The Project Gutenberg eBook, Theoretical Ethics, by Milton Valentine

THEORETICAL ETHICS

BY
MILTON VALENTINE, D.D., LL. D.

Ex-President of Pennsylvania College, and Professor of Theology
in the Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg, Pa.,
Author of "Natural Theology or Rational Theism."

CHICAGO
SCOTT, FORESMAN & CO.
1900

Copyright, 1897, by
Scott, Foresman & Co.

PRESS OF
THE HENRY O. SHEPARD CO.
CHICAGO

[PREFACE.]

Ethical Theory has felt the full force of recent scientific and philosophical agitation. The earlier systems have been subject to earnest and continued discussion. The severest tests available by the progress of knowledge have been applied to both their premises and their conclusions. New theories, based on changed conceptions of man and the world, have been variously elaborated, presenting greatly altered views of the whole phenomenon of morality. While not overthrowing old views these have given instructive suggestions. The ethical field has thus been largely re-surveyed, and whatever light modern science and speculation have furnished has been thrown upon this great and unceasingly important subject. In some respects the agitation has brought confusion and uncertainty. The clash of theories has been disturbing. But on the whole ethical philosophy has been the gainer. The discussions have certified the immovable foundations and essential features of the moral system. The fresh light from the advance of knowledge has proved, as it always does, not destructive, but corrective and confirmatory. The abiding truth has been shown and vindicated by the ordeal through which it has passed.

This volume is largely the outcome of the author's many years of class-room lecturing on the subject. Its object is to furnish for students and general readers a compendious view of the ethical facts and principles as the author believes them to be established by the best accredited knowledge and thought of our times. There seems to be room for such a work. The method is believed to give proper recognition to both the empirical and metaphysical sides of the subject. Starting from the universal phenomenon of moral distinctions in life, it determines the conscience psychologically, as a rationally intuitive power discerning the moral distinction and the reality and authority of moral law. The implications of conscience and moral law necessarily become theistic. The metaphysical examination finds for the real phenomena of the subjective faculty the objective and abiding reality of the ethical law which the faculty discerns, and the right or morally good itself so perceived as consisting proximately in a conformity of conduct with the relations of life in which moral requirement meets human freedom, and as ultimately grounded in the absolute and perfect source of the moral constitution of the universe. The movement carries to the conclusion of eternal and immutable moral law. The disclosures of revelation confirm the ethical law of the natural reason, completing the moral view and supplying, in the divine forces of Christianity, the proper dynamic for the realization of the ethical life.

The volume is humbly sent forth in the hope that it may contribute somewhat to the cause of truth and prove quickening to the life of duty and righteousness.

Gettysburg, Dec. 1, 1896.

[CONTENTS.]

[THEORETICAL ETHICS.]

[CHAPTER I.]
DEFINITION AND DIVISIONS.

Ethics Defined.

1. Ethics is the science of rectitude and duty. It treats of the right and its obligations. Its subject is morality. Its sphere is the sphere of virtuous conduct. It covers a double range of inquiry, as the subject-matter lies within or without the human constitution. On the one side it investigates and sets forth the facts and laws of man's moral constitution; on the other, the nature and grounds of the distinction of right and wrong. In the light of the whole investigation into these fundamental verities, it determines the principles and rules of duty in the various relations of life. It thus discovers and elucidates the underlying pre-suppositions and principles upon which the phenomena of moral discernment and obligation rest, and on which man rises into the possibility and reality of character, as his supreme distinction among the orders of existence on earth. The inquiry throughout is conducted according to the scientific method of careful observation and analysis of the unquestionable facts concerned, and an orderly presentation of their necessary logical implications and conclusions. Hence the product of the investigation, as the systematized view of the facts, with their underlying principles, may justly be called, as it usually is called, moral science.

The term Ethics, which we thus use to designate this branch of study, with its systematized truth, is not employed with etymological strictness. For it comes from the Greek ἦθος [Greek: êthos], moral character, which, according to Aristotle is derived from ἔθος [Greek: ethos] custom, under the notion that moral virtue is a product of repeated acts of voluntary preference.[1] Taken strictly this would build rectitude or the ethically right on the mere habits or usages of a people. But this conception of the basis of virtue must not be included and carried into the scientific use of the word, or be at all allowed to prejudice the final decision of this great question of the foundation of right, in the end, in the light of all the facts in the case.[2]

The Latin equivalent for ἦθος [Greek: êthos] was mos, with similar suggestion as to the nature of rectitude, and human duty was treated under the head of De Moribus. Cicero says: "Quia pertinet ad mores, quod ἦθος [Greek: êthos] illi vocant, nos eam partem philosophiæ De Moribus appellare solemus; sed decet augentem linguam Latinam nominare Moralem."[3] This suggestion of Cicero has given the common English designation Morals or Moral Philosophy. Recent usage, however, speaks of the study rather as moral science, in harmony with the prevailing preference for the term science in all investigations conducted under the inductive method. It is, nevertheless, as will appear, largely a metaphysical and philosophical investigation, and, if classed as science, must be counted as pre-eminently a philosophical science.

Historical Glance.

