 Conscience acts as a “witness” when it is consciously aware of some personal wrongdoing, whether of commission or omission. It “binds” or “incites” when it makes a judgement that some act should be performed. Finally, it “accuses”, “torments” or “rebukes” when it judges that some past action was either morally acceptable or it was not. Although it is difficult to see how conscience in the first sense—conscience as witness—can function as an application of knowledge to conduct, this seems less problematic in the second and third senses of the term, which harken back to the legislative and judicial senses of conscience found in St. Paul and pagan antiquity, respectively (D’Arcy 1961: 46). In any case, an example of the way in which conscience applies the natural law—whose principles are apprehended by synderesis— is articulated in Aquinas’s De veritate: