CONSCIENCE AND MORALITY 129 



The central fact of the moral consciousness is not the 

 control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or 

 feelings ,* but the control by the conscience of all those 

 feelings which call it into play. 



It is distinguishable from other impulses by the nature 

 of the stimulus on which it is dependent. It requires the 

 presentation of some event which is itself the outcome of 

 another impulsive series. Thus, for example, fear may be 

 set up by an external stimulus of any kind, whereas the 

 conscience is excited by the actions to which fear gives rise 

 in ourselves. Conscience is concerned with our running 

 away, not with the threats of death or wounds that make 

 us fly. Attempts have been made to discover the criterion 

 which distinguishes virtue from vice in some single impulse 

 which is invariably good in its resultant action, and without 

 which no action is good. As all our moral sentiments, 

 without exception, are derived ultimately from the in 

 stinctive reactions of the conscience, this attempt could 

 only be successful if we found that those reactions, in normal 

 people, were always determined in the same direction and 

 degree by the acts which proceed from some single original 

 impulse, that is to say, if fear, or love, or sympathy, or any 

 other single impulse, always produced acts which attracted, 

 and was opposed to acts which repelled. The impulse 

 which has most frequently been selected for this office is 

 sympathy. This, it has been alleged, is the radical principle 

 from which all our moral sentiments are derived. It is 

 not, however, found as a matter of experience, that the 

 instinctive reactions of the conscience are always attractive 

 when the act by which they are excited has been prompted 

 by sympathy, and repellent when the act has been opposed 

 to it, and that all other acts which are neither prompted 

 by nor opposed to sympathy are indifferent. In the first 

 place, there are many acts, such as yawning, which may be 

 prompted by sympathy, but which are no more virtuous 

 then than when that motive is absent. If we take those 



1 H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, p. 113. 



BENETT 



