The word “conscience” was perhaps originally synonymous with consciousness, but it gradually came to mean self-consciousness of a very special type, namely, the silent commendation or censure which a man may bestow upon his actions or his projects. This word “conscience” replaced the Middle English term inwit,—a term made famous in the title of a book (circa 1340) called the “Ayenbite of Inwit” (that is, the “Again-bite or Remorse of Conscience”). The concept of conscience has played an important part in modern ethical theory, and it is supposed by many persons to be the foundation of all morality. What place it deserves to hold in a constructive, mechanistic ethics can be determined, however, only by careful analysis. So many extravagant claims have been advanced in its behalf as to make one suspect that none of them are true. Things which people have “always heard lauded and never discussed” are only with difficulty saved from oblivion when intellectual revolutions have altered the emphasis which man puts on the values of life. It was thus with the word “soul,” and with the word “immortality,” and it is likely to be the same with the word “conscience.” At least it will be an advantage to look at the philosophical pedigree of this once mighty shibboleth.

It may be surprising to learn that as far as ethical theory is concerned, the doctrine of an infallible conscience is the product of no less recent a time than the XVIII century. The Conscience-theory is the philosophical property of such men as Butler, Clarke, Kant, Shaftesbury, and Reid, rather than of their predecessors. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who founded critical English ethics, flatly refused to give to the then immature concept of conscience any recognition; indeed, he declared it to be nothing less than a “disease” of the state, and one “of those things that weaken or tend to the dissolution of a commonwealth.” In Chapter XXIX of the “Leviathan,” he states the current notions of conscience: (1) “That every private man is judge of good and evil actions,” and (2) “That whatsoever a man does against his conscience is sin.” Both of these notions Hobbes condemns. “For,” he observes with characteristic sagacity, “a man’s conscience and his judgment is the same thing, and as the judgment so also the conscience may be erroneous.”

This emphasis which Hobbes placed upon the untrustworthiness of private ethical judgments was fatal to his purpose. His successors began straightway to reanimate that which he had sought to bury once and for all, and, whether on account of their temperamental antipathy to the intellectualism of Hobbes, or because they were honestly seeking for some valid ethical principle, they asserted, first timidly, and later with a surprising boldness the very thing which Hobbes had sought especially to efface from the docket of ethical discussion.

We find this reaction beginning in Shaftesbury (1671-1713). Albeit this author gives a minor place in his ethical theory to the notion of a “moral sense,” or rational, reflex affection which approves only socially beneficial actions, yet the positive emphasis which he puts upon it is nevertheless significant. The affirmation proved to be contagious, for those who followed Shaftesbury immediately elevated conscience to a central position in their systems. We refer here to Butler, Clarke, Kant, and Reid, who are known as intuitionists.

According to Butler (1692-1752), conscience is a “principle of reflection” and not a mere feeling. And this principle of reflection is for him a natural or inherent property of man’s mind. It is the principle by which a man “approves or disapproves his heart, temper, and actions”; it is a faculty which “tends to restrain men from doing mischief to each other, and leads them to do good.” Be it noted here that Butler says nothing about the so-called infallibility of conscience, nor does he argue that it must be the same for all persons. Moreover, he gives a somewhat analytical definition of it, and is willing to grant that its function is utilitarian.

The old belief in the certainty of conscience now begins to reappear. It was Clarke (1675—1729) who attempted to defend it by the use of a mathematical analogy. We are all familiar with the axiom (or truism) that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. If now we keep the general form, but alter the substance of this axiom, so that it reads: “Whatever I judge reasonable or unreasonable for another to do for me, that by the same judgment I declare reasonable or unreasonable that I in the like case should do for him,” we have Clarke’s Law of Equity. To an arm-chair philosopher such a statement sounds fairly cogent, but its empirical value is not thereby guaranteed. As every student of psychology knows, individual differences, individual preferences, and the capacity of individuals by this method of give-and-take are completely ignored in the formulation of this law. Besides, Clarke’s conception of conscience may be said to contain a hint of ethical solipsism, or the theory that oneself is the only accurate authority on social justice. We need not pause longer over the insuperable difficulties of such a point of view.

