Azel Ames - "The Mayflower and Her Log, v1"

P.G. Wodehouse - "Uneasy Money"

David Hume - "An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals"

Louisa May Alcott - "A Modern Cinderella"

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NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Problems of Conduct

D >> Durant Drake >> Problems of Conduct




Out of what has conscience developed?

The "conscience" of our moralizing and religious literature figures
as a sharply defined and easily recognizable "faculty," like "will"
or "reason." But this classification, though useful, is misleading
by its simplicity. If we observe by introspection what goes on in our
minds when we "will" or "reason" or "listen to conscience," we shall
find all sorts of emotions, ideas, impulses, surging back and forth,
altering from moment to moment, never twice the same. At another period
of our lives, or in another man's mind, the psychological stuff
pigeonholed under these names may be almost entirely different. A great
many diverse mental elements have at one time or other taken the role
of, or formed an ingredient in, the function we label "conscience."
We will enumerate the more important:

(1) Experience quickly teaches her pupils that certain acts to which
they feel a strong impulse will lead to an aftermath of pain or
weariness, or will stand in the way of other goods which they more
lastingly desire or more deeply need. The memory of these consequences
of acts remains as a guide for future conduct, not so often in the
form of a clearly recognized memory as in a dim realization that the
dangerous act must be avoided, a vague pressure against the pull of
momentary inclination, or an uncomprehended feeling of impulsion toward
the less inviting path. This residuum of the moral experience of the
individual is one ingredient in what we call his conscience.

(2) But there is much more than this. The individual is a member of
a group. The customs and expectations of this group not only bear upon
him from without but find a reflection in his own motor mechanism.
He hears the voice of the community in his heart, an echo of the general
condemnation and approval. This acquired response, the reverberation
of the group judgment, may easily supplant his personal inclinations.
Primitive man is sensitive to the judgments and emotional reactions
of his fellows; the tribal point of view is unquestioned and
authoritative over him. So important is this pressure in his mental
life, though not understood or recognized for what it is, that conscience
is denned by many moralists as the pressure of the judgment of the
tribe in the mental life of its members, or in similar terms. Paulsen
calls it "the existence of custom in the consciousness of the
individual." This is to neglect unjustly the other sources of the sense
of duty; but certainly the pulls and pushes arising from these two
sources, which we may call the inner aspect of individual moral
experience and of loyalty to the community-morals, reinforcing one
another as they generally do, produce a very powerful form of conscience.

(3) A number of primitive emotions join forces with them. Sympathy
is generally on their side, and the instinctive glow of patriotism
or pride in the tribe's success. The shrinking from disapproval, the
craving for esteem, the very early emotions of shame and vanity, help
to pull away from the self-indulgent or selfish impulse. The
spontaneous admiration of others for their virtues and anger at them
for their sins is applied involuntarily by a man to himself; contempt
for his own weakness and joy in his superiority according to the
generally accepted code are powerful deterrents. The consciousness
of the resentment that others will feel if he does evil, the instinctive
application to himself of a trace of the resentment he would feel
toward him or toward these fellow tribesmen of is-such complex states
of mind complicate his mental processes and help check his primary
instincts.

(4) To these ingredients we must early add the more or less conscious
fear of the penalties of the tribal law, of the vengeance of chiefs
or powerful members of the tribe, of the tribal gods and their jealous
priests. These fears may be but dimly felt and not clearly
discriminated; but however subconscious they may be in a given case
of moral conflict, they play a large part. The peace of mind that
accompanies a sense of conformity to the will of rulers or of gods,
contrasted with the anxiety that follows infraction, gives a greatly
increased weight to that growing pressure of counter instincts which
comes so largely to override a man's animal nature. Most of the sources
of conscience thus date far back beyond the dawn of history. But they
can be pretty safely inferred from the earliest records, from a study
of existing savage races, and from the study of childhood. The definite
conception of "conscience" is very late, scarcely appearing until very
modern times. And the fact that conscience itself, even in its
rudimentary forms, was much later in growth than the underlying animal
instincts which it developed to control and guide, is shown by its
late development in the child-not, normally, until the beginning
of the third year. The early life of the individual parallels the
evolution of the race; and the later-developed faculties in the child
are those which arose in the later stages of human progress. But the
existence of our well-defined moral sense, with its significant role
in modern life, needs no supernatural explanation. It has grown up
and come to be what it is as naturally as have our language, our customs,
and our physical organs.

