theStech/trainer_dataset · Datasets at Fast360

source stringclasses 3 values	answer stringlengths 0 156k	extra dict
book	The psychological question is for most disputants the only question. When your ordinary	null
book	doctor of divinity has proved to his own satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called ‘conscience’ must be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your	null
book	popular- science enthusiast has proclaimed that ‘ apriorism ’ is an exploded superstition, and	null
book	that our moral judgments have gradually resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said. The familiar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really refer to the psychological question alone. The discussion of this question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible to enter upon it at all within the limits of this paper. I will therefore only express dogmatically my own belief, which is this, —that the Benthams, the Mills, and the Barns have done a lasting service in	null
book	82	null
book	taking so many of our human ideals and showing how they must have arisen from the	null
book	association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and reliefs from pain. Association with many remote pleasures will unquestionably make a thing significant of goodness in our minds; and the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will its source appear to be. But it is surely impossible to explain all our sentiments and preferences in this simple way. The more minutely psychology studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are practically all th at pure empiricism can admit. Take the love of	null
book	drunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror of high places, the tendency to sea-sickness, to faint at the sight of blood, the susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics,—no one of these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility. They go with other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing in us for which some use may not be found. But their origin is in incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure w hose original features arose with no reference to the	null
book	perception of such discords and harmonies as these.	null
book	Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this secondary and brain-	null
book	born kind. They deal with directly felt fitnesses between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of habit and presumptions of utility. The moment you get beyond the coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, the Decalogues and Poor Richard’ s	null
book	Almanacs, you fall into schemes and positions which to the eye of common- sense are	null
book	fantastic and overstrained. The sense for abstract justice which some persons have is as excentric a variation, from the natural -history point of view, as is the passion f or music or for	null
book	the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness, etc.,—are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing tastes better, and that is all that we can say. ’Experience’ of consequences	null
book	may truly teach us what things are wicked , but what have consequences to do with what	null
book	is mean and vulgar ? If a man has shot his wife’s paramour, by reason of what subtile	null
book	repugnancy in things is it that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again? Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier ’s and Bellamy ’s and Morris’s Utopias should	null
book	all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtile brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests against the entire race -tradition of retributive justice? —I refer to Tolstoi with his	null
book	ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his substitution of oblivion for repentance (in his novel of Dr. Heidenhain’s Process), to M. Guyau with his radical condemnation of the punitive ideal. All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as much beyond what can be ciphered out from the ‘ laws of association ’ as the delicacies of sentiment possible between a	null
book	pair of young lovers go beyond such precepts of the ‘etiquette to be observed during engagement ’ as are printed in manuals of social form.	null
book	No! Purely inward forces are certainly at work here. All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience	null
book	83	null
book	than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the	null
book	lessons it has so far taught as must learn to bend.	null
book	This is all I can say of the psychological question now. In the last chapter of a recent work31 I	null
book	have sought to prove in a general way the existence, in our thought, of relations which do not	null
book	merely repeat the couplings of experience. Our ideals have certainly many sources. They are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to be escaped. And for having so constantly perceived this psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whether or not such applause must be extended to that school’ s other characteristics	null
book	will appear as we take up the following questions.	null
book	The next one in order is the metaphysical question, of what we mean by the words	null
book	‘obligation,’ ‘good,’ and ‘ ill.’	null
book	II.	null
book	First of all, it appears that such words can have no application or relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists. Imagine an absolutely material world, containing only physical and chemical facts, and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interested spectator: would there be any sense in saying of that world that one of its states is better than another? Or if there were two such worlds possible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good and the other bad,—good or bad positively, I mean, and apart from the fact that one might relate itself better than the other to the philosopher ’s private interests? But we	null
