will;—­and again, that as the identity or coinherence of the absolute will and the reason, is the peculiar character of God; so is the ‘synthesis’ of the individual will and the common reason, by the subordination of the former to the latter, the only possible likeness or image of the ‘prothesis’, or identity, and therefore the required proper character of man.  Conscience, then, is a witness respecting the identity of the will and the reason effected by the self-subordination of the will, or self, to the reason, as equal to, or representing, the will of God.  But the personal will is a factor in other moral ‘syntheses’; for example, appetite ‘plus’ personal will=sensuality; lust of power, ‘plus’ personal will,=ambition, and so on, equally as in the ‘synthesis’, on which the conscience is grounded.  Not this therefore, but the other ‘synthesis’, must supply the specific character of the conscience; and we must enter into an analysis of reason.  Such as the nature and objects of the reason are, such must be the functions and objects of the conscience.  And the former we shall best learn by recapitulating those constituents of the total man which are either contrary to, or disparate from, the reason.

  I. Reason, and the proper objects of reason, are wholly alien from
       sensation.  Reason is supersensual, and its antagonist is
       appetite, and the objects of appetite the lust of the flesh.

  II.  Reason and its objects do not appertain to the world of the
       senses inward or outward; that is, they partake not of sense or
       fancy.  Reason is super-sensuous, and here its antagonist is the
       lust of the eye.

  III.  Reason and its objects are not things of reflection, association,
       discursion, discourse in the old sense of the word as opposed to
       intuition; “discursive or intuitive,” as Milton has it.  Reason
       does not indeed necessarily exclude the finite, either in time or
       in space, but it includes them ‘eminenter’.  Thus the prime mover
       of the material universe is affirmed to contain all motion as its
       cause, but not to be, or to suffer, motion in itself.

Reason is not the faculty of the finite.  But here I must premise the following.  The faculty of the finite is that which reduces the confused impressions of sense to their essential forms,—­quantity, quality, relation, and in these action and reaction, cause and effect, and the like; thus raises the materials furnished by the senses and sensations into objects of reflection, and so makes experience possible.  Without it, man’s representative powers would be a delirium, a chaos, a scudding cloudage of shapes; and it is therefore most appropriately called the understanding, or substantiative faculty.  Our elder metaphysicians, down to Hobbes inclusively, called this likewise discourse, ’discursus, discursio,’ from its mode of action as not staying