2. The beginning of the movement to give a systematic view of ethical truth may be traced to Socrates. The pre-Socratic philosophy failed to produce anything that can be called a system in this connection. The difficulty in the way was not only the want of a scientific spirit at that period, but especially the inadequate and false light in which human beings were viewed. Outside of the Hebrew people there was little or no recognition of the freedom of man, as man. Such freedom was denied both in thought and in life. Everywhere, in India, China, and Egypt, as well as in Greece and Rome, the immense mass of the population were in a condition of abject slavery, regarded as chattels, not amenable to the responsibilities of moral life. Only the free citizens were viewed as capable of virtue. Slavery was a part of the very conception of the State. The essential characteristics and rights of humanity were not thought of as belonging to all men. But moral life, as will appear, can exist only in the sphere of liberty. Even the most advanced philosophers of the ancient world extended the conception of moral manhood only to the free citizen, the status of the rest not bringing them within the possibility of even civic virtue. And even the so-called free citizen existed almost absolutely for the State. His sacred selfhood disappeared under ownership by the Government, by which he was held and used as a machine for military service. Even long after Socrates opened the way, within this limited range, toward some connected view of ethical life, these disabling causes continued to distort and impede all efforts to systematize the principles which underlie and determine it. Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophers generally, continued to know nothing of a morality for all human beings.[4]

It is to be remembered, too, that this tardy appearance of effort in scientific ethics is part of the wider fact, that in that period of human history even the most advanced tribes and nations had not risen to science at all. All knowledge was in the non-scientific form, or only fragmentarily and inchoately adjusted. The moral consciousness and personal virtues, however, of course existed, as part of the normal constitution and practical activities of human life. The various peoples had collections of moral precepts and rules for right living, often bright with gems of ethical truth and beauty, usually in close connection with religious beliefs and convictions; but these were not based and unified on any underlying principles bringing them logically into compact and consistent system. Just as the facts and practices of religion existed, in even rich luxuriance, anterior to the appearance of speculative theologies, and the phenomena of nature for long centuries preceded the formation of the natural sciences, so the moral constitution of the race and practical morality existed long in advance of the explanations and systemization that create the science of ethics.

The history of the science does not come within the purpose of this work. The greatness of the speculative and practical questions involved in the subject, clearly and impressively apparent when once brought forward, could not fail to awaken and hold the most earnest interest of the human mind. They concerned the powers and possibilities of man in the crowning endowments of his nature, and in the highest ascent of their evident intention and adaptation. They touched the great problems of personal and social welfare in the most vital relations and decisive interests. So the old sages became moralists and their great themes were the themes of virtue and duty. Not very deeply, however, did they, for centuries, succeed in penetrating the rational principles of the moral life and the authority of the moral judgments. Yet clear gems of thought and deep suggestion mark the pathway of their thinking. In passing on, and over from pagan into Christian development, the treatment was mostly in connection with religious truths, and as involved in theological doctrine. In the light of the Christian Scriptures the whole subject came under a new illumination. The various duties, however, in the different relations of life, were permitted to rest, without much theorizing, on the warrant of supernatural revelation and divine precept. Down through the early Christian period, and the centuries of mediæval scholasticism, and on through the Renaissance and the Reformation and the subsequent dogmatic period of Protestant theology, ethics continued to be treated simply as a division of theology, based almost wholly on the Sacred Scriptures, with but little inclusion of any effort to determine its natural basis and significance. But with the age of modern philosophy and science a new interest and direction came to ethical inquiry. Explanation began to be sought for the unique authority of the ethical judgments, and concerning the place of the moral power in the essential constitution of the human soul. Special emphasis was given to the fact that, even apart from the precepts of revelation, man is bound to rectitude by an imperative within him, which is not of his choice, but claims the right to dominate his choices. And since the seventeenth century the ethical constitution of humanity, together with the nature and grounds of right, has been made, apart from theology, the distinct and separate theme of scientific and philosophical investigation and discussion. It has been among the leading subjects of rational inquiry and constructive effort. Especially in Great Britain and in our own country has the inquiry been conducted on this basis, and directed to the exhibition of the natural foundation and character of the ethical distinctions and judgments, and to a systemization of the ethical realities and laws thus determinable. The work thus done has created an immense literature, and established a body of securely authenticated scientific results.

3. Ethics, in its comprehensive sense, is naturally divided into two leading parts—Theoretical Ethics, and Practical or Applied Ethics.

Theoretical Ethics.

(1) Theoretical Ethics deals with the essential realities and principles which form the fundamental basis and source of obligation and moral law, in the constitution of man and of the world. It is a speculative study, seeking a rational account of the foundations of morality and behests of duty. It secures a theory from and of the facts. It has, however, a double range of investigation, as it seeks to determine the truth with respect to the two great essential factors in the aggregate inquiry.

In the one range it examines and ascertains the facts and laws of man's moral nature. It investigates the constitution of the moral agent, in whose conscious experience, in the presence of the concrete world, the moral phenomena arise. In this part, the inquiry is psychological, and its results are scientific.

In the other range it investigates the nature and ground of right, or the morally good. In this the search is not for what is discoverable within the moral agent, or the phenomena of the moral perceptions and emotions, but for that which is without him and to which his moral life is, at least apparently, required to be adjusted. Here the work is metaphysical, passing on from what is phenomenal within man, and looking for the super-phenomenal realities implied. The process and results here are philosophical.

It thus appears that the one range of investigation moves subjectively, the other objectively. The first discovers what man is—at least so far as his constitution embraces those powers, perceptions, judgments and feelings in which he becomes and recognizes himself a moral being; the second seeks to know what rectitude is, or what is that to which the moral perceptions and discriminations refer and bind. When the truth on both these sides is discovered and brought together, the whole view, with the particulars logically correlated, will present the aggregate theory of duty, or the rationale of obligation.

Practical Ethics.

(2) Practical Ethics sets forth the proper application of these fundamental principles of right and duty, as developed and justified in theoretical ethics, to the varied relations of men, personally, in the Family, in Society, and in the State. It passes on from the philosophy of moral obligations to a settlement of particular duties in the different spheres of human life and activity.

The connection between theoretical and practical ethics is very close and vital. Theory and practice always affect each other. They cannot be held wholly apart. They act and react on each other, in ceaseless influences. It is so in every department of thought and life. Theoretical error in physical science, in art, in trade, in political economy, can hardly fail to appear in faulty or misdirected practice. Every failure to grasp first principles correctly and firmly is sure to mean failure also to grasp and maintain the true order and beauty of right living. False views as to the reality and grounds of moral obligation weaken, vitiate and corrupt life. They become, often, the fountain of far-flowing streams of evil and blight. At best they lack power for the true and right life. A correct theory of ethical truth is, therefore, demanded by all the high interests in the moral life of man and the order of the world.

