Return to Contents

Morality Prior To Conscience

Chapter 4

The Relationship Between Morality And Conscience

32. What has been said shows clearly that in the first development of human beings morality precedes conscience, because morality belongs to the first order of reflections while conscience belongs to the second. A singular but irrefutable consequence of this truth is that a state can exist where morality is really present in human beings without their being conscious of it. This fact demands our careful attention.

33. We wish to know whether conscience is present in the act of practical acknowledgement, the foundation of moral action. Conscience, we have said, is a judgment the individual makes on his practical judgment; it is a decision whether this practical judgment conforms to the law or not. When I make a practical judgment, therefore, must I at the same time make a speculative judgment on its morality?

The problem may at first seem simple but is in fact complex, because it consists of three different questions:

Does conscience, as a speculative judgment, form part of the concept of a moral act?

If indeed a moral act can be considered abstractly as different from conscience, can it be really posited without the accompanying act of conscience?

Finally, does conscience always accompany a moral act, not because of some intrinsic necessity but accidently, because of some cause external to the nature of morality?

We must now answer these questions.

34. I begin with a concrete case. A child at the age of reflection has already perceived human nature (direct knowledge), and is on the point of judging the worth of a human being, for example, an employee of the house. The child has a choice. Using the rule for measuring himself, he must either judge the other person to be like himself, that is, worthy of the same respect, and consequently not to be used as an instrument for his own ends. Or he must judge and regard the other person simply as an instrument of his will, to be made use of, like his dog or one of his toys; in this case the child makes himself the sole end and the employee merely a means. As long as the child, this human being, remains on the point of committing himself to one or other of the two opposing practical judgments, he has not posited a moral act.

He sees the two judgments as possible, one corresponding to the truth (direct knowledge), the other contradicting and opposing it. We must therefore ask ourselves: before the child pronounces one or other judgment does he, in order to effect a moral act, have to judge the judgments themselves, that is, judge the first in conformity with the law and the second opposed to it? In other words, for the practical judgment he is about to make (but has not yet made) to be morally good or bad, must he have formed a moral conscience about it, in such a way that without conscience, his practical judgment would be devoid of morality?

35. We might answer immediately that the child's practical judgment cannot be morally good or bad until he himself judges it so. But such a reply does not do full justice to the question, which is: does the concept of conscience form part of the concept of a moral act?

An exact reply requires us to start from what we have already seen, namely, that the function of morality and the function of conscience are different functions of moral reason. They are two reflections at different levels, one higher than the other, since the function of morality naturally precedes that of conscience. Their acts therefore are considered separately and as independent of each other (cf. 23-31). Consequently, in the order of concepts the act of conscience essentially presupposes that of morality and not viceversa.

36. I say in the order of concepts, because our discussion is about concepts. In the order of reality my conscience could certainly precede my moral action. In fact, this is what normally happens in developed human beings, who judge their actions before positing them. The moral action is first present in me as conceived, not posited (together with the practical judgment it is thought as possible). Then I make a speculative judgment on the mentally conceived moral action; this is an antecedent conscience. Thirdly, I perform the action to which I have committed myself. The last act in this sequence is, as the Scholastics say, the first to be conceived; the conscience which is posterior to the conceived moral act is anterior to the real act.

37. In the order of concepts what is judged is always presupposed by the judgment about it. Is the opposite true in the real order? If the moral act, conceived only in the mind, precedes conscience, what is the order of conscience and morality when the act is really posited and not simply conceived?

We must not confuse this second question with the third, which is to be discussed later and asks whether the moral act is in fact always accompanied by a moral conscience. It may perhaps be true that someone acting morally is always conscious of his moral act, but it could equally be true that this consciousness or conscience which constantly accompanies the moral act, does not influence the formation of that act.

The answer to the question is implicit in what has been said. The nature of a moral act is different from an act of conscience. Moreover, a moral act belongs to a function of moral reason, while an act of conscience belongs to some other function. Furthermore, a moral act is an act of first reflection while conscience is never less than second reflection. Consequently, a moral act need not always and necessarily be joined to an act of conscience, which does not have to begin before the moral act is completed. A moral act, therefore, can really subsist without being preceded by an act of conscience.

