The great fact of moral distinctions, found to be universal in human thought and life, must be traced back to the particular power of the mind which discerns and feels these distinctions. Back of the phenomenon must be recognized the psychical capacity and action out of which the discriminations arise. The moral faculty answers to and in part accounts for the moral fact. In modern general literature it is usually called the conscience. Ethical science properly accepts the designation. It is sometimes called the moral consciousness, or the moral sense. It expresses a power of the personal ego or self to make the moral discrimination and discern the obligation to rectitude. Without such power, as an adequate capacity for the ideas, it is plain that the ethical judgments could not arise. The very idea of obligation, the ethical "ought," would be wanting. The whole realm of what this science considers would be a blank. In the moral faculty or conscience itself, as the immediate source of the ethical distinctions and laws of duty, we are furnished with additional material for this study.

No particular stress is here laid on the term "faculty," as a designation of the moral power. There is, indeed, no validity in the claim of some recent psychologists that the term must be abandoned on the ground that psychology discovers only mental acts, without a psychic subject with distinct faculties back of the acts. Yet the term faculty has often been used and understood in a way inconsistent with the essential and conscious unity of the personal ego or self, making the soul seem a bundle of independent and separately acting parts of a psychical organism. The perfect oneness of the personal self must be maintained, and the term faculty, when used for any form of psychical ability, must be understood simply as expressing the soul's capacity or power to do any specific form of work, or to act in any particular and distinctively definable way, as, for instance, to know, to feel, to will, to remember, to compare. In this sense the use of the term stands fully justified in psychological usage and propriety. But the reason for abating from the claim of strict exactness in the term in this connection is that the conscience, in its full conception and action, as will hereafter appear, while exhibiting a specific and simple power as its central reality, will be found to include also subordinately the conjoint action of several other forms of psychical power. It stands for a complex of capacities and powers. This will appear when we reach its analysis. But the question of the absolute simplicity of the faculty does not affect the substance of our inquiry into its existence nor the propriety of employing the term for the power in its totality. For, as naming the central and decisive reality in the conscience, it is justly spoken of as a special faculty. Even when it is viewed as standing for a complex of powers converging, in their functions, to the discernment of moral distinctions and the reality of duty, it has sufficient individuality to be rightly and scientifically designated in this way. The question to be considered, and upon which the logical conclusions of the science will depend, is not its absolute simplicity, but the fact of such a power as a normal part in the soul's essential constitution of powers. If the power be found integral and normal in the soul's actual capacities, we have all that is essential for the foundation of ethics.

The existence of the conscience as a specific and natural faculty of discernment of right and duty may seem to the student or reader to need no formal proof, as something substantially everywhere acknowledged. But as various theories undertake to question its existence, in the sense thus explained, and resolve the affirmations of right and duty into pseudo-products developed in a roundabout way, or by some illusive transformation of ideas or sentiments given by the other faculties of the soul, ideas or sentiments which in fact are really unethical, it becomes necessary to vindicate the asserted existence of this moral faculty.

1. The primary and fundamental evidence is the great fact, already set forth, of the moral distinctions which arise out of its action and fill personal consciousness and the life of the world with their attesting presence. The known object implies a power by which it is known. Without the faculty, in the sense of a power to know, the knowledge here in question could not exist. Its existence is proof of the reality and action of the faculty perceptive of it. The only alternative to this would be a total denial of the ethical distinction, even as a genuine phenomenon, and an assertion that the supposed knowledge of it is, and always has been, illusory and unreal. And this would be equivalent to a claim that men may and should abandon the ethical distinction and believe that there is absolutely no moral difference between justice and injustice, between kindness and hatred, between truth and lying, between friendship and treachery, between charity and murder. And this again would mean that we are to repudiate, as without validity, the whole notion which the ages, especially the most intelligent and best ages, have cherished, that man is capable of character, as good or bad, excellent or blameworthy. But this whole alternative becomes impossible, by reason of the necessary and invincible contrary judgment by which the moral distinctions are affirmed as actual and valid for human life. The faculty of moral discernment proves its existence by making the contrary of its discernment an impossible conception.

2. Its existence is further proved by the unique and peculiar character of its data or perceptions. These are unlike any other, sui generis. They are original and cannot be deduced from other data. The ethical percept is something that can be understood only in terms of itself. It cannot be described or expressed in the terms of the percepts or knowledge given by the other faculties of the soul, either general or special, either separately or in combination. Hence we must, according to all sound psychological procedure, postulate a special faculty, as distinctive and normal as is the percept, for this original and irresolvable ethical idea.