It is apparent, however, that it is only the theoretical part that constitutes the science of ethics. It alone settles the systematic view of it, revealing its underlying pre-suppositions and principles, exhibiting its reasons and determining its laws. Practical ethics, as simply pointing out how these bear upon men's temper and conduct in actual life, is apart from the scientific investigation. Though this has usually constituted a large portion of formal treatises on the subject, we, for the reason thus given, omit it from this discussion.

4. A few of the relations of ethical science are properly called to mind here. Its place will thus be more clearly seen. It sustains very close relations to three other great branches of study.

Relation to Psychology.

(1) To psychology. It is organically related to this. In that part of its work which determines the reality and nature of moral obligation from the constitution and action of the human mind, moral science joins with psychology in the investigation of man's mental capacities and powers. Ever since the days of Aristotle ethics has been seen to have real psychological basis and pre-suppositions.[5] Yet, as a result of the later general subsuming of ethics under religious and theological precepts, this basis received but little distinct investigation till the time of Shaftesbury who, though failing to give adequate or correct account of it, brought it prominently forward. Mental science is essentially conditional for moral science. The behests of duty are provided for and sanctioned in human nature. The moral discriminations and convictions emerge as psychical phenomena. "To understand what man ought to do, it is necessary to know what he is." In the very structure and adjustment of his powers, it becomes apparent that he has been made for duty and organized under obligations.

But while psychology and ethics both study the powers and functions of the soul, they do so with different aims. The one has no aim beyond a knowledge of the phenomena and laws of the mind as mind. The other studies it with a view to the light which this knowledge sheds on the problems of virtue and duty. There are, indeed, some questions in ethics that transcend the province of psychology, and belong to the further realm of metaphysics—as, for instance, the validity and ground of the distinction between right and wrong—yet, so far as it is the science of conscience or of man's moral nature, it is thoroughly psychological. And well would it have been for moral science if, instead of speculatively and arbitrarily theorizing on the subject, it had more critically, fully, and exactly searched out the real facts in actual psychology and moved forward always toward the conclusions necessitated by these fundamental and abiding realities.

Relation to Natural Theology.

(2) To Natural Theology. As Natural Theology seeks to determine the existence, character and will of God as Creator and Moral Governor of the world, and the consequent relations and responsibilities of men, it covers, to some extent, the same ground as a system of ethics constructed simply upon the basis of reason and the data found in man's nature and place. Both, if properly drawn out, bring to view the reality of "a power that makes for righteousness"[6] in the natural constitution of the world, and exhibit the laws of obligation that bind men under the action of conscience. Both treat of the fact and authentications of human duty. A science of ethics, as well as a theology, may be constructed, apart from supernatural revelation, from the data of reason and nature alone. The possibility of this is implied in Rom. 2:14, 15. This would be a system of natural ethics. There is still, however, a large difference—though theology and ethics be kept apart from the teachings of special revelation. For Natural Theology keeps more prominently and controllingly in view the being and character of God, and aims more distinctly to produce the religious sentiments, while authenticating the reality and action of the moral law. Ethics, on the other hand, puts the facts of human nature and life into the front and includes the religious element only as a consequential, though necessary, inclusion.

Relation to Christian Theology.

(3) To Christian Theology, or revealed religion. As this is the fullest disclosure of the duty of man, in all his relations, to God, to his fellow-men, and to his own end, it is not surprising that for so many centuries, the treatment of morals was made simply a part of general theology, and merely distinguished as Moral Theology. In the modern separation of ethics from theology and treatment of it as a science, it is not meant to deny the close affinity between the two investigations or the rich illumination that duty receives from supernatural revelation, but only to trace out more distinctly and fully, in independent and scientific form, the deep and immovable foundations of the principles of duty in the very constitution of man and the world. This exhibition of the natural basis of ethical law and obligation becomes an independent and generic enforcement of the principles of righteousness. It gives a philosophic vindication of one of the first assumptions of Christianity—the supremacy of the law of rectitude for human life. And Christianity is vindicated and exalted when it comes recognizing and confirming all the principles and duties discoverable in our moral nature, and adding a supernatural disclosure of the way in which righteousness may be established in our lives, and men may attain their right character and destiny.

Christianity, while much more than this, appears as a divine re-publication of the ethical truth which from the first has been incorporated in the organization of humanity. In it the light of conscience is supplemented and made clear. The ethics of human reason and those of revelation thus cover, to a great extent, the same ground. When correctly read they are never in conflict, but in harmony. Both show man to be under moral law—and under broken law, that is, under sin. But the light of the Scriptures is broader and fuller. For in addition to their confirmation of a natural ethic for man, they disclose a scheme of redemption, with otherwise undiscoverable moral relations and obligations, introducing new and vital elements into the science of ethics. The inclusion of these elements and truths turns pagan or natural ethics into Christian.

Whatever interpretation may be given by different Christians to the redemption thus disclosed, the ethical teaching of the Sacred Scriptures, by universal consent, surpasses, in clearness, elevation and completeness, every other ethical view or system in the world. The loftiest philosophical thought has reached no higher summit—and has climbed to its best only in the light which Christianity has supplied. No system of morals is now worthy of the name that fails to avail itself of its ethical teaching. Only when this is properly included, illuminating natural ethics with its supernatural light, can we have the whole view of human duty. He who refuses the Christian grade and completeness of moral view goes back from the full daylight into the obscure dawn before the morning. Nevertheless the natural basis of ethical laws needs to be clearly apprehended and distinctly borne in mind. In these days when the foundations of all truths are put to scrutinizing tests, it is of fundamental importance that, through the verifying processes of careful science, we shall recognize the ethical verities and responsibilities, affirmed by revelation, as primarily and immutably a part of the very nature of man and the constitution of the world.