38. However, as we have said, the real acts are in fact often preceded by conscience. If not, they easily escape our observation. For this reason we have difficulty in understanding the problem. We judge our future action good or, more often, malicious, and we act with this conscience, which determines the merit attributed to us. This may be the present state of our developed humanity, which is able to reflect at a very high level. But was it always and necessarily so? The real problem is whether an act of whose morality we are not conscious is moral or not. Such a problem can be solved by concentrating only on what necessarily happens, not on what simply happens.

39. What I have written about the morality of human actions will be of great help in solving the problem. A clear concept of rational law (the source of all law) is necessary to understand my meaning correctly.
The essence of natural law can be summed up as follows: 'A human being acts justly when he acknowledges and esteems the beings he has perceived for what they are.' We do not need the abstract concept of law to be able to function morally, nor do we need to know explicitly how to state, for example, the principle that we must give all beings their due. In order to act justly and therefore morally, it is enough for us to give to the beings we conceive what is theirs, without considering anything else.

Such an acknowledgement, which accords with truth, that is, with the entity of the perceived being, can be natural and instinctive; we can do it without thinking of anything else, in such a way that every time we act, we simply say to ourselves: 'This being has this amount of beingness; I esteem it as such.' Without needing anything else, we have 1. acted intellectively, 2. with our will, 3. and according to the rule of what is just, that is, according to the entity we have perceived. We have therefore acted in a human, moral way. We may not yet be able to talk about law or utter the word 'obligation'; we may not reflect on what we do, but we act according to the movement of our good nature, according to the natural, rational order which indicates the way we should act. This is morality in human beings prior to the formation of conscience. It is a state which justly demands the attention and consideration of philosophers.

40. The answer to the second question helps us to solve the third, which is: 'If the act of conscience is not part of the moral act nor necessarily present in the real production of a moral act, does it in fact always accompany a moral act for some accidental reason?' We believe the answer is negative for the following reasons.

41. Analysis of a practical judgment invariably indicates that it is composed of only two elements: 1. direct knowledge of intelligent beings, in whom our moral acts terminate (rule, law, truth); 2. practical reflection on the beings conceived in direct knowledge (adhesion to the rule, law, truth). Nothing more seems required for this judgment.

42. If a moral act needs only these two elements, we cannot affirm that it is always accompanied by conscience (which is a third element) unless we have a sufficient reason for explaining the formation of an act of conscience along with a moral act.

This sufficient reason is even more necessary if we are to affirm confidently that we are always aware of the morality of what we do. Such an awareness would require an altogether special explanation because it militates against the general law that 'our acts can exist in us without our being aware of them' or, as I have often noted about this fact of nature, 'each of our acts is unknown to itself.'
Only a sufficient reason could show that morality is always accompanied by awareness and explain this constant union of morality and conscience, which are per se two different things, as we have seen.

43. Observation of each moral act would help little, because observation would apply only to the particular cases observed. But by analogy, observation of a great number of cases would indicate some probability concerning those unobserved cases.(17) However, accurate observation of individual cases is difficult. If there are moral acts in us of whose morality we are unaware, it must be difficult to observe them. The fact that we lack awareness of their morality is a clear indication that we reflected very little upon them when we did them. They have not, as it were, escaped our thought and will; they have escaped our deliberate reflection. Furthermore, acts that take place in us with little or no reflection(18) leave in our memory very weak and easily erased traces, if indeed they leave anything observable.

In addition, as adults, or when our faculties have been activated, we are ceaselessly activated by the goad of innumerable sensations, and have continually before us the purpose of our actions, which keeps all our powers ceaselessly alert and active. This allows us to perform a quantity of moral acts with reflection, deliberation, and an acute conscience, which serves as their proximate rule. These actions, splendidly illuminated for our spirit by the light of reflection and conscience, attract our full attention and prevent the spirit from observing the weaker, less important actions which escape both general reflection and the moral reflection suitable for constituting conscience. The eye of our spirit has an experience similar to that of our natural eye when it passes from a brightly lit room to one poorly lit: it has the impression of being in total darkness, unable to see objects, which, although not totally dark, are barely visible.

44. Experience, if it has anything to offer, supports the opinion that moral acts take place in us without our being aware of them. As we have said, it is a constant law that our acts are per se unknown to themselves and independent of our awareness of them (cf. 42). Furthermore, as we see when we deliberately examine our actions, we often say to ourselves: 'I have made a mistake; I can see it now', and we try to determine how much harm we have done. We reproach ourselves for not having thought about it previously, and gradually discover the harm present but not adverted to when we did the action. We were too busy causing the damage to think about it.

45. This point is further strengthened by the common opinion of the learned that no human action is indifferent; all actions are either morally good or bad (when I have the opportunity, I shall examine possible exceptions to this opinion, but it is certainly true generally speaking).

But can we in fact pass a moral judgment on every action we do? The smallest actions in our life are linked together, are rational and willed; they are therefore human, and consequently just or unjust. But can we say that they are always accompanied by judgments about their morality, especially when our reason and will perform them more through habit than through deliberate act? Little thought is required to see that we do a great many things without comparing them with the law in order to discover, with yet another act, whether they conform to or deviate from the law. Nevertheless conformity or deviance are present because they form part of the nature of our willed action, from which however they have not been separated and abstracted, nor become abstractly known.

46. The abstract state of law, which is our subject, and the moral quality of actions demand our most careful attention, if we are not to fall into error.

The ideas we each possess have become highly developed, distilled and refined, and we have no difficulty in believing they have always been so. When we meet people who do not share similar ideas, we think they have no ideas at all. But this is a mistake. Sufficient attention has never been given to the initial state of the human heart and mind, and to the first stages of its development. Naturally we cannot observe ourselves directly because the first moments of our development have passed forever. Nor can we focus fully on infants, on the uneducated and on similar people unless we have an extraordinarily acute observation and an unrelenting application to experiment. We can only observe ideas, noting their essential elements and isolating them from our own state of mind which gives ideas a purely accidental mode.

47. If we do this, we are aware that the abstract idea of law, as society now sees it, is not necessary for the formation of the morality of actions. Law is now understood as an entity of its own, a being formed by reason, an independent principle directing actions. As a result it seems there can be no morality before we have compared our action with the mental abstract rule called law, which appears to have acquired a body, so to speak, by being spoken and expressed in words, propositions and the formulas of natural or positive precepts.

48. But relative to morality, the primitive state of the human race was quite different. At that time human beings did not need an abstract form of law to act justly or unjustly. It was sufficient to know intelligent beings, relative to whom they had to act and exercise morality, which always consists in a relationship between ourselves and the intelligent beings (cf. 29) we know. For example, as soon as we know someone like ourselves, the rule for our treatment of that person lies in the knowledge itself. We may not have heard the word 'law', or cannot say it because we do not have the least abstract, general idea of it. But someone like ourselves, that is, human nature perceived in someone like ourselves, is sufficient law for us. Simply by the perception of someone like us, we are in a position to exercise our will and freedom: we can give to that being an esteem and affection equal to that which we give ourselves, or we can do the contrary. We are therefore free to be good or evil, just or unjust, to that being. Acting like this implies no further reflection nor comparison of our action with the law, which as yet is not conceived separately. In a word conscience is absent.

49. Our enquiries can, therefore, be reduced to considering whether the moral act is always related to a reason sufficient to produce an act of conscience along with the moral act itself. We have already seen that conscience is not intrinsically necessary to the moral act.

Because this sufficient reason must be a stimulus capable of prompting a person to reflect upon the morality of what he does, the question can be formulated in the following terms: 'Can it be proved that the moral act produces as its consequence a stimulus causing a person to reflect upon his own act, judging it lawful or unlawful? That is, does the stimulus cause him to form a conscience?'

50. Our answer requires us to distinguish between human beings in a state of totally good and incorrupt nature, unaffected by serious temptations against morality, and human beings in a disordered state where virtue cannot be attained without a struggle.