It is, however, in the writings of Kant and Reid that the conscience-theory attains its modern, sentimental form. In his “Metaphysic of Morality” Kant (1724-1804) makes the following straddling assertion: “Nothing in the whole world, or even outside of the world [sic!] can possibly be regarded as good without limitation except a good will.” But this is not the full extent to which this philosopher presses his claims. For he continues, “A man’s will is good, not because the consequences which flow from it are good, nor because it is capable of attaining the ends which it seeks, but it is good in itself, or because it wills the good. Its intrinsic value is in no way increased by success or lessened by failure.” From all of which Kant concludes that “As the will must not be moved to act from any desire for the results expected to follow from obedience to a certain law, the only principle of the will which remains is that of the conformity of actions to universal law. In all cases I must act in such a way that I can at the same time will that my maxim should become a universal law.” This last statement is the famous categorical imperative.

At first glance this appears to have profundity, but it turns out even upon the slightest analysis to be quite the opposite. For example, the first passage quoted (“Nothing ... can be regarded as good without limitation except a good will”) contains assertions that nobody can know enough to make. It is ritualistic philosophy. Moreover, the expression “good will” actually does (Kant to the contrary, notwithstanding) put a logical limitation upon the concept good, just as “good” cat, or “good” razor does. Besides, the term “will” or volition always refers to a phenomenon which is strictly dependent upon circumstances, for a man wills only when there is something to be possessed. These are not all the errors which Kant here commits. His attempt to explain why the good will is good (itself a statement exhibiting the fallacy of ambiguity) reveals that Kant was a very poorly equipped psychologist. I ask you, how many persons is it possible to find,—indeed, is it possible to find one single man except among the psychopathic cases,—who would ever be stimulated to live,—much less to subscribe to Kant’s theory,—if his successes or failures had no effect whatever upon his future volitions? We do not imply by this rhetorical question that every man is, or can be, or should be immoderately egoistical, but only that Kant had no insight whatever into the psychological problems involved in ethics.

Consequently, the categorical imperative as a deduction from Kant’s first principles is to be regarded as completely erroneous. How, indeed, can a man act in such a way as to make the maxim of his action a universal law? Suppose we offer a simple example. When I am hungry, and food is before me, I eat it. Does this imply that my will to eat becomes a universal law, namely, that all the hungry should eat? But when I learn of the many hungry who are unable to eat, my will to eat illustrates not a universal law, but an extremely particular law, that is to say, the law that if I am hungry, and if food is supplied, and, furthermore, if I am willing to risk that food, then, but only then, do I eat it. There seems to be no way to establish the validity of Kant’s imperative, regardless of the direction one’s thought takes. To cite a different example entirely, let us imagine a hungry man who, having cornered all the food of his tribe, eats it on the assumption that every other man would do the same thing if he were similarly fortunate. Here the categorical imperative appears in such a light as to shock its author profoundly. And yet in strict logic, this interpretation is a valid one for an intuitionist ethics. Do we wonder that Levy-Brühl speaks of “the ambiguous and bastard concept of the moral law,” when they who attempt to state such a law have neither comprehension nor patience enough to discover the simplest principles of human conduct?

It is, however, in the “Essays on the Active Powers of Man,” by Thomas Reid (1710-1796) that the commonplace notion of conscience receives its principal philosophical support. Concerning this “moral sense,” as Reid calls it in reminiscence of Shaftesbury, the following formidable assertions are made. In the first place, “It is without doubt far superior to every other power of the mind.” In the second place, “The testimony of this moral sense,” like that of the rest of the senses, “is the testimony of nature, and we have the same reason to rely upon it.” In addition, just as the sense of vision is fundamental for space perception, so “The truths immediately testified by our moral faculty are the first principles of all moral reasoning.” Reid would also have us note that this reasoning is not inductive, but deductive, for he says, “The first principles of morals are the immediate dictates of the moral faculty.”

