8 Conscience and Conscious
I. PRELIMINARIES
Greek oida and Latin scio mean ‘I know’. The Greek verb can be compounded with the prefix sun or xun (sunoida), the Latin with cum which in composition becomes con-, giving us conscio. Sun and cum in isolation mean ‘with’. And sometimes they retain this meaning when they become prefixes, so that sunoida and conscio can mean ‘I know together with, I share (with someone) the knowledge that’. But sometimes they had a vaguely intensive force, so that the compound verbs would mean merely ‘I know well’, and perhaps finally little more than ‘I know’. Each verb has a train of related words. With sunoida goes the noun suneidesis and (its synonym) the neuter participle to suneidos, and the masculine participle suneidôs; with conscio, the noun conscientia and the adjective conscius. It will be seen at once that the double value of the prefixes may affect all these, so that suneidesis and conscientia could be either the state (or act) of sharing knowledge or else simply knowledge, awareness, apprehension—even something like mind or thought.
Our word therefore has two branches of meaning; that which uses the full sense (‘together’) of the prefix and that in which the prefix is—or may be treated for our purpose as being—almost inoperative. Let us for convenience call them the together branch and the weakened branch.
The richest and most useful developments of the weakened branch are in English comparatively modern, but some of its earlier and obsolete senses need to be noticed at once. I shall therefore begin with a brief glance at the weakened branch; then turn to the together branch; and in conclusion turn back to the weakened in its later condition.
II. THE WEAKENED BRANCH
We read in Diogenes Laertius (VII, 85) ‘Chrysippus says that the first property of every animal is its structure and the suneidesis of this’. Suneidesis here can hardly mean anything other than ‘awareness’. The Greek Lexicon quotes from Plutarch ‘to suneidos of the affairs’, presumably the knowledge of them. The Septuagint version gives us ‘curse not the king in your suneidesis’ where A.V. has ‘curse not the king, no not in thy thought’.
Latin usages of the same sort are numerous, but usually post-classical. Macrobius mentions one Vettius as ‘unice conscius of all sacred matters’—uniquely knowledgeable about or learned in. Where the Septuagint has merely ‘we don’t know’ (ouk oidamen) in Genesis xliii. 22, the Vulgate reads ‘it is not in our conscientia’. When Tertullian speaks of convictions lodged in our ‘innate conscientia’ or Lactantius of what is ‘clear to our conscientia’ some sense like ‘mind’ or ‘understanding’ is required.
It will at once be obvious that the French la conscience descends from the weakened branch; a Frenchman could perhaps use it to translate the conscientia of Tertullian and Lactantius. In Modern English the specialisation of consciousness for this purpose has left conscience free to develop almost exclusively the ‘together’ senses; a notable example of desynonymisation. But it is a comparatively recent achievement. When Gawain saw his hostess steal into his bedroom and tried to figure out ‘in his conscience’ what this might portend, the word must mean ‘mind’ or ‘thought’. In Shakespeare’s ‘Canst thou the conscience lack to think I shall lack friends?’ it seems to mean ‘sense’ or ‘gumption’. And this meaning, though finally defeated by those of the together branch, may have had subtle effects upon its conquerors.
One late Middle English usage is hard to account for. Chaucer apostrophises Dido as the ‘sely’ (guileless) woman, full of innocence, pity, truth, and conscience. His prioress sheds tears at the sight of a mouse in a trap because of her ‘conscience and tendre herte’, and that whole passage is ushered in by the words ‘for to speken of her conscience’ (l. 142). In Gower, Pompey ‘tok pite with conscience’ on the captive Armenian king (VII, 3230). In all these some such meaning as ‘tenderness’ (vulnerability, even excessive sensibility) seems to be required. The influence of the ‘together’ branch may have had something to do with it. There might also be a progression from ‘awareness’ to ‘extreme awareness’, thence to ‘perceptiveness’, the opposite of callousness.
III. THE EXTERNAL WITNESS
To the ‘together’ branch, to usages where sun- and con- have their full meaning, I now turn.
The man who shares the knowledge of anything with So-and-so can say ‘Sunoida (or conscio) this to So-and-so’. In order to avoid many cumbrous circumlocutions I am going to describe this state of affairs as ‘consciring’. But of course when everyone is consciring about a piece of knowledge (e.g. that the Sun rises in the east) it will never be mentioned. Consciring is worth talking about only when two, or a few, men share some knowledge which most men do not possess; in fact, when they are in a secret. The man who conscires anything with me is conscius (or suneidos) to me. The fact of his consciring is his conscientia (or suneidesis), his shared knowledge.
When Teiresias tries to evade the questions put him by Oedipus about the origin of the curse that has fallen on the city, Oedipus says ‘What? suneidos (though you are in the secret) you won’t tell?’ In the Antigone the soldier, questioned about the burial of Polyneices, says he will take any oath that he has neither done it himself nor tô xuneidenai—been privy to, been in the confidence of, anyone who did it (l. 266). Tacitus says that Sallustius had been interficiendi Agrippae conscius, privy to, in the secret of, Agrippa’s murder; or again, that when Tiberius practised astrology he ‘used the conscientia of a single freedman’, took only that one into his confidence, admitted no other witness of his proceedings. By metaphor, an inanimate object or an abstraction can be conscius, can have conscientia. In Ovid, Ajax, competing with Ulysses for the reward of having done best service in the Trojan War, says that his own deeds were all done in public while his rival produces ‘feats he performed without witness, feats of which only Night is conscia’—to which only Night was privy.
