Thirdly, the action of the conscience is marked by necessity. And by this we are to understand something more than the simple uniformity in which all the psychical activity, except that of the choices of the will, is held under "fixed laws of thought and feeling." The necessity here affirmed is that unique necessity which distinguishes and marks intuitive or a priori cognition, as of time, space, and causality. "Necessity" is justly conceded to be one of the criteria of these and other intuitional "first truths." It is not at the option of the human mind whether it will think the world under the relations of time and space, or events as occurring under the principle of causation. These are "forms of knowledge," knowledge of super-sensible realities, that come not at our choice but by an unavoidable insight. The primary and fundamental ethical distinction belongs to such rational intuition, and is marked by the peculiar necessity of intuitional action. As on occasion of knowing material bodies with three dimensions, or of changes in consciousness or in the outer world, with the fact of co-existence or succession and duration, the phenomenal sphere is necessarily transcended and time and space are necessarily discerned, so when we understand the manifold relations in which our lives are to be lived, in which we may use our personal powers, either in harmony with or in violation of our given adaptations, and with either great injury or rich good to others, in the same necessary way the conscience must discern the distinction of right and wrong and the reality of duty.
The great implication in this necessity, as we shall hereafter see in examining the nature of virtue, is that the principle of righteousness or the law of duty is something that belongs to the objective order of the world as constituted by God, a divine reality permanent and immutable, not produced but perceived by the conscience. It is not made by man but finds him—finds him through the intelligence by which he is informed of the realities to which he must adjust his life. Moral law stands for a reality that rays itself into view in the human reason whether men will or not. The intuitions of it do not come at the call, or desire, or even at the consent of man. The law revealed stands independent of the individual's personality or choices and asserts itself over him. While this is true of the law revealed, the perception of the law becomes a necessity with the moral agent that is normally endowed and developed. Man does not furnish the moral law to himself. He is not the giver of it, but the recipient. The conscience, therefore, is an open window of our being, through which the objective law of righteousness to which the Creator has adjusted our nature and the constitution of the universe may be discerned by us, a sphere of reality enfolding us, with which our freedom is to harmonize our conduct. Francis Newman has admirably marked the position of this conscience-power in our constitution:
"This energy of life within is ours, yet it is not we.
It is in us, belongs to us, yet we cannot control it,
It acts without our bidding, and when we do not think of it,
Nor will it cease its acting at our command, or otherwise obey us,
But while it recalls from evil, and reproaches us for evil,
And is not silenced by our effort, surely it is not we;
Yet it pervades mankind, as one life pervades the trees."[20]
The reason of these intuitions of the conscience is that back of it and around it and above it is a realm of moral obligations which must, without contingency, be made known to us, that we may order our lives aright.
Erroneous Theory.
6. It is proper at this place to express dissent from some forms of theory which are at variance with the truth thus brought to light. Almost all of them are the outcome of the philosophical phenomenalism of which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is the best illustration. It discredits the competency of our cognitive faculties to reach knowledge of things as they really are. We can know, it is said, only phenomena, while the noumena or things in themselves are incognizable; and doubt is raised whether there is a reality corresponding to what our faculties report. It is suggested that the data of these faculties, especially in the forms of intuition and universal judgments, may be mere "forms of thought," forms of knowing but not of real being, created within as well as by the mind itself, and projected thence in connection with apprehended phenomena. They may be mental fictions in whole or in part, in which the ideal must not be held as standing for actual being. Thus while time and space are necessary "forms of thought" under which all bodies and events must be known, yet time and space, it is alleged, may be but subjective forms given to the phenomena by and in the cognitive action. We are obliged, indeed, it is conceded, in practical life to follow the guidance of our necessary forms of thought. But the knowledge is merely regulative for present activity; and being a product created and shaped largely by the particular organization of our minds, this merely relative and regulative perception of truth may be different in other minds or be hereafter so changed as to present changed phenomena, superseding the judgments now given by other judgments under other views. When the adherents of the Positive Philosophy proceed to define matter as merely "a permanent possibility of sensations,"[21] faith