book	must leave these private interests out of the account, for the philosopher is a mental fact, and we are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physical facts per se . Surely	null
book	there is no status for good and evil to exist in, in a purely insentient world. How can one	null
book	physical fact, considered simply as a physical fact, be ‘ better ’ than another? Betterness is not	null
book	a physical relation. In its mere material capacity, a thing can no more be good or bad than it can be pleasant or painful. Good for what? Good for the production of another physical fact, do you say? But what in a purely physical universe demands the production of that other fact? Physical facts simply are or are not; and neither when present or absent, can they be	null
book	supposed to make demands. If they do, they can only do so by having desires; and then they have ceased to be purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscious sensibility. Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realised somewhere in order really to exist; and	null
book	the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic ‘nature of things’ can realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only	null
book	habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.	null
book	The moment one sentient being, however, is made a part of the universe, there is a chance for	null
book	goods and evils really to exist. Moral relations now have their status , in that being’ s	null
book	consciousness. So far as he feels anything to be good, he makes it good. It is good, for him;	null
book	and being good for him, is absolutely good, for he is the sole creator of values in that universe, and outside of his opinion things have no moral character at all.	null
book	In such a universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the question of whether the	null
book	solitary thinker’s judgments of good and ill are true or not. Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to which he must conform; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity, subject to no higher judge. Let us call the supposed universe which he inhabits a moral solitude . In such	null
book	a moral solitude it is clear that there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of his own several ideals with one another. Some of these will no doubt be more pungent and appealing than the rest,	null
book	31 The Principles of Psychology, New York, H. Holt & Co, 1890.	null
book	84	null
book	their goodness will have a profounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt him	null
book	with more obstinate regrets if violated. So the thinker will have to order his life with them as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardly discordant and unhappy. Into whatever equilibrium he may settle, though, and however he may straighten out his system, it will be a right system; for beyond the facts of his own subjectivity there is nothing moral in the world.	null
book	If now we introduce a second thinker with his likes and dislikes into the universe, the ethical	null
book	situation becomes much more complex, and several possibilities are immediately seen to obtain.	null
book	One of these is that the thinkers may ignore each other’s attitude about good and evil	null
book	altogether, and each continue to indulge his own preferences, indifferent to what the other may feel or do. In such a case we have a world with twice as much of the ethical quality in it	null
book	as our moral solitude, only it is without ethical unity. The same object is good or bad there, according as you measure it by the view which this one or that one of the thinkers takes. Nor can you find any possible ground in such a world for saying that one thinker’s opinion is more correct than the other ’s, or that either has the truer moral sense. Such a world, in short,	null
book	is not a moral universe but a moral dualism. Not only is there no single point of view within it from which the values of things can be unequivocally judged, but there is not even a demand for such a point of view, since the two thinkers are supposed to be indifferent to each other’ s	null
book	thoughts and acts. Multiply the thinkers into a pluralism, and we find realized for us in the ethical sphere something like that world which the antique sceptics conceived of,—in which individual minds are the measures of all things, and in which no one ‘objective’ truth, but only a multitude of ‘subjective’ opinions, can be found.	null
book	But this is the kind of world with which the philosopher, so long as he holds to the hope of a	null
book	philosophy, will not put up. Among the various ideals represented, there must be, he thinks, some which have the more truth or authority; and to these the others ought to yield, so that	null
book	system and subordination may reign. Here in the word ‘ought’ the notion of obligation comes	null
book	emphatically into view, and the next thing in order must be to make its meaning clear.	null
book	Since the outcome of the discussion so far has been to show us that nothing can be good or	null
book	right except so far as some consciousness feels it to be good or thinks it to be right, we perceive on the very threshold that the real superiority and authority which are postulated by the philosopher to reside in some of the opinions, and the really inferior characte r which he	null
book	supposes must belong to others, cannot be explained by any abstract moral ‘nature of things’ existing antecedently to the concrete thinkers themselves with their ideals. Like the positive attributes good and bad, the comparative ones better and worse must be realised in order to	null
book	be real. If one ideal judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be made flesh by being lodged concretely in some one’s actual perception. It cannot float in the atmosphere, for it is not a sort of meteorological phenomenon, like the aurora borealis or the zodiacal light. Its esse is percipi , like the esse of the ideals themselves between which it	null