Hobbes, in a curious passage which is perhaps not very true to the idiomatic English of his own day, gives English conscious exactly the classical meaning of conscius: ‘When two or more men know of one and the same fact [i.e. deed] they are said to be conscious of it one to another.’
Since secrets often are, and are always suspected of being, guilty secrets, the normal implications of conscious and conscientia are bad. My conscius, the man who is conscius mihi, who shares my secret, who can give evidence about something I have done, is usually the fellow-conspirator; therefore the possible witness against me, the possible blackmailer, or at least the man who can taunt me with my deed and make me ashamed.
It was principally, I believe, a desire to imitate the Latin classics rather than a native English tendency that gave this sense of conscious (privy to) a great vogue in literature from the Restoration period down to the early nineteenth century. Thus in Denham the hunted stag flies through ‘the conscious groves, the scenes of his past triumphs and his loves’. The usage here is of course very flaccid; only the tiniest shade of mingled archness and pathos is gained by reminding us that these groves had witnessed his youthful battlings and ruttings. There is more point in Milton’s ‘So all ere day-spring under conscious night Secret they finished’. What they finished—the manufacture of the first artillery—was really secret and, in Milton’s view, abominable; personified Night was privy to their crime. The most interesting and most often misunderstood examples are in Jane Austen. In Northanger Abbey (ch. XXX) Henry Tilney is introduced to Mrs Morland ‘by her conscious daughter’. She was conscious in exactly the classical sense; knowing much which her mother did not know about Henry and her own relations to him, she was in a secret, shared a knowledge with him. This is ‘being conscious’; but you can also ‘look conscious’, look like a conspirator or accomplice. Mrs Jennings is sure that Colonel Brandon’s letter had something to do with Miss Williams ‘because he looked so conscious when I mentioned her’. He looked as if he had a secret on his mind. So in the same book (ch. XVIII) ‘he coloured very deeply . . . Elinor had met his eye and looked conscious likewise’. Many students whom I have asked to explain these passages were content with the theory that, somehow or other, conscious meant ‘self-conscious’. But this seems, without further explanation, an impossible bit of semantic history. No doubt when one is conscious, when one has a secret, one tends to be, and to look, ‘self-conscious’. Thus, if you like, the speaker’s meaning is ‘self-conscious’ in the sense that the mental state and facial expression she refers to would in fact be what we call ‘self-conscious’. But that is not the word’s meaning.
IV. THE INTERNAL WITNESS
Man might be defined as a reflexive animal. A person cannot help thinking and speaking of himself as, and even feeling himself to be (for certain purposes), two people, one of whom can act upon and observe the other. Thus he pities, loves, admires, hates, despises, rebukes, comforts, examines, masters or is mastered by, ‘himself’. Above all he can be to himself in the relation I have called consciring. He is privy to his own acts, is his own conscius or accomplice. And of course this shadowy inner accomplice has all the same properties as an external one; he too is a witness against you, a potential blackmailer, one who inflicts shame and fear.
Linguistically, the construction which represents this experience in the simplest form is ‘I conscire (this or that) to myself’. Thus in Aristophanes ‘xunoida, I conscire, many dreadful deeds to myself’—I know a lot against myself. Or in St Paul: ‘I conscire (sunoida) nothing to myself.’ The A.V. rendering, ‘I know nothing by myself’, not very good even when it was made, now completely obscures the meaning. The proper translation is ‘I know nothing against myself’. In Latin it is the same. Horace says that the ‘brazen rampart’ round a happy life should be nil conscire sibi, to know nothing against oneself, to have nothing ‘on one’s mind’. It will be noticed that the things conscired in the passage from Aristophanes and the things of which there are none to be conscired in those from St Paul and Horace, are evil. In the situation within a man, as in the situation between man and man, consciring is presumed to be of evil unless the reverse is explicitly stated.
Now the state of thus consciring to (or with) oneself is in Greek suneidesis (or, more rarely sunesis), and in Latin of course conscientia. ‘What is your malady?’ Menelaus asks the haunted matricide Orestes. ‘Sunesis’, he replies, ‘for I have done a dreadful deed and conscire it’. The Septuagint version of Wisdom reads ‘Wickedness condemned by an internal witness is a cowardly thing and expects the worst, being hard pressed by suneidesis’ (xviii. II). Close to this is Menander’s statement that if even the toughest man is aware of guilt, sunesis makes him a very coward. The same experience finds expression centuries later when the murderer in Richard III says that conscience ‘makes a man a coward’ (I, iv, 132) or Richard apostrophises ‘Coward Conscience’ (V, iii, 180). When you have a clean bill of moral health, that is, when you conscire no evil to yourself, you are eusuneidetos, have a good suneidesis. So in Latin, when what you conscire to yourself is good, or when at least you conscire to yourself nothing bad, you have a ‘good’ conscientia. ‘All wish to hide their sins,’ says Seneca, ‘but a good conscientia loves the light.’
