CONSCIENCE
26S
CONSCIENCE
ity was treated as equivalent to legitimate blood rela-
tionship. The courts regarded marriages within the
forbidden degree as voidable rather tlinii voirl, liutsuch
marriages were declared void by an act of !'i and (i Wil-
liam IV (1S35). In the United States all tlie States
prohibit marriage between lineal descendants; most
of them prohibit marriages between uncle and niece,
nephew and aimt, and Ijetween first cousins (Des-
mond, The Church and the Law, Chicago, 1898, C. X).
Genealogical Table. — We subjoin a genealogical table which exhibits the various degrees of consan- guinity according to a custom in use in the Western Church since the seventh century (Isidore of Seville"). This will be a useful guide in determining the extent of the impediment of affinity (q. v.). Affinity from a true marriage is a diriment impediment to the fourth degree of consanguinity of the deceased spouse; ac- cording to the ecclesiastical law a widower may not marry any of his deceased wife's blood-relations as far as the fourth degree inclusively, nor a widow her de- ceased husband's blood-relations. There is a modifi- cation if the affinity be one arising from illicit inter- course.
Feije, De Impedim. el Dispenx. Matn'rn. ^Louvain, 1885), ch. xiii, XXX. xxxi; Scavini, Theol. Mor.. Bk. Ill, De Imped. Matr.y art. 2 (Milan, 1858); De Angelis, Pral. J:tr. Can., vol. Ill, pt. I, tit. xiv (Rome, 1880); Taunton, The Law vf Ihe Church (Lon- don, 1906) s. v.; ZiTELLi, Apparat. Juris EccL, Bk. II. ch. ii, art. 7, p. 439 (Rome, 1888); Santi-Leitner, Prml. Jur. Can. (4th ed., New York, 1905), III, 245-61; Kenrick, Theol. Mor.. Tract, xxi. De Matr.. eh. v. (.Mechlin. 1861); Addis and Ar- nold, Catholic Dictionary (London, 1903), s. v.; Craisson, Man. Jur. Can., vol. Ill, Bk. II, ch. viii, De Imped. Cugnat. (Poitiers, ISSO); Laurentius, Inst. Jur. Can. (Freiburg, 1903), § 151; Andre-Wagner, Diet, de droit canon. (Paris, 1901), s. v.; D'A\TNO, Enciclopedia delV Ecdesiastico, s. v. Imped, del Matr. (Turin, 1878); Hastings, Did. of Ihe Bible (New York, 1902), s. V. Marriage; Cheyne, Encyclopedia Biblica (New York, 1S99), s. V. Marriage.
Richard L. Burtsell.
Conscience. — I. The Na.me. — In English we have done with a Latin word what neither the Latins nor the French have done: we have doubled the term, making " conscience ' ' stand for the moral department and leav- ing consciousness" for the universal field of objects about which we become aware. InCicerowe have to de- pend upon the context for the specific limitation to the ethical area, as in the .sentence: "mea mihi con.scientia pluris est quam omnium sermo" (Att., XII, xxviii, 2). Sir W. Hamilton has discussed how far we can be said to be conscious of the outer objects which we know, and how far "consciousness" ought to be held a term restricted to states of self or self-consciousness. (See Thiele, Die Philosophie desSelbstbewusstseins, Berlin, 1895.) In the two words Beviusstsein and Gewissen the Germans have made a serviceable distinction an- swering to our "consciousness" and "conscience". The ancients mostly neglected such a discrimination. The Greeks often used <pp6vr)(Tts where we should use "conscience", but the two terms are far from coinci- dent. They also used a-meioriins, which occurs repeat- edly for the purpose in hand both in the Old and the New Testament. The Hebrews had no formal psy- chology, though Delitzsch has endeavoured to find one in Scripture. There the heart often stands for con- science.