51. A. I cannot conceive that anyone in a naturally good state, and operating uprightly, would simultaneously be stimulated to form a conscience for himself. On the other hand, I cannot conceive that he could carry out an immoral act without feeling some stimulus prompting him to judge his act as guilty and blameworthy. In other words, he would in these circumstances form a conscience.

52. My conclusion depends upon the fact that good acts are spontaneous and in harmony with nature. They are required and demanded by the laws constituting rational, human nature which, when not deformed and disordered, has an innate inclination towards them. Acknowledging willingly what we know necessarily, affirming the truth, telling ourselves that we know simply what we know, and accepting that we have perceived in beings the grades of entity that we have in fact perceived in them, is so natural, easy and simple that an evil act can be explained only by some power at enmity with our nature. When we give our willing assent to what is good in the beings we know and thus acknowledge them in practice, everything within us is tranquilly ordered and is as it should be; we suffer no disorder, disharmony or interior contradiction.

53. The opposite is true if an evil act is committed. When we do not want to acknowledge what we know necessarily, there is an inevitable struggle within us between what is willed and what is necessary. The will combats the truth in an interior, irreconcilable conflict: the truth can neither surrender nor change, although the will refuses to recognise and submit to it. Such a struggle must prompt human beings to reflect upon what they have done, or tried to do (evil is a confrontation with the truth rather than an attack upon it — truth is immune from violence and attack).

If humans follow their direct knowledge and simply acknowledge willingly the beings they know, adhering to them according to the quantity of goodness found in them, their action accords with the nature of things and reaches its term without producing any new movement in the agents themselves who simply rest in what they have done because their act of will has reached its term. There is no internal cause drawing their attention to reflect upon such an orderly, tranquil act, free from disquiet.

54. It is true that good will, acknowledgement of truth, and love corresponding to what is good bestow an agreeable feeling upon us. It is a law of our nature, or rather a universal law of all intelligent natures, that being, willingly acknowledged, is good for the person acknowledging it, and produces joy proportioned to its quantity. The act of recognition posits or completes order in the nature responsible for the act; it arouses a feeling of peace and pleasant harmony. This, we may think, should also prompt reflection.

But this is not the case. The pleasing feeling — and its displeasing, painful opposite — contains a moral sense which must not be confused with knowledge. Sense, feeling is one thing; knowledge is another. The distinction is highly important, and accepted by all, but understood by few.(19) Conscience, moreover, is not simply a feeling, but knowledge, true judgment about the morality of our act. Hence, although every good action of ours is accompanied by a feeling of pure moral pleasure (because it belongs to our faculty of moral feeling,(20)) not all our moral acts are accompanied by awareness. A good feeling is tranquil and restful; it possesses no extraordinary or adversarial qualifications. It is according to nature. And as we said, only what is extraordinary and novel excites our attention.

Why should we reflect in this case? We feel no disturbance from which we need to free ourselves through reflection. On the contrary, we prefer not to be distracted from our enjoyment by other thoughts. We are like people walking quietly along a road, free to devote ourselves to whatever comes into our mind, without paying attention to ourselves or anything around us. But if we tread unexpectedly on something sharp, we begin to think of ourselves and our pain, and how to stop or prevent it in future. It is always a need, or pain, or contradiction that distracts our attention from external objects, to which our faculties are naturally attracted, and makes us turn back upon what we are doing. In this way we are brought to judge ourselves and our acts. But if we had never experienced any difficulty, need or damage, we would never, of ourselves,(21) have turned to look at ourselves. We would have forgotten ourselves completely. Difficulties and sufferings confer at least this benefit upon us: they draw us back to ourselves and enable us to develop those human powers that have such a bearing on the events and fortune of mankind.