One who conscires something to himself is of course conscius sibi, privy to himself, in his own secret; or suneidos heautô in Greek. It would be prudish not to quote the passage, worthy of Walt Disney, where Juvenal describes the mysteries of the Bona Dea (which excluded all men) as a ceremony testiculi sibi conscius unde fugit mus (VI, 339)—whence a (male) mouse hurries away, laden with the secret of its own virility. Exactly the same construction was current in older English. ‘If he be an impudent flatterer,’ says Bacon, ‘look, wherein a man is most conscious to himself that he is most defective . . . that will the flatterer entitle him to.’ So in Bunyan: ‘I am conscious to myself of many failings.’ A modern reader, carelessly ignoring the to himself and to myself, will think he has met conscious (d.s.) (in its dangerous sense of ‘aware’). He will have missed a shade of the real meaning.
As I have already said, consciring, whether to oneself or to another, is usually of evil, usually conspiratorial. It may, however, be of good, as in Sophocles: ‘being valiant, he is conscious (of it) to himself’ (hautô sunoide). When conscious or conscience are of qualities, not defects, a neglect of their precise meaning may be disastrous. Milton’s Eve drew back a little from Adam’s suit, so impelled by ‘her virtue and the conscience of her worth, That would be wooed, and not unsought be won’. We rub the bloom off the passage if we give conscience simply the meaning of modern ‘consciousness’ and take Milton to be telling us simply that Eve knew she was eminently desirable. It is far more delicate than that. It is (transferred to a woman) what Sidney attributes to a heroic king, the ‘secreat assurance of his owne worthines which (although it bee never so well cloathed in modestie) yet alwaies lives in the worthyest mindes’. A secret assurance. You must bring in the consciring. Eve’s beauty was a secret between Eve and herself, ‘worthy of sacred silence’ even within, neither Eve mentioning to the other what both Eves could not but know, her conscientia of it thus resembling a conspiracy in all but guilt.
V. SUMMARY
This inner witness, one’s own conscientia, or privity, to oneself, is already a sufficiently formidable idea. Quintilian (V, xi) quotes as a proverb conscientia mille testes; one’s own consciring is (as bad as) a thousand (external) witnesses. But we must also notice what conscientia, in the examples hitherto quoted, is not. It bears witness to the fact, say, that we committed a murder. It does not tell us that murder is wrong; we are supposed to know that in some other way. In this respect it is exactly like an external witness who gives evidence about matter of fact; the criminality or innocence of the fact has been fixed by the legislator and will be declared by the judge. Hence according to the usages we have considered it would make no sense to say ‘My conscientia tells me this is wrong’; it tells me simply that I have done this—for of course what we conscire is always in the past. Again, conscientia, so far as we have seen, issues no commands or permissions. Those can come from the law or the bench, but not from the witness box. To talk of ‘obeying’ or ‘disobeying’ your conscience, so long as that word remains in the semantic stage we have been observing, would be nonsensical. I cannot by any present action ‘obey’ my future privity to the fact of having done that action itself. Nor is there yet any idea of conscience as a separate faculty of the soul. The only faculty involved is knowing by memory. Suneidesis or conscientia is rather ‘a state of affairs’; knowing about your own past actions what others, or most others, do not know.
VI. THE INTERNAL LAWGIVER
The remarkable development of meaning whereby conscience, so to speak, passed from the witness-box to the bench and even to the legislator’s throne, must now be considered. Some such process is already foreshadowed in a fragment of Menander quoted by Mr Pierce: to all mortals suneidesis is theos’—which might be rendered ‘is a god’ or ‘is divine’, but hardly ‘is God’. More important is the influence of the New Testament.
Some of its usages quite clearly conform to the pattern we have already studied; suneidesis means consciring and sunoida means ‘I conscire’. Such are the passages from I Cor. iv. 4, noted above, ‘I conscire nothing (that is, nothing bad) to myself’; ‘from a pure heart and good suneidesis’; ‘a good suneidesis’; ‘with all good suneidesis’. But other passages are harder. ‘With suneidesis of the idol’ in I Cor. viii. 7 is possibly corrupt. There is a similar use of suneidesis with the genitive in I Pet. ii. 19, ‘It is meritorious if a man who is unjustly punished patiently bears his sufferings through suneidesis of God’. What this means, or how A.V. could get out of it ‘for conscience toward God’, I am uncertain.
