in the kind; the senses being morally passive, while the conscience is essentially connected with the will, though not always, nor indeed in any case, except after frequent attempts and aversions of will, dependent on the choice.  Thence we call the presentations of the senses impressions, those of the conscience commands or dictates.  In the senses we find our receptivity, and as far as our personal being is concerned, we are passive;—­but in the fact of the conscience we are not only agents, but it is by this alone, that we know ourselves to be such; nay, that our very passiveness in this latter is an act of passiveness, and that we are patient (’patientes’)—­not, as in the other case, ‘simply’ passive.  The result is, the consciousness of responsibility; and the proof is afforded by the inward experience of the diversity between regret and remorse.

If I have sound ears, and my companion speaks to me with a due proportion of voice, I may persuade him that I did not hear, but cannot deceive myself.  But when my conscience speaks to me, I can, by repeated efforts, render myself finally insensible; to which add this other difference in the case of conscience, namely, that to make myself deaf is one and the same thing with making my conscience dumb, till at length I become unconscious of my conscience.  Frequent are the instances in which it is suspended, and as it were drowned, in the inundation of the appetites, passions and imaginations, to which I have resigned myself, making use of my will in order to abandon my free-will; and there are not, I fear, examples wanting of the conscience being utterly destroyed, or of the passage of wickedness into madness;—­that species of madness, namely, in which the reason is lost.  For so long as the reason continues, so long must the conscience exist either as a good conscience, or as a bad conscience.

It appears then, that even the very first step, that the initiation of the process, the becoming conscious of a conscience, partakes of the nature of an act.  It is an act, in and by which we take upon ourselves an allegiance, and consequently the obligation of fealty; and this fealty or fidelity implying the power of being unfaithful, it is the first and fundamental sense of Faith.  It is likewise the commencement of experience, and the result of all other experience.  In other words, conscience, in this its simplest form, must be supposed in order to consciousness, that is, to human consciousness.  Brutes may be, and are scions, but those beings only, who have an I, ’scire possunt hoc vel illud una cum seipsis’; that is, ‘conscire vel scire aliquid mecum’, or to know a thing in relation to myself, and in the act of knowing myself as acted upon by that something.