book	obtains. The philosopher, therefore, who seeks to know which ideal ought to have supreme weight and which one ought to be subordinated, must trace the ought itself to the de	null
book	facto constitution of some existing consciousness, behind which, as one of the data of the	null
book	universe, he as a purely ethical philosopher is unable to go. This consciousness must make the one ideal right by feeling it to be right, the other wrong by feeling it to be wrong. But now what particular consciousness in the universe can enjoy this prerogative of obliging others to	null
book	conform to a rule which it lays down?	null
book	If one of the thinkers were obviously divine, while all the rest were human, there would	null
book	probably be no practical dispute about the matter. The divine thought would be the model, to	null
book	85	null
book	which the others should conform. But still the theoretic question would remain, What is the	null
book	ground of the obligation, even here?	null
book	In our first essays at answering this question, there is an inevitable tendency to slip into an	null
book	assumption which ordinary men follow when they are disputing with one another about questions of good and bad. They imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides; and each tries to prove that this pre- existing order is more accurately reflected in his	null
book	own ideas than in those of his adversary. It is because one disputant is backed by this overarching abstract order that we think the other should submit. Even so, when it is a question no longer of two finite thinkers, but of God and ourselves,—we follow our usual habit, and imagine a sort of de jure relation, which antedates and overarches the mere facts,	null
book	and would make it right that we should conform our thoughts to God’s thoughts, even though he made no claim to that effect, and though we preferred de facto to go on thinking for	null
book	ourselves.	null
book	But the moment we take a steady look at the question, we see not only that without a claim	null
book	actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim . Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms;	null
book	they cover each other exactly. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true ‘ in themselves, ’ is therefore either an out -and-out	null
book	superstition, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our obligation must be ultimately based. In a theistic -ethical philos ophy that thinker in question is, of course, the	null
book	Deity to whom the existence of the universe is due.	null
book	I know well how hard it is for those who are accustomed to what I have called the	null
book	superstitious view, to realize that every de facto claim creates in so far forth an obligation.	null
book	We inveterately think that something which we call the ‘ validity ’ of the claim is what gives to	null
book	it its obligatory character, and that this validity is something outside of the claim’ s mere	null
book	existence as a matter of fact. It rains down upon the claim, we think, from some sublime dimension of being, which the moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens. But again, how can such an inorganic abstract character of imperativeness, additional to the imperativeness which is in the concrete claim itself, exist ? Take any demand, however slight, which any	null
book	creature, however weak, may make. Ought it not, for its own sole sake, to be satisfied? If not, prove why not. The only possible kind of proof you could adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a demand that ran the other way. The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired. Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it makes itself valid by the fact	null
book	that it exists at all. Some desires, truly enough, are small desires; they are put forward by insignificant persons, and we customarily make light of the obligations which they bring. But the fact that such personal demands as these impose small obligations does not keep the largest obligations from being personal demands.	null
book	If we must talk impersonally, to be sure we can say that ‘the universe’ requires, exacts, or	null
book	makes obligatory such or such an action, whenever it expresses itself through the desires of such or such a creature. But it is better not to talk about the universe in this personified way, unless we believe in a universal or divine consciousness which actually exists. If there be such a consciousness, then its demands carry the most of obligation simply because they are the greatest in amount. But it is even then not abstractly right that we should respect them. It	null
book	is only concretely right,—or right after the fact, and by virtue of the fact, that they are actually made. Suppose we do not respect them, as seems largely to be the case in this queer	null
book	86	null
book	world. That ought not to be, we say; that is wrong. But in what way is this fact of wrongness	null
book	made more acceptable or intelligible when we imagine it to consist rather in the laceration of an à priori ideal order than in the disappointment of a living personal God? Do we, perhaps,	null
book	think that we cover God and protect him and make his impotence over us less ultimate, when we back him up with this à priori blanket from which he may draw some warmth of further	null
book	appeal? But the only force of appeal to us , which either a living God or an abstract ideal order	null
book	can wield, is found in the ‘everlasting ruby vaults’ of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive and not irresponsive to the claim. So far as they do feel it when made by a living consciousness, it is life answering to life. A claim thus livingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity and fulness which no thought of an ‘ ideal ’ backing can render	null