A little explanation will help to show this. Let us make search for the ethical idea or perception among the well-known data of the other faculties. Manifestly it is not given by the "sense-perception," for it presents none of the physical properties which this makes known. Clearly, too, it is not created by the "consciousness," which presents simply the states or acts of the mind, with the personal self as their subject, but which does not itself originate the states or acts it reveals—any more than does the light of the morning create the objects of the landscape which it discloses. Further, it is evidently not given by the power of "representation," for this merely reproduces and re-knows what was before known through the "sense-perception" and revealed in "consciousness," revived in the form of memory or rearranged and recombined in the forms of the constructive imagination. It supplies no original data. It, further still, cannot be the product of the "logical" faculty, as the power or function of discursive reasoning, because this originates no new material, but only reconnects and judges of relations in the material already known, simply dealing with ideas furnished to it. Nor can the ethical percept, as an intuition to the obligation to rectitude, be at all identified with the a priori ideas of time and space, or the categories of substance and attribute, identity and difference, means and end, or the law of causation. And yet it stands out in an originality as positive and distinct as do any of the unquestionable data or percepts of the soul's acknowledged specific faculties.

Just as little can the ethical idea, as the discrimination of right and wrong, be referred to the "sensibility," as the pleasure or dislike with which we regard what is found useful and conducive to enjoyment or the reverse. For, though a certain pleasure is connected with the ethically right, this specific feeling follows, and is dependent on no other perception than of the right. It is a satisfaction which the ethically good thus awakens. But the knowledge which experience gives of what is useful and conducive to enjoyment is generically different from the moral idea and its sense of obligation. Utility and the ethical discrimination are not the same conception. They belong to two diverse realms of thought and knowledge. Whatever relations may be traced between them, they cannot be identified or held as convertible percepts. The autonomous imperative of the ethical idea often positively prohibits the very things men judge to be profitable and pleasurable. It is a remarkable fact that the testimonies from literature and life to the phenomenon of moral distinctions everywhere maintain the difference between the idea of right and that of the pleasurable or profitable. What is right is one thing; what is agreeable is another thing. The two conceptions are not identical, but are often placed in immediate and irreducible antithesis. Those who do right, choosing it and heroically loyal to it despite the appeals of ambition, the temptations of avarice, the enticements of ease, and the favor or the wrath of the wicked, are approved and honored. To such the gates of the divine favor and recompense are pictured as ever standing open.

There is another consideration in this connection which shows beyond question that this ethical faculty, whose action is everywhere traceable, is not to be confounded with mere intellectuality or the action of simply the general intellectual powers. It exhibits itself in a distinct line of working and results, like a particular current in the common sea, and often in open contrast. It is a peculiar and significant fact, often observed by historians, that as the civilizations of antiquity, of Assyria, Egypt, Phenicia, Greece and Rome, advanced in intellect they declined in morals. Intellectualism may be at its height while the moral side of life may suffer a submergence beneath the floods of luxury and refined social vices. Buckle confesses that intellect and morals are not only distinguishable, but separable.10 Herbert Spencer says: "The belief in the moralizing effects of intellectual culture, flatly contradicted by facts, is absurd a priori."11 Lord Wolseley makes a statement not flattering to the boasted advantage claimed for simple intellectualism: "The virtue of the Zulu women was superior to that of any civilized people I know of."12 The function of the conscience in human nature and life stands clearly distinguishable from the common data and powers of mere intellectualism. The world will not be ethically saved by intellect alone. The conscience must dominate mere intellectual results and forces. And the high distinctive place and peculiar character of the conscience-perception is seen when it is thus observed that the perception is not of something that is, but of what ought to be, in the sphere of conduct and character. Its object is apprehended as lying in the ideal realm of obligation. The reality perceived is transcendent, as what should be in life, in order that life may accord with a super-sensible reality in the realm of righteousness. It as truly reaches beyond sense as do the intuitions of time and space or the law of causation; and, as truly as they, it calls for the recognition of a special and original psychical faculty or provision, among the powers of the soul, for its perception. The conscience,

"Deep-seated in our mystic frame,"

discerns a law of righteous obligation, which is not the dictate of mere desire or pleasure or self-advantage, but a law established at once over us and in us not dependent on our will or choice but demanding conformity of will and choice to itself.