[CHAPTER II.]
THE FACT OF MORAL DISTINCTIONS.

Moral Distinctions.

The primary fact underlying the science of ethics is the great phenomenon of moral distinctions in the world. Scarcely anything in human life has been more conspicuous and indubitable than the existence of ideas of right and wrong and their application to human conduct. This has characterized mankind everywhere and in all ages. Its prevalence is as broad as humanity. A phenomenon so universal and permanent must necessarily be regarded as in some way organic in the human constitution. It calls for examination and justifies scientific inquiry into its cause and implications.

The certainty and largeness of the phenomenon become deeply impressive when it is traced out and fairly considered.

Revealed in Personal Conscious­ness.

1. The distinction between right and wrong appears in every man's personal consciousness. Each one is directly and fully aware of it in his own case. He approves and condemns on this basis, and in doing so finds himself in harmony with a principle marking the sentiments of others around him. He passes quick, spontaneous judgments on his own conduct and on that of his fellow-men. The distinction, to greater or less degree, shapes itself into a sense of obligation and a law of duty. Nothing can wipe it out from his knowledge and feelings.

Incorporated in Social Organism.

2. It is found incorporated into the social organism. What each man is conscious of doing in his own inner life, society, in its solidarity or constitutional unity, is found doing and enforcing. Organic humanity reveals the presence of the ethical conception and sure lines of its action everywhere. However diverse may be its judgments, there is such a thing as a public conscience that holds up conduct to favor or reprobation, not simply as beneficial or injurious but as being intrinsically right or wrong.

The social constitution is in fact framed together under the human capacity and necessity of perceiving and fulfilling the duties that arise in the inter-relations of associated life. For, the very laws and administrations on which the social order and welfare are dependent, and through which they are in a measure secured, are the embodiment of the ethical ideas and judgments of the people. No adjustment of relations is possible except upon this foundation. The obliteration of these ideas would mean social anarchy. "Society," says Prof. Borden P. Bowne, "in its organized form, is a moral institution with moral ends. However selfish individuals may be, they cannot live together without a social order which rests on moral ideas."[7]

Witnessed in History.

3. The great volume of history is witness to the universal phenomenon. Its records testify to the presence and action of the moral distinctions everywhere and in all the ages of the world. Whether these records present the customs and habits of early tribes, the rise and fall of nations, the reigns of princes and emperors, the exploits of generals and conquerors, the march and overthrow of armies, the relentless cruelty of tyrants or the noble service of patriots and benefactors, the establishment of just institutions or the miseries of the people where the oppressor's millstones grind on, all the pages are replete with evidence that men, around all the globe and through all the centuries, have been wont either to accuse or excuse the conduct and motives of one another according to some standard of moral judgment or sentiments of right and wrong. It is true that from some pages of history the moral sense seems darkened out of sight. They bring before us thousands of men, often the most conspicuous in the ever-changing drama of public life, from whose thinking the notions of right and wrong seem to have been wanting or obliterated, acting only from selfishness, avarice, or ambition, monsters of injustice, heartlessness, cruelty and blood. Many of its chapters are but the sickening stories of tribal and national feuds and wars, of crime, plunder and devastation, of hate, scheming and treachery, of thirst for power, fame and treasure, of moving armies and fields of carnage and fire-swept lands, seeming to report that the moral sense had no place or force whatever in the men who were the actors in those scenes. But these chapters of lurid crime and wrong, like the records of crime to-day, do not represent all the thought of the humanity of such times. They tell of the men and deeds that most completely defied the moral ideas that belonged to their own nature, and whose remorseless wrong-doing evoked the deep, indignant reprobation of the thousands and millions of innocent and injured sufferers. And when the pen of history, with eye on the relations of cause and effect and the unfolding issues of such flagrant violation of right and justice, has traced the steps of a divine Nemesis, a stern Avenger, following the guilty, age after age, the record proves to be, all the more emphatically, a ceaseless testimony to the great fact of moral distinctions as a world-wide and ceaseless phenomenon of human life.

Shown in All Religions.

4. The religions of the world all show the same fact. While these present a Godward side and express the perpetual human need of union and fellowship with the infinite divine Source of all Good, they at the same time testify to a distinctively moral constitution and action of human life. The sense of obligation, duty and guilt appears in the warp and woof of religion everywhere. While with a singular breach with reason religious rites and practices here and there have shown a wide departure from correct moral principles, yet the religious consciousness of the race has been almost a synonym for the action of the moral sense. In all lands and all ages this consciousness has carried with it, in greater or less clearness and force, a conviction that the Power above men not themselves is a Power that makes for righteousness, establishing and enforcing principles of duty among men. And the various religions of mankind, especially those of monotheistic teaching and more distinct development, present clear and emphatic codes of moral principles and requirement. Some of them are resolvable largely into philosophies of life, with ethical directions for the regulation of conduct. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which belongs to the age of the pyramid builders, from 2000 to 3000 B. C., we find set forth a morality marked by surprising breadth and purity.[8] In all the wide-spread religions of Asia, some of them emerging out of the darkness of prehistoric times, the Akkadian and Babylonian, Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Tâoism, Shintoism, and Mohammedanism, with their countless millions of followers, everywhere the constitution of man and social life is recognized as laid in laws of moral obligation and order, and religious life, in greater or less degree, is called to aspire to that which is judged to be right and good. Ancient Druidism was strongly marked by its emphatic moral tone. No Christian needs to be reminded with what sublime distinctness Christianity, with its redemption economy, declares the eternal distinction between moral good and evil, and calls men to peace and blessedness through faith and righteousness.