The outstanding fault of such a theory is that it assumes that every name we choose to manufacture has a reality corresponding to it. This is the fallacy of hypostatization, to which all idealistic philosophers are addicted. Granted that it is true, as Butler says, that we approve and disapprove of some of our actions, yet this does not imply that there is a transcendent faculty within us which we are at liberty to substantialize as Conscience or a Moral Sense. Such language is merely noun-worship. It is granted that the words “moral” and “sense” have each separately a meaning, but it does not follow that the compound term “moral-sense” must therefore have one. Moreover, all of these intuitionists are wilful and unperspicuous rationalists, demanding a fundamental principle in ethics before they have employed any induction or experimentation that might help them to frame such a principle correctly. They are willing to do no hard work, and to perform no crucial tests in order to see whether their guesses are facts or fictions. To complete our criticism, we must not omit to state that Reid’s elevation of conscience to a place among the senses merely reveals the extent to which he was willing to go in his defence of the testimony of the senses in general against the idealists of his age. His use of the “moral sense” was a debater’s trick. The high esteem in which conscience was held by his antagonists tempted him to turn one of their own weapons against them.

We can now better understand the statement previously made that the personification of conscience was the peculiar artifice, the “useful dodge,” of a certain school of ethical thinkers in the XVIII century. Consequently it is erroneous to suppose that the commonplace view of this phenomenon has always held undisputed sway over theoretical ethics. It had no place whatever in the minds of Greek ethical writers. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and their contemporaries founded the science of ethics without even dreaming that there was a conscience. Epictetus, Epicurus, and Marcus Aurelius showed no poverty of constructive thought for the lack of it. Even Helvetius, a contemporary of the intuitionists, rejected it as spurious when he wrote: “He who will warrant his virtue in every situation is either an impostor or a fool; characters equally to be mistrusted.”

Most people who have heard the name of John Locke will recall his arguments against the assumptions of the moral intuitionists in those passages where he combats the theory of innate moral ideas. According to Locke, all such ideas would have to be (1) independent of geographical location and climate, (2) independent of the age of the person and of his training, and (3) recognized by all persons as fundamental. But none of these conditions are found to be satisfied by anyone who makes the shortest pilgrimage through the world in the search for these statistics. And consequently the intellectually honest Locke rejects the philosophical theory of conscience, independently of his recognition of the facts of self-approval and self-disapproval.

It remained, however, for John Stuart Mill to foreshadow the beginning of the end of this fantastic theory of the moral faculty in Chapter III of his “Utilitarianism.” He writes:—

This analysis of Mill’s reveals that what the intuitionists loosely termed conscience is a far more complex phenomenon than they had suspected, and with this revelation the whole logical structure of intuitionism breaks down. For if conscience is not the simple, innate, infallible principle or faculty which the intuitionists postulated it to be, the deductions they made from this hypothesis become more and more untenable the longer they are scrutinized. Mill’s analysis of the psychological factors in conscience, together with Locke’s discovery of the cultural and geographical limitations of any moral sense make it necessary to define this ethical phenomenon in purely empirical terms.

Such a definition as we seek, however, could only be obtained by securing an elaborate census of cases in which the words “conscience” or “moral sense” were used. The census-taker would have to roam over the whole earth, ask questions all day long, and even become an eavesdropper at night, in order to gain the information he desired. Even this method would hardly be exhaustive, since perhaps far more “pangs of conscience” are felt than are ever expressed in language; and so our census-taker, were he as thorough as we might desire him to be, would have to be equipped with a sort of ultra-stethoscope,—one that could elevate a blush into an audible phenomenon,—in order to return with a full and complete report. The lack of such exhaustive statistics must, of course, be permanent; not only for want of census-takers, and for want of accuracy and sincerity on the part of those giving their introspection, but also because the concept of conscience may be slowly evolving, so that the end of the census might not harmonize with its beginning.

