To which correspond those two beautiful maxims of the Gospel: “Do to others as thou wishest to be done by. Do not do to others what thou dost not wish they should do to thee.”
The law of duty is not only obligatory in itself, it is so also because it is derived from God, who in his justice and goodness wishes we should submit to it. God being himself the absolutely perfect being, and having created us in his image, wishes, for this very reason, that we should make every effort to imitate him as much as possible, and has thus imposed on us the obligation of being virtuous. It is God we obey in obeying the law of honesty and duty.
10. Moral conscience.—A law cannot be imposed on a free agent without its being known to him; without its being present to his mind—that is to say, without his accepting it as true, and recognizing the necessity of its application in every particular case. This faculty of recognizing the moral law, and applying it in all the circumstances that may present themselves, is what is called conscience.
Conscience is then that act of the mind by which we apply to a particular case, to an action to be performed or already performed, the general rules prescribed by moral law. It is both the power that commands and the inward judge that condemns or absolves. On the one hand it dictates what should be done or avoided; on the other it judges what has been done. Hence it is the condition of the performance of all our duties.
Conscience being the practical judgment which in each particular case decides the right and the wrong, one can ask of man only one thing: namely, to act according to his conscience. At the moment of action there is no other rule. But one must take great care lest by subtle doubts, he obscures either within himself or in others the clear and distinct decisions of conscience.
In fact, men often, to divert themselves from the right when they wish to do certain bad actions, fight their own conscience with sophisms. Under the influence of these sophisms, conscience becomes erroneous; that is to say, it ends by taking good for evil and evil for good, and this is even one of the punishments of those who follow the path of vice: they become at last incapable of discerning between right and wrong. When it is said of a man that he has no conscience, it is not meant that he is really deprived of it (else he were not a man); but that he has fallen into the habit of not consulting it or of holding its decisions in contempt.
By ignorant conscience we mean that conscience which does wrong because it has not yet learned to know what is right. Thus, a child tormenting animals does not always do so out of bad motives: he does not know or does not think that he hurts them. In fact, it is with good as it is with evil; the child is already good or bad before it is able to discern between the one or the other. This is what is called the state of innocence, which in some respects is conscience asleep. But this state cannot last; the child’s conscience, and in general the conscience of all men, must be enlightened. This is the progress of human reason which every day teaches us better to know the difference between good and evil.
It sometimes happens that one is in some respects in doubt between two indications of conscience; not, of course, between duty and passion, which is the highest moral combat, but between two or more duties. This is what is called a doubting or perplexed conscience. In such a case the simplest rule to follow, when it is practicable, is the one expressed by that celebrated maxim: When in doubt, abstain. In cases where it is impossible to absolutely abstain, and where it becomes necessary not only to act but to choose, the rule should always be to choose that part which favors least our interests, for we may always suppose that that which causes our conscience to doubt, is an interested, unobserved motive. If there is no private interest in the matter either on the one side or the other, there remains nothing better to do than to decide according to circumstances. But it is very rare that conscience ever finds itself in such an absolute state of doubt, and there are almost always more reasons on the one side than on the other. The simplest and most general rule in such a case is to chose what seems most probable.
11. Moral Sentiment.—At the same time, as the mind distinguishes between good and evil by a judgment called conscience, the heart experiences emotions or divers affections, which are embraced under the common term moral sentiment. These are the pleasures or pains which arise in our soul at the sight of good or evil, either in ourselves or in others.
In respect to our own actions this sentiment is modified according as the action is to be performed, or is already performed. In the first instance we experience, on the one hand, a certain attraction for the right (that is when passion is not strong enough to stifle it), and on the other, a repugnance or aversion for the wrong (more or less attenuated, according to circumstances, by habit or the violence of the design). Usage has not given any particular names to these two sentiments.