Religion, it is to be remembered, is in the broadest sense a fact of humanity. The distinguished anthropologist Quatrefages is sustained by the fullest evidence when he asserts that man is essentially a religious being. It appears in every tribe on earth. Moral conceptions and sentiments, however faint and faultily applied, are a part of this omnipresent religious mind of the race.

Pervades Literature.

5. Such moral conceptions pervade the general literature of the world. Wherever a people has progressed in culture sufficiently to create and preserve a literature, it is found to be many-tongued witness to a recognized difference between right and wrong. In its pages these discriminations appear as a never-ceasing characteristic of human thought. They come to us out of the remotest past and from regions untaught by the decalogue of Sinai. They illuminate, as already implied, the sacred books of India, China, Egypt, Persia and Babylonia, as well as the classic writings of ancient Greece and Rome and the Saga writing of Northern Europe. They not only form the body of the moral disquisitions of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cato, Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and many others, but color and shape the drama and lyric poetry in which the thought and sentiment of the race have been embalmed. To see illustrations of this we need only read the tragedies of Sophocles, for instance Œdipus Tyrannus, lines 863-871, or Antigone, lines 449–460, or listen to the verse of Horace, Book III, Ode 3, tracing the supremacy and triumph of a consciousness of right over all other authority and power. With the advance of humanity as the centuries have passed away literature is more and more the representation of human sentiment and life under the action and reaction of these ethical discriminations in the ever-changing conditions of the world. Philosophy and science and fiction and poetry and politics and jurisprudence are occupied in dealing with the principles and questions thus raised, and our modern libraries are largely the accumulated treasures of the thinking world on the significance and application of these principles.

Anthropol­ogical Confirma­tion.

6. The ethnic and anthropological information of the present day reports no people or tribe, even the rudest, altogether without moral ideas and some measure of application of them to conduct. Enthusiastic scientists, travelers and missionaries, traversing the earth, have thoroughly established this point. Often, indeed, has the universality here asserted been disputed. Reports were brought of tribes discovered altogether destitute of the ethical sense. But closer inspection of the tribal and personal life has corrected the first impression, and evidences of the disputed fact have become indubitable. A low and confused manifestation had been mistaken as none whatever. In degraded and besotted conditions of human life, it is altogether reasonable to believe that the particular discrimination in question would appear only in the crude and uncertain forms in keeping with the undeveloped grade of all the functions of thought and sentiment. The sunken humanity has carried down and buried its proper and normal manifestations almost out of sight. As soon as uplift comes to a tribe, the powers of moral discernment and knowledge, whose action was scarcely discoverable before, emerge in unmistakable certainty and force. And no phenomenon that science is seeking to investigate to-day can be more justly regarded as universally human than the fact under consideration.

Not Affected by Explanations.

7. It needs to be distinctly fixed in mind that this great fact is not at all affected by any offered theory of its cause and significance. It stands independent of any particular explanation of it, and indeed of all solutions. If, for instance, the origin of these moral judgments should be traced back and accounted for, as is done by Herbert Spencer, as the result of accumulated experiences of utility, gradually organized and inherited as spontaneous approval and disapproval, the theory still recognizes the fact of ethical judgments while endeavoring to account for them. Or, when the older utilitarianism seeks to explain them as resolvable into the pleasure or satisfaction men feel toward certain forms of conduct or principles of behavior that are found to be useful and promotive of happiness, the fact still remains that judgments of right and wrong are actually established and dominate the thought and life of men. The very attempt to identify the virtues of life with its utilities, while making the virtues only its utilities, concedes that the obligation to them is part of the recognized reality of human life. Or, further, should a bolder and more radical view allege that these notions of right and wrong are mere matters of taste and prejudice, a fictitious product of adventitious circumstances and education, without verity or validity at bottom, the offered explanation would be simply a denial, but no disproof of the fact concerned. For it would amount to a claim that in the absolute sense one thing is essentially as good as another, and would thus disregard the real affirmation as it stands in the moral judgment of mankind. Such a claim, it has been well said, no theorist of the present day would pretend to maintain outside of his closet.[9] Not in any race or people has the ethical sense allowed that essentially and at bottom all acts are equally right. This is the very point of the great phenomenon presented. Whatever may be the final explanation of it, somehow or other the reason, sentiment and practical sense of mankind insist on a real difference, and look upon all denial of the distinction as a manifest and intolerable absurdity.

The universal recognition of this distinction, revealed in every man's consciousness, involved in the organic relations of society, testified to everywhere in the pages of history, embodied essentially in the religious nature and sentiments of mankind, woven into general literature, found to-day unmistakably in the thinking, laws and customs of all races and tribes, and acknowledged in the philosophical view of humanity wherever man is studied, irreducible as a fact by any account of its genesis or explanation of its significance, presents the occasion and primary materials of ethical science. The great phenomenon calls for investigation. We want to know the reasons for it and the import of it.

[CHAPTER III.]
FACULTY OF MORAL DISTINCTIONS—THE EXISTENCE OF CONSCIENCE.

The Moral Faculty.

The great fact of moral distinctions, found to be universal in human thought and life, must be traced back to the particular power of the mind which discerns and feels these distinctions. Back of the phenomenon must be recognized the psychical capacity and action out of which the discriminations arise. The moral faculty answers to and in part accounts for the moral fact. In modern general literature it is usually called the conscience. Ethical science properly accepts the designation. It is sometimes called the moral consciousness, or the moral sense. It expresses a power of the personal ego or self to make the moral discrimination and discern the obligation to rectitude. Without such power, as an adequate capacity for the ideas, it is plain that the ethical judgments could not arise. The very idea of obligation, the ethical "ought," would be wanting. The whole realm of what this science considers would be a blank. In the moral faculty or conscience itself, as the immediate source of the ethical distinctions and laws of duty, we are furnished with additional material for this study.

