Christian Morals Author:Andrew Preston Peabody 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: LECTURE IV, textit{CONSCIENCE. My subject to-day is Conscience. 1 would give as a provisional definition of conscience, ? It is the perception or feeling o... more »f right and wrong in voluntary human acts, whether our own or those of others. It bears a close analogy to what are called the bodily senses, and may not improperly be termed a sense. It has, indeed, no specific bodily organ; but the senses, commonly so called, belong no more to the body than the conscience does. It is not the eye that sees, or the ear that hears ; but sights and sounds ordinarily reach the mind through these loopholes in the body, ? yet not always; for I think that there can be no doubt that in somnambulism and other abnormal states objects are perceived without the intervention of these organs, and we certainly can conceive of perception independently of them in the disembodied spirit. The mind discriminates between acts as right or wrong in very much the same way as that in which it discriminates between objectstextit{PROVINCE OF CONSCIENCE. 83 as black or white, by immediate and what may not unfitly be termed intuitive perception. There is as much reason for believing the one sense as for believing the other to be innate. Nay, conscience seems even a more essential part of human nature than the bodily senses are. We regard a man born blind or deaf as none the less a man, entitled to all the rights and privileges of humanity ; but in the rare cases in which a person is wholly destitute of the moral sense, to whom murder seems as good an act as almsgiving, no matter what his mental capacity may be, we regard him as less than human, as not to be treated as a man, as more nearly allied to beasts than to his human kindred. I have said that conscience takes cognizance of voluntary human acts; but by a ...« less