kinds of knowing exercised by the undivided and indivisible self are plainly arranged in an ascending order, till at their summit they are crowned with the intuitional power which we may term, as we here do, the reason--the power of discerning necessary universal truths. But it is equally clear that of the powers below the reason--sense-perception and consciousness furnishing facts objective and subjective, memory restoring them before the mental eye, and the logical power rushing to necessary conclusions--none, either singly or together, can stand for the conscience. Sense and consciousness can give us only what is, not what ethically ought to be. The memory can but renew to mental view what was before known. The sense of logical necessity is clearly different from the perception of moral rightness and obligation. But the action of these antecedent powers or faculties supplies the conditions for the existence and action of the conscience--gives knowledge of the personal self and the relations of life, in the midst of which moral right and wrong and obligation and duty are developed and are seen to arise. Upon this knowledge, in which man knows himself and his relations to the world of which he forms a part, the soul rises to an outlook in the clear atmosphere of which the reality of ethical distinctions, duty and responsibility become visible. And to the crowning power of the reason, as rational insight, must be assigned the central function of this ethical perception of right and obligation--somewhat as to it belong, in another field of view, also the intuitions into the realities of time and space and the categories of substance, attribute, and causality. This position of the conscience as, in its fundamental action, a form of rational intuition, among the summit forms of the mind's powers, makes evident its relation of dependence on the entire complex of psychical faculties which furnish the conditions for its discernments and imperative. But there is something more. As we shall yet see, its total function, in guiding the moral life, includes the action of many of the common functions of both intellect and sensibility. =4.= The specific psychology of the conscience itself, under close and complete analysis, will disclose the following clearly distinguishable elements in its action. They reveal the nature of the conscience-power in its total complex reality. These elements are not separable in fact, but are distinguishable in the analytic thinking that examines them. ==Ethical Distinctions.==