What is conscience now? It is a valuable exercise in introspection
to observe a case of "conscience" in one's own life and note of what
mental stuff it is made. When a number write down their findings
without mutual suggestion, the results are usually widely divergent.
Any of the original ingredients hitherto mentioned may be discovered,
or other personal factors. There may be present to consciousness only
a vague uneasiness or restlessness, or there may be a sophisticated
recurrence of the concepts of "conscience," "duty," etc. The one
universal fact is that there is a conflict between some primitive
impulse or passion and some maturer mental checks. Any sort of mental
stuff that serves the purpose of controlling desire will do; we must
define conscience in terms not of content but of function. There is
no such unity in the material as the single name seems to imply; and
whether or not that name shall be given to a given psychological state
is a matter of usage in which there is considerable variation.

In general, we reserve the name "conscience" for the vaguer and more
elusive restraints and leadings, the sense of reluctant necessity whose
purpose we do not clearly see although we feel its pressure, the
accumulated residuum of long inner experience and many influences from
without. Our minds retain many creases whose origin we have forgotten;
we veer away from many a pleasant inclination without knowing why.
These unanalyzed and residual inhibitions that grip us and will not
let us go, form a contrasting background to our more explicit motives
and often count for more in our conduct. The very lack of comprehension
serves in less rational minds to enhance their prestige with an
atmosphere of awe and mystery. These strange checks and promptings
that well up in a man's heart are which he must not dare to disobey.
The voice of God in our hearts we may, indeed, well conceive them to
be. The attempt to analyze into its psychological elements and trace
the natural genesis of conscience, as of morality in general must not
be taken as an attempt to discredit it or to read God out of the world.
For God works usually, if not universally, through natural laws; and
the historical viewpoint, that sees everything in our developed life
as the outcome of ages of natural evolution, is not only rich in fruitful
insight, but entirely consistent with a deep religious feeling. For
hortatory or inspirational purposes we do not need to make this
analysis; it has, indeed, its practical dangers. It tends to rob the
glory from anything to analyze it into its parts and study the natural
causes that produced it. The loveliest painting is but a mess of
pigments to the microscope, the loveliest face but a mess of cells
and hairs and blood vessels. There is something gruesome and
inhuman about embryology and all other studies of origins.

While we are analyzing an object, or tracing its genesis, we are not
responding to it as a whole or feeling its beauty and power. The mystery,
the spell, vanishes; we cease to thrill when we dissect. But knowledge
proceeds by analysis, and gains by a study of origins and causes.
And the temporary emotional loss should be more than balanced
by the value of the insight won. We need not linger too long at
our dissecting. The discovery that conscience is an explicable
and natural development does not preclude a realization of the
awfulness of obligation, the sacredness of duty, any more than
a geologist must cease to thrill at the grandeur and beauty of
the Grand Canyon because he has studied the composition of
the rocks and understands the causes that have slowly, through
the ages, wrought this miracle. So we need feel no sense of duty
is not something imposed upon human nature from without; it is of
its very substance, it has developed step by step with our other
faculties, slowly crystallizing through millenniums of human and
pre-human experience. In the abstract, then, we may say that
conscience is a name for ANY SECONDARY IMPULSES OR
INHIBITIONS WHICH CHECK AND REDIRECT MAN'S PRIMARY
IMPULSES, FOR A GREATER GOOD; any later developed
aversions or inclinations, judgments of value or feelings of constraint,
which guide a man in the teeth of his animal nature toward a better
way of life PROVIDED THAT THESE SUPERIMPOSED IMPULSES
ARE NOT EXPLICIT ENOUGH TO BE CLASSIFIED UNDER SOME
OTHER HEAD. For example, we may be pulled up sharply from a
course of self-indulgence by a conscious realization of the harm we
are doing to others thereby; this bridling state of mind, whether chiefly
emotional or more intellectual, we may call sympathy, or an altruistic
instinct, or love. But when we feel the pressure from these same
mental states incipiently aroused, when our motor-mechanism half
automatically steers us away from the selfish act, without our
consciously formulating a specific name for the new impulse or
recognizing any articulate motive, we are apt to give this mental
push the more general name of conscience. So if we consciously
reckon up, balance advantages, and decide on the less inviting
act in recognition of its really greater worth to us, we say we act
from prudence or insight, we are reasonable about it; while if
the grumbling of the prudential motives remain subterranean,
subconscious, they play the role of conscience. Conscience is,
on such occasions, but inarticulate common sense. Usually,
however, prudential and altruistic motives would both be
discovered if the dumb driving of conscience were to be
made articulate. The reverberation of parental teachings,
of sermons heard and books read, of the opinions and
emotions of our fellows, might be found, all bent and
fused into a combined "suggestion," a mental push,
a "must" or "ought," from whose influence we find it
difficult to escape.

