Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/79

54 tell a white lie, or speak an unkind word, and conscience, if a little used to such things, never winces. But you bow to the wrong man in the street, or you mispronounce a word, or you tip over a glass of water, and then you agonize about your shortcoming all day long, yes, from time to time for weeks. Such an impartial and independent judge is the feeling of what you ought to have done. Shall ethics be founded on feeling, which to-day is and tomorrow is cast into the oven?

The traditional answer of the advocates of conscience, when these facts are urged against them, is well known. They say, various less dignified mental tendencies may at times be mistaken for conscience; but the moral sense is real and trustworthy notwithstanding all these mistakes. Shame, or love of praise, or sense of propriety may pass themselves off as conscience; but the genuine conscience, when you find it, is infallible. But we may still rejoin that, if the difficulty is of this nature, the consequence must be very much the same as what we are insisting upon. For if the question can arise whether a given impulse in me, which I take to be conscience, really is the voice of the infallible conscience or not, then this question cannot be decided by appeal to conscience itself; since the very problem then is: “Of two impulses, both pretending to represent conscience, which is the genuine conscience?” And questions of this sort must be appealed to some higher tribunal than the conflicting impulses themselves. It will not be enough to apply even Antigone’s sublime test to the warring impulses, and to