3. The existence of the conscience as an integral power of the human constitution is evidenced also by the special feelings which attend its perceptions. They are distinctively peculiar. This is illustrated in the sense of obligation arising from the idea of right and the perception of duty. It is even more clearly illustrated in the satisfaction which attends and follows duty done, and the remorse which follows wrong or crime committed.

The sense of obligation, i. e. the emotion awakened by the perception of obligation, is unique among the emotions of the sensibility. In the presence of recognized right or wrong men feel bound to correspondent action as they feel bound under no other perceptions. The conscience, indeed, uses no compulsion, but it presents the right or wrong and correspondent obligation. Freedom is not annulled, but appealed to. The feeling, as the sensibility excited, is the feeling of ought or ought not, added to the perception of it. Nothing like this appears in connection with any of the other perceptions. We may perceive truth, but if the truth is not the particular truth of obligation itself, there is only the pleasure, gratification or admiration in its discovery and attainment. We may perceive beauty, but if the beauty be apart from that of ethical excellence, the feeling is simply Æsthetic and different from the obligatory feeling: "I ought." We may perceive utility or understand what is simply profitable, but the feeling awakened is but desire. All these and like simply intellectual perceptions awaken no sense of obligation to cherish any special sentiments or perform any special acts. But as soon as men, in pure and normal state of their rational and emotional nature, perceive the right as over against the wrong, the sensibility which always in greater or less degree responds to every act of knowledge, presents a form of feeling, in the ethical "ought," generically different from the feelings that arise out of all other kinds of knowledge. This feeling is itself a part and parcel of the aggregate or complex of the conscience. But its presence marks the conscience as a special power normally constituent of human nature.

The other moral emotions named, viz.: satisfaction in duty done and remorse or compunction for wrong, bring us to the same conclusion. These feelings are sui generis. They are distinctively characteristic, and are never called forth but in connection with the moral intuitions. These peculiar satisfactions or compunctions never appear upon perception of a truth of mathematics or a fact in chemistry or a gem of art. Such knowledge evokes no sense of duty and is followed by no feeling of remorse or rush of compunction, flooding the soul with self-condemnation. A sense of loss, in failing to gain a possible advantage, is incapable of being confounded with the feeling of having done wrong. Some of the highest elevations of ethical satisfaction are felt when men have maintained their fidelity to the right in face of the most enormous losses and of the most desolating sufferings. The deepest remorse the human soul ever knows may spring up in view of ways and acts which have given men all the things they have coveted and judged to be the most useful and enjoyable. There must surely be a special power whose peculiar discernments call the sensibilities into such unique and peculiar forms of feeling.

4. This conclusion is not weakened, as has sometimes been supposed, by the diversity and seeming conflict of moral judgments among men. This diversity seems, in the view of many persons, inconsistent with the supposition of a conscience, in the sense given. The fact of such diversity is freely conceded. The progress of history shows many changes in moral judgments. An advance is clearly traceable, in which once accepted rules of conduct have been superseded by different requirements. Things approved in one land and tribe are condemned in another. Pascal has said that conscience is one thing north of the Pyrenees and another south. In every community what some look upon as right others declare wrong. Infanticide, which under our civilization is punished as murder, on the banks of the Ganges has been esteemed a high religious duty. Polygamy, which our government is trying to wipe out as an immorality and foul blot, is held by the Mormons as a sacred right. Slavery is still regarded by some as right though condemned by the convictions of the nation as morally indefensible. Most startling diversities and contrasts are continually appearing. Hence it has often been said that our moral judgments rest, in fact, on no original and permanent principles discerned by a distinct and universal faculty of the soul, but are a purely adventitious and accidental product, shaped in ideas that come of circumstances, education or the shifting spirit of the age.13 The law of morality is reduced to the dictates of expediency or to sentiment and caprice born of our changeful desires. This virtually denies both the validity of the ethical behests and the reality of an ethical faculty provided for perception of rectitude and duty. But the difficulty from this diversity and apparent contradiction loses its force when carefully considered. It disappears when we recall the following indubitable facts:

First, that in the midst of this variety and conflict in the moral judgments, the ethical sense still persists in maintaining its function. If convicted of acting inconsistently, it still acts. Though it is found judging differently, it still judges, asserting its place and office, and imposing its decisions as obligatory in conduct. Under the view alleged in the objection, the sense of obligation ought to disappear, its supposed authority having been explained away. The person finds that in very truth the moral behest, though in him is not of him, is not of his will or choice, but arises out of the necessary action of a power that he cannot displace by refusal to obey it. The faculty or power does not consent, so to speak, to omit or withdraw its ethical distinction and assertion of duty. It does not abdicate, when men allege the illegitimacy of its authority.