book

The psychological question is for most disputants the only question. When your ordinary

null

book

doctor of divinity has proved to his own satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called ‘conscience’ must be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your

null

book

popular- science enthusiast has proclaimed that ‘ apriorism ’ is an exploded superstition, and

null

book

that our moral judgments have gradually resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said. The familiar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really refer to the psychological question alone. The discussion of this question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible to enter upon it at all within the limits of this paper. I will therefore only express dogmatically my own belief, which is this, —that the Benthams, the Mills, and the Barns have done a lasting service in

null

book

82

null

book

taking so many of our human ideals and showing how they must have arisen from the

null

book

association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and reliefs from pain. Association with many remote pleasures will unquestionably make a thing significant of goodness in our minds; and the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will its source appear to be. But it is surely impossible to explain all our sentiments and preferences in this simple way. The more minutely psychology studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are practically all th at pure empiricism can admit. Take the love of

null

book

drunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror of high places, the tendency to sea-sickness, to faint at the sight of blood, the susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics,—no one of these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility. They go with other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing in us for which some use may not be found. But their origin is in incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure w hose original features arose with no reference to the

null

book

perception of such discords and harmonies as these.

null

book

Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this secondary and brain-

null

book

born kind. They deal with directly felt fitnesses between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of habit and presumptions of utility. The moment you get beyond the coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, the Decalogues and Poor Richard’ s

null

book

Almanacs, you fall into schemes and positions which to the eye of common- sense are

null

book

fantastic and overstrained. The sense for abstract justice which some persons have is as excentric a variation, from the natural -history point of view, as is the passion f or music or for

null

book

the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness, etc.,—are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing tastes better, and that is all that we can say. ’Experience’ of consequences

null

book

may truly teach us what things are wicked , but what have consequences to do with what

null

book

is mean and vulgar ? If a man has shot his wife’s paramour, by reason of what subtile

null

book

repugnancy in things is it that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again? Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier ’s and Bellamy ’s and Morris’s Utopias should

null

book

all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtile brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests against the entire race -tradition of retributive justice? —I refer to Tolstoi with his

null

book

ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his substitution of oblivion for repentance (in his novel of Dr. Heidenhain’s Process), to M. Guyau with his radical condemnation of the punitive ideal. All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as much beyond what can be ciphered out from the ‘ laws of association ’ as the delicacies of sentiment possible between a

null

book

pair of young lovers go beyond such precepts of the ‘etiquette to be observed during engagement ’ as are printed in manuals of social form.

null

book

No! Purely inward forces are certainly at work here. All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience

null

book

83

null

book

than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the

null

book

lessons it has so far taught as must learn to bend.

null

book

This is all I can say of the psychological question now. In the last chapter of a recent work31 I

null

book

have sought to prove in a general way the existence, in our thought, of relations which do not

null

book

merely repeat the couplings of experience. Our ideals have certainly many sources. They are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to be escaped. And for having so constantly perceived this psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whether or not such applause must be extended to that school’ s other characteristics

null

book

will appear as we take up the following questions.

null

book

The next one in order is the metaphysical question, of what we mean by the words

null

book

‘obligation,’ ‘good,’ and ‘ ill.’

null

book

II.

null

book

First of all, it appears that such words can have no application or relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists. Imagine an absolutely material world, containing only physical and chemical facts, and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interested spectator: would there be any sense in saying of that world that one of its states is better than another? Or if there were two such worlds possible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good and the other bad,—good or bad positively, I mean, and apart from the fact that one might relate itself better than the other to the philosopher ’s private interests? But we

null

book

must leave these private interests out of the account, for the philosopher is a mental fact, and we are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physical facts per se . Surely

null

book

there is no status for good and evil to exist in, in a purely insentient world. How can one

null

book

physical fact, considered simply as a physical fact, be ‘ better ’ than another? Betterness is not

null

book

a physical relation. In its mere material capacity, a thing can no more be good or bad than it can be pleasant or painful. Good for what? Good for the production of another physical fact, do you say? But what in a purely physical universe demands the production of that other fact? Physical facts simply are or are not; and neither when present or absent, can they be

null

book

supposed to make demands. If they do, they can only do so by having desires; and then they have ceased to be purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscious sensibility. Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realised somewhere in order really to exist; and

null

book

the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic ‘nature of things’ can realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only

null

book

habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.