55. This phenomenon is explained by the way in which the pain felt by any part of us is somehow experienced by all our other parts and powers. Our perfect unity as subjects brings this about inevitably. The subject as such endeavours to rid himself of the disturbance by activating all his faculties, animal and intellective, and in particular rouses his reflection to help him in his pain. We may note, for instance, that bodily pain, although it has no direct effect on the understanding, becomes an occasion for bringing to bear intellectual action in defence of the whole suffering subject.(22)

56. But we must return to our main point. We lack a reason or necessity for reflection if we have a feeling only of natural, tranquil pleasure. This is the case when we act uprightly. Upright action does not cause disquiet or disorder in well-ordered human nature. The opposite is true of sin. Sin breaks the natural, normal order of human life; and the resultant disorder is always extraordinary, whatever its frequency. And as it is impossible for us to judge ourselves on each of the innumerable, continuous occasions when we act uprightly, so it is impossible not to feel some reproof, and turn back upon ourselves, when we offend against our direct knowledge, the natural rule governing our actions.

57. If all went well in us, we would not even take the trouble to think abstractly about the law; direct knowledge of beings would be sufficient for the presence of law. Sin, however, forces us to think of law in the abstract because we realise that we are doing wrong when we oppose the truth of direct knowledge with the energy of our evil. Our intelligence focuses necessarily on the duty we infringe, and consequently on a moral necessity (that is, on a law) obliging us to do the opposite. Mankind had never experienced the force of such law until it found the law in opposition to its desires, as the Apostle says: 'The law is not laid down for the just man but for the unjust and disobedient.'(23) 'The just person' is in full accord with the law, in which his will rests as if the law were one with him, not different from him; he has no need to consider the constituent elements of his nature. The unjust, however, cannot act wickedly without some internal, self-imposed admonition and reproof: 'For the evil man will question his own thoughts.'(24)

This characteristic of an evil will, in contradistinction to a good will, draws us to reflect on the relationship between what we do and what we should do. On the one hand we find an unassailable law; on the other, a vain effort on our part to violate the law and contradict nature. The matter is aptly described in the words of Genesis when the serpent tempts Eve to sin by promising her an increase in knowledge: 'Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.' The seducer kept his promise as the victims fell, but not in the way they expected: 'Then the eyes of both were opened.' The same point is made when God forbids them to eat of the fruit of a tree which he calls 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,'(25) that is, of moral good and evil. As they eat, they realise they have sinned; the tree is the tree of conscience.(26)

58. There is nothing repugnant or even improbable in the notion that innocent mankind, prompted by a healthy instinct, can make upright, practical judgments which bring contentment in their wake, without reflecting on the uprightness of the judgments themselves. In our initial state there seems no sufficient reason for innocent, contented mankind, prompted by right instinct, to be brought by some sufficient reason to reflect immediately on what has been done. In this state, mankind could go on acting virtuously in a pure and simple way without the reflective knowledge of which we are speaking; we could be good without realising it: we could feel the benefit of being good and enjoy it without pride because the human subject would not seek to know or say how good he was. His virtue, the result of moral spontaneity, would be perfectly simple. The power of free will becomes apparent only when it contradicts, not when it seconds, spontaneity. Hence Bede and other Fathers and writers understood the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as a symbol of free will because it reveals itself more in evil than in good.(27)

59. B. We have shown so far that when a person has acquired ideas of God, of himself and other intelligent beings that serve as the rule and measure of his esteem and love, there is no contradiction in the thought of such a person freely following the exigencies of these ideas by acting truthfully, that is, with uprightness and justice, towards what he knows. This can all be done without any need of reflection on his own actions in order to judge their morality and form a conscience about them. This state, in which we simply do good, without conscience, belongs to an upright nature which does good spontaneously, without effort or violence.

60. This explains why scripture often uses the phrase to judge in the sense of to condemn or to condemn evil without further qualification. For example: 'Judge not, that you may not be judged';(28) 'For God sent not his Son into the world, to judge the world, but that the world may be saved through him.'(29) And although 'to judge' is used here and elsewhere for 'to condemn', the opposite is not true: there is possibly not a single example in scripture where 'to judge' is used in the sense of 'to approve of.' I shall add one more example from the many which could be found: 'He who believes in him is not judged',(30) that is, not condemned.

