity of Christ without seriously blurring
or even tacitly denying his humanity. The
either-or dilemma appeared inevitable. To
insist upon humanity was to slight divinity.
To exalt and glorify divinity was to reduce
humanity to an appearance, an illusory seeming.
The same situation attached to theories of
Scripture infallibility. In order to safeguard the
Butborfts ot Conscience 35
authority of the Bible, it seemed necessary to
claim not merely divine inspiration, but even
dictation by God of the actual words, so that the
writers were reduced to mechanical puppets
who simply transmitted what was communicated
to them ; and Balaam's ass, on this account,
might be regarded, and sometimes was regarded,
as no less adequate a reporter than Isaiah or Paul .
On the other hand, as soon as one began to
emphasise a human and literary element in
Scripture, he was bound to be suspected of heresy,
and set down as a bold denier of the divine
authority of the ancient word. The world was
doomed on this basis to travel a curious zigzag
course, one extreme of emphasis leading inevit-
ably to a compensating swing in the opposite
direction.
The dualistic interpretation of the universe
was responsible for another famous theory of
conscience, which long held the field the
intuition theory. This was the view that con-
science is a divinely implanted faculty or moral
sense, supplied from another world to the new
arrival here in this one. It is a complete and
independent contrivance for knowing virtue.
It is neither derived from reason nor acquired
by experience. It is a God-given monitor, a
36 fcbe -Nature an&
precise and unerring guide. One may obey its
pointing or not obey it, but it remains, from the
beginning of life to the end of it, an oracular voice,
announcing the path which ought to be taken.
It was natural, under the conditions of thought
which prevailed, that the authority of conscience
should be maintained in this ready-made, easily
workable fashion. It was supposed that only
by a severe " dichotomy," cleaving asunder the
human and the divine, and making conscience
wholly derived from yonder, could its " superior-
ity and superintendency " be secured and
guaranteed. This fixed, static, immutable
oracle, foreign to the human characteristics of
the soul and from beyond its margins, unaffected
by any changes or variations ot earth, did not
present the same intellectual difficulties to
seventeenth and eighteenth century psychology
that it does to the experience and the psychology
of the present time. We do not like schemes
which split our universe into compartments,
and set chasms between the here and the yonder.
Our moral decisions cannot be detached from
the natural psychological functions by which we
live. We.must decide what to do in complicated
situations which have grown out of social and
historical movements ; and our decision, in
Hutboritp ot Conscience 37
order to be right, must be one that will produce
the best moral results, not for some remote other
world, but for this one here where our moral
issues lie and are to be found. It would be as
intelligent to treat of the harmonious beauty
of Beethoven's music without any reference to
human ears that can hear it, as it would be to
talk of consciousness of moral duties without
consideration of social institutions in con-
nection with which duties have meaning and
significance.
Bishop Berkeley thought that all facts of sense
experience were the result of direct divine
communications from the mind of God to the
soul of the individual. This intuition theory
does not see any necessity of going to that
metaphysical extreme, but with restraint insists
only on direct infallible revelations in the moral
sphere. In this one region of our life everything
that concerns us is operated from the other
world, and comes from yonder. Every revela-
tion of duty is divinely communicated. Every^
intimation of the right course is injected into
our natural man, somewhat as the click of our
electric dock is injected into it from a dynamic
centre at Greenwich or Washington.
This theory of conscience as an implanted
33 itbe nature an&
oracle not only commits us to a dualistic universe
and a dualistic human nature, but it takes from
us our moral autonomy. It makes us hollow
pipes for a voice not our own to sound through.
In the striking words of Coleridge, spoken against
a similar theory : " This breathing organism,
this glorious panharntonicon, which I have seen
stand on its feet as a man, with a man's voice
given to it, the doctrine in question turns at
once into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow
passage for a -voice . . . and yet no man
uttered it and never in a human heart was it
conceived." 1 It makes the very basis of
morality something foreign and external to our-
selves. All the rich " life and co-agency of our
humanity " is miraculously suspended. Our
moral faculty becomes inexplicable in terms of
anything known to us. A voice which comes
from outside our human experience, and which
we can never investigate or verify, imposes an
absolute command upon us, and we must always
obey it without ever knowing or asking why.
On this theory any individual may always
defend his course on the claim that he is obeying
the infallible divine voice. It supplies us with
1 Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit,
Letter III.
Hutboritp of Conscience 39
no universal and overarching moral truth or
principle, by which individual differences can
be settled. It furnishes us autocratically with
a ready-made decision for each occasion, and we
have no function but to accept or refuse it. The
individual is a mitred pope. His dogmatic
deliverance ends all issues. He can challenge
all opposition with the assertion, " I am the
recipient of an infallible revelation, the oracular
voice of a divine command."
The solid moral experience of the race casts
grave doubt upon this claim to infallibility.
