After thus distinguishing all that is truly _present_ in consciousness, from common remembrance, I surely need not undertake, at any length, to distinguish it from that peculiar species of remembrance, which goes under the name of _conscience_; though their similar etymology may have a slight tendency to mislead. _Conscience_ is our _moral memory_;--it is the _memory of the heart_, if I may apply to it a phrase, which, in its original application, was much more happily employed, by one of the deaf and dumb pupils of the Abbe Sicard, who, on being asked what he understood by the word _gratitude_, wrote down immediately, “_Gratitude is the memory of the heart_.” The power of conscience does, indeed, what consciousness does not. It truly doubles all our feelings, when they have been such as virtue inspired; “Hoc est vivere _bis_, vita posse priore frui;” and it multiplies them in a much more fearful proportion, when they have been of an opposite kind--arresting, as it were every moment of guilt, which, of itself, would have passed away, as fugitive as our other moments, and suspending them forever before our eyes, in fixed and terrifying reality. “Prima et maxima peccantium est pæna,” says Seneca, “_peccasse_; nec ullum scelus, illud fortuna exornet muneribus suis, licet tueatur ac vindicet, impunitum est quoniam sceleris in scelere supplicium est.”[43] “The first and the greatest punishment of guilt, is to have been guilty; nor can any crime, though fortune should adorn it with all her most lavish bounty, as if protecting and vindicating it, pass truly unpunished; because the punishment of the base or atrocious deed, is in the very baseness or atrocity of the deed itself.” But this species of memory, which we denominate _conscience_, and, indeed, every species of memory, which must necessarily have for its object the past, is essentially different from the consciousness which we have been considering, that, in its very definition, is limited to _present_ feelings, and of which, if we really had such an intellectual power, our moral conscience would, in Dr Reid's sense of the term, be an _object_ rather than a part.