Note 296.1 — FOOTNOTES.

There are two points generally discussed in ethical treatises, which belong most naturally to our present rubric; first, whether moral judgments are performed by a separate faculty called Conscience; second, whether all our emotions are not originally selfish; whether benevolence, like remorse, is not a derived and compounded rather than an original and simple element of our nature. To both these questions the Association theory of Hartley gave the start; for with him, as we have seen, everything is compounded; will, judgment, conscience, whatever acts seem most emphatically to proceed from the imperial I within, are radically only transmuted sensations, the composite result of a curiously interwoven tissue of associations. Now there are no questions in ethical science more easily answered than these. Conscience is certainly not a separate faculty; it is an exercise of judgment, that is, of discriminating reason, accompanied with an emotion. You confess to me, for instance, as your friend, that on such and such an occasion, from a regard to some petty interest, or a desire to curry favour with some influential person, you displayed a cowardly reticence, where an open profession of your sentiments would have been advantageous to the cause of humanity; and you feel ashamed of your conduct. Here is nothing but Reason applied to action; and the emotion of self-reproach in reference to an unreasonable action, which is the exact correlative of the feeling of incongruity which attaches itself to a false proposition. Man is not a mere cognitive machine; he has emotions of delight, which make him start from his seat and cry out εὕρηκα! at the naked perception of a purely speculative truth, much more when he uses his reason on the most important acts that concern the well-being of himself individually, and the society of which he is a part. Let anything very good be done by his tribe, or nation, or church, if he is a complete man he instantly flames up into a noble enthusiasm, and becomes ambitious of attempting like deeds; let anything very bad be done, he fumes, in grim indignation, or blushes with shame, and is ready to reproach and to condemn, and even to trample his proper self under foot. This is the most natural thing in the world; the necessary result of applying reason to action at all; for a man cannot act without motive power, that is, without passions, which may be either noble or base. But though there is no separate faculty called Conscience, there is a peculiar sensibility of the soul in reference to moral action, when judgment is pronounced by any individual on the character of any action which he has performed. Self-condemnation, self-reproach, and, in their sharpest potency, what are called the stings of remorse, are judgments of reason accompanied by emotions, which well deserve a separate name; and just as for the classical Latin judicium when speaking of the fine arts, we now use the peculiar word taste, so for our judgments of actions, with the peculiar emotions which accompany them, we use the word Conscience. It is not a new word; it is as old as Periander and Bias;[296.1] it has been used by both heathens and Christians for more than two thousand years; and there is no reason why it should be abolished. The ignoring of its compound character by incurious people can do no harm; its analysis into practical reason and passion by the more curious can do little good. When, on the other hand, it is declared generally to be the mere product of association, a great deal of harm may be done; for from this doctrine a consistent one-sided moralist may prove that morals are the mere creatures of habit, fashion, fancy, and caprice, as readily and with precisely the same warrant that Alison proved that beauty is an accidental product of the same unreasoning elements. What we ought to say is simply this—there is an enlightened conscience, and there is an unenlightened conscience; neither of these can act independently of associations; for associations supply the bonds by which the materials of thought and feeling are bound into separate parcels; but the difference is this: in the enlightened conscience feelings and actions are bound together by associations over which cultivated Reason has exercised a control; in the unenlightened conscience, where the emotions connected with the performance of certain actions are the crude product of all sorts of random influences, it is natural that moral judgments should exhibit all sorts of inadequacy, perversity, and absurdity. To a conscience so constituted the neglect of a piece of insignificant silly ceremonial may cause more pain than the commission of a murder.