Persons who have made the tremendous claim
have often proved to be misguided, and some
of the deeds which men have performed on the
" infallible " ground of an authoritative voice
do not now seem to enlightened men to have
been heaven-guided . We have, too, been learning
that God does not supply us with easy, labour-
saving contrivances which relieve us of perplexing
and tragic strains. We have been compelle(i
to spell out with slow and painful effort the secrets
of nature which might have been " communi-
cated " to us from the start, so that we should
have been spared the long, weary wilderness
wanderings of discovery. We might have been
told where the coal lay hid and where the oil
40 ZCbe Mature an&
was stored. We might have had an early
message about the microbes and antitoxins,
which would have saved us many losses and
catastrophes. The information was not
vouchsafed. No kind voice from the sky
announced the errors of the Ptolemaic astronomy
and the truth which Copernicus discovered so
late. The race was for long centuries within
easy reach of electrical energies, but no
" sociable angel " was sent to tell us how to
tap these sources of power. Mechanical short-
cuts and magical clicks which transmit irora
another world our moral deliverances must
therefore be open to some suspicion. Finally,
it does not seem true to the actual facts of
experience chat everybody always, on all con-
crete occasions of life, has a perfectly clear,
definite and precise revelation of the right
course. The Psalmist said : " I open my mouth
and pant for thy commandment." Those who
are not psalmists have often felt as he did.
There can be no doubt that every moral person
has, at some eventful cross-road moment of his
life, longed and panted for a clear knowledge of
the right course which, with all his sincere
yearning, he could not discover. Much of our
moral effort, it is true, is due to the fact that we
ButborftB ot Conscience 41
cannot raise our will to the pitch of following our
vision, but we also most surely experience this
other difficulty. We want to discover the right
trail in the complicated jungle which environs
us, and we cannot tell infallibly which track
leads toward the light and will unerringly take
us to the goal.
One does not need to have been charged with
the " cure of souls " in the world of our time
in order to be impressed with the reality of this
perplexity. What one of us, if too old ourselves
to be at the cross-roads, has not tried to help
some serious-minded youth, face to face to-day
with difficulties as hard as those which
confronted Antigone whose heart led her
to take one course while the laws of her
country required her to take a different one ?
We have seen men of the most unques-
tionable honesty, and of sun-clear purity of
purpose, unable to discover, by any click or
through any infallible mechanism, what the '
sure path of their feet really was ; and, when
they emerged from their moral struggle, we have
seen one man following one hard path and
another man, equally honest and sincere, follow-
ing a path antithetic to the first one, though
perhaps no more soft or easy.
4 ttbe nature an&
But we run into greater confusion, and we
make the perplexities of life still greater, when
we assume that conscience is nothing but a
mutable and errant empirical feeling, developed
by the natural processes of an evolving
world. Many attempts have been made to
explain conscience as a slow, natural acquisition
either in the individual or in the race. No
theories of acquisition by education or by
evolution give any adequate account (i) of the
origin of conscience, nor (2) of the august and
authoritative character of it. It is easy to see
that there is an educational factor always in
evidence wherever conscience appears, but it
is impossible to understand how mere social
habits and family customs and the influence of
praise and blame, of approval and disapproval,
could of themselves produce the overwhelming
conviction of duty, or the compelling sense of
obligation, which mark conscience at its highest.
This explanation gives no clue to the majesty
of an autonomous moral self. Some original
and underived capacity must be assumed in the
very structure of the soul which makes the child
responsive to moral education, for no external
authority could teach the child moral duty
except by calling into activity the latent powers
Sutbortts of Conscience 43
of his soul. 1 Huckleberry Finn is speaking, not
as a character in fiction, but as a real boy alive
in the world, when, pagan as he is, he comes
suddenly upon the immense fact that " con-
science takes up more room than all the rest of
our insides put together."
Evolutionary writers have tried to push the
education further back, and to explain conscience
as a product of the slow disciplinary culture of
the race. Writers like Herbert Spencer have
contended that the new-born child literally
inherits the immemorial gains of the centuries.
He arrives with the intellectual and moral
riches which his less favoured ancestors have
won. He is literally heir of all the ages. He
comes equipped with what society has learned
and now requires for its continued existence.
This theory assumes, without sufficient proof, that
the tiny increments .of moral wisdom which
each generation acquires are inherited by the
offspring of that generation and passed on to the
remote heirs. But this immense claim is
unproved. There is grave doubt whether
acquired characteristics, gained by the efforts
of a parent, are ever inherited by offspring, and
'See Hastings Rashdall's Conscience and Christ,
p. 24.
44 Vbe feature anb
that questionable theory must in any case be
affirmatively proved before we can use it as a
natural explanation of conscience. Professor
Edward Westermarck has written a great
two-volume work, full of learning and patient
research, tracing from the lowest levels of life
to the highest the slow accumulations of emotion
and behaviour. L. T. Hobhouse has, with no
less success, followed the stages of the evolution
of emotion as action, as they enter into moral
conduct. More important than either of these
books is A. F. Shand's The Foundations of
Character, a contribution of immense value.
But none of these volumes, however valuable
their anthropological history of instincts and
emotions may be, explains to us the majesty of
duty or the imperial authority which not only
Butler and Kant recognise, but which the most
humble of us have sometimes realised. There
is something there which the history of instincts,
emotions and behaviour fails to reach.