I would insist that what I have said explains this use by showing that upright actions in conformity with nature do not require any explicit judgment distinct from the actions themselves. But wrong acts, out of harmony with nature, inevitably cause opposition and conflict, and lead to judgment. Division and duplicity spring from evil; union and harmony go hand in hand with doing good.

61. As we know, courts of law exist to try unlawful actions and settle conflicts. The same happens in the internal forum. We establish a tribunal in our heart to judge unlawful, not lawful actions. Our conscience first comes into existence to judge bad, not good acts.

62. But this is no longer true of humanity in its present, disordered condition, as experience shows, sacred tradition teaches and even pagan thinkers lamented. Although a good, upright nature loves to act consonantly with its inclinations, a nature already inclined to evil can do good only with difficulty, and often at the cost of overcoming the obstacles caused by its own passions. As we have seen, mankind, when innocent, has to choose between opposing forces in order to desire evil. On the one hand, innocent human nature is motivated through the clarity of the idea of the being which exercises its moral action upon human beings; on the other, innocent humanity itself invents its own false good. A similar situation prevails when people are deceived by their own concupiscence and attracted to act in defiance of the law. In this case, an obstacle, their own evil instinct, impedes their acting in conformity with the law, and draws them to reflect upon themselves. From within they must now find the mental energy to struggle and choose between the idea presented to them and the evil inclination. And here we can discern a reason sufficient to move a person to form a conscience about his action.

63. Summarising our position, let us list the different situations in which we can find ourselves when we act:

1. Naturally good humanity possesses an animal instinct that either accords with the rational instinct or is easily conquered by it(31) because the beauty of the moral order (the exigency of ideas) has more power over innocent mankind than the sensation received passively from what is external.(32) In this case humanity acts spontaneously to second the known truth, without reflection and consequently without conscience.

2. If human beings are drawn to fix their attention enjoyably on a pleasant sensation opposed to the truth of what they know (and they can only be attracted by the word of someone else), they begin to weaken in their attitude towards the demands of truth. Their will is already at risk, and their inborn inclination strengthened. Having given their attention to what they have heard, they have mentally conceived the possibility of acting against the law and, as temptation begins to make itself felt, form a conscience.

3. When they deliberate about giving their willing consent to the specious good they have formed by arousing their imagination, they feel their error more strongly, and conscience becomes more insistent in them.

4. After their fall, concupiscence is generated in their heart. The inclination to evil becomes constant and habitual;(33) natural instincts are undermined and left to themselves as they are withdrawn from the supernatural influences of God to whom human beings were first bound by the tie of grace.

64. In this new state of humanity, concupiscence (the name we give today to all spontaneity and natural instinct damaged by sin) is subject to the same law of development as that which governed natural instinct in its pristine state. The first movements of concupiscence, therefore, are weak, but gain strength through repetition and the addition of free activity, which at first is passive related to concupiscence.

65. Besides the general rule governing its increase, concupiscence is found in everyone in infinite varieties, which cannot be foreseen or calculated but depend upon age and circumstances. As far as I can see, such subspecies of concupiscence, which sometimes flares up suddenly only to fade away almost to nothing, are not governed by any law.

66. We can, however, attempt to classify these 'outbursts' of evil concupiscence.

I. Sometimes concupiscence lies dormant. During these periods of tranquillity, we can consent to the demands of our ideas by means of the good, rational instinct(34) which, because it depends upon the truth of what is already known, is never absent in fallen human beings. This truth never fails, and never ceases to appeal to us — if it were to perish, we would understand nothing and would cease to exist as intelligent beings. Our quiet moments are those in which we can sometimes do good without reflection, and hence without conscience, even in our present state.(35)

67. II. At certain instances and in different circumstances, concupiscence increases to make temptations much more acute and overbearing, but not to the extent that it removes our capacity and power(36) for knowing the exigency of ideas (which constitutes our natural law) and consenting to them if we wish. This embattled state gives rise to the development of human freedom and to the extraordinary energy freedom shows in choosing which of two contraries pleases it more. The choice cannot be made, however, without reflection upon the opposing acts forming the choice, and hence cannot be actuated without a judgment about our actions, that is, without conscience.

