So in relation to the idea of the _good_. It does not stand forth to the eye of consciousness, in the first instance, as an abstract conception. The _moral sense_--the affection of the sensibility in presence of voluntary and responsible action--is first revealed in the spontaneous consciousness. When we behold an act of justice, of kindness, of beneficence, we experience the fullest satisfaction. We admire and esteem the actor. We feel that his conduct is praiseworthy, and that he is deserving of honor and reward. These sentiments spring up spontaneously and involuntarily in our bosoms long before we have defined their reason and law. The reflective consciousness subsequently elicits the rational ideas which underlie these emotions--the ideas of the useful, the just, the beneficent, the noble, and the perfect, all which are finally embraced in the idea of the _good_. And the repeated comparison of the conduct of voluntary agents existing under certain relations, with the fundamental ideas of the reason, these standards of right erected in the soul, will result in an ideal of moral excellence--a true ἐθικόν. If this doctrine of conscience be the product of a true psychological method, it will enable us to account for the apparent want of uniformity in its suffrages in individual cases, and the varied phenomena presented in different men. Conscience, like consciousness, has its gradual development. Though natural and necessary to every human soul whose powers are normally developed, it is not exercised at the beginning of its existence, but only after certain conditions of growth and stages of growth have been attained. This development may be arrested or it may be perverted. The absence of proper conditions, the lack of suitable discipline and culture in any one of the faculties whose operation enters into the concrete phenomena, will modify the general result. An excess of _sensibility_ will give a morbid conscience; the lack of sensibility, a slumbering conscience. A defective apprehension of the relations in which we stand to God and to our fellow-men will prevent our seeing our specific duties. Inattention to the character of our own motives, or ignorance of the real intentions of other men, may mislead the _judgment_ in discriminating between the quality of actions. There are also natural differences in the soundness and accuracy of the judgments of individual men. We meet those who with a limited acquaintance with particular facts and abstract notions are nevertheless endowed with sound practical judgment; while others, with a larger knowledge of facts and general principles, are strangely defective in judgment. Finally, unless men accustom themselves to reflection, to analysis, the ideas of the just, the right, the good, do not come clearly into the light of consciousness. Hence the different manifestations of conscience in individual men.