It does not seem possible for any extension
of our scientific knowledge to reduce conscience
to a naturalistic explanation. Its power over
us cannot be explained on the ground that it
aids survival. The distinction of right and
wrong does not rest in the ultimate analysis
Hutboritp ot Conscience 45
upon prudence, foresight, or any consideration
of utilitarian results, in fact upon any extraneous
or self -advantageous considerations. It cannot
be reduced to a fine calculation of results. It
cannot be traced to an emotion, or to an instinct,
which aided survival, or to a racial habit or
custom. We do not catch the secret of con-
science by any study of the slow results of
restraint or the fear of punishment, here or
hereafter. The difficulty about the whole
situation is that fear of consequences is not
morality it is fear of consequences I
It proves to be impossible to explain the higher,
the essential, features of conscience by a refer-
ence either to biological history or to the
influence of social environment. We have in
the sublime obligation of duty a fact of the most
momentous significance. It attaches not to
an accident of biological survival. It is rooted
in the fundamental nature of self-consciousness
It is bound up with the unique fact that man is
man and not animal. It has the same standing
and the same sure ground of validity that truth
has in the sphere of knowledge. When we
speak of truth we always mean something
wholly different from " opinion." Truth rises
above the variations of sense reports and the
4& ttbe Mature an&
accidents and caprices of contingent happenings.
It voices something as universal, permanent,
unalterable, irreversible, eternal, and absolute.
It gives us contingent items of experience, but
here at length they are organised through a
universal, rational principle which abides and
holds firm through all the welter of change and
variation. Its basis, the basis of truth, is not
to be found somewhere outside in the stream of
events, it is to be found inside, in the nature of
the mind that, knows.
Archbishop Temple has finely expressed this
fundamental distinction which belongs to
our nature as rational spiritual beings. He
says : " However far our doubts may go, they
cannot root up from within us, without our
own consent (nor, I would add, even with
it), the power which claims to guide our
lives with supreme authority. They cannot
obliterate from within us the sense of right
and wrong, and of everlasting difference between
them. They cannot silence, unless we Join
in silencing, the voice that bids us believe
that, in spite of all that can be said, seen, or
felt, the law of right is the eternal foundation
on which all things are built. By this a man
may yet live if he has nothing else to live by.
Hutborfts ot Conscience 47
and God will assuredly give him more in His
own good time." 1
The central meaning of ought, and the cate-
gorical distinction of right and wrong, cannot
be stated in terms of anything else, or identified
with any other content of consciousness but
themselves. We have here come upon something
sui generis, like the appreciation of beauty, or
the truth of mathematics. One either has the
trait or does not have it, but if a man is not
elementally susceptible to the meaning of ought,
he cannot be taught morality any more than
he could be taught mathematics, if he had no
perception of the special distinction of " up and
down," or " out and in." It is quite likely
in fact it is only too obvious that there are
men and women who are almost neutral when
confronted with moral issues. They are not
so much immoral as unmoral. They hardly
know what one means when one talks of
categorical imperatives and the overwhelming
sense of ought or ought not. They have not
been there. They see as those do who have no
eyes. Plotinus has well said : " As it is not
tor those to speak of the beauties of the material
world who have never seen them or known them
1 Rugby Sermons (Pint Series).
43 Ube Mature
men born blind, for instance so must those
be silent about the beauty of noble conduct and
knowledge who have never cared for such things ;
nor may those tell of the splendour of virtue
who have never known the face of justice and
temperance, beautiful beyond the beauty of
the morning and evening star." 1
Every analysis of conscience reveals an element
in it which cannot be explained by anything
else, any more than the taste of sugar, or the
smell of a rose, or the perception of redness can
be explained in terms of anything else. There
is an elemental aspect which could not be derived
or acquired. The categorical distinction of
right and wrong which conscience voices
may possibly aid survival but in any case
it does not get its lofty place in human
life on the ground of its survival-value.
Its origin in us appears to be due to the funda-
mental fact that a person is an ideal-forming
being. He always extends his world in ideal
directions. A person is never confined to the
world of " things as they are." He is never
limited to objects that are given in experience.
He always transcends and sees beyond the facts
and items which his senses present. This
1 Enneads I. 16, 4.
Hutborftfi of Conscience 49
creative, idealising tendency is one of the most
unique and original traits in us, one of the
deepest facts of personality as well as one of
the most mysterious. Our driving forces are
to be found in our instincts and emotions, but
our ideals are our directive powers. They
organise the instincts and emotions ; they raise
and transform them o that they arc no
longer instincts in the blind and primitive sense.
They cease also now to be mainly egoistic
and self-seeking, and yet their energy and
effectiveness are greatly heightened as they
come to be expanded and transformed through
ideals.
Our moral grandeur springs from this capacity
of ours to live beyond and to outrun anything
which the world of experience gives us, and with
this idealising capacity the power to look
before and after is linked an inevitable sense
of obligation to act in conformity with what
the soul sees ought to be. It is a normal feature
of personality to live not only in reference to
considerations of prudence and foresight, but
also to live in reference to an ideal spectator,
to do right even when the world is not looking
on or viewing the deed. We assert by an
irresistible compulsion the incomparable worth
so 3be nature anb
of our personal ideals, and the moral insights
which attach to them. We build on ahead
of experience and fashion the inner world that
ought to be, and this vision makes us dissatisfied
with anything that comes short of our ideal
good. Some persons no doubt possess this
power of transcending the actual more strongly
than do others. The reference to an ideal
spectator is weak in some and powerful in
others. The appeal from what is here and now
to that which ought to be does not operate
alike in all bosoms.