II. Origin op Conscience in the Race and in the Individuai,. — Of anthropologists somedo and some do not accept the Biblical account of man's origin; and the former class, admitting that Adam's descendants might soon have lost the traces of their higher descent, are willing to hear, with no pledge of endorsing, what the latter class have to say on the assumption of the human development even from an animal ancestry, and on the further assumption that in the use of evi- dences they may neglect sequence of time and place. It is not maintained by any serious student tliat the Darwinian pedigree is certainly accurate: it has the value of a diagram giving .some notion of the lines along which forces are supposed to have acted. Not,
then, as accepting for fact, but as using it for a very
limited purpose, we may give a characteristic sketch of
ethical development as suggested in the last chapter of
Mr. L. T. Hobhouse's "Morals in Evolution". It is a
conjectural story, very like what other anthropolo-
gists offer for what it is worth and not for fully certi-
fied science.
Ethics is conduct or regulated life; and regulation has a crude beginning in the lowest animal life as a re- sponse to stimulus, as reflex action, as useful adapta- tion to environment. Thus the amceba doubles itself round its food in the water and lives ; it propagates by self-division. At another stage in the animal series we find blind impulses for the benefit of life and its propagation taking a more complex shape, until some- thing like instinctive purpose is displayed. Useful actions are performed, not apparently pleasurable in themselves, yet with good in the sequel which cannot have been foreseen. The care of the animal for its young, the provision for the need of its future offspring is a kind of foreshadowed sense of duty. St. Thomas is bold to follow the terminology of Roman lawyers, and to assert a sort of morality in the pairing and the propagating of the higher animals: "ius naturale est quod natura omnia animalia docuit". (It is the na- tural law which nature has taught all animals. — "In IV Sent.", dist. xxxiii, a. 1, art. 4.) Customs are formed under the pressures and the interactions of ac- tual living, they are fixed by heredity, and they await the analysis and the improvements of nascent reason. With the advent of man, in his rudest state — however he came to be in that state, whether by ascent or de- scent — there dawns a conscience, which, in the devel- opment theory, will have to pass through many stages. At first its categories of right and wrong are in a very fluid condition, keeping no fixed form, and easily inter- mixing, as in the chaos of a child's dreams, fancies, il- lusions, and fictions. The requirements of social life, which becomes the great moralizer of social action, are continually changing, and with them ethics varies its adaptations. As society advances, its ethics im- proves. " The lines on which custom is formed are de- termined in each society by the pressiu-es, the thousand interactions of those forces of individual character and social relationship, which never cease remoulding until they have made men's loves and hates, their hopes and fears for themselves and their children, their dread ol unseen agencies, their jealousies, their resentments their antipathies, their .sociability and dim sense of mu- tual dependence — all their qualities good and bad, sel fish and sympathetic, social and anti-social." (Op cit.. Vol. II, p. 2(52.) The grasp of experience widen; and power of analysis increases, till, in a people like thi Greeks, we come upon thinkers who can distinctly re fleet on himian conduct, and can put in practice thi yvwOi ireavrdv (know thyself), so that henceforth th method of ethics is secured for all times, with indefinit scope left for its better and better application. " Her we have reached the level of philosophical or spiritua religions, systems which seek to concentrate all experi ence in one focus, and to illuminate all morality froi one centre, thought, as ever, becoming more comprt hensive as it becomes more explicit ". (ibid., p. 2(50.
What is said of the race is applied to the individua as in him customary rules acquire ethical character b the recognition of distinct principles and ideals, a tending to .a final imity or goal, which for the mere eve lutionist is left very indeterminate, but for the Chri: tian has adefpiate definition in a perfect po.s.session ( God by knowledge and love, without the contingenc of further lapses from duty. To come to the fullness i knowledge jmssilile in this world is for the individual process of growth. The brain at first has not the o ganization which would enable it to be the instrumei of rational thought: probably it is a necessity of oi mind's nature that we .should not start with the ful formed brain but that the first elements of knowled;