Granting, indeed, that such an evolution exists, it does not now appear to be either uniform or universal. For while, as we have recently shown, the concept of conscience first attained a philosophic importance in the XVIII century, and was thereafter variously modified and developed, yet the popular notion of a moral sense,—of “this deity within my bosom,” as some have even expressed it,—has actually degenerated into something unworthy of a place among the positive ethical values. Our quotation from James Murray’s account of the behavior of the Adelie penguin is extremely pertinent here. “The fear of being found out” is, we venture to say, the very nucleus and core of the consciences of the majority of men. And while without doubt some forms of fear are well-grounded, as, for example, the farmer’s fear lest the oncoming storm wash out his seedlings, yet when fear tends to limit prudence, or take the place of prevision, the organism in which that fear arises is sub-normal and unsound. Conscience, then, in so far as it is identical with this degrading emotion of fear, and in so far as it begins and ends in a withdrawing reaction, is nothing but a blight.

Yet something more remains to be said about the popular conception of the word “conscience.” This word, as commonly used, denotes an emotional state which, far from being in harmony with the ideals of the group, often denotes the very opposite condition. It is hardly necessary to remark that the fear of being found out does not imply loyalty to the group any more than it implies the recognition of that which makes for power, wisdom, and peace in the individual. Indeed, conscience as popularly experienced, involving as it does anxiety, trepidation, self-abasement, and a host of other introversive tendencies, is an ethical liability, both to the group and to the individual. The man who has transgressed the will of the group is surely not a bit better off because of his fear of being caught, nor can he regard his fear, even though he has already been tortured by it, as giving him any right to a mitigation of the penalty. As for himself, the conscience-stricken individual may have so long squandered his energy in his effort to conceal his offence as to bring him very close to ethical bankruptcy. The picture we draw is not extreme,—it can be duplicated in every neighborhood, if not in every family on the globe. For conscience, as it is usually experienced, is a painful, withdrawing reaction, implying negation rather than affirmation, incoordination rather than skilful prevision, and morbidity instead of frank, overt, constructive action. Accurate indeed is the phrase, “The pangs of conscience,” as a description of the organic turmoil incident to this condition of mal-adjustment. Can it not, then, be truthfully said, that in the cases just described conscience is a pathological phenomenon?

Thus to discover that the popular form of conscience implies a vice rather than a virtue is not, however, enough. We wish also to know how and why this form of conscience has attained so great a vogue. And here again we touch upon matters of the greatest importance for a mechanistic ethics.

Conscience as a form of fear is so strong and so wide-spread for two reasons. The first is already familiar to us, and is briefly repeated. It is that the flexor system is originally stronger than the extensor system. And so in the great majority of men whose natures are less evolved, fear is almost a daily experience,—not only the fear of nature and of the unknown, but also the fear of the group by whose tolerance they exist. Moreover, sentiment and not knowledge is the great group asset, by which we imply no such educated sentiments as are derived from analytical inquiry, or from an open search after the facts, but rather that kind of sentiment which passively bars and actively hinders the enlargement of the understanding. The group really never explains. When offended, it simply becomes suspicious, and its gossips freely translate this suspicion into rumor and inuendo. It is small wonder, then, that the conscience-stricken individual, as a product of his group, has as his first, and sometimes his only reaction, the tendency to shrink and become unresilient when he realizes that his acts, or worse still, his thoughts, have transgressed the taboos of his tribe. It is a case of like master, like man; the group does not usually know what its purposes are, much less does it ask to have those purposes examined and revealed; and so the conscience-stricken individual,—the sentimental child of the group,—reacts to his realization of estrangement from the group in a manner that makes his last state worse than his first.

This cannot be taken to imply that it is a sign of intellectual maturity to transgress all the taboos of the group. Yet the argument still holds that the influences produced by the exclusive use of this negative form of conscience are baleful. Very early in the life of the average child the expressions: “Don’t,” “If you dare to do that again, I’ll whip you,” “What would people say?” and a score of other negations are employed by his parents and teachers on the principle that ethical guidance is achieved by such means. As a result, says Edwin Holt, “The parent has set a barrier between the child and a portion of reality; and forever after the child will be in some measure impeded in its dealings” with those things which have become taboo, always first feeling the prohibition, rather than the urgency to act discriminatively upon a knowledge which a close contact with the reality should produce. Such a parent has not “trusted the truth,” and the final result is that the child has actually become “a second-rate mind, not in harmony with itself,” since not in creative touch with the environment.