Plato, with his symbol of Gyges' ring, has
expressed the view that the " many " do right
because they fear consequences. This ring
enabled the possessor of it to become invisible
at will. He could always escape notice, and
could therefore pursue his pleasures and achieve
his ends without being observed or caught.
Could anybody be found who might own this
extraordinary ring with perfect moral safety ?
Are there persons who would take no advantages
of the privileges of its magic ? Plato knows at
least of one such person. He has drawn the
portrait. of a moral genius whose supreme prayer
was for inward beauty, and who took his hard
course of action, not out of fear of any kind of
Hutborfts ot Conscience 51
consequences, but in order to conform with a
heavenly pattern in his soul.
It is probably true that conscience rises to its
august height only in persons who may be called
spiritual geniuses. We do not estimate the
significance of music by the performance on
the Indian tom-tom. We find it revealed in
Mozart or some other outstanding creator.
We do not judge the scope of art by the Maori
carvings on a walrus' tusk. We see it at its
full glory in the Sis tine Madonna or in Michel
Angelo's Moses. So, too, we shall never appre-
hend the nature of conscience if we study it
only as an anthropological emotion. We see
what it means and we discover its full
implications in persons of marked moral
profundity.
There is an underived ethical core in us, or
at least in some oi us, which gives us a fixity of
soul for that which ought to be. This elemental
basis of our conscience cannot be traced to any S
physical origin, it cannot be reduced to a
biological function, it cannot be explained in
utilitarian terms. It attaches to our deepest
spiritual being our inalienable tendency to
form ideals and to feel the imperative call of
what ought to be. Its development can be
5* Vbe future an&
traced; its origin cannot be traced. The
elemental distinction of right and wrong is
presupposed in every appreciation of moral
quality, just as every judgment of beauty pre-
supposes an appreciation of beauty. The
structural distinction of right and wrong is an
endowment of reason which cannot be identified
with anything else or traced to any " natural-
istic " origin. It is that basic foundation of the
soul which the mystics called " synteresis," or
junction of the soul with God. It is what Kant
calls the categorical imperative, or the soul's
fundamental assertion of a distinction between
right and wrong, It is so essential to a rational
being that in denying it you tacitly affirm it,
and when it appeared the race first began to be
human man emerged, " Adam " was born !
Every little creature in the myriad hosts of
life's immense output is different in some respect
from every other. Every tiny being that gets
born has some slight mark of uniqueness. This
fact a fact which we do not explain is what
makes life a varying affair. Every germ in " the
enormous fecundity of nature" has its own
irreducible peculiarity. Somewhere, sometime,
in the great stream there came a being that was
unique in this, that he did not live merely by
Butboritg of Conscience 53
fact and act for the sake of consequences, but
he felt the moral worth of certain acts and could
recognise an " ought." He judged his conduct
by an ideal which outran his deed. There have
been many crises in the history of evolution
moments when something qualitatively new
appeared, and of which no exhaustive psycho-
logical explanation can be given. Mutations
are not only unpredictable, but they are inex-*
plicable in terms of the environment. The
birth of self-consciousness is one of these crises.
The appreciation of beauty is another. The
birth of religion, the soul's consciousness of a
great Companion, is another, The appearance
of conscience, the distinction of moral right and
wrong is another. It is as original and
irreducible as the consciousness of up and down
or of before and after. In a word, it is as
underived from anything else as the perception
of time and space is.
All knowledge of concrete times and spaces
implies a susceptibility to time and space
already in the capacity of the mind that
perceives. Without an underived distinction
of " before and after " I could never learn about
times, and without the capacity for *' within "
and " without," and " up " and " down," I could
54 Ube Mature
never get the idea of particular spaces. The
idea of space is pre-supposed in all experiences
of spaces. The mind of a rational being comes
already equipped with these essential conditions
of knowledge these capacities for experience
which are filled with content by actual experi-
ence. So, too, a person must be susceptible to
the meaning of " ought " before ever he can
learn from experience what is right and wrong
in a given concrete situation. The capacity
for duty is, thus, native and original, a condition
of all moral appreciation ; our judgment upon
the particular definite things that are right and
wrong is always coloured by experience ; that
is to say, the formation of our actual standards,
the creation of our concrete conscience, is an
immense social process, as I shall endeavour to
show. If this view is correct, we discover
why conscience is so imperative It is an
irreducible fact of reason itself, using reason
in the broad sense which has become familiar
since Kant. It cannot be eliminated or
destroyed without abolishing rationality itself.
It is bound up with the very nature of reason,
as is our absolute certainty of mathematical
truth, or as is the inevitable idea that an
effect must have a cause. Deny it, ignore it,
Hutborltg of Conscience 55
disobey it, transgress it ; it still confronts
one as unsuppressed and absolute as ever. 1
This view of conscience is no less a divine
reality than Barclay's view, or the intuition
theory, would make it, only its divine quality
is not to be secured by isolating it and
dividing it off from man's essential nature.