68. III. Finally, concupiscence acts at certain moments with such rapidity and independence that it forestalls reflection, especially if this is generally slow to come into being. Sometimes the effects of concupiscence begin and end before reflection can come to the rescue, or at least before it has been able to draw from the contemplation of the exigencies of ideas the feeling of esteem and affection that can arm it against unjust desire.(37)

69. Such an occurrence may take place in two ways.

I. The movement of unjust desire(38) totally precedes the action of reason. In this case, it also forestalls the action of the will which co-operates only negatively by not rousing itself in time to prevent the impetus of desire. This is certainly a defect because no act subject naturally to the rule of will in a reasonable being should be withdrawn from this subjection. The will must rule; it must foresee, permit and approve, at least as basic cause, that which the animal part of the human being does. But the opposite takes place in fallen humanity which has lost its pristine state of well-being, and finds the various parts of its nature at loggerheads with one another. The organic unity humanity once enjoyed has been replaced by a double or triple partition in its being. Its animal part acts without reference to human nature even when this should intervene.

In this case, a human being's act is not necessarily provided with conscience, and may even be amoral if it is not of such a kind that the will could or should have foreseen, dominated, refrained from or modified it. I think it highly probable that animal instinct can act alone in the human being without the positive concurrence of the will. Observation does in fact show that animal instinct is a perfect power capable by itself of putting the animal in movement and action. And human beings, as animals, do not differ from brute creatures in whom instinct can be seen as an effective power or full cause moving the animal to act without any need for recourse to reason or will. It seems reasonable to conclude, therefore, that instinct alone is of its nature sufficient to activate the animal, that is, to bring all its acts into being, and it is not absurd to think that human beings also are capable, without the intervention of the will, of every act that does not exceed the sphere of animality.(39)

70. II. Sometimes, in moving the feelings, the desire acts with greater rapidity and violence on human beings than does the morally necessitating truth of ideas, which acquires its operative force only much later. In this case the will is under pressure and surrenders necessarily to the attraction of the apparent good. Weakened by the violence of the unruly desire and by its own weakness and slowness, the will has no time to suspend its assent (the will, too, depends upon laws of time for its operation).(40) Attracted by the movement of instinct towards some present good, the will accompanies the instinct in such a way as to be brought without express deliberation to its own practical judgment. More from inertia than from malice, it cedes to an unjust judgment almost forced upon it by deplorable seduction. In such circumstances the will, already inclined to specious good by a radical defect, feels little or no pleasure from the truth which it disregards for the sake of the seductive pleasure of concupiscence. Blindly, without deliberation, the will abandons itself to the pleasure available to it, and acts almost like the instinct. In this way, it can act without conscience, and even without fault, if necessity impels it.

This is what happens in children. But what I shall say later should help to clarify this teaching.

71. For the time being we can conclude that a morally good or evil act, in order to lack conscience, must be done instinctively, without deliberation, or under spontaneous motivation, when an act of different moral quality has so little force of attraction that it can be considered outside our powers of advertence. But although the moral act can lack conscience, it does not follow that it must do so. The force of wayward instinct and the habitual love of truth (of being) have many gradations. Conscience is lacking in the disordered act only when habitual love is reduced almost to nothing, and the wayward instinct is most assertive.

Notes

(17) Experience and observation certainly guide us in these investigations. But I distinguish the experience of particulars from that of universals. The former reveals little of itself but can, however, be of use when helped by the law of analogy, which is the foundation of induction and belongs to what I call the experience of universals. People satisfied solely with the observation of particulars deceive themselves about what they are doing. If they limited themselves only to particulars, as they claim, science would be impossible for them and their spirit would be reduced to the animal level.

(18) In ordinary speech, 'reflection' means any use of the mind. But I use it in its proper sense of that special function by which the mind turns back on itself and its cognitions (cf. 10-12).

(19) PE, 71-75.

(20) This faculty consists in feeling pleasure in moral good, and pain in moral evil.

(21) We say 'of ourselves' because we can easily be brought to reflect upon ourselves through speech in the company of mature people. However, even here we are assisted at least by our needs, interpreted by speech, if not by severe pain and discomfort.

