1. Without pushing our inquiries back into the legendary lore of savage life, in which we find evidence of the idea in the social institutions and religious enactments of primitive races, it is among the Greeks that the word, if not the idea of conscience, first meets us. Perhaps the earliest trace of the notion is to be found in the mythological conception of the Furies, whose business it was to avenge crime--a conception which might be regarded as the reaction of man's own nature against the violation of better instincts, if not as the reflection or embodiment of what is popularly called conscience. It can scarcely be doubted that the Erinnyes of Aeschylus were deities of remorse, and possess psychological significance as symbols of the primitive action of conscience.[2] Though Sophocles is less of a theologian than Aeschylus, and problems of Ethics count less than the human interest of his story, the law of Nemesis does find in him dramatic expression, and the noble declaration put into the mouth of Antigone concerning the unwritten laws of God that 'know no change and are not of to-day nor yesterday, but must be obeyed in preference to the temporary commandments of men,'[3] is a protest on behalf of conscience against human oppression. And even in Euripides, regarded as an impious scoffer by some scholars,[4] there are not wanting, especially in the example of Alcestis, evidence of belief in that divine justice and moral order of which the virtues of self-devotion and sacrifice in the soul of man are the witness. Socrates was among the first teachers of antiquity who led the way to that self-knowledge which is of the essence of conscience, and in the 'Daemon,' or inner voice, which he claimed to possess, some writers have detected the trace {70} of the intuitive monitor of man. Plato's discussion of the question, 'What is the highest good?' involves the capacity of moral judgment, and his conception of reason regulating desire suggests a power in the mind whose function it is to point to the highest good and to subordinate to it all the other impulses of man. In the ethics of Aristotle there is a reference to a faculty in man or 'rule within,' which, he says, the beasts lack. But it is among the Stoics that the word first appears; and it is to the Roman moralist, Seneca, that we are indebted for the earlier definite perception of an abiding consciousness bearing witness concerning a man's own conduct. The writings of Epictetus, Aurelius, and Seneca approach in moral sublimity and searching self-analysis the New Testament Scriptures. It was probably to the Stoics that St. Paul was indebted for the word _syneidesis_ to which he has given so distinctive a meaning that it has coloured and determined the whole later history of the moral consciousness.