Page 327 - Complete Works of Dr. KCV Volume 1
P. 327

 just eclipsed and substituted by the voice of the wishes of a dictator or a tyrant or a religious, exalted personage. Therefore they had to have a series of conventions of dharma, or law, which were intended to curb as much the tyrant as the ordinary people. It was equality in the eyes of the law that dharma inculcated, to secure the freedom of every individual from the oppression of every other individual, however high or however low. So there was this dharma-shastra, the birth of the dharma-shastra. Conscience was expected to speak dharma, but if it did not speak the language of dharma, it was not conscience, it was not the voice of God!
That is how they began to regulate conscience. As you know that famous passage "conscience makes cowards of us all", which Shakespeare has used in one of his plays. Conscience was later on merely thought of as some thing that prevents us from doing evil, not doing the good. And so it seems evil doing is good, according to the ideas of power-politics people. Conscience was suppressed and everybody who spoke about conscience was laughed at. So, as recently as a few weeks ago, when a person said "my conscience is very clear", on a particular matter, some of us thought why not place the conscience on the table for vivisection, that is it has to oblige the law of my rationality. It cannot be considered to be a private matter which has absolutely no check, and so it has to be proved that it is rational. Conscience, then, must be rational. Reason, then, became more important than an inward voice. So reason, specially as we have learnt to know about it in the recent philosophic age as the age of reason, we find that reason is anything that can be proved by means of our perceptions that are our ordinary experience, and not that which transcends them. Unfortunately our whole conduct and our loss of virtue are matters not for reason to select out of our experiences, or experiences of conduct. As you all know that the age of reason claimed that conscience must be the language of reason, and this reason must be something that produces social harmony, and makes a savage society into a civilized or cultured society.
John Locke, and afterwards Rousseau, tried to show that the terms of the social contract, which he said makes for political society, are based on reason, not upon revelation. So revelation went out of the picture and conscience also went out of the picture. And as Hegel later on proved to our conviction, the institutions of mankind are mere objectified reason to which
































































































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