(22) On the unity of the human subject cf. AMS, bk. 4.

(23) 1 Tim 1: 9.

(24) Wis 1: 9.

(25) Gen 3: [5: 7; 2: 17].

(26) I do not mean that mankind would not have felt some natural inclination at the sight of the beautiful fruit on the tree of good and evil. This desire, however, was initially prevented from exceeding its limits by the prevalent force of the beauty of order and duty. Perhaps no temptation could have put such beauty in our way if we had not willed it; of itself, beauty's power to tempt was infinitely small, incipient and scarcely perceptible.

(27) 'The tree of knowledge of good or evil is our own power of voluntary discernment, placed in our midst to distinguish good and evil. If anyone, abandoning the grace of God, tastes it, he shall die' (Bede, Gen. c. 2). 'As the tree of good and evil was present in paradise, so free will, which enables us to do good and evil, is present in the holy soul' (Egidius Romanus, Tract. de Paradiso, c. 5).

(28) Matt 7: 1.

(29) Jn 3: 17.

(30) Jn 3: 18.

(31) I mean accords with natural law because human beings, in their first, perfect state, were guided by the Creator in such a way that happiness and uprightness were always in harmony. There could, however, have been some opposition between positive law and animal instinct, although good will would have conquered the latter without difficulty.

(32) Every sensation is a principle of instinct. If a person receives a sensation passively without adding anything of his own to it, the sensation produces a very slight or inchoate instinct. Only through repetition of the sensation, and the assenting activity of the feeling subject, are the sensation and image reinforced to produce an affection that strengthens the instinct.

(33) This applies not only to inclinations of the flesh, but also to inclinations of the person as a whole, that is, to self-love. The twofold tendency is indicated by St. John in the words 'not of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man' (1: 13).

(34) Three feelings, and hence three instincts, animal, rational and moral, can be distinguished in human beings. The animal instinct is ordered to the conservation and perfection of animality; rational instinct aims at intellectual perfection; and moral instinct tends to produce moral perfection. Not every rational instinct, therefore, is moral; and moral instinct is more noble and sublime than rational instinct.

(35) This state is found most often amongst still incorrupt, developing peoples. [. . .]

(36) There is in each human being a unique, basic force of a certain quantity. I call basic force the power in which all our faculties are based, and which begins, exercises and exhausts itself in them. The more one faculty draws on this force, the less remains available for other faculties and acts. A person activated and intent upon one thing will necessarily lack energy for other things, and may even be lifeless in their regard.

I say 'lifeless' because the full development of a single capacity within us would absorb and demand our entire, primal basic force, and leave the other faculties totally inactive. Excessive pain, for instance, deprives a person of the use of his understanding and other faculties, just as intense intellective contemplation also withdraws him from pain, or from advertence to pain. The quantity of individual basic force appears, however, to differ from one person to another, and even to ebb and flow in the same individual according to remarkable laws which it is impossible to indicate in a footnote. The attentive reader will understand, however, that the study of these laws is a subject worthy of philosophers.

(37) This may be an animal appetite, or the appetite that draws a human being to make himself his own end.

(38) The unjust desire of which I am speaking is one destined to be subject to the command of the will. In a state of perfect nature, the will's command probably extended even to animal acts, at least negatively, in the sense that although not commanded, they were conceded and licensed by the will which, however, could not interfere with certain laws of animality. For example, the will could either allow the individual to sleep, or not. But once he had begun to sleep, it does not seem that the will could suspend or interrupt sleep. The extent to which the will is of its nature conditioned by animal laws has been discussed in AMS.

(39) For the distinction between will and instinct, and a description of the laws with which they act, cf. OT, and more detailed treatment in AMS.

(40) Several conditions are required for the will to attain free activity. As I have shown, one of these conditions is the formation of abstract ideas and of speech, the means by which we acquire abstract ideas. We are born with a will, that is, with an interior power of acting according to motives and reason, but we have to acquire dominion over this power in order to manage it as we will. In a word, we are not born free. Cf. OT, AMS.