Secondly, that while there is diversity as to many points, there is none in its judgments as to the great body of virtues and vices of human life. As to all the leading qualities of character and conduct there is full and universal agreement. With respect to all the cardinal virtues, such as justice, kindness, veracity, love, courage, fidelity, generosity, the moral judgments approve them as the magnet owns its pole, in all the multi-form relations and offices of life. On the other hand, injustice, falsehood, enmity, treachery, cruelty, adultery, theft, murder and similar dispositions and acts in their thousand forms of unmistakable manifestation, are universally condemned. There is no question anywhere around our globe that one who deliberately kills his mother or mangles his father, or tortures the innocent or defrauds his friend, is a wrong-doer, of abhorrent guilt. Over almost the entire broad field of moral obligation there is a consentient, clear and consistent judgment by the moral sense of man in all ages and places. It is only along dividing lines, wider or narrower as they may be, that, by reason of the fainter presence of the moral element or the complexity of the relations concerned, the moral judgments exhibit this diversity or act with less assured and certain accuracy. The perplexity and difference find place only in limited degree and on remoter points, where the distinctions are so subtle as to require the nicest balancing of all the complex relations and elements which develop the ethical obligations.

If, indeed, the conscience reported entirely different codes throughout, from bottom to top and from center to circumference, or codes with contradictions as to the cardinal virtues and vices, then we might well question the existence and action of a real, original and normal faculty as actually perceiving a real moral distinction and principle of duty. But if such diversities are found only in limited degree, on marginal ground and in complex situations, we are simply in the presence of a fact of great similarity of the conscience with all the rest of the finite and fallible faculties of the human mind. Upon a hundred points of practical morals the intelligent conscience would be likely to agree quite as well as the judgments of men in any other sphere of practical knowledge and life.

Thirdly, that even with respect to the cases in which there is the most startling diversity, there is often an underlying agreement, overlooked by superficial thought. Take, for instance, the Hindu mother's act of infanticide. Underneath her act and guiding it, is one or the other, or possibly both, of these principles: 1. Whatever sacrifice God calls for ought to be made; or, 2. Whatever is best for the child ought to be done. Falsely taught to believe that God calls for the sacrifice of her child, or that this surrender of it to him is the best thing for it, the mother makes the offering. Essentially as to the principles from which she acts her conscience and the Christian conscience are at one. But she has been misled as to the will of God. Her understanding is without correct information as to matters of fact, and she applies mistakenly the principles of duty which are in her moral nature. Take, again, the crimes of religious intolerance and persecution. The religious zealot believes that every man is to be, without weakness or shadow or turning, faithful to the truth. So also does the dissenter from the creed which the persecutor defends. They agree as to the underlying principle of action. Each feels bound by the same ethical law of "fidelity to the truth," but the persecutor is in grievous error in understanding that this fidelity binds him to coerce the mind of his dissenting brother.

Fourthly, the difference must be clearly kept in view between the essential ethical perception, viz.: the distinction of right and wrong with the involved obligation, and the application of that perception—between the primary and secondary moral judgment. The primary is the intuition of the law of right, the secondary affirms the quality of right or wrong with respect to particular actions. In the one case the moral sense perceives that justice, love, veracity, kindness, etc., are right, and injustice, hatred, falsehood and cruelty are wrong; in the other the judgment is concerned with the further question whether this, that, or the other act comes under one or the other of these categories. The fundamental ethical distinction and obligation, with approval of justice, truth, etc., are generic, and altogether irrespective of any particular actions or instances. The secondary judgments apply the distinction to particular modes of conduct or forms of temper and feeling. The latter are only in part moral judgments, i. e. only so far as the particular feeling or deed exhibits to the conscience the presence of the ethical quality. It is an unquestionable fact that in many of the activities of life there are open alternatives of choice where the question of moral quality is not raised at all. As, for instance, between taking one path or another to a certain point, or in writing a letter with a pen or typewriter, the choice is morally indifferent. The decision involves no ethical judgment. But in most contemplated action there are relations that raise the question of right or wrong—in some cases only by remote implication, in others in clear and burning emphasis. There are degrees in this respect, all the way from the faintest glimmering of ethical quality to the boldest and most transparent certainty. We are by no means entitled to doubt the existence of conscience, because in all these unequal conditions, with imperfect knowledge of the relations of particular actions and feelings, it fails to apply its unchanging affirmations of generic duty, with equal or unmistaken certainty and exactness, to all the varied motives, feelings and deeds of men. It is clear how differing moral judgments may occur, without any impeachment whatever of either the ethical reality or the existence of the faculty for its discernment.

