Conscience, then, is a witness respecting the identity
of the will and the reason effected by the self-subordination of the
will, or self, to the reason, as equal to, or representing, the will of
God. But the personal will is a factor in other moral 'syntheses'; for
example, appetite 'plus' personal will=sensuality; lust of power, 'plus'
personal will,=ambition, and so on, equally as in the 'synthesis', on
which the conscience is grounded. Not this therefore, but the other
'synthesis', must supply the specific character of the conscience; and
we must enter into an analysis of reason. Such as the nature and objects
of the reason are, such must be the functions and objects of the
conscience. And the former we shall best learn by recapitulating those
constituents of the total man which are either contrary to, or disparate
from, the reason.
I. Reason, and the proper objects of reason, are wholly alien from
sensation. Reason is supersensual, and its antagonist is
appetite, and the objects of appetite the lust of the flesh.
II. Reason and its objects do not appertain to the world of the
senses inward or outward; that is, they partake not of sense or
fancy. Reason is super-sensuous, and here its antagonist is the
lust of the eye.
III. Reason and its objects are not things of reflection, association,
discursion, discourse in the old sense of the word as opposed to
intuition; "discursive or intuitive," as Milton has it.
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