The detailed psychological analysis of cases of conscience and the
study of its genesis are of no essential ethical interest, except as
they show us that the sense of duty is not an ultimate, irreducible
element in our consciousness, or make clearer to us its function and
value. Conscience is the general name for coercion upon conduct from
within the mind. The important thing to note is the useful purpose,
which, in its so widely varying forms, it serves. Whatever its sources
or its exact nature in contemporary man, it is one of the most valuable
of our assets. To a more explicit statement of its value we must now
turn. What is the value of conscience?

It would seem, at first glance, as if the development of reason should
make conscience unnecessary. When we are able to discern the
consequences of our acts, formulate and weigh our motives and aims,
what need of these vague pre-rational promptings and inhibitions? Why
not train men to supplant a blind sense of duty by a conscious insight,
a rational valuation of ends and means? Is not reason, as it has been
recently called, "the ultimate conscience"? [Footnote: G. Santayana,
Reason in Science, p. 232; where also the following: "So soon as
conscience summons its own dicta for revision in the light of
experience and of universal sympathy, it is no longer called
conscience, but reason."]

(1) Conscience is valuable on account of our ignorance. Individually
we have not had experience enough to guide us in our crises;
conscience is the representative in us of the wisdom of the race.
In many cases we should never reason out the right solution of
a problem; we lack the data. But we can lean upon the racial
experience. Many past experiences, now forgotten, have gone
to the molding of this faculty. The need of action is often imminent,
there is no time for the long study of the situation which alone could
form a sure insight into the conduct it demands. We need readymade
morals. Moreover, we are subject to bias, to individual one sidedness,
and to the distortion of passion; in the stress of temptation we are not
in a mood to reason judicially, even if we have the necessary data.
Altogether, insight, though in the long run the critic of conscience,
is not a practical substitute. What conscience tells us is more apt
to be true than what at the moment seems a rational judgment.

(2) Conscience is also valuable in view of our rebelliousness.
Conventional morality is external, and would continually arouse
revolt, were it not reinforced by an inward prompting. If external
motives and penalties alone bore upon us we should chafe under
them, and under the stress of passion or longing throw them aside.
Even if these external sanctions were reinforced by insight into the
rationality of morality, that insight might still leave us rebellious and
unpersuaded. Knowledge alone is feeble, marginal in our lives. We
often sin in the full knowledge of the penalties awaiting us. We need
something more dynamic, pressure as well as information. Conscience
is such a driver. Its commands weigh upon us, and will not be stilled.
Reason plays but a weak part in the best of us; and to counteract our
incurable waywardness, our recurrent longings for what cannot be had
without too great a cost, we need not only the presence of law and
convention, not only the weak voice of knowledge, but the stern
summons of this powerful psychological response. Nature was wise
when she evolved this function as a bulwark against our weakness,
a bit between our because of our forgetfulness. Over and over again
we say, "I didn't stop to think." If our conscience had been properly
acute, it would have made us stop. Insight, however comprehensive
and clear, is apt to remain somewhere in a locked drawer in our minds
when the hot blooded impulse appears. If we were but to pause and
reflect, we should be sensible and kind. But our intellect is dulled by
our emotions, it does not get working. We need a more instinctive,
a deeper-rooted mechanism, an imperious "Halt!" at the brief moment
between the thought of sin and the act. Conscience is not only a
teacher and a driver, it is a sentinel. Its red flag stops us at the brink
of many a disaster, and we have it to thank for many an otherwise
forgotten duty performed.