Fifthly, we must add that the reality of this faculty, as an essential endowment of the human soul, by no means involves infallibility in its action. No one of the human faculties is, in all its range and the application of its data, absolutely infallible, incapable of error or of being misled. The sense-perceptions, the memory, the logical power, the power of applying the notions of time and space, are all liable to error. Yet these are all original, constitutional and normal faculties of man, divinely-given guides for his self-direction and suited to the ends for which they exist. The reality of a faculty is not disproved by its fallibility. Finiteness, limitation and consequent incompetence to exclude mistake or only partial discernment, are no reason for denying the existence of any faculty within the range of its given action and real discriminations. The very errors that appear in its action are at once evidence of its existence and proof of limitations which harmonize it with the aggregate human psychology. The objection against the conscience from its fallibility, which is but another name for this diversity in its applicatory judgments, if applied to all the psychical faculties, would discredit the reality of the aggregate complex of the psychical powers and overthrow the basis of all our knowledge, even of that which is employed to effect such overthrow. No diversity occurs in the primary judgment of distinction between moral good and evil. As already explained, it is easy to see how differences, varied and great, should appear in the application of the distinction to the complicated, obscure and ever-changing aspects and relations of human conduct.

5. These proofs of conscience as a distinct endowment of the human mind are independent of the whole question of the mode of its origin. For they consist of facts, as clear, peculiar, indisputable and irreducible as are the facts that guarantee any particular science whatever. They are capable of verification under perpetual tests, as they have been verified in the consentient experience of mankind in all its normally developed conditions. And the logic of the facts is altogether irrespective of any theory of the mode of the origin of conscience. It is needful that this point should be clearly fixed in mind, especially in view of the wide favor at present shown to the hypothesis of an evolutionary genesis of man. Except in the materialistic and atheistic form of the hypothesis the theory distinctly presents evolution not as the cause, but only as the mode of the creation of man with all his now given endowments. It is, of course, incumbent on the supporters of the hypothesis, in any form whatever, in order to vindicate its scientific claims, to show its competency to account for the existence and action of the moral faculty with its ethical discernment and law. An hypothesis that fails to solve any of the involved phenomena discredits itself, not the facts. So far as the materialistic, non-teleological form of evolutionism is concerned, which proposes matter and force as the full cause and account of man, it is condemned by its own utter inadequacy to explain the genesis of conscience with its moral law, as well as of the other great psychical realities in the nature and life of man. It is helpless before the task. Its only resource is to seek to resolve both the ethical fact and the ethical faculty into illusion. With respect to theistic evolutionism, which stands simply as an hypothesis of the mode of creation by God, the existence of the moral faculty may still be admitted, as having its all-sufficient cause in the divine creative power as the source of all things. If, instead of an immediate creation of man, the idea of his gradual creation from the inferior animal orders be maintained as the actual method of the divine work, then the law of evolution must be regarded as having been adjusted and used for the production of man with the faculty of moral discernment. The teleological principle, everywhere illuminating the structure of organisms and the constitution of life, must, from the first, have guided the development for this enthronement of right in the human personality. Asserting its method of a progressive genesis of conscience, this kind of evolutionism confesses its existence. Whether or not its account is satisfactory is another question, to be decided according to the evidence furnished. It is more than doubtful if it has yet succeeded in making clear the possibility of its origin under the hypothesis. Some serious difficulties have still to be overcome.14 If it ever does succeed it must be, not by denial of the conscience, but by showing the evolutionary movement in some way or other competent to its creation.

This lengthened presentation of the evidence of the existence of the conscience as an essential endowment and part of human nature, may seem to the reader to have been unnecessary or beyond the importance of the question involved. But, as will appear hereafter, the firm establishment of this point is vitally needful, in order to exclude various forms of erroneous teaching and secure a firm and immovable foundation for a just ethical system.