CONSERVATIVES AND CONSCIENCE 29

old word almost out of fashionis essential to morality."

If the good old word conscience was almost out of

fashion when this Republic was founded, it has suffered

still worse since then; and, as Adams knew, the whole

world has suffered proportionately. Bentham endeavored

to reduce "conscience" to mere enlightened selfishness;

Marx declared that conscience had no function except as

a weapon of the expropriated against the guilty expro-

priators; Freud thought that conscience was nothing bet-

ter than guilt-complex derived principally from infantile

mishaps. But as men and women denied any significance

to the word and the concept "conscience," the world be-

gan to experience the dismaying consequences of a phi-

losophy that abandoned the ancient moral instrument of

private responsibility, individual conscience, and tried to

substitute instead some abstract "pleasure and pain"

equation in morals, or some amorphous notion of "social

justice" unrelated to personal duties and personal sense

of abiding laws of right and wrong. The atrocities and

catastrophes of our century, like those of Greece in the

fifth century before Christ, demonstrate the pit into

which fall sophisticated societies that mistake clever self-

interest, or new "social controls," for a satisfactory alter-

native to conscience.

Now "conscience," in the dictionary's definition, is "the

internal recognition of right and wrong as regards one's

actions and motives; the faculty which decides upon the

moral quality of one's actions and motives, enjoining one

to conformity with the moral law." Conscience is a pri-

vate matter: there is really no such thing as a "public con-

science" or a "state conscience." Conscience has two as-

pects: one governing the relationship between God and

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