I now turn to passages which may probably have contributed to the great semantic shift. In I Cor. viii. 10, St Paul says that if a ‘weak brother’, a scrupulous person, sees you eating meat which has been offered to idols—a thing, in St Paul’s view, innocent in itself—his suneidesis will be emboldened or ‘built up’ to do likewise. (This is a bad thing because, being scrupulous, he will probably be worried about it in retrospect.) What St Paul really meant is a question for theologians; we, busied about the history of a word, are concerned with what he would possibly, or probably, or almost inevitably, be taken to mean by succeeding generations. I believe this passage would have suggested to them (as to most of us) the idea that suneidesis here means, not consciring, but ‘judgement as to what is right and wrong’. The weak brother’s scale of values, or standard of good and evil, originally classified the eating of sacrificed flesh as a sin; under your influence, encouraged by your example, he alters his scale or standard, modifies his moral judgement. Again, in Rom. xiii. 5, we are told to obey magistrates ‘not only because of the wrath’ (because it is dangerous not to) but also ‘because of suneidesis’ (A.V. ‘for conscience sake’). Now it may be true in fact that St Paul only meant ‘Obey, not only for safety’s sake, but also because, later on, you will not like consciring to yourself that you have not’; it being assumed that we all know we ought to be law-abiding, and that the conscience or consciring of a failure in this duty will be a ‘bad’ conscience. But the passage very easily, indeed more easily, suggests that suneidesis here means our actual moral judgement (that men should be law-abiding). Similarly in II Cor. iv. 2, ‘commending ourselves to all men’s suneidesis’ may in fact mean only ‘showing ourselves respectable to all men’s knowledge’, sun- being of the weakened branch; but it can easily be taken to mean ‘behaving in a way which everyone’s moral judgement will approve’.
Whether the word is already taking on a new meaning in the New Testament or whether a new meaning, arising from different causes, led to a misreading of these passages and was then, by that very misreading, greatly strengthened, the change was certainly effected and the new sense remains current today. To trace it through the earlier Christian centuries would be beyond my learning and beyond our present needs.
In its new sense conscience is the inner lawgiver: a man’s judgement of good and evil. It speaks in the imperative, commanding and forbidding. But, as so often, the new sense does not replace the old. The old lives on and the new is added to it, so that conscience now has more than one meaning.
Theologians and scholars are aware of this and draw the necessary distinctions. Aquinas, who claims to be conforming to the ‘common use of language’, says that conscientia is an application of our knowledge to our own acts, and that this application occurs in three ways. (1) We judge that we have done this or that. (2) We judge that something ought, or ought not to be done. (3) We judge that our past act was good or bad. The first is conscire in the classical sense. The second, which really includes the third (synteresis or synderesis) is something quite different; something which will be named, according to the system we employ, practical reason, moral sense, reflection, the Categorical Imperative, or the super-ego. Conscientia in this second sense can be said to ‘bind’ and ‘impel’ (instigare), and can of course be obeyed or disobeyed. Our own Burton follows Aquinas in substance, but will not stretch the word conscience to cover synteresis. For him there are: (1) synteresis, which is knowledge of good and evil; (2) a dictamen rationis, a precept or injunction of reason which ‘admonishes’ to do the one and forbear from the other; (3) the conscience which then justifies or condemns what we have done. Jeremy Taylor makes the semantic situation unusually clear by noting the ancient meaning of conscientia—Horace’s conscire sibi—and saying that while this is correct so far as it goes it is not ‘full and adequate; for it only signifies conscience as it is a witness, not as a guide’. Under the name conscience we must also include ‘that which is called synteresis, or the general repository of moral principles’.
If popular language had followed these distinctions, much confusion, and perhaps not a little bloodshed, would have been avoided. But that is not the way of common language. It would have nothing to do with the word synteresis though it was ready to talk abundantly about the thing. It therefore used the single word conscience, sometimes to mean the consciring of what we have done, sometimes the Inner Lawgiver who tells us what we should or should not do, sometimes the inner nagger or prompter that urges us to obey the Lawgiver here and now, and sometimes other things as well. All the senses work upon, and in and out through, one another, and often, no doubt, men did not know themselves, much less make clear to others, exactly what they meant. There are, it is true, passages where we find synderesis in more or less popular texts. Deguileville in his Pilgrimage of the Life of Man defines it as the higher part of reason whereby a man can learn how to govern his conscience. This is intelligible but would not much help a reader who had never met the word before. In the Assembly of Gods (ll. 932–8) we learn no more, and perhaps the poet knew no more, than that synderesis and conscience are somehow connected. Nothing was likely to come of either passage. The word had no future and does not occur in Johnson’s Dictionary. Todd’s supplemented edition of Johnson (1818) gives it with an erroneous definition and quotes only one example.
Conscience is thus left with a maze—or, better, a simmering pot—of meanings which we must now try to investigate.
VII. SURVIVAL OF THE SENSE ‘CONSCIRING’
This continues to flourish unimpaired to the present day. We can still have a ‘guilty conscience’, that is a consciring of guilt; for it is certainly not the inner lawgiver who is guilty. Thus we find a ‘coumbred conscience’; ‘clearness of conscience’; a ‘grieved conscience’. The Prayer Book urges us to ‘examine our own consciences’ and suggests confession for any who cannot ‘quiet his own conscience’. Conscience is still the witness, though with added reference to the judge-before-whom, when Taylor says it ‘doth excuse or accuse a man before God’. A slight and not unnatural confusion is perhaps creeping in when Cranmer talks of feeling ‘our conscience at peace with God’. Why is it our conscience (whether as witness or lawgiver) rather than we who are at peace? Here, as throughout, we must remember the intense emotional pressure of the experience the words refer to; in this circumambient emotion the separate semantic rights, so to speak, of the culprit soul and the witness get confused.
