The Two Consciences Author:William Dennis Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. CONSCIENCE THE MORAL LAW. We may observe, in the development of our moral nature, a certain sense of right by which we are guided and assisted... more » in judging of and determining the moral character of actions or conduct as being right or wrong, good or evil, just or unjust; in other words, in forming our convictions of right. If we analyze this principle or capacity, we shall find it to be composed of two elements; first, a tendency or predisposition, apparently in- herent, to regard with satisfaction and approval certain qualities in actions, such as we represent by the terms benevolence, truth, justice, and the like, and to disapprove of their opposites ; and secondly, a conscious feeling of responsibility or accountability to some authority or power above us. The "approving and disapproving faculty" enables us to distinguish between the qualities of actions and to separate them into two classes, the approved and disapproved, but the feeling or sense of accountability is essentially necessary to enable us to assign to each of these classes its proper character as constituting the actions, to which they respectively belong, right, good, just; Appendix, Note C. or wrong, evil, unjust. And the ground of connection is this, that we both instinctively infer and rationally judge that what our moral nature is so constituted as to approve, is also approved by that power or authority above us which our moral nature is so constituted as to recognize. Moral approbation is, of itself, manifestly inadequate to the production of the result observed ; for, since by the use of language and by general consent the terms right and wrong denote respectively what is morally commanded or enjoined and what is morally forbidden or prohibited, it is impossible to regard actions o...« less