We cannot prove a revelation or pronounce-
ment to be divine by merely insisting that
it is unconnected and unrelated with any-
thing in our finite experience, or by saying
ever so emphatically that it has been injected
into time from a realm beyond time. The
divine is not confined and limited to another
world than ours. It can be a fact and quality
of our own essential life, and if we are to find
it anywhere we must find it here.
" Draw, if thou canst, the magic line
Severing rightly His from thine,
Which is human, which divine."
This fundamental distinction of right and
wrong, this compelling sense of obligation,
seems to be the very mark and badge of man's
origin from a deeper spiritual universe, or at,
least of his present relation with such a universe.
NOTB. I have been influenced here and elsewhere
by the lectures of my Harvard teacher. Professor George
Herbert Palmer.
56 ttbe future an&
As a child bears forever in his body the marks
of his origin from his mother, so this moral
capacity marks the point of juncture with a
spiritual realm from which we have come and
with which we are still connected. The Beyond
is within. We are embedded in a larger con-
sciousness than that bounded by the margins
of our finite self. We come here upon the central
fact which makes man an ethical person. In
his essential nature as a self-conscious being,
looking before and after, and judging his deeds
in reference to a world as it ought to be, man is
always more th^ji finite he is over-finite. We
can and often do treat t v individual as a finite
unit for practical purples, but to do so is to
reduce him to a static, abstract thing; quite
unlike the living concrete self of real inner
experience. He is now a sundered fragment
and not the organic whole we know as a spiritual
person. The latter always involves and mani-
fests an immanent principle which transcends
the finite fragment. We look down on our
fragment-self from the watch-tower of our wider,
larger self, arid approve it or disapprove it, in
the light of an ideal which sweeps far on ahead
of anything the finite fragmentary self has ever
experienced. This " dividual phantom self,"
HutborltB ot Conscience 57
as Coleridge called it, is forever set in and organic
with a more than its own tiny domain. The
sense of imperfection which marks all our experi-
ence, the glory of the unattained which attracts
us, the unstilled desire for the beyond, the
" hints of occasion infinite " that keep us alert
for moving goals, all have their ground in this
indissoluble junction of our nature with the
spiritual Whole in which our consciousness
is set.
But at the same time, there is a large temporal
and historical factor in every man's conscience
as it is formed and filled by experience and
education. It bears, and must bear, the marks
of the social group in which it has been developed.
It is influenced, as all our ideals are and as
personality itself is, by the social life of which
we are an organic part. Edmund Burke was
right when he talked of the social conscience as
" the bank and capital of nations and of ages."
We are woven inextricably into the fabric of
some living group. We catch a thousand
features of our life through unconscious imitation .
We take over from our social group the very
language through which we form and express all
our ideas. It is here, in this indispensable
social environment, that we discover our
58 Vbe nature an*
primitive desires, and that we make our earliest
experiments in finding out what we want and
what we do not wantone of the greatest
experiments in this human venture of ours I
Tones, looks and gestures of approval and dis-
approval work powerfully upon the acutely
suggestible infant mind. Family customs,
personal influence, the appeal of rewards and
punishments, the illumination of discipline on
the plastic mind, are profoundly formative.
During the long period of helplessness and
dependence, the child slowly learns what the
race has learned. Play, art, literature, religion,
begin now to make their immense contribution
to his inner life, and he becomes acute and
sensitive to the requirements of the society of
which he is an organic member.
This explains why in the early stages conscience
is negative. The individual instinctively follows
custom. So long as he goes along with habitual
tendencies he is unconscious of any guiding, as
is the case with all subconscious functions. But
let a subjective inclination push him in a direction
contrary to custom, and immediately self-
consciousness is awake and a collision or conflict
appears within. So long as there is conformity,
conscience slumbers ; the moment the individual
Hutboritg of Conscience 59
asserts himself against the social group, conscience
is wide awake, his deed reveals dangers and gives
him trouble. Duty at this stage arises as a
limitation of individual impulse. The primitive
moral consciousness is knit in a close solidarity
with the life of the tribe. The " self " in the
early stage is hardly differentiated as a separate
fact. It is a living cell in a tribal organism which
is the real unit. Hebrew story is rich with
material bearing on this negative and tribal
conscience. We see in the Old Testament how
in generation after generation the individual
was merged into the corporate life of the racial
group, and how difficult it was for the individual
to pursue a course which conflicted with estab-
lished law and custom. Greek literature reveals
a similar custom. The Spartan soldiers at
Thermopylae felt they had no private, individual
choice. They were merged into the life of the
tribe. " Tell Sparta you saw us lying here,"
their epitaph says, " in obedience to our country's
call." Socrates, with all his prophetic leader^
ship, to which I have referred in an earlier
section, was deeply immersed in the social life
and custom of his race. His divine voice is in all
reported instances a restraining, checking guide.
When escape was possible he remained in prison
6o Ubc taaturc anb
and accepted the hemlock in unquestioning obedi-
ence to the laws of his country. 1 The Hebrew
prophets, however, and the Greek tragedians
take us up to a different moral level. Here we
have a profound conflict of duties, and conscience
appears as a positive, affirmative, pushing force.
