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.