English / French · European moral psychology
conscience
Heard as KON-shence
- Period
- medieval to modern
- Semantic range
- In English, increasingly the moral word. In French, conscience still does moral and psychological work.
- What it can mean
- Moral witness, guilt, integrity, the inner court.
- What it should not be equated with
- Not simply the old word for consciousness. The English split is a history, not a discovery that they were always two things.
- Primary or early source
- English moral and religious prose; French philosophical usage.
- Scholarly source
- SEP seventeenth-century consciousness; Thiel.
- Relation to other terms
- After the split, the sibling of consciousness, not its inferior copy.