142 



CLEMENT C. J. WEBB^ ESQ.^ M.A., ON 



This absolute use of " Conscience '* is, of coiu^se, nothing new. 

 AVe find it in St. Paul, by whom the Stoic term (TvveLhrjcrL<; 

 of which conscieiitia and conscience are translations, is freqaentlv 

 used ; though it is rarely found in the Xew Testament outside 

 of his writings, never perhaps outside of those of authors who 

 ■stood under his influence. AVe can trace it and the personifica- 

 tion of Conscience back to the tag from Menander, airaaiv rj/ih' 

 1] avveihr](TL^ 6eo^. It may even be said to be imphcit in the 

 Gvv, the con, which signalizes the knowledge spoken of in the word 

 as something existing alongside of, and therefore in some sense 

 distinct from, another more direct or immediate knowledge, which 

 is presupposed by it and which is mine as the doer of the acts 

 which are observed and judged. Although, perhaps, the force of 

 the cognate word Consciousness has been weakened by its use as 

 a rendering of the German Beicusstsein, it also ought strictly to 

 be used only of a reflective knowledge — of what is sometimes 

 distinguished by modern writers on philosophy as self- 

 consciousncss, or at least of a kind of knowledge which only a 

 .self-conscious being can possess. And in Conscience this 

 reference to reflection has not been lost : the word is always 

 understood to mean a sort of awareness in which one's own 

 actious are the object, from which as conscientious one 

 distinguishes oneself as a subject. It is just for this very reason 

 that the personification of Conscience, as though it were another 

 person from the persons who act and whose acts are observed 

 and judged, is so easy and, one may even say, inevitable. 



The mediaeval schoolmen distinguished, as is well known, 

 Conscientia {crvveihr^a-L^) from Si/ncleresis, and it is in some 

 Tespects regrettable that this distinction should have fallen 

 into disuse. The history of the word Syncleresis is obscure, and, 

 so far as it is known, curious. It no doubt represents a Greek 

 (7ui>T)]pr]cri<;, which was probably, like cruvelSrjo-Lf; itself, a 

 technical term of the Stoics ; what the precise significance of 

 that term was has been disputed, but it came, in the degenerate 

 form of Synd.eresis, into the vocabulary of mediaeval philosophy 

 from a passage of St. Jerome's commentary on Ezekiel, in 

 which, among other interpretations of the prophet's vision, he 

 mentions one accorcUng to which the man, the lion, and the 

 calf represent the three so-called parts of the soul enumerated 

 by Plato in the Bepuhlic, the rational, the passionate, and the 

 appetitive, while the eagle stood for that which the Greeks 

 called (7vvT7]p7](TL<;, which is above tliese and beyond them, 

 namelv, the sjxcrJc of conscience;, scintilla conscientioe , which was 

 not extinguished in the heart of man by the Fall, and, by means 



