CHAPTER V 



CONSCIENCE AND MORALITY 



THE distinctively ethical values of human conduct fall 

 into two classes, of which one includes the ends of ambition, 

 and the other the moral values, or virtue and vice. The 

 ultimate basis of all moral valuations is supplied by the 

 conscience, and in the following pages an attempt will be 

 made to describe in bare outline the more important of the 

 phenomena of that department of the mind, and to trace 

 from them the genesis of objective rules of morality. The 

 reason why these two classes are bracketed as ethical, to the 

 exclusion of aesthetic and religious values, is that they both 

 imply self-determination ; one in the direction of self- 

 assertion, the other, of self-negation. The recognition of 

 conscience as a distinctive function of the human mind is 

 comparatively recent, and dates from that period of Greek 

 thought when philosophy began to take the place of religion 

 with the more highly educated classes. Before then it was 

 commonly confused with prudence, or with the sense of 

 beauty or with religion itself, and even now it is seldom 

 clearly discriminated from each one of these. One school 

 of thinkers still identifies moral goodness with prudence, 

 another with aesthetic excellence, and a third with the com 

 mands of revealed religion, where the affinity is perhaps 

 closer than in either of the former cases. The emergence 

 into clear consciousness of any distinguishable vital process 

 is slow and tentative, but it may, at the same time, be 

 taken as an indication of its increased importance from the 

 point of view of evolution. 



The simplest manifestations of conscience are feelings of 

 attraction and repulsion in regard to some act or course 

 of action, when it is presented to the mind of the individual 

 as his own, or as one that may become his own. 