null

book

The moment one sentient being, however, is made a part of the universe, there is a chance for

null

book

goods and evils really to exist. Moral relations now have their status , in that being’ s

null

book

consciousness. So far as he feels anything to be good, he makes it good. It is good, for him;

null

book

and being good for him, is absolutely good, for he is the sole creator of values in that universe, and outside of his opinion things have no moral character at all.

null

book

In such a universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the question of whether the

null

book

solitary thinker’s judgments of good and ill are true or not. Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to which he must conform; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity, subject to no higher judge. Let us call the supposed universe which he inhabits a moral solitude . In such

null

book

a moral solitude it is clear that there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of his own several ideals with one another. Some of these will no doubt be more pungent and appealing than the rest,

null

book

31 The Principles of Psychology, New York, H. Holt & Co, 1890.

null

book

84

null

book

their goodness will have a profounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt him

null

book

with more obstinate regrets if violated. So the thinker will have to order his life with them as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardly discordant and unhappy. Into whatever equilibrium he may settle, though, and however he may straighten out his system, it will be a right system; for beyond the facts of his own subjectivity there is nothing moral in the world.

null

book

If now we introduce a second thinker with his likes and dislikes into the universe, the ethical

null

book

situation becomes much more complex, and several possibilities are immediately seen to obtain.

null

book

One of these is that the thinkers may ignore each other’s attitude about good and evil

null

book

altogether, and each continue to indulge his own preferences, indifferent to what the other may feel or do. In such a case we have a world with twice as much of the ethical quality in it

null

book

as our moral solitude, only it is without ethical unity. The same object is good or bad there, according as you measure it by the view which this one or that one of the thinkers takes. Nor can you find any possible ground in such a world for saying that one thinker’s opinion is more correct than the other ’s, or that either has the truer moral sense. Such a world, in short,

null

book

is not a moral universe but a moral dualism. Not only is there no single point of view within it from which the values of things can be unequivocally judged, but there is not even a demand for such a point of view, since the two thinkers are supposed to be indifferent to each other’ s

null

book

thoughts and acts. Multiply the thinkers into a pluralism, and we find realized for us in the ethical sphere something like that world which the antique sceptics conceived of,—in which individual minds are the measures of all things, and in which no one ‘objective’ truth, but only a multitude of ‘subjective’ opinions, can be found.

null

book

But this is the kind of world with which the philosopher, so long as he holds to the hope of a

null

book

philosophy, will not put up. Among the various ideals represented, there must be, he thinks, some which have the more truth or authority; and to these the others ought to yield, so that

null

book

system and subordination may reign. Here in the word ‘ought’ the notion of obligation comes

null

book

emphatically into view, and the next thing in order must be to make its meaning clear.

null

book

Since the outcome of the discussion so far has been to show us that nothing can be good or

null

book

right except so far as some consciousness feels it to be good or thinks it to be right, we perceive on the very threshold that the real superiority and authority which are postulated by the philosopher to reside in some of the opinions, and the really inferior characte r which he

null

book

supposes must belong to others, cannot be explained by any abstract moral ‘nature of things’ existing antecedently to the concrete thinkers themselves with their ideals. Like the positive attributes good and bad, the comparative ones better and worse must be realised in order to

null

book

be real. If one ideal judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be made flesh by being lodged concretely in some one’s actual perception. It cannot float in the atmosphere, for it is not a sort of meteorological phenomenon, like the aurora borealis or the zodiacal light. Its esse is percipi , like the esse of the ideals themselves between which it

null

book

obtains. The philosopher, therefore, who seeks to know which ideal ought to have supreme weight and which one ought to be subordinated, must trace the ought itself to the de

null

book

facto constitution of some existing consciousness, behind which, as one of the data of the

null

book

universe, he as a purely ethical philosopher is unable to go. This consciousness must make the one ideal right by feeling it to be right, the other wrong by feeling it to be wrong. But now what particular consciousness in the universe can enjoy this prerogative of obliging others to

null

book

conform to a rule which it lays down?

