 This understanding of conscience as a deeper form of moral knowledge brings us to the second sense in which conscience can be said to have an epistemic role. As well as merely witnessing received opinions or divine laws, conscience can also be conceived as a moral sense giving us direct access to moral principles. Understood in this way, conscience is typically seen as intuitive and influenced by emotions, rather than a reason-based faculty. In particular, 18th Century sentimentalist philosophers often (e.g., Shaftesbury (1711) and Hume (1738–1740)) identified conscience with a moral “sentiment” or moral “sense”. According to Hume’s psychological theory, for instance, “reason is wholly inactive and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals” (Hume 1738–1740: book 3, part 1, section 1). Also on more recent accounts of conscience and of private morality, the dictates of conscience can be understood as expressions of our moral intuitions. According to Thagard and Finn (2011), for instance, “conscience is a kind of moral intuition” (p. 168) that is “both cognitive and emotional”(p.156).