senses impressions, those of the conscience commands or dictates. In
the senses we find our receptivity, and as far as our personal being
is concerned, we are passive, but in the fact of the conscience we
are not only agents, but it is by this alone that we know ourselves
to be such--nay, that our very passiveness in this latter is an act
of passiveness, and that we are patient (patientes), not, as in the
other case, SIMPLY passive.

The result is the consciousness of responsibility, and the proof is
afforded by the inward experience of the diversity between regret and
remorse.

If I have sound ears, and my companion speaks to me with a due
proportion of voice, I may persuade him that I did not hear, but
cannot deceive myself. But when my conscience speaks to me, I can by
repeated efforts render myself finally insensible; to which add this
other difference, namely, that to make myself deaf is one and the
same thing with making my conscience dumb, till at length I became
unconscious of my conscience. Frequent are the instances in which it
is suspended, and, as it were, drowned in the inundation of the
appetites, passions, and imaginations to which I have resigned
myself, making use of my will in order to abandon my free-will; and
there are not, I fear, examples wanting of the conscience being
utterly destroyed, or of the passage of wickedness into madness; that
species of madness, namely, in which the reason is lost. For so long
as the reason continues, so long must the conscience exist, either as
a good conscience or as a bad conscience.

It appears, then, that even the very first step--that the initiation
of the process, the becoming conscious of a conscience--partakes of