VIII. THE LAWGIVER
We have seen that already for Menander suneidesis was theos. When synteresis (whether distinguished in name from conscience or not) is being thought about within a Christian frame of reference, the tendency to regard it as a separate, and special, and specially divine, faculty in man, will be increased. For the inner lawgiver must now be conceived either as God himself or as his specially appointed lieutenant in the soul. Who else could claim such legislative rights? ‘Conscience (suneidesis) is God’, says Tatian. ‘It is the whiteness of eternal light, the spotless mirror of God’s majesty and the image of his goodness’, says St Bernard; ‘the corrector and paedagogus of the soul’, says Origen; God ‘rules in us by his substitute, our conscience’, says Taylor, from whom I take these quotations. So in Milton, where God says ‘I will place within them as a guide My umpire conscience’. ‘I feel not this deity in my bosom’, says the conscienceless Antonio, scoffing, but none the less showing how those who did not scoff regarded the matter. Even hardier—for he spoke not ‘rapt above the Pole’ but standing on the floor of an Elizabethan House of Commons—are the words of Edward Aglionoy: ‘the conscience of man is eternal, invisible, and not in the power of the greatest monarchy in the world in any limits to be straitened, in any bounds to be constrained’. Less exalted in language but, well weighed, no narrower in its claim, is Butler’s assertion that ‘Conscience does not only offer itself to show us the way we should walk in, but it likewise carries its own authority with it that it is our natural guide; the guide assigned to us by the Author of our nature’.
Expressions of this sort are not, I think, to be found in the New Testament. They neither arise from it nor lead back to it. The claims made for conscience as something beyond ‘the power of the greatest monarchy in the world’ because it was God’s vicegerent will be repeated in later times by ‘conscientious objectors’ of all kinds; including those who claimed (in my opinion rightly) freedom to obey their conscience by maintaining that God does not exist.
One whimsical result of making conscience a name for synteresis is that the adjective ‘good’ when applied to it may now have a quite new sense. Immemorially—and still in the commonest usage—a ‘good conscience’, Seneca’s bona conscientia—means a good consciring, that is, a consciring of good or, more usually, a consciring of no evil. This is what it means in the Prayer Book when the compilers claim that it ‘doth not contain any thing which a godly man may not with a good conscience use’—anything which he would conscire to himself that he had sinned in using. But it means something totally different when Hall (1649) says ‘A good conscience will tell you . . . you are bound to make restitution’; if your synteresis or inner lawgiver is a good or sound one—if it is functioning properly—it will tell you this. The ambiguity is prettily seized by George MacDonald: ‘she was sorely troubled with what is, by huge discourtesy, called a bad conscience—being in reality a conscience doing its duty so well that it makes the whole house uncomfortable’.
IX. DIVERSITY OF CONSCIENCES
I must here, for a moment, adopt what I know to be a false simplicity.
The more boldly men claim that conscience is, directly or vicariously, a divine lawgiver and the ‘spotless mirror of God’s majesty’, the more troublesomely aware they must become that this lawgiver gives different laws to different men; this mirror reflects different faces. Hence we have consciences in the plural, not meaning those different conscirings which different men must obviously have but those different inner laws they acknowledge. Thus Whitgift writes that such an alteration of the Church as the Puritans demand would cause ‘offence to many consciences’—many men have a synteresis which will forbid them to accept it. Butler complains that the Presbyterians force all people to become ‘Saints’, though ‘against their consciences’. The preface to the Prayer Book mentions ‘such alterations . . . as should be thought requisite for the ease of tender consciences’, for some men have a synteresis so ‘tender’, so sensitive, that it forbids what others with a less exacting inner lawgiver would feel free to do. Hence, inconveniently, almost any man can claim exemption from the laws of the state on the ground that his own peculiar synteresis (is it not a far higher law?) forbids him to obey them, so that ‘nothing is more usual than to pretend conscience to all the actions of man which are public’. Pretend does not mean ‘simulate’, but ‘put forward’ or ‘plead’. On Taylor’s view such men are right in obeying their synteresis even when their synteresis itself is wrong; for it is man’s lawful sovereign and in such cases ‘the king is misinformed, but the inferiors are bound to obey’.
Hence arise the conceptions of ‘forcing’ or ‘freedom’ of consciences. Thus in Hudibras (I, i, 765) ‘Liberty of consciences’. Thus Robinson Crusoe, shortly before his departure from the island, finds himself absolute sovereign over a Protestant, a Pagan, and a Papist, but adds ‘I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions’. Everyone will remember Milton’s ‘New Forcers of Conscience’ in the sonnet. Language does not always make quite clear whether the liberty in question is that of having a certain synteresis, or of endeavouring by persuasion to make the synteresis of other men more like your own, or of obeying your own synteresis in overt action, or all three.
But this, as I have warned the reader, is an oversimplification.