in the reliability of our knowledge of the realities about us, as true for those realities, is thoroughly undermined. This tendency toward an invalidating of our knowledge as real for objective truth, has been fostered by recent physiological psychology which, under materialistic implications, magnifies the effect of the physical organization and condition upon the mental products. In these ways extreme idealism and positive materialism join hands in effort to reduce to uncertainty or illusion what our cognitive faculties perceive of reality and truth in both the material and moral systems about us. But ethical science, in harmony with the soundest and best sustained philosophy of the Christian centuries, rejects these agnostic suggestions, as not only unproved but untenable. They form a theory of our intellectual faculties which cuts away the foundations of all knowledge, even of that which is most clear, fixed, necessary and unchangeable in the intelligence of the race. The theory becomes intellectual suicide, as it nullifies the real validity of all the fundamental perceptions of both sense and reason, on which its own conclusion rests. Its suggestions discredit themselves by confessing that their own foundation is but a part of the illusory, phantasmal action of faculties which, instead of perceiving what is, present but forms which they produce. While it is conceded that, even on this agnostic basis, the conscience would still possess "regulative" authority—as it still asserts its imperative "ought" for life—yet rational ethics, like self-respecting philosophy, must not vacate for our cognitive faculties the great function of knowing while attempting to exercise it, nor fail to maintain that they have been organized for real knowledge, within the sphere and measure opened to them, of the genuine realities with which we have to do, in both the material and moral worlds. The conscience, therefore, must be held, not as formative of its peculiar phenomena, but perceptive of the ethical realities of right and obligation.
Consistent with Theistic Evolution.
7. It is proper also to point out here that this view of the nature of the conscience is not necessarily affected by the question of its evolutionary origin. Should the theory of man's derivative origin, under some form of theistic and teleological evolution, ever pass from its position as an hypothesis into that of scientific truth, this would not require us essentially to alter our account of the nature of this faculty. For the nature of the faculty has not been found in considerations of the mode of its origin, but from analysis of the elemental facts in its action. The adherents of the evolution hypothesis have, indeed, found one of their most formidable difficulties in attempting a satisfactory explanation of a possible origination of this faculty in the assumed forces and laws of evolutionary action. Keeping in view the fact that the very center of the conscience-function appears in regulation and often in denial of inherited feelings and habits, the difficulty of attributing its creation to hereditary action is clearly seen and deeply felt. It has been well pointed out that "the injunctions of conscience do not run with the stream of our hereditary tendencies, but rather against them."[22] That a law of the work and victory of hereditary forces should issue in organizing an endowment for control and repression of hereditary tendencies, seems to involve too much of a contradiction to be accepted. That the survival of the strongest in the battle of individual existence, the reign of "tooth and talon," should gradually create a faculty for asserting the obligation and law of love and kindness to the weak, fails to come properly under our conception of the working of cause and effect.[23] Even in the theistic form of the theory, in which evolution offers itself as presenting not the cause but only the mode of creation, it is hard to conceive of the adaptation of such a process for the production of such a result—a result standing apart from the means by a total difference in both their nature and direction. It is as if the flow of the stream should create the principle of repression of flowing. The actual attempts of evolutionist writers to construct an ethical view which shall explain the phenomena of conscience and justify its authority, has added further evidence of the difficulty on this point. No such attempts have thus far been satisfactory. But the nature of the conscience, as has already been shown, is properly settled, not by the mode of its origin, but by an examination of its actual psychology and intrinsic powers. If this makes it clear, as it unquestionably does, that it is primarily intellectual and percipient in its function, then any failure of evolution or any other theory to explain its origin must much rather discredit the theory than disprove the nature of the endowment which stands as a fact. But an origin of the conscience by evolution, should it ever be proved, would introduce no trouble at this point in the science of ethics. For the faculty is competent for its office in virtue of what it is, and not by the mode through which the divine creative power worked in its formation. The necessity in the case would be met should the evolutionary mode be shown to be capable of evolving an intellectual endowment high enough in perceptive power to discern the ethical distinctions and bind their obligations on men.