It becomes a silent but august revelation of an
ideal course of action.
As soon as personal life grows rich, complex
and reflective, the simple, primitive instincts
no longer wotk as blind, unconscious motor
forces as they were at first. They are organised
now into wider systems of emotions and senti-
ments. They become infused with intelligence,
and guided and controlled by reason. They
minister to the higher ends and ideals of life and
serve to fulfil spiritual values. I am using
sentiment of course in its nobler meaning, as the
best modern writers on the emotions have taught
us to use the word. "Sentimental" and
" sentimentality " have acquired an undesirable
reputation, as something soft arid flabby, but we
must not allow the associations formed around
those words to keep us from using the word
sentiment .in its true and proper sense. Every
1 This attitude of obedience is the subject of Plato's
Cri/o.
Butborftg of Conscience 6x
sentiment includes in a single unified system a
complex of instinct, emotion, thought and will.
It forms a tiny sphere of its own within the wider
life of the person. Imbedded in it, controlled
by it, are instincts which by themselves would
be blind and egoistic. They are, however,
raised and transmuted by the organising energy
of the system in which they are merged. This
is the way in which all spiritual achievements
are made. Instincts are not " killed," they are
not eliminated; they are ruled, subordinated,
and made to minister to purposes and aims
that reach beyond the welfare of the single self
in which the instinct was born. Wherever love
and loyalty come into play a system of this type
is found, a system of rationalised or idealised
desires is created. Such a system, with its inner
springs of love and loyalty, makes conquest of
egoistic traits and brings into operation a spirit
of devotion, dedication, self-sacrifice. All senti-
ments of this loftier sort reach out beyond the
interests of the individual, in modern phrase they
are over-individual. They have to do with the
self plus its wider relationships its relationship
with other persons, with beauty, with truth,
with goodness, with a communion of saints, with
God. Under the sway of an idealising sentiment
62 Hbc feature anD
it becomes natural for one to live, or even to
die, for the end upon which the sentiment is
focussed and around which it is organised.
" Nature " itself thus becomes spiritualised and
transformed through the transmutation of
desires. The whole level of the human aim is
raised. Action no longer centres on mere
survival of existence. The person under the
sway of an organising sentiment is absorbed in
the triumph of ideal values which are worth
infinitely more than houses or lands or body
or bread.
Conscience on this higher level, as the voice
of the ideal self, operates more often unconsciously
or subconsciously than consciously. Its decisions
seem " instinctive," " second nature." They
are arrived at by processes that appear " intui-
tive." That is, however, not because conscience
was put ready-made into the individual at
birth. It is because the central ideals in us are
deeper than reflection reaches.
" Beneath the stream, shallow and light, of what we
say we feel,
Beneath the stream, as light, of what we think we feel,
There flows with noiseless current, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed." 1
It is also because action under the sway of
1 Matthew Arnold.
Butborttg ot Conscience 63
ideals and sentiments has formed habits and
tendencies which fit the direction in which our
personality is moving. But there often appears
to be a " rivalry " among the ideals which control
us and shape our deeds. There are many
possible ruling systems of sentiments, and the
world has never fully agreed upon an unvarying
order of their importance. Love of family,
love of friend, love of country, love of church,
love of race, love of truth, love of God which
of all these is the highest loyalty and the most
sacred system of desire or of sentiment ?
Temperament, education, character, will In large
degree determine in our personal lives in which
direction our ideals will organise our sentiments,
and so form the dominating passion of our
souls. The lover, the patriot, the martyr, the
saint, have each felt clearly that life came to
its consummate glory in the end for which they
severally lived and died. There is no arbiter
who can settle this question between "ends which
are all good in themselves.
But nothing surely can be higher or diviner
than a life organised under the ideal which Christ
has revealed and fused with His spirit. As I
have said in a former section, His way of life
reveals individual conscience in its most acute
64 ttbe feature an&
and exalted form. It does not mean that self
is obliterated. It does not mean that life ceases
to be this-woridly and becomes other-worldly.
It rather means that the soul's vision opens out
upon the reality of a God of perfect goodness
and love, joining Himself with us and forever
needing us to complete His own purposes. It
means going out to the tasks of life with faith
in the complete triumph of love, a readiness to
go to all limits of suffering and crucifixion for
this faith of love. It means an overmastering
conviction that, human lives united to Him and
dedicated, as He was, to love can help bring into
being a Kingdom of God, a brotherhood of those
who live by truth and love. To live Christ's
way of life means dying to selfish and utilitarian
aims through inner assurance of fellowship with
Him and with the whole human family in love,
in faith, in life and in service. To have these
aspects merged into one ruling system of thought
and emotion and will is what I mean by the
sentiment of loyalty to Christ, which spon-
taneously reveals itself in the conscience when
the moment of choice comes. It makes all other
11 goods I* and all other ends appear inferior and
subordinate in comparison. It holds the soul
like adamant, and is as near to an absolute
ButboritB ot Conscience 65
authority as one can find in this world of
change and process.