X. PRECARIOUSNESS OF THE SENSE ‘LAWGIVER’
The over-simplification lies in the attempt to isolate the inner lawgiver from the intellectual context in which he speaks. No lawgiver, inner or outer, gives laws in a vacuum; he always has real or supposed facts in mind, an idea of what is, which influences his rulings about what ought to be. Thus the outer lawgiver ceases to make new statutes against witchcraft when he ceases to believe in it, and does not make vaccination compulsory till he thinks it will prevent smallpox. It is the same with the inner lawgiver. If you believe in the Christian God, synteresis will lay upon you many duties towards him, and if you disbelieve, it will not. If you believe in transubstantiation it will tell you to risk Tyburn by attending Mass, and if you believe the Mass to be idolatry it will tell you to risk Smithfield by abstaining from it. It is indeed extremely difficult to find a pure difference of synteresis, one that does not flow from different beliefs about matter of fact. Perhaps the belief that it is in any possible circumstances wrong to kill a man, or that non-Aryans have no rights against the Herrenvolk, or that justice is the will of the people, might rank as ‘pure’. But for the most part the imperatives of the lawgiving synteresis are conditioned by the indicatives of each man’s belief or ‘convictions’. The two together make up what would now perhaps be called an ‘ideology’.
Philosophers and theologians, no doubt, will usually draw the distinction and will see that the high claims which can plausibly be made for the imperatives cannot with equal plausibility be made for the indicatives. ‘Since you think A, do B’ might conceivably be a ‘divine’ voice. But the opinion that A is true—which may involve answers to all sorts of problems in ecclesiastical history, Greek and Hebrew scholarship, textual criticism, the nature of authority, international law, or the interpretation of Karl Marx—is clearly in a different position. Ordinary language, however, makes no distinctions. In it, your reasons for thinking the Mass holy or idolatrous and your consequent duty to go, or not to go, to it are both equally conscience. Side by side with this confusion, we have (I think) a faint influence from the Middle English usage mentioned above in section II—conscience as ‘mind’ or ‘thought’. As a result, we shall find the word sliding from the full sense of synteresis into that of profound conviction about truth and thence into that of mere opinion (about comparatively trivial matters), yet often carrying with it overtones from the idea of consciring. That is why I spoke about a simmering pot of meanings; any ingredient may be flavoured by any other.
XI. MIXED USAGES
We should all agree it was for conscience’ sake that Sir Thomas More refused to take the Oath of Supremacy. But in how many different senses? Urged by the Lord Chancellor to observe that all the bishops, universities, and scholars in England had agreed to the Act, More replied that he did not see ‘why that thing in my conscience should make any change’, for by going outside England and back into the past he could find a greater weight of authority on his side; ‘therefore I am not bound, my lord, to conform my conscience to the council of one realm against the general council of Christendom’. Here neither the Chancellor’s claim nor More’s answer has any bearing on the law given by synteresis that you must not swear what is false. The question at issue is whether the thing he is asked to swear to is false or not. If More had been an obscure private person, not called upon to swear but merely forming an opinion on Henry’s supremacy, the formation of that opinion would hardly have been a matter of conscience in the sense of synteresis. When he says that the decision of the English authorities will not alter his conscience, does he mean ‘will not alter my conception of my duty’ or ‘will not alter my view’ (on which, of course, the duty is based)? Probably both, but language does not of itself make this plain.
In this passage the indicative (Henry is not the head of the Church in England) and the imperative (Thou shalt not forswear thyself) are so closely linked both in logic and in emotion that the double meaning is almost inevitable. We come a little further when More, earlier in the same book, says it was not likely he would disclose to the government Tool (Mr Rich) ‘the secrets of my conscience touching the King’s Supremacy’. I think this means principally ‘my private opinion’, perhaps with some notion of consciring—‘the opinion to which I alone am privy’. Another passage from Roper carries us further still. The Chancellor asks Lord Fitzjames whether the indictment against More is ‘sufficient’ and gets the cautious reply ‘If the act of parliament be not unlawful, then is the indictment in my conscience not insufficient’. Fitzjames is giving a judge’s reply; conscience must mean ‘opinion’.
But I would not say it means simply ‘opinion’. The word has not completely lost touch either with the sense ‘synteresis’ nor with the sense ‘consciring’. This will perhaps become clearer if we add two other examples. Pepys writes, ‘The Duke did, to my Lord’s dishonour, often say that he did in his conscience know the contrary to what he then said’ (in a dispute about a game of cards). The disguised King in Henry V says ‘By my troth, I will speak my conscience of the King’ (IV, i, 119). In these, as in Fitzjames’s reply, conscience does indeed mean ‘what I think’ (or, in Pepys, ‘know’). But to get the exact shade of meaning I believe we should translate it ‘what I really think’, or ‘my honest opinion’, or (in Pepys) ‘he really knew very well’. That is how this usage is still flavoured by the other meanings of conscience. In all three examples we may infer some motive for evading or lying. If, despite this, you say what you really think or know, you are (a) uttering your conscience in the Middle English sense, declaring your actual mind; (b) obeying your conscience (synteresis) one of whose laws is ‘Tell the truth’; (c) revealing what you conscire to yourself as your secret opinion or knowledge. In the Pepysian passage there may lurk also the idea that my Lord will, after lying, have an unpleasant consciring (mala conscientia) of the fact.
The word may seem to have lost all trace of an ethical meaning when, as Taylor says, ‘some men suspect their brother of a crime and are persuaded, as they say, in conscience that he did it’. But even here there is probably some muddy-minded assertion that the suspicion is sincerely held and was honestly come by; combined, no doubt, with a monstrous, though only half-conscious, attempt to dignify it by all the lofty associations which the word conscience derives from the meaning ‘synteresis’.
