Motive Power.
It is through these feelings that the conscience becomes a motive power for moral life. The perception of duty alone, as purely intellectual, would be, as said, "like a mirror accurately reflecting the ethical reality passing before it, but as indifferent as the mirror." But upon the perception the emotional nature springs into action. Knowledge, if at all, always goes into effect mediately through the sensibilities in which the soul is stirred by affections and desires. These may be toward moral good as truly as toward sensuous good. We may love the true and the beautiful and the right. We may love the right as right. According to our choices we make the ethically good our own and mould our life into its excellence and blessedness, or the contrary. These feelings are motive powers, bringing occasions for choices.
It is proper to take note, however, that it is only the feelings in view of the right or wrong of an act yet to be done, that are directly moral motives. For it is only through these that we are face to face with the question of choosing or refusing the right in the proposed conduct. The feelings that arise, as satisfaction or remorse after wrong acts, have no existence till the conduct is in retrospect, and can have no motive force for it. And when memory brings these experiences as motives for subsequent conduct, they stand mainly, if not wholly, as considerations for enjoyment. They are not feelings of pure obligation to rightness, but remembrances of pleasure or pain influential as prompting or dissuading on the lower ground of comfort. There is a generic and indelible difference between the feeling of duty, under the pure behests of right, and the natural desire to gain the enjoyment or avoid the misery which we have learned to anticipate from experiences in conduct. In the one case it presents love of the right as right; in the other a love of the more agreeable consequences of right. Unquestionably, indeed, a desire of the better consequences is a proper motive for choices. In these consequences virtue is proving its adaptation to bring its own reward. But the merit of virtue is not in seeking the reward, but in seeking virtue itself. The mercenary spirit is not the love of righteousness, nor as high as it.
5. This analysis makes clear the following characteristics of the conscience.
Conscience is Intellectual.
First, it is primarily and fundamentally intellectual. It is a power of rational perception. It perceives, in direct or intuitive way, the primary ethical distinction between right and wrong, perceives the quality of rightness or wrongness in particular acts or conduct, perceives the obligation of the moral agent with respect to right and wrong, as also the merit or demerit of the moral agent. But along with and blended in inseparable concurrence, moves the function of the sensibility, in feelings of approval and obligation, satisfaction or remorse. Both the intellectual and emotional action of the soul are, therefore, included in what is named the conscience—the perceptive action, here as everywhere else, being primary and conditional for the emotional. If there were no ethical distinction perceived, none would be felt. The conscience, taken in its totality, thus includes both sides of the human psychology, the intellect and the sensibility, and it addresses its behests of duty to the will in its own peculiar way of moral law for conduct.
The strife between intuitional theories and sentimental theories of conscience is, therefore, composed by the concurrence of both knowing and feeling in the action of this power. But the intellectual part is necessarily logically prior to the emotional, and conditional for it. To make a feeling of obligation the basal fact in the psychology of conscience would be an inversion of the whole order of dependence revealed in consciousness. And, surely, the feelings here developed are rational, not physiological sensations. They cannot, for a moment, be identified with the physical sensations which condition the sense-perceptions. Their true place is among the rational emotions.
Sole Percept Moral Quality.
Secondly, the sole object of perception by the conscience is moral quality—the quality of rightness or wrongness, together with the correspondent obligation. It is something supersensible and ideal; not actions themselves as known by sense, but their quality as morally good or evil as discovered by the ethical reason. The thing discerned by the conscience is generically different from the things discerned by the sense-perception or consciousness. Through our senses we know the whole world of objective existences, events and their relations; through consciousness the states, acts and experiences of the subjective personal self are given. But the conscience does not furnish us with a knowledge of any of the substances, events or relations which constitute the world about us or the world within us, but solely of the moral quality of conduct and sentiment, as duty is developed in these relations. It takes notice of the ethical character of the actions and motives of intelligent and responsible beings.
Conscience Acts of Necessity.