No particular stress is here laid on the term "faculty," as a designation of the moral power. There is, indeed, no validity in the claim of some recent psychologists that the term must be abandoned on the ground that psychology discovers only mental acts, without a psychic subject with distinct faculties back of the acts. Yet the term faculty has often been used and understood in a way inconsistent with the essential and conscious unity of the personal ego or self, making the soul seem a bundle of independent and separately acting parts of a psychical organism. The perfect oneness of the personal self must be maintained, and the term faculty, when used for any form of psychical ability, must be understood simply as expressing the soul's capacity or power to do any specific form of work, or to act in any particular and distinctively definable way, as, for instance, to know, to feel, to will, to remember, to compare. In this sense the use of the term stands fully justified in psychological usage and propriety. But the reason for abating from the claim of strict exactness in the term in this connection is that the conscience, in its full conception and action, as will hereafter appear, while exhibiting a specific and simple power as its central reality, will be found to include also subordinately the conjoint action of several other forms of psychical power. It stands for a complex of capacities and powers. This will appear when we reach its analysis. But the question of the absolute simplicity of the faculty does not affect the substance of our inquiry into its existence nor the propriety of employing the term for the power in its totality. For, as naming the central and decisive reality in the conscience, it is justly spoken of as a special faculty. Even when it is viewed as standing for a complex of powers converging, in their functions, to the discernment of moral distinctions and the reality of duty, it has sufficient individuality to be rightly and scientifically designated in this way. The question to be considered, and upon which the logical conclusions of the science will depend, is not its absolute simplicity, but the fact of such a power as a normal part in the soul's essential constitution of powers. If the power be found integral and normal in the soul's actual capacities, we have all that is essential for the foundation of ethics.

The existence of the conscience as a specific and natural faculty of discernment of right and duty may seem to the student or reader to need no formal proof, as something substantially everywhere acknowledged. But as various theories undertake to question its existence, in the sense thus explained, and resolve the affirmations of right and duty into pseudo-products developed in a roundabout way, or by some illusive transformation of ideas or sentiments given by the other faculties of the soul, ideas or sentiments which in fact are really unethical, it becomes necessary to vindicate the asserted existence of this moral faculty.

Moral Distinctions Prove Conscience.

1. The primary and fundamental evidence is the great fact, already set forth, of the moral distinctions which arise out of its action and fill personal consciousness and the life of the world with their attesting presence. The known object implies a power by which it is known. Without the faculty, in the sense of a power to know, the knowledge here in question could not exist. Its existence is proof of the reality and action of the faculty perceptive of it. The only alternative to this would be a total denial of the ethical distinction, even as a genuine phenomenon, and an assertion that the supposed knowledge of it is, and always has been, illusory and unreal. And this would be equivalent to a claim that men may and should abandon the ethical distinction and believe that there is absolutely no moral difference between justice and injustice, between kindness and hatred, between truth and lying, between friendship and treachery, between charity and murder. And this again would mean that we are to repudiate, as without validity, the whole notion which the ages, especially the most intelligent and best ages, have cherished, that man is capable of character, as good or bad, excellent or blameworthy. But this whole alternative becomes impossible, by reason of the necessary and invincible contrary judgment by which the moral distinctions are affirmed as actual and valid for human life. The faculty of moral discernment proves its existence by making the contrary of its discernment an impossible conception.

The Moral Perceptions Peculiar.

2. Its existence is further proved by the unique and peculiar character of its data or perceptions. These are unlike any other, sui generis. They are original and cannot be deduced from other data. The ethical percept is something that can be understood only in terms of itself. It cannot be described or expressed in the terms of the percepts or knowledge given by the other faculties of the soul, either general or special, either separately or in combination. Hence we must, according to all sound psychological procedure, postulate a special faculty, as distinctive and normal as is the percept, for this original and irresolvable ethical idea.

A little explanation will help to show this. Let us make search for the ethical idea or perception among the well-known data of the other faculties. Manifestly it is not given by the "sense-perception," for it presents none of the physical properties which this makes known. Clearly, too, it is not created by the "consciousness," which presents simply the states or acts of the mind, with the personal self as their subject, but which does not itself originate the states or acts it reveals—any more than does the light of the morning create the objects of the landscape which it discloses. Further, it is evidently not given by the power of "representation," for this merely reproduces and re-knows what was before known through the "sense-perception" and revealed in "consciousness," revived in the form of memory or rearranged and recombined in the forms of the constructive imagination. It supplies no original data. It, further still, cannot be the product of the "logical" faculty, as the power or function of discursive reasoning, because this originates no new material, but only reconnects and judges of relations in the material already known, simply dealing with ideas furnished to it. Nor can the ethical percept, as an intuition to the obligation to rectitude, be at all identified with the a priori ideas of time and space, or the categories of substance and attribute, identity and difference, means and end, or the law of causation. And yet it stands out in an originality as positive and distinct as do any of the unquestionable data or percepts of the soul's acknowledged specific faculties.

Just as little can the ethical idea, as the discrimination of right and wrong, be referred to the "sensibility," as the pleasure or dislike with which we regard what is found useful and conducive to enjoyment or the reverse. For, though a certain pleasure is connected with the ethically right, this specific feeling follows, and is dependent on no other perception than of the right. It is a satisfaction which the ethically good thus awakens. But the knowledge which experience gives of what is useful and conducive to enjoyment is generically different from the moral idea and its sense of obligation. Utility and the ethical discrimination are not the same conception. They belong to two diverse realms of thought and knowledge. Whatever relations may be traced between them, they cannot be identified or held as convertible percepts. The autonomous imperative of the ethical idea often positively prohibits the very things men judge to be profitable and pleasurable. It is a remarkable fact that the testimonies from literature and life to the phenomenon of moral distinctions everywhere maintain the difference between the idea of right and that of the pleasurable or profitable. What is right is one thing; what is agreeable is another thing. The two conceptions are not identical, but are often placed in immediate and irreducible antithesis. Those who do right, choosing it and heroically loyal to it despite the appeals of ambition, the temptations of avarice, the enticements of ease, and the favor or the wrath of the wicked, are approved and honored. To such the gates of the divine favor and recompense are pictured as ever standing open.