XII. CONSCIENCE AS FEAR
Even in ancient times, as we have seen, a ‘bad conscience’, that is, the consciring evil deeds to oneself, was associated with fear; fear of possible detection and punishment by men, or of punishment by the gods whose detection was certain. The Christian doctrine of certain judgement and (highly probable) damnation naturally linked conscience and fear even more tightly together. From the consciring ‘I have sinned’ to the fear ‘I may be damned’ the transition became instantaneous and invariable, so that it was not felt to be a transition at all. When this process is complete, the word conscience itself may come to mean simply ‘fear of hell’.
The process has not gone so far in Milton when Adam says ‘O conscience, into what abyss of fears And horrors hast thou driven me!’ Conscience is still the driver into that abyss, not the abyss itself. A slightly further stage has been reached in Book IV (ll. 23 f.) where conscience ‘wakes’ in Satan, not the memory of guilt, but ‘despair’, the ‘memory’ of past bliss, present misery, and greater misery to be expected in the future. Conscience here is ‘of’ punishment, not of sin. So in Taylor ‘conscience is present with a message from God and the men feel inward causes of fear’. In Bunyan’s Holy War it is Mr Conscience who explains that Emanuel’s last messenger ‘was a messenger of death’. Similarly in Johnson, ‘he that feels himself alarmed by his conscience’, the fact that conscience, strictly speaking, testifies and thus is the occasion rather than the source of the alarm, disappears.
But some usages go beyond this. Latimer says ‘when with the eye of his conscience . . . he beheld the horror of death and hell’. Punishment has completely replaced sin as the object or content of conscience. Taylor, here again, is instructive. He says that, on ‘viewing’ the legislation of synteresis, conscience ‘binds to duty’, but on viewing ‘the act’ (our own past act) ‘it binds to punishment or consigns to comfort’. Surely he unwittingly uses the verb bind in two quite different senses, of which the first (obliging) is clearly proper to the inner lawgiver but the second (condemning to) is not, or not in the same way; it is an executive act and, if a command at all, a command to the hangman not the culprit. And indeed bind in this sense is barely English. I suspect that Taylor is trying to find room for ‘fear of punishment’ as one of the senses of conscience without admitting to himself that it has, historically, very little claim to that position and may even be regarded as a semantic degradation. The furthest stage of all is reached by Henry More—the last author in whom I expected to find it—who embodies this sense in a definition: ‘And first, of natural conscience, it is plain that it is a fear and confusion of mind arising from the presage of some mischief that may befall a man beside the ordinary course of Nature or the usuall occurrences or affairs because he hath done thus or thus.’ To be sure, it is only ‘natural’ conscience, pagan conscience, that he is defining. But he is ignoring the element of synteresis, the judgement of good and evil, even in it. His conscience would cover the merely prudential avoidance of ‘unlucky’ actions (Antidote, I, 10).
I feel almost certain that we here have the clue to Hamlet’s use of conscience at the end of the famous soliloquy (III, i, 83), where I believe it means nothing more or less than ‘fear of Hell’. I see that a case can be made for taking it to mean ‘reflection, thought’—an instance of the Middle English sense, belonging to the weakened branch. And this is even supported by the ‘pale cast of thought’ two lines later. But when we remember the passages already quoted from Richard III (‘conscience . . . makes a man a coward’, ‘O coward conscience’); and the close linking, which finally leads to the actual identification, of conscience with fear of punishment; and the fact that fears of ‘what dreams may come’ and ‘ills we know not of’ are the very reflections which have ‘sicklied o’er’ the native hue of Hamlet’s resolution; I think we must interpret the passage otherwise. In Latimer and Henry More we see the consciring of sin confused or equated with the fear of future suffering. Hamlet goes a step further. He says nothing at all about sins to be conscired; he fears future suffering, and he calls that fear conscience. It must of course be remembered that sins to be conscired, in every man, would be taken for granted. When once fear of the next world had been mentioned they would be understood.
XIII. RAMIFICATIONS OF THE SENSE ‘SYNTERESIS’
‘I will make a Star Chamber matter of it’, says Shallow. You may or may not bring Falstaff’s poaching before that tribunal; similarly, a man may or may not bring this or that of his actions before the inner tribunal of conscience; for most people think that at least some choices—say, having a boiled or a buttered egg—are ‘morally indifferent’ and do not fall under conscience’ jurisdiction. When we bring an act before the tribunal we make it a ‘matter’ (or ‘case’) of conscience just as Shallow would make poaching a Star Chamber ‘matter’. Thus Burton says of religious melancholics, ‘I see them make matters of conscience of such toys and trifles’. ‘Some think it a great matter of conscience to depart from a piece of the least of their ceremonies’, says the Prayer Book (Of Ceremonies). In these cases it is scrupulosity that burdens the court of conscience with unnecessary business. But moral laxity, eager for loopholes and hence fruitful in fine distinctions, may do the same; ‘when men have no love to God, and desire but just to save their souls, and weigh grains and scruples, and give to God no more than they must needs, they shall multiply cases of conscience to a number which no books will contain’.