But it now appears that this positive type of
affirmative conscience, the creation of the
higher sentiments and the voice of the ideal
self in us, is no longer stern and hard, cold and
foreign, a fusion of commands and terrors
" a rod to check the erring and reprove." A
certain sense of awe will always attend, as is
fitting, this lofty function of the soul. The
forward way of love, as it separates us from
many things we should like to keep, will be,
in the words which Edmund Spenser used
reverently of his wife, " our dear dread." But
conscience on this higher level ceases to be an
alien voice, a threatening law-giver, reproving
and over-awing us. It becomes rather the deep
ground-swell of a whole unified, organised
personal self, moving toward the end for which it
dimly feels it was made. It operates less and
less explicitly, reflectively, as a conscious judg-
ment, backed and buttressed by effort. It
works more and more as a directing force below
the threshold, a new and transformed kind of
instinct, an instinct which has been created
rather than blindly received. It is a moral
dexterity of soul, and yet almost possessing
66 TIbe nature anfc
the well-known unerring accuracy of instinct.
It has close affinity to the higher order of
aesthetic taste. In fact the greatest of the
Greeks identified beauty and moral goodness.
Their loftiest word for personal character waa
the composite word " beautifulgood," As my
old teacher, Professor G. H. Palmer, has finely
said ; " The most triumphantly beautiful thing
in the world is a good life." The stoic and
puritan moral harshness is here transcended,
as is also utterly transcended the calculating,
prudential regard for consequences. Freedom
and joy are gloriously realised. Duty wears-'
" The Godhead's most benignant grace ;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon her face.' 1
I conclude, then, that conscience is both
divine and human. In origin it goes back to
the very moral nature of God Himself. It
always comes from beyond the isolated person,
the fragmentary self, for in the depth of our
being we are never sundered from God. We are
at least at one inner point conjunct with that
Person who is the life of our lives. For this
reason some kind of moral ideal is inherent in
the nature of man. But on the other hand all
moral ideals *.*., all the calls of conscience,
Hutborits of Conscience 67
have a temporal history. They are slowly
formed and shaped by the gains and testings of
the ages. The race discovers what in the long
run will and what will not work well for humanity
or for a smaller social group of humanity;
what destroys and what constructs personality ;
what enlarges and what restricts the life of the
group itself. The guiding formative influence
of the group in the primitive stage of the race
and of the individual can hardly be overstated.
But this must not blind us to the fact that
conscience, as soon as it rises as a fact, is, first,
last, and always, an individual thing. The
phrases " social conscience " and " group
conscience " are very common, and are very
often used as though corporate conscience were
an actual reality. The words, however, have
only a figurative meaning. The only conscious-
ness which psychology can recognise is con-
sciousness appearing in individual persons.
Many such persons may and do act in intimate
concert, and Join in common pursuits and
purposes, but even so they do not fuse into a
literal " organism " with a unified consciousness
of its own over and above the individual
consciousness.
I! that is true of consciousness in general it is
68 Ube feature anfc
no less true of the particular aspect of conscious-
ness which we call conscience. The only centre of
experience is the individual mind, the only point
at which the distinction of right and wrong is
brought to focus is in the inner life of the person.
Society finds its voice and discovers its direction
in the consciences of individuals, in the many
centres of personal experience. Reasoning,
suggestion, imitation, contagion of ideas, are
no doubt real forces which tend to carry one
person's thoughts and ideals into the many
lives which compose a group ; but there are no
forces which compel the individual to adopt
an ideal, however forcibly it may be pro-
claimed. The individual holds the key of his
destiny in his own hand, and no organism, no
group, no corporate life of any kind can, by
causal forces, overwhelm and determine the
personal will.
Great moral geniuses appear from time to
time, who push the common idea) of goodness
a stage further on, and by degrees the whole
race is raised to that height. Hastings Rashdall
has well said : "In the ethical region men of
science are beginning to say in the biological
region also nature takes more leaps and longer
leaps than a priori evolutionary thinkers like
Hutbortts of Conscience 69
to admit. And the form which such leaps
assume in the moral region is most commonly
to be found in the appearance of great person-
alities. . . . Men's capacities for ethical
judgment vary enormously ; and average men
have to rely to a very large extent upon the
judgment of the gifted few. The prophet or
great personality may be looked upon as one in
whom Conscience has attained an exceptional
development." 1
The hardest issues, the most tragic collisions,
that ever come are the conflicts between the old
fixed order, the status quo, embodied in the
social group, and the forward-pushing ideal,
embodied in the moral reformer, whether he be
gifted as prophet or genius, or whethei he be
only an ordinary person who cannot make his
individual vision fit with the moral residuum
from the past. On the lower scale morality, as
its name suggests, was conformity with the
accumulated wisdom and customs of the grouj^
On the higher level it becomes a solitary adven-
ture, a heroic faith in a vision of what ought to
be, though it is not yet actual anywhere on
sea or land. " Narrow creeds of right and
wrong " must yield and give way before " the
1 Conscience and C \rist, pp. 21-22.
TO . TTbe future an&
unmeasured thirst for good/' incarnate in some
brave soul, who goes forth to try his soul and to
lift the common standard. As fast as any moral
gain is won, it is wrought out into forms of
social institutions; it is embodied in art, in
literature, in law, in religion, in social etiquette,
in the system of education of the period, in
national hopes and ideals.
