In Search after Truth (Regulæ ad directionem ingenii ut et inquisitio veritatis per lumen naturale, Amsterdam 1701) he wrote the word with a gloss: conscientiâ, vel interno testimonio (translatable as "conscience, or internal testimony"). It might mean the knowledge of the value of one's own thoughts. One way that this shift during the seventeenth century from "conscience" to "consciousness" took place was through the poetry of John Milton, as the scholar Timothy M. Harrison has shown.

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