There is another consideration in this connection which shows beyond question that this ethical faculty, whose action is everywhere traceable, is not to be confounded with mere intellectuality or the action of simply the general intellectual powers. It exhibits itself in a distinct line of working and results, like a particular current in the common sea, and often in open contrast. It is a peculiar and significant fact, often observed by historians, that as the civilizations of antiquity, of Assyria, Egypt, Phenicia, Greece and Rome, advanced in intellect they declined in morals. Intellectualism may be at its height while the moral side of life may suffer a submergence beneath the floods of luxury and refined social vices. Buckle confesses that intellect and morals are not only distinguishable, but separable.[10] Herbert Spencer says: "The belief in the moralizing effects of intellectual culture, flatly contradicted by facts, is absurd a priori."[11] Lord Wolseley makes a statement not flattering to the boasted advantage claimed for simple intellectualism: "The virtue of the Zulu women was superior to that of any civilized people I know of."[12] The function of the conscience in human nature and life stands clearly distinguishable from the common data and powers of mere intellectualism. The world will not be ethically saved by intellect alone. The conscience must dominate mere intellectual results and forces. And the high distinctive place and peculiar character of the conscience-perception is seen when it is thus observed that the perception is not of something that is, but of what ought to be, in the sphere of conduct and character. Its object is apprehended as lying in the ideal realm of obligation. The reality perceived is transcendent, as what should be in life, in order that life may accord with a super-sensible reality in the realm of righteousness. It as truly reaches beyond sense as do the intuitions of time and space or the law of causation; and, as truly as they, it calls for the recognition of a special and original psychical faculty or provision, among the powers of the soul, for its perception. The conscience,

"Deep-seated in our mystic frame,"

discerns a law of righteous obligation, which is not the dictate of mere desire or pleasure or self-advantage, but a law established at once over us and in us not dependent on our will or choice but demanding conformity of will and choice to itself.

Feelings from Conscience Perceptions.

3. The existence of the conscience as an integral power of the human constitution is evidenced also by the special feelings which attend its perceptions. They are distinctively peculiar. This is illustrated in the sense of obligation arising from the idea of right and the perception of duty. It is even more clearly illustrated in the satisfaction which attends and follows duty done, and the remorse which follows wrong or crime committed.

The sense of obligation, i. e. the emotion awakened by the perception of obligation, is unique among the emotions of the sensibility. In the presence of recognized right or wrong men feel bound to correspondent action as they feel bound under no other perceptions. The conscience, indeed, uses no compulsion, but it presents the right or wrong and correspondent obligation. Freedom is not annulled, but appealed to. The feeling, as the sensibility excited, is the feeling of ought or ought not, added to the perception of it. Nothing like this appears in connection with any of the other perceptions. We may perceive truth, but if the truth is not the particular truth of obligation itself, there is only the pleasure, gratification or admiration in its discovery and attainment. We may perceive beauty, but if the beauty be apart from that of ethical excellence, the feeling is simply æsthetic and different from the obligatory feeling: "I ought." We may perceive utility or understand what is simply profitable, but the feeling awakened is but desire. All these and like simply intellectual perceptions awaken no sense of obligation to cherish any special sentiments or perform any special acts. But as soon as men, in pure and normal state of their rational and emotional nature, perceive the right as over against the wrong, the sensibility which always in greater or less degree responds to every act of knowledge, presents a form of feeling, in the ethical "ought," generically different from the feelings that arise out of all other kinds of knowledge. This feeling is itself a part and parcel of the aggregate or complex of the conscience. But its presence marks the conscience as a special power normally constituent of human nature.

The other moral emotions named, viz.: satisfaction in duty done and remorse or compunction for wrong, bring us to the same conclusion. These feelings are sui generis. They are distinctively characteristic, and are never called forth but in connection with the moral intuitions. These peculiar satisfactions or compunctions never appear upon perception of a truth of mathematics or a fact in chemistry or a gem of art. Such knowledge evokes no sense of duty and is followed by no feeling of remorse or rush of compunction, flooding the soul with self-condemnation. A sense of loss, in failing to gain a possible advantage, is incapable of being confounded with the feeling of having done wrong. Some of the highest elevations of ethical satisfaction are felt when men have maintained their fidelity to the right in face of the most enormous losses and of the most desolating sufferings. The deepest remorse the human soul ever knows may spring up in view of ways and acts which have given men all the things they have coveted and judged to be the most useful and enjoyable. There must surely be a special power whose peculiar discernments call the sensibilities into such unique and peculiar forms of feeling.

Conflict of Moral Judgements.

4. This conclusion is not weakened, as has sometimes been supposed, by the diversity and seeming conflict of moral judgments among men. This diversity seems, in the view of many persons, inconsistent with the supposition of a conscience, in the sense given. The fact of such diversity is freely conceded. The progress of history shows many changes in moral judgments. An advance is clearly traceable, in which once accepted rules of conduct have been superseded by different requirements. Things approved in one land and tribe are condemned in another. Pascal has said that conscience is one thing north of the Pyrenees and another south. In every community what some look upon as right others declare wrong. Infanticide, which under our civilization is punished as murder, on the banks of the Ganges has been esteemed a high religious duty. Polygamy, which our government is trying to wipe out as an immorality and foul blot, is held by the Mormons as a sacred right. Slavery is still regarded by some as right though condemned by the convictions of the nation as morally indefensible. Most startling diversities and contrasts are continually appearing. Hence it has often been said that our moral judgments rest, in fact, on no original and permanent principles discerned by a distinct and universal faculty of the soul, but are a purely adventitious and accidental product, shaped in ideas that come of circumstances, education or the shifting spirit of the age.[13] The law of morality is reduced to the dictates of expediency or to sentiment and caprice born of our changeful desires. This virtually denies both the validity of the ethical behests and the reality of an ethical faculty provided for perception of rectitude and duty. But the difficulty from this diversity and apparent contradiction loses its force when carefully considered. It disappears when we recall the following indubitable facts:

Ethical Sense Persists.