null

book

If one of the thinkers were obviously divine, while all the rest were human, there would

null

book

probably be no practical dispute about the matter. The divine thought would be the model, to

null

book

85

null

book

which the others should conform. But still the theoretic question would remain, What is the

null

book

ground of the obligation, even here?

null

book

In our first essays at answering this question, there is an inevitable tendency to slip into an

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assumption which ordinary men follow when they are disputing with one another about questions of good and bad. They imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides; and each tries to prove that this pre- existing order is more accurately reflected in his

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own ideas than in those of his adversary. It is because one disputant is backed by this overarching abstract order that we think the other should submit. Even so, when it is a question no longer of two finite thinkers, but of God and ourselves,—we follow our usual habit, and imagine a sort of de jure relation, which antedates and overarches the mere facts,

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and would make it right that we should conform our thoughts to God’s thoughts, even though he made no claim to that effect, and though we preferred de facto to go on thinking for

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ourselves.

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But the moment we take a steady look at the question, we see not only that without a claim

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actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim . Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms;

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they cover each other exactly. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true ‘ in themselves, ’ is therefore either an out -and-out

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superstition, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our obligation must be ultimately based. In a theistic -ethical philos ophy that thinker in question is, of course, the

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Deity to whom the existence of the universe is due.

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I know well how hard it is for those who are accustomed to what I have called the

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superstitious view, to realize that every de facto claim creates in so far forth an obligation.

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We inveterately think that something which we call the ‘ validity ’ of the claim is what gives to

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it its obligatory character, and that this validity is something outside of the claim’ s mere

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existence as a matter of fact. It rains down upon the claim, we think, from some sublime dimension of being, which the moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens. But again, how can such an inorganic abstract character of imperativeness, additional to the imperativeness which is in the concrete claim itself, exist ? Take any demand, however slight, which any

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creature, however weak, may make. Ought it not, for its own sole sake, to be satisfied? If not, prove why not. The only possible kind of proof you could adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a demand that ran the other way. The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired. Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it makes itself valid by the fact

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that it exists at all. Some desires, truly enough, are small desires; they are put forward by insignificant persons, and we customarily make light of the obligations which they bring. But the fact that such personal demands as these impose small obligations does not keep the largest obligations from being personal demands.

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If we must talk impersonally, to be sure we can say that ‘the universe’ requires, exacts, or

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makes obligatory such or such an action, whenever it expresses itself through the desires of such or such a creature. But it is better not to talk about the universe in this personified way, unless we believe in a universal or divine consciousness which actually exists. If there be such a consciousness, then its demands carry the most of obligation simply because they are the greatest in amount. But it is even then not abstractly right that we should respect them. It

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is only concretely right,—or right after the fact, and by virtue of the fact, that they are actually made. Suppose we do not respect them, as seems largely to be the case in this queer

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86

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world. That ought not to be, we say; that is wrong. But in what way is this fact of wrongness

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made more acceptable or intelligible when we imagine it to consist rather in the laceration of an à priori ideal order than in the disappointment of a living personal God? Do we, perhaps,

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think that we cover God and protect him and make his impotence over us less ultimate, when we back him up with this à priori blanket from which he may draw some warmth of further

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appeal? But the only force of appeal to us , which either a living God or an abstract ideal order

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can wield, is found in the ‘everlasting ruby vaults’ of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive and not irresponsive to the claim. So far as they do feel it when made by a living consciousness, it is life answering to life. A claim thus livingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity and fulness which no thought of an ‘ ideal ’ backing can render

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