The consciousness of an internal tribunal in man (before which
"his thoughts accuse or excuse one another") is CONSCIENCE.
Every man has a conscience, and finds himself observed by an
inward judge which threatens and keeps him in awe (reverence
combined with fear); and this power which watches over the laws within
him is not something which he himself (arbitrarily) makes, but it is
incorporated in his being. It follows him like his shadow, when he
thinks to escape. He may indeed stupefy himself with pleasures and
distractions, but cannot avoid now and then coming to himself or
awaking, and then he at once perceives its awful voice. In his
utmost depravity, he may, indeed, pay no attention to it, but he
cannot avoid hearing it.
Now this original intellectual and (as a conception of duty) moral
capacity, called conscience, has this peculiarity in it, that although
its business is a business of man with himself, yet he finds himself
compelled by his reason to transact it as if at the command of another
person. For the transaction here is the conduct of a trial (causa)
before a tribunal. But that he who is accused by his conscience should
be conceived as one and the same person with the judge is an absurd
conception of a judicial court; for then the complainant would
always lose his case. Therefore, in all duties the conscience of the
man must regard another than himself as the judge of his actions, if
it is to avoid self-contradiction. Now this other may be an actual
or a merely ideal person which reason frames to itself. Such an
idealized person (the authorized judge of conscience) must be one
who knows the heart; for the tribunal is set up in the inward part
of man; at the same time he must also be all-obliging, that is, must
be or be conceived as a person in respect of whom all duties are to be
regarded as his commands; since conscience is the inward judge of
all free actions. Now, since such a moral being must at the same
time possess all power (in heaven and earth), since otherwise he could
not give his commands their proper effect (which the office of judge
necessarily requires), and since such a moral being possessing power
over all is called GOD, hence conscience must be conceived as the
subjective principle of a responsibility for one's deeds before God;
nay, this latter concept is contained (though it be only obscurely) in
every moral self-consciousness.