Socrates heard an inner voice that only ever told him no
Socrates claimed a divine sign warned him whenever he was about to make a mistake, but never urged him toward anything. That image of a restraining inner voice is one of many ways cultures have pictured conscience, the faculty that produces remorse when we betray our own values and, some argue, guides us beforehand.
Conscience is usually described as a cognitive process that brings up feelings and reasoned associations drawn from a person's moral outlook, rather than a reflex triggered by the senses. How far it shapes judgment before we act, and whether that judgment should rest on reason or feeling, has been argued over since the end of the Middle Ages. Secular accounts tend to treat the capacity as probably inherited, with its content absorbed from culture, while religious traditions link it to an innate morality or to the divine.
Traditions frame it very differently. In the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, knowledge of good and evil accumulates in the soul through karma over many lifetimes. Zoroastrian teaching has the soul judged at the Bridge of the Separator, where those who denied their better nature suffer for it. The Buddha counted conscience among the Guardians of the World and tied it to a calm, well-directed mind. In Islam the related idea of taqwa, piety or guarding against evil, is described in the Quran as inspired by God, and Al-Ghazali held that people still freely choose between right and wrong.
Christian history is full of conscience colliding with authority. At the Diet of Worms, Martin Luther declared his conscience bound to scripture and refused to act against it. John Calvin pictured conscience as a battlefield. Catholic theology treats it as reason's final practical judgment, the conclusion of a moral syllogism applying a general norm to a particular case, and asks believers to examine it daily. Thomas More, who died in 1535, accepted execution rather than go against his. Cardinal Newman reportedly toasted conscience first and the pope second.
The conflict is ancient. In Greek tragedy Antigone defies King Creon's ban on burying her brother, appealing to an unwritten law and a deeper loyalty to the dead. Marcus Aurelius cast conscience as living by rational principles in harmony with the universe.
Source: Conscience