Each person thus forms his own moral ideal
the ground swell of his own inward voice of
what is right for him in the social environment
into which he is born. He is, from his earliest
days, a member of the society already moralised,
a fellow citizen of a state in which morality is
more or less objectified and made visible. He
must form his own moral ideals by means of
the moral attainments of the race, and these
ideals will always have the mark and brand of
a temporal epoch, and there will always be a
local colouring upon them. But he may, as has
been said, and in fact he should, transcend the
common level of his time, and push the moral
goal beyond any previous attainments, though
it must be along lines already potential ; and his
ideal, his .attainments, must be tried out in the
siftings and testings of social history.
Conscience, as we have seen, in its loftiest
Butborttg of Conscience 71
stage, is no longer negative. It affirms a unique
personal life. It has a positive aspect ; it is
the knowledge of a higher will than that of our
momentary, isolated self. It is the voice of our
ideal self, out complete self, our real self, laying
its call upon the will. This voice, this call, comes
up out of the deep, for the ideal which a man
has and by which he shapes his life is, as I have
said, subconscious rather than explicit and
thought out. But it is not something foreign
to the man himself, it is not something external
to him, it is not some one particular instinct
among other instincts. It is the complete self
voicing its ideals and exerting its sway over
passion and impulse and momentary self and
courses of action which fall below our vision.
It forms itself slowly under education and environ-
ment as the character forms, and it is unique and
august because it is the deepest self rising into
consciousness and asserting itself. It is the true
self vocal.
If this is a sound view, we see that the moral
standard is always being made never final.
It shows, too, why we do not all have the same
conscience. There will always be the personal
element present, for each man's ideal has formed
under particular circumstances, has aspects that
72 TTbc feature an&
are unique, and has been slowly shaped by
experience. But conscience is more than
subjective opinion or individual caprice. A
person's conscience to be sound must have
imbibed the spirit of the social group, past and
present, living and dead, in which it was formed ;
and if in any particular it is unique or peculiar
it should be by transcending the realised morality
of the group on lines already forecast by past
experience.
Though we cannot make the immense assertion
that conscience is absolutely infallible and a
precise guide under any and every circumstance
of life, it is nevertheless the surest moral
authority within our reach a voice to be
implicitly obeyed in the crisis of an action.
It is our highest guide. No command on earth
can take precedence of it. Nothing more
autonomous or more worthy of obedience can
be discovered. But, even so, it must not be
allowed to crystallise or to ^become a static,
habitual moral form. The Pharisee, the
inquisitor and the bigot are appalling illustra-
tions of the dangers that beset the arrested,
conformed conscience, even when it is honest.
It needs constant re-examination and revision.
The influences which re-make and re-vitalise it
Hutbotit? of Conscience 73
must have no terminus. There must always
be adjustments to new light, a healthy, living
response to fresh truth, and a continual
transformation of conscience in relation to the
growing revelation of God. It must be under
the watchful guardianship of the awakened and
enlightened spirit. Conscience is, thus, like the
mariner's chronometer. While he is in port he
tests it out by all the expedients known to the
science of- the clock maker. He perceives and
realises that it is subject to slight variations,
But when he is at sea he implicitly trusts it,
reckons it as reliable as the movements of Orion
or Arcturus, and sails his ship by its pronounce-
ments.
One other danger must be guarded against,
or at least reduced to its lowest minimum I
mean the danger of self-casuistry. Few things
in human experience are more subtle than are
the ingenious psychological methods and processes
by which we often defeat ideal courses of life,
by the use of expedients and labels to excuse a
choice of the least ideal alternative. No one
can arrive at a decision where there is a conflict
of issues, until he succeeds in making one
alternative nil the focal centre of attention and
so dominate consciousness. The complicated
74 ttbe feature anfc
process of deliberationwhich constitutes the
main drama of our inner life is an oscillation
of mind from one alternative to another in the
search for decisive reasons, reasons which can
prevail, and in this state of suspense, while the
search is going on, we are strongly prone to ease
the strained situation by finding heads or labels
under which to classify our motives so that they
will satisfy our reason. Cut-and-dried maxims,
fine-sounding formulae, authoritative principles
work almost " like magic here. Before one
knows it one is swept on toward a momentous
decision under the spell of a rubric. The subtle
casuistry works both ways. It may furnish a
pretext for evading the call of the ideal ; or it
may, again, supply a ground for stubborn
allegiance to what is called an "ideal " while
in fact the other alternative is really higher.
There is, thus, no short cut, no labour-saving
device, no magic contrivance that can save the
soul from the stern mpral effort, the " slow dead
heave of the will/* that in a crisis puts all the
accumulation of character, all the gathered
wisdom of life, all one's faith in the eternal
realities/ into the scale for the venture.
The last place of refuge amid the confusion
of the world is this inner citadel of the soul.
Hutboritg of Conscience 75
We owe almost everything to the larger society
of which we are an organic part almost every-
thing, but there is one thing we can never
surrender, barter, or disobey at the command
of any social authority whatever, the august
voice within us.
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