To sum up: Instinct and desire are lacking in proper adjustment to
the needs of life. Society seeks to control them by the pressure of
law and custom. These powerful forces, however, are external, and,
savoring more or less of tyranny, tend at times to awaken a rebellious
spirit in the hotheaded. So a perpetual antinomy would exist between
internal impulse and external constraint, were it not that that external
constraint is reflected within the individual mind by a secondary and
overlying set of inhibitions and promptings which we call variously
the "moral sense," the "sense of duty," or "conscience." We often do
not know or remember consciously at the moment of decision what the
law ordains or the wisdom of the race teaches. But we have an inward
monitor. We often hang back from a recognized duty. But we feel an
inward push. When the wrong impulse is pungent and enticing, and
the right one insipid and tame, when we would forget if we could the
perils of sin, conscience surges up in us and saves us from ourselves.
It is a mechanism of extreme value, which nature has evolved in us
for imposing on our weak and vacillating wills action that makes for
a truer good than we should otherwise choose. No wonder, then, if
we reverence this saving power within us, and crown it with a halo
as the divine spark in the midst of our grosser nature. The more we
revere it, the brighter the glamour it has for us, the stronger it grows
and the more it helps us. The apotheosis of conscience has been
of immense use in leading men to heed its voice and obey its leading.
Yet this blind allegiance has its dangers; conscience has often been
a cruel tyrant. It is by no means an always-safe guide, as we shall
presently note. And as men grow more and more adjusted by instinct
and training to their real needs, they will have less and less need of
this helmsman. After all, there is something wrong with a life that
needs conscience; it is a transition help for the long period of man's
maladjustment. Spencer looks forward, a little too hopefully, perhaps,
to a time in the measurable future when we shall have outgrown the
need of it, when we shall wish to do right and need no compulsion,
outer or inner. And Emerson, in a well known passage, writes: "We
love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous.
When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant
as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and
not turn sourly on the angel and say, 'Crump is a better man with his
grunting resistance to all his native devils.'" A Chinese proverb says,
"He who finds pleasure in vice and pain in virtue is still a novice in
both." The saint is he who has learned really to love virtue, in its
concrete duties, better than all the allurements of sin; to him we
may say, as Virgil said to Dante, "Take thine own pleasure for thy
guide henceforth." But until we are saints it is wise for us to
cultivate conscientiousness, the habit of obedience, even
when it costs, to that inward urging which is, on the whole,
for most of us, our safest guide.

F. Paulsen, System of Ethics, book II, chap. V, secs. 1, 2, 5. H.
Spencer, DATA OF ETHICS, chap. VII, secs. 44-46. S. E. Mezes,
ETHICS, DESCRIPTIVE AND EXPLANATORY, chaps. V, VIII.
Sutherland, op. cit, chap. XV. F. Thilly, INTRODUCTION TO
ETHICS, chap. III. Westermarck, op. cit, chap. V. Darwin,
DESCENT OF MAN, partt. I, chap. III. J. H. Hyslop, ELEMENTS
OF ETHICS, chaps. VI, VII. J. S. Mill, UTILITARIANISM, chap.
v. H. W. Wright, SELF-REALIZATION, part. I, chap. IV.




CHAPTER V

THE INDIVIDUALIZING OF CONSCIENCE

Conscience as we have seen, is the result of a fusion of elements
coming from personal experience and tribal judgment. In its early
phases the latter elements predominate; conscience may be fairly called
the inner side of custom. Primitive men have little individuality and
involuntarily reflect the general attitude. But with widening
experience and growing mental maturity, conscience, like man's other
faculties, tends to become more individual and divergent, until we
find, in civilized life, a man standing out for conscience' sake
against the opinion of the world. The individualization of conscience,
with the consequent clash of ideals, gives the study of morality much
of its interest and difficulty; it will be worthwhile to note some
of its causes. Why did not the individualizing of conscience occur
earlier?

