If the savage acts according to his conscience in killing and eating his enemies, and so, too, those who persecute others for religion's sake, is not this evidence that conscience is simply a matter of education? If not, what is its source? How may one recognize the voice of conscience?
A similar question was asked in the Theosophical Forum, and to it Mr. Judge gave the following reply:
"Conscience seems to be a faculty which may be stilled or made active. In my opinion its source is in the Higher Self, and as it comes down through plane after plane it loses its force or retains power according to the life and education of the being on earth. The conscience of the savage is limited by his education, just as were the consciences of the New Englander to the European religionists who destroyed men for the sake of God and Christ. We cannot assert that the men who indulged in religious persecution were not going according to what they called their conscience. By this I do not mean that conscience is a matter of education, but that the power of its utterances will be limited by our education, and consequently if we have a bigoted religion or a non-philosophical system, we are likely to prevent ourselves from hearing our conscience. And in these cases where men are doing wrong according to what they call their conscience, it must be that they have so warped their intuition as not to understand the voice of the inward monitor."
Conscience is inherent. It is the voice of the divine nature, seeking ever to make itself heard in the turmoil of our life. That the dictates of conscience are not the same to all alike is simply evidence of the varying limitations which men have built up around themselves. The sun shines for all, yet the powers of seeing vary. Some are blind, some can see but dimly, and some, though keen of sight, catch none of the glories of nature, of landscape and sea and sky. So, too, the voice of conscience speaks to all, though unheard, unheeded by some, and though the interpretations of its divine message be many.
All men come into the world with certain limitations, — their Karma brought over from the past. Some of these find expression in the circumstances and surroundings of birth, whether as a savage or in a thought-sphere of religious dogmatism, but besides these limitations, too often men wilfully blind themselves and build up new limitations in the present; too often men hear the voice of conscience and heed it not, and then fool themselves by substituting for this divine voice some brain-mind reasonable (!) conclusion which subserves their vanity or ambition. So easy is it to deceive ourselves with ideas of false independence — "false when it is used to support any one for a selfish purpose," — wrote Mrs. Tingley a short time ago — which "often tends to affect the minds of well-meaning people and through them disrupt organizations like our own which are based on interdependence and unity." One may know the voice of conscience in that it never speaks to gratify the personal self, but that its promptings are ever towards a wider service, a deeper trust, a fuller recognition of the divine in all. Like the sun-light it lays bare the cobwebs and the dark places of the heart, it reveals the chains which man has forged around himself, but thus it is that man may see to break these chains and to step out of the limitations that hedge him in, into the wider, purer life of the soul.