Very often, where the thought to be expressed is exactly the same, the words ‘matter of’ or ‘case of’ are omitted, so that Burton can write ‘we make a conscience of every toy’; or in Bunyan’s Mr Badman we read ‘a family where the governors . . . made conscience of the worship and service of God’ (thought it their duty to have family prayers). So Taylor: ‘He is a good man, and makes conscience of his ways’—brings before the inner tribunal all that should be brought.
Some more difficult usages remain. ‘My conscience will serve me to run away from this Jew my master’, says Gobbo. Conscience here means, I think, not the faculty but the content of synteresis, not the lawgiver but the law he gives. There is nothing (or nothing that can’t be got round) in Gobbo’s internal Statute Book which rules out running away. To be sure, the rest of his soliloquy shows this claim to be far from true, but we are concerned with its meaning. Something of the same process possibly accounts for Hamlet’s ‘Is’t not perfect conscience To quit with this arm?’ (V, ii, 67). As we say ‘it’s the law’, meaning ‘it is what the law permits (or enjoins)’, Hamlet describes, perhaps, as ‘perfect conscience’ what any sound synteresis would approve. Along the same line we may reach Iago’s generalisation about the ladies of Venice, that ‘their best conscience Is not to leave’t undone, but keep’t unknown’. This might mean that the only (and therefore the best) precept contained in their synteresis is ‘Thou shalt not be found out’.
All such semantic bridges are, however, conjectural, and it is most improbable that the authors I quote could have enlightened us on the semantic history of their own expressions.
The words of the money-lender in Wilson’s Usury give rise to more than one problem. ‘It may bee’, he says, ‘there is some shifte to save a man’s conscience wyth all’. If save means ‘salve’, ‘heal’, or ‘soothe’, conscience will here be principally consciring; the usurer wants something which will silence the internal witness and make him feel comfortable. But he may speak of ‘saving’ his synteresis—as one ‘saves’ one’s credit or ‘face’—in the sense of enabling it without disgrace, without loss of all its high pretensions, to issue more lenient laws.
XIV. RETURN TO THE WEAKENED BRANCH
We have already observed that English conscious retained even to the nineteenth century the together sense and was therefore a synonym for Latin conscius. But a weakened sense was growing up at the same time. The noun consciousness had a similar history, for though it was formed later than conscience it was not formed in order to express a new meaning, but was at first a useless synonym.
The gradations between the original (together) sense of both words and that which both now bear are very fine. The extremes are clear. When they are used absolutely (‘the patient is conscious’, ‘the injection removed all consciousness’) the modern—and dangerous—sense is fully present. When either is followed by to the drift towards the dangerous sense (so far as concerns that author and that context) has not yet begun; thus the N.E.D. quotes from a seventeenth-century author ‘their consciousness to themselves of their ignorance’, and, more strikingly, from Berkeley ‘God is conscious to our innermost thoughts’ (Principles). Here the idea of consciring is obviously at work. In between these two extremes come the doubtful cases.
Of large and irregular assemblies Hobbes says ‘he that cannot render a particular and good account of his being amongst them is to be judged conscious of an unlawfull and tumultuous designe’. This is almost certainly the together sense; if conscious of meant merely ‘aware of’ it would imply no complicity; a government spy might be so aware. When Locke says ‘To be happy or miserable without being conscious of it seems . . . impossible’ the dangerous sense (‘aware’) is almost full-blown. Almost, but perhaps not quite. Locke may be saying something more than that an un-felt misery is not a misery. What that something more could be is apparent from Clarke’s definition, ‘Consciousness in the most strict and exact sense of the word signifies . . . the Reflex act by which I know that I think and that my thoughts . . . are my own and not another’s’. Consciousness is here something very like the medieval common sense, something distinguishable from mere sentience, and something whose absence would be not quite identical with what most speakers today call ‘unconsciousness’. There would still be a slight together sense—myself consciring my thoughts as mine. But notice that Clarke has to qualify this as ‘the most strict and exact sense’; a looser, and more weakened, sense was presumably current. I think Locke is using it, if not in the passage I have quoted yet in the very next paragraph, when he says the soul ‘must necessarily be conscious of its own perceptions’.
I am very puzzled as to what Pope meant when he wrote
The forests wondered at th’unusual grain
And secret transport touch’d the conscious swain.
If conscious here bears the dangerous sense, one wonders why we need be told that the swain who felt transport was neither fainting, asleep nor anaesthetised. If it means ‘consciring’, what was this mystery to which he was privy? Why, if it comes to that, was his transport so ‘secret’? What ‘touched’ him was the sight of ‘yellow harvests’, approved by ‘monarchs’. Or is it, as the following lines perhaps suggest, that the swain was in a secret because, in all this, he saw—and monarchs did not—‘fair Liberty’ beginning to rear ‘her cheerful head’? We are on firmer ground when Cowper speaks of having ‘borne the ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew’. This is the weakened sense, though not yet in its absolute use.
While these senses obviously belong to the weakened branch, there is no evidence so far as I know that they descend from that language in which the weakened branch flourished without rival; in other words that they were influenced by French. They are an independent effort of our own language to provide itself with necessary tools of thought.