enistic Jew extremely well acquainted with the trend of Greek
thought in the third century B.C. It does not occur in the Gospels,
except in the story of the sinful woman whom Christ refused to
condemn--a history which, though profoundly in accord with the
sympathetic genius of Jesus, is none the less an interpolation in the
eighth chapter of the Johannine Gospel, so much so that Tischendorff
excised it from his last edition of the text of the New Testament. St.
Paul certainly uses the word once in the Epistle to the Romans, and
though known in the latter days before the advent of Christianity, we
may assume that mainly through that religion the word was popularised
throughout the world.

But what is the faculty which corresponds to the word conscience? We
shall find etymology of great assistance in giving precision to our
thoughts. The word is, of course, a derivative from the Latin,
_conscientia_, knowledge with, or together. Now, _scientia_ is the
simple knowledge of things by the reason, while _conscientia_ is the
knowledge which the reason has of itself; it is the realisation of
one's selfhood--the realisation of the _ichkeit des ego_, as the very
expressive German phrase has it, "the selfhood of the I". In English
philosophical language we commonly denominate this self-realisation
consciousness, a word of precisely the same etymological origin as
conscience. If, in the next place, the reason is occupied, not with
the reflex action of self-contemplation, but with moral action or the
discernment of right from wrong, then it is called, and is, no longer
consciousness, but _conscience_. Putting it technically, consciousness
is a psychological expression, while conscience is ethical.

Nevertheless, it must be most carefully remembered that the two
functions are performed by one and the same reason--immaterial and
indivisible in us. Truly speaking, there is no real, but only a
conceptual, distinction between the reason of a Darwin elaborating his
famous law, realising his selfhood, and acknowledging his obligations
to the eminent man--only less so than himself--who had simultaneously
lighted on the great discovery of the age--the law of organic
evolution. As Paul says of those manifold endowments of the earliest
Christians, "A diversity of gifts and a diversity of graces, but in
them all worketh the self-same spirit," so say we of the reason at the
very heart of our being, the sole, self-sufficing explanation