(1) In primitive man there is not much opportunity for the development
of individuality. There are few personal possessions, there is little
scope for the exercise of peculiar talents, there is little power of
reflection, to develop strongly individual ideas. The self-assertive
instincts are to considerable extent still dormant for lack of stimulus
to call them forth. The individual is content to take his place in
the group life, and it seldom occurs to him to question the group-
judgment.

(2) In primitive life there is a drastic repression of any incipient
rebelliousness, through the enforcement of custom or explicit law in
the ways we have indicated; the fear of a heavy discouragement to any
innovator. If men dared to defy the community morals, they were very
likely to be put to death before the habit of free judgment had much
time to spread. There was thus a sort of artificial selection for
survival of the conventional type, and weeding-out of the freethinker
and moral genius. Even in historic times this process has continued
and been an enormous clog on human progress. The man of revolutionary
moral insight has had to pay the penalty, if not of death as in
the case of Socrates or of Jesus-at least of ridicule and ostracism,
of excommunication and isolation as, in our own day, with Tolstoy.
Many and many a saint who might have been a beacon-light to mankind
has lived under the curses or sneers of his fellows and died in
loneliness, to be soon forgotten. A few have, after years of opposition,
obtained a following and accomplished great reforms, as did Buddha,
Mohammed, St. Francis, and Luther. But none can count the potential
reformers, the men of new insight, of individual moral judgment, who
have been crushed by the weight of group-opposition. Man has been the
worst enemy of his own progress.

(3) There is another aspect to this selective process, noted before
in another context- the struggle for existence between groups. So
intense are these tribal struggles in early society that harmony within
a group is absolutely necessary. Individualization means
disorganization; and whatever communities developed free thought and
divergent ideas were at a disadvantage when it came to action. Many
such groups, ahead of their rivals in individual moral development,
were wiped out by barbaric armies that gave unquestioning obedience
to the tribal will and worked together like a machine. Up to a certain
stage in human development individuality was an undesirable variation
and was ruthlessly repressed, sometimes by the execution of the
particular offenders, sometimes by the destruction of the group to
which they belonged and which they by their divergence weakened.
What forces made against custom-morality? Against these repressive
forces, however, other forces were from early times urging men on to
reject the tyranny of custom. Those inward promptings that we call
conscience were continually tending to become less the echo of the
group conventions and more the expression of the individual's needs
and deepest desires.

(1) At bottom, of course, lay the natural restlessness and passions
of men, the impatience of control, the longing for liberty, and the
craving for self-expression. The combative instinct, pride, obstinacy,
and notably the sex-instinct, were from earliest times spurring men
on to a disregard of the conventional and the formation of individual
standards.

(2) We may make special mention of the love of power over others, which
has been one of the deep roots of the perpetual internecine struggles
of man. There is a need of leadership in every group; and this need
is felt more and more keenly as the groups increase in size. At first
the authority of the elders suffices, or of strong men who push to
the fore at times of crisis, as in the case of the so called judges,
the military dictators, as we might better call them, of early Israel.
But as Israel, grown in numbers, and feeling the need of greater unity
and readiness, clamored for a king, so generally, at a certain stage
of culture, permanent chiefs of some sort become necessary. Now the
chief, enjoying his sense of power, usually imposed his will upon the
people; his individuality, at least, had more or less free play. And
thus, through the changing decrees of successive rulers, all sorts
of varying standards became realized, and the rigidity of early custom
was steadily loosened.

(3) In the hunting stage of primitive life, and even in the pastoral
stage, there was little private property, and hence little opportunity
for the development of the acquisitive instinct. But with the
transition to an agricultural life, and still more with the growth
of commerce and the arts, private accumulation became possible.
Individual initiative began to pay; the smarter and more ingenious
could outstrip their fellows by breaking through the crust of custom,
while those who were hidebound by a conventional conscience were at
a disadvantage. To a large extent this lawlessness or innovation in
conduct came into conflict with the individual's conscience. But the
question "Why not?" would at once arise; if possible, a man would justify
his act to himself. And to some degree those new ways of acting would
swing conscience over to their side.