When scholarship, reason and conscience have made impossible the acceptance of Revelation as the bedrock of morality, the student—­especially in the West—­is apt next to test “Intuition” as a probable basis for ethics.  In the East, this idea has not appealed to the thinker in the sense in which the word Intuition is used in the West.  The moralist in the East has based ethics on Revelation, or on Evolution, or on Illumination—­the last being the basis of the Mystic.  Intuition—­which by moralists like Theodore Parker, Frances Power Cobb, and many Theists, is spoken of as the “Voice of God” in the human soul—­is identified by these with “conscience,” so that to base morality on Intuition is equivalent to basing it on conscience, and making the dictate of conscience the categorical imperative, the inner voice which declares authoritatively “Thou shalt,” or “Thou shalt not”.

Now it is true that for each individual there is no better, no safer, guide than his own conscience and that when the moralist says to the inquirer:  “Obey your conscience” he is giving him sound ethical advice.  None the less is the thinker faced with an apparently insuperable difficulty in the way of accepting conscience as an ethical basis; for he finds the voice of conscience varying with civilisation, education, race, religion, traditions, customs, and if it be, indeed, the voice of God in man, he cannot but see—­in a sense quite different from that intended by the writer—­that God “in divers manners spoke in past times”.  Moreover he observes, as an historical fact, that some of the worst crimes which have disgraced humanity have been done in obedience to the voice of conscience.  It is quite clear that Cromwell at Drogheda was obeying conscience, was doing that which he conscientiously believed to be the Will of God; and there is no reason to doubt that a man like Torquemada was also carrying out what he conscientiously believed to be the Divine Will in the war which he waged against heresy through the Inquisition.

In this moral chaos, with such a clash of discordant “Divine Voices,” where shall sure guidance be found?  One recalls the bitter gibe of Laud to the Puritan, who urged that he must follow his conscience:  “Yea, verily; but take heed that thy conscience be not the conscience of a fool.”

Conscience speaks with authority, whenever it speaks at all.  Its voice is imperial, strong and clear.  None the less is it often uninformed, mistaken, in its dictate.  There is an Intuition which is verily the voice of the Spirit in man, in the God-illuminated man, which is dealt with in the fifth chapter.  But the Intuition recognised in the West, and identified with conscience, is something far other.

For the sake of clarity, we must define what conscience is since we have said what it is not:  that it is not the voice of the Spirit in man, that it is not the voice of God.