Even more pointedly John Dewey writes in his criticism of the doctrine of self-denial. “Morals is a matter of direction, not of suppression. The urgency of desires cannot be got rid of; nature cannot be expelled. If the need of happiness, of satisfaction of capacity, is checked in one direction, it will manifest itself in another. If the direction which is checked is an unconscious and wholesome one, the one which is taken will be likely to be morbid and perverse. The one who is conscious of continually denying himself cannot rid himself of the idea that it ought to be ‘made up’ to him; that a compensating happiness is due him for what he has sacrificed, somewhat increased, if anything, on account of the unnatural virtue he has displayed. To be self-sacrificing is to ‘lay up’ merit, and this achievement must surely be rewarded with happiness—if not now, then later. Those who habitually live on the basis of conscious self-denial are likely to be exorbitant in the demands which they make on some one near them, some member of their family or some friend; likely to blame others if their own ‘virtue’ does not secure for itself an exacting attention which reduces others to the plane of servility. Often the doctrine of self-sacrifice leads to an inverted hedonism; we are to be good—that is, forego pleasure—now, that we may have a greater measure of enjoyment in some future paradise of bliss. Or, the individual who has taken vows of renunciation is entitled by that very fact to represent spiritual authority on earth and to lord it over others.”

They who wish even a more striking picture of the extent to which the negative type of conscience degrades the intellect, have only to consult Alfred Adler’s “The Neurotic Constitution.” If Dr. Adler correctly depicts the salient traits of the neurotic, many intuitionists themselves are by implication introverts, and consequently forfeit their claims to ethical leadership. The neurotic is described as “a person possessing anxiety,” “the self-sacrificing virtue,” “a marked sensitiveness,” “an irritable debility,” “an estrangement from reality,” as well as “a person with a strong tendency to symbolization,” and a penchant for “guiding fictions” invented for the purpose of compensating him for his feeling of inferiority at having lost solid contacts with reality. This, then, is the success which the conscience-theory has met with at the hands of scientific experts,—keen and sympathetic observers of the ways of men.

Such an account of the degeneration of conscience into a self-annihilating sentiment is, however, only one chapter in the history of this concept. And while the list of uses to which the word “conscience” has been put does not furnish as solid a basis upon which to build a constructive ethical technique as did the uses of “good,” “right,” and “virtue,” we can nevertheless still find a positive ethical value for this term. How, then, will this value be discovered?

It will be found by a study of those persons who have attained the power to view the world in a purely objective and empirical manner; of those persons who treat their own and other peoples’ actions as experiments in the great laboratory of time, rather than as timid ventures to be apologized for on the slightest provocation; of those persons who have evolved to that point where their knowledge determines their sentiments, and not their sentiments their knowledge; and of those who, having by this means chosen their dependable goods, learn the right methods to attain them, and thereafter employ plain judgments of fact in estimating the success which they acquire and the quality of the virtue which they achieve. In such persons the positive, constructive, liberalizing type of conscience exists,—a conscience which, through being built up of objectively tested judgments, becomes the outstanding ethical asset of the personality.

This type of conscience is not a myth, for it may be acquired in the same way as any other skill is acquired. The objective knowledge which it presupposes can be gained where every natural curiosity of a child or an adult is developed into a frank acquaintance with the object of curiosity; where fear is turned into intrepidity by a bold analysis of its cause and by a frontal attack upon the exciting stimulus; where one learns that ethical problems are always solved by forming serviceable habits and never by the cultivation of permanent anxieties; and where, finally, all the entangling alliances forced upon one by unprofitable acquaintances are boldly, but politely, annihilated. Even though many strongly entrenched traditions and institutions of the world would decay were the type of conscience we here describe to become wide-spread, yet this cannot deter the wise man from making it his life work to add as many new names to the list of those possessing ethical insight as it is within his power to do. Indeed, whenever this list becomes so large as to be generally regarded by autocrats as dangerous, we shall have come to that place in the course of civilization where the first real ethical advance is to be made.