humanists.freeserve.co.uk

The Growth of Conscience

SIR WILLIAM MATTHEW FLINDERS PETRIE (1853 - 1942)

WILLIAM MATTHEW FLINDERS PETRIE, Egyptologist and scholar, was born at Chariton in 1853.

He was educated privately and at an early age evinced a predilection for archaeological studies and between the years 1880-1914, was actively engaged in excavations in Egypt. To this period belong the discovery of the Greek settlements at Naukratis and Daphnae, the Palaces of Memphis, and the Treasure of Lahun.
In 1905 he founded the British School of Archaeology in Egypt - an enlargement of the Egyptian Research Account which had been instituted by him eleven years earlier.

Dr. Petrie is ranked as one of the foremost Egyptologists. Many of his published works are of a highly technical character, and form valuable contributions to Egyptological research. Among these may be mentioned his "Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty", "Historical Scarabs", and the monumental "History of Egypt", of which he was the general editor and author of those volumes relating to the Dynastic period. Later works include "Egypt and Israel", the "Hawara Portfolio", "Scarabs", "Some Sources of Human History", "Hill Figures of England", and "Objects of Daily Use".


Dr. Petrie was appointed Edwards Professor of Egyptology at University College, London, in 1892, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the British Academy.

In 1898 Dr. Petrie delivered a series of lectures on "Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt", which threw a valuable light on this subject. The following source document formed part of that series.

THE GROWTH OF CONSCIENCE

Let us consider, somewhat briefly, what we mean by conscience; not by any means to construct an artificial definition of the idea, nor to argue as to its limits in relation to other conceptions, for that would lead us into the barren grounds of speculation. But rather let us look practically at the acts of others around us, and into our own minds.

Conscience is that mass of the intuitions of right and wrong, which are born in the structure of the thoughts, though they may often need development before the latent structure becomes active. A plant does not put out its leaves and flowers all at once; yet they are latent, and are inevitable if any development of growth takes place. And thus, perhaps, some can look back to a time when only one or two elements of conscience were yet active in their minds, such as a sense of justice and injustice, and they reflected then that no act would seem wrong or shocking if it was not unjust. Yet later on, as the mind grew (and growth or death is the choice of the mind, though the body may continue an animal existence), the various other elements of conscience unfolded gradually from some central stem (such as that of justice) which had first sprung up.

It is needful to remember thus that conscience is an inherited development, as much an inheritance in the structure of the brain as any other special modification is in the body - needful because in the consideration of the springs of action it has been generally the habit to deal with the individual as if he had a perfectly blank mind, and was only impressed by the facts of life around him in a perfectly calculating and unbiassed manner. On the contrary the untrained mind teems with prospects of every kind, possible and impossible, at every change of surrounding, and acts far more by impulse and intuition than by precise calculations of theoretical right or utility. This is seen most plainly in the waywardness of children and savages; the ideas of all kinds of possibilities are present, and the growth of conscience and of habit is not yet strong enough to determine uniformly which opening shall be followed. Thus we may look on each person as only a fragment of the common life of mankind, inheriting in his brain-structure a tendency to certain lines of action and certain choices between opposing claims. He is the heir of all his ancestors, and specially of those nearest to him; for, as Galton has shown by physical tests, inheritance of special characters rapidly diminishes in each succeeding generation, and there is a constant tendency thus to revert to an average type.

From this point of view we see at once how it is that the utilitarian — such as Mill or Herbert Spencer - can point triumphantly to the fact that the moral ideas of right conform to what is the greatest utility, though often a far-fetched utility to the race, rather than utility directly to the individual. It is not, as he assumes, that the individual argues carefully from utility to right; but, rather, that the stress of utility has throughout human history crushed out all those strains of thought that were least helpful.

Starting with the wild mass of wayward minds with infinitely varying choice of action before each, all those which were least useful in the long run went to the wall, found difficulties and hindrances to life prevail against them, and died out. Those minds whose impulses were the most useful and most regular and consistent succeeded best, and hence that type of brain descended to future generations. In short, utility has been the great selecting agent in brain variation as in bodily variation. And the result is that the great mass of inherited habits of thought, which we call intuitions or conscience, are those which in the long run are most useful to the individual and to his community in general; those which will lead his descendants most surely to success among their fellows, and which will help his community to hold its ground against others.

Here we have a complete explanation of the often distant and intricate utility of some intuition or moral principle, which may be directly opposed to the comfort or even the well-being of the individual. A mental type of a community which produces on the average a certain number of martyrs to conscience, may thus ensure to itself that strength which may lead it to success over the fallen bodies of its saviours; their conduct is strictly utilitarian, though it would be impossible to deduce it from any argument of utility to themselves. I have dwelt on this because it constrains us in the most decisive way to place utility as the blind selecting agent acting on the race, and not as the choice of the individual, and so explains the utilitarian action of the person apart from any argument in his own mind.

This clears out of the way the imperious, yet sole, argument against the reality of the rule of intuition ; and we are free to accept what is to some - perhaps to all - the obvious mode of working of the mind. We do not act by elaborate calculation of consequences, but by a certain sense of what seems the inevitable course in the circumstances; we follow our inherited intuitions, and the more we develop and unfold them, the more we let them rule over the mere impulse of the momentary feeling, the safer we are and the more surely are we in the way of right fulfilment. We are, then, trusting not to momentary expediency, but to the great growth of intuition, battered and lopped and toughened into its most sturdy and useful form by all the blasts of adversity that countless ancestors have endured, and by which they have been shaped. This is conscience.

In thus briefly glancing over the ground, as a mere explanatory preface to our view of Conscience among the Egyptians, we cannot possibly deal with the various constructive evidences by which we are led to this general statement: such as the examples of hereditary intuition and mental processes, apart from education; the parallels of physical inheritance; the manifest growth of a body of moral intuition, even in the midst of decaying societies where everything was against each fresh generation; the absence of conscience in most races where early marriage prevails; and the well-known advantage of the later over the earlier members of the same family in their mental ability, tact, and intuition, due to their inheriting a more developed brain. But we have here indicated that such a view of conscience, as a body of intuition gradually shaped by the stress of hard utility, and pruned of all its varieties that were not permanently successful, - that such a view is the key which fits the great puzzle of the strength of intuition and the prevalence of utility, as no other explanation can fit it.

This leads to the practical view of the paramount value of the proper unfolding of the inherited intuitions, and of the strengthening, selecting, and guarding of them by each person who is thus the temporary trustee of the great inheritance of the race. A duty to this precious growth is paramount over all other duties of life to the person, to the fellow men to whom the individual's character is the most valued part of him, and to those who may come after.

A rightly organised intuition of moral perception, of judgment, and of feeling, is worth any amount of temporising calculations, which always have to deal with unknown forces. And this is indeed most closely paralleled to our acquisition of knowledge in other matters. Probably few, if any, persons remember even a small part of what they read; and yet there is all the difference possible between a well-read and an ignorant man. In what does this difference consist if the actual words and facts are not remembered? It consists in the education of his intuitive knowledge, in shaping and leading the mind, so that without being able to quote a single exact parallel, he can yet frame a correct judgment on history or on present life, and say at once if an assertion is likely or a future event is probable. Often a book is read - perhaps most books are read - not to retain a single detail in mind, but in order to consciously modify or expand the general mass of opinion and knowledge in the mind. And this is one of the strongest revelations to us of the vast mass of organised intuitions which we unconsciously bear in our minds, to which we apply on all occasions, and by which we rule our lives.

Click the arrow below to go to the top of this page.

.