CHAPTER V.

WHETHER CONSCIENCE IS THE SAME AS THE UNDERSTANDING, OR A FACULTY DIFFERENT FROM AND INDEPENDENT OF IT.

State of the question. SOME have maintained that our moral feelings and judgments are the exercise of a peculiar sense, and that the perceptions and feelings of this sense cannot be referred to the understanding. Such as maintain this theory suppose, also, that the dictates of conscience are infallibly correct, if the mind is in a proper state.

Truths premised. Others have maintained that the dictates of conscience are the judgments of the understanding, in regard to moral duty, and that, of course, an error in the judgment of the understanding must affect the decisions or dictates of conscience. To clear 41this subject, if possible, from all obscurity and perplexity, I would make the following remarks:

The act complex. 1st. The exercise of the moral faculty, or conscience, is not simply an intellectual act; it is complex, including two things—a judgment and an emotion, or feeling of a peculiar kind.

As judgment, it is intellectual. 2d. All judgments of the mind, whatever be the subject of them, appertain to the understanding. This comprehensive faculty includes all intellectual acts, whether relating to external objects, mathematical relations, natural beauty and sublimity, or moral duty. So far, therefore, as conscience is a judgment respecting any moral subject, so far it is an exercise of the understanding. We have not one faculty by which we discern physical truths, another by which we judge of mathematical theorems, and another for matters of taste; but all these are the one and the same understanding, exercised on different objects. Accordingly, when moral qualities are the objects of our contemplation, it is not a different 42faculty from the reason or understanding which thinks and judges, but the same, exercised on other subjects; and the only difference is in the object. Our conclusion therefore is, that so far as conscience is an intellectual act or judgment of the mind, so far it belongs to the understanding.

3d. More than intellectual acts in conscience. But as more is included under the name conscience than a mere intellectual act or judgment, and as this judgment is attended with a peculiar feeling, called moral, and easily distinguished from all other emotions; and as mere emotion or feeling can with no propriety be referred to the reason, therefore conscience is, so far as this is concerned, different from the understanding.

4th. Harmony of mental operations as to morals. If the moral judgments of the mind were from a faculty distinct from the understanding, and often differing from it, the harmony of the mental operations would be destroyed. While reason led to one conclusion, conscience might dictate the contrary. And upon this 43theory, conscience must always be correct, unless the faculty be morbid.

How far conscience is of reason. All experience and history show that men may act under the influence of an erroneous conscience. The dictates of conscience are always in conformity with the practical judgments of reason. When these are erroneous, conscience is erroneous. The conclusion therefore is that conscience is not a distinct faculty from reason, so far as it consists in a judgment of the quality of moral acts. Reason or understanding is the genus; the judgments of conscience are the species. Reason has relation to all intelligible subjects; the moral faculty is conversant about moral qualities alone.