  Like Shaftesbury, Butler held that conscience is a reflective principle. Shaftesbury asserted that “every reasoning or reflecting Creature is, by his Nature, forc’d to endure the Review of his own Mind, and Actions; and to have Representations of himself, and his inward Affairs, constantly passing before him, obvious to him, and revolving in his Mind,” (Shaftesbury 1699 II.1 [119] For Butler conscience is more specifically a reflection on prospective or retrospective actions of oneself and others according to moral principles. When we judge characters we reflect on actions in relation to the capacities of agents (“Dissertation on Virtue” §5). Butler presumes that all ordinary human beings have a sense of right and wrong in presuming that the moral principles are accessible for reflection, and that the many ways of describing this sense of right and wrong all point to one and the same capacity: “Conscience, moral Reason, moral sense, or divine Reason… as a Sentiment of the Understanding, or as a Perception of the Heart” (“Dissertation on Virtue” §1). There are a number of elements in the natural supremacy of conscience that help us to understand the nature of its authority.