First, that in the midst of this variety and conflict in the moral judgments, the ethical sense still persists in maintaining its function. If convicted of acting inconsistently, it still acts. Though it is found judging differently, it still judges, asserting its place and office, and imposing its decisions as obligatory in conduct. Under the view alleged in the objection, the sense of obligation ought to disappear, its supposed authority having been explained away. The person finds that in very truth the moral behest, though in him is not of him, is not of his will or choice, but arises out of the necessary action of a power that he cannot displace by refusal to obey it. The faculty or power does not consent, so to speak, to omit or withdraw its ethical distinction and assertion of duty. It does not abdicate, when men allege the illegitimacy of its authority.

Agreement in Judgments.

Secondly, that while there is diversity as to many points, there is none in its judgments as to the great body of virtues and vices of human life. As to all the leading qualities of character and conduct there is full and universal agreement. With respect to all the cardinal virtues, such as justice, kindness, veracity, love, courage, fidelity, generosity, the moral judgments approve them as the magnet owns its pole, in all the multi-form relations and offices of life. On the other hand, injustice, falsehood, enmity, treachery, cruelty, adultery, theft, murder and similar dispositions and acts in their thousand forms of unmistakable manifestation, are universally condemned. There is no question anywhere around our globe that one who deliberately kills his mother or mangles his father, or tortures the innocent or defrauds his friend, is a wrong-doer, of abhorrent guilt. Over almost the entire broad field of moral obligation there is a consentient, clear and consistent judgment by the moral sense of man in all ages and places. It is only along dividing lines, wider or narrower as they may be, that, by reason of the fainter presence of the moral element or the complexity of the relations concerned, the moral judgments exhibit this diversity or act with less assured and certain accuracy. The perplexity and difference find place only in limited degree and on remoter points, where the distinctions are so subtle as to require the nicest balancing of all the complex relations and elements which develop the ethical obligations.

If, indeed, the conscience reported entirely different codes throughout, from bottom to top and from center to circumference, or codes with contradictions as to the cardinal virtues and vices, then we might well question the existence and action of a real, original and normal faculty as actually perceiving a real moral distinction and principle of duty. But if such diversities are found only in limited degree, on marginal ground and in complex situations, we are simply in the presence of a fact of great similarity of the conscience with all the rest of the finite and fallible faculties of the human mind. Upon a hundred points of practical morals the intelligent conscience would be likely to agree quite as well as the judgments of men in any other sphere of practical knowledge and life.

Agreement in Principles.

Thirdly, that even with respect to the cases in which there is the most startling diversity, there is often an underlying agreement, overlooked by superficial thought. Take, for instance, the Hindu mother's act of infanticide. Underneath her act and guiding it, is one or the other, or possibly both, of these principles: 1. Whatever sacrifice God calls for ought to be made; or, 2. Whatever is best for the child ought to be done. Falsely taught to believe that God calls for the sacrifice of her child, or that this surrender of it to him is the best thing for it, the mother makes the offering. Essentially as to the principles from which she acts her conscience and the Christian conscience are at one. But she has been misled as to the will of God. Her understanding is without correct information as to matters of fact, and she applies mistakenly the principles of duty which are in her moral nature. Take, again, the crimes of religious intolerance and persecution. The religious zealot believes that every man is to be, without weakness or shadow or turning, faithful to the truth. So also does the dissenter from the creed which the persecutor defends. They agree as to the underlying principle of action. Each feels bound by the same ethical law of "fidelity to the truth," but the persecutor is in grievous error in understanding that this fidelity binds him to coerce the mind of his dissenting brother.

Difference of Perceptions.

Fourthly, the difference must be clearly kept in view between the essential ethical perception, viz.: the distinction of right and wrong with the involved obligation, and the application of that perception—between the primary and secondary moral judgment. The primary is the intuition of the law of right, the secondary affirms the quality of right or wrong with respect to particular actions. In the one case the moral sense perceives that justice, love, veracity, kindness, etc., are right, and injustice, hatred, falsehood and cruelty are wrong; in the other the judgment is concerned with the further question whether this, that, or the other act comes under one or the other of these categories. The fundamental ethical distinction and obligation, with approval of justice, truth, etc., are generic, and altogether irrespective of any particular actions or instances. The secondary judgments apply the distinction to particular modes of conduct or forms of temper and feeling. The latter are only in part moral judgments, i. e. only so far as the particular feeling or deed exhibits to the conscience the presence of the ethical quality. It is an unquestionable fact that in many of the activities of life there are open alternatives of choice where the question of moral quality is not raised at all. As, for instance, between taking one path or another to a certain point, or in writing a letter with a pen or typewriter, the choice is morally indifferent. The decision involves no ethical judgment. But in most contemplated action there are relations that raise the question of right or wrong—in some cases only by remote implication, in others in clear and burning emphasis. There are degrees in this respect, all the way from the faintest glimmering of ethical quality to the boldest and most transparent certainty. We are by no means entitled to doubt the existence of conscience, because in all these unequal conditions, with imperfect knowledge of the relations of particular actions and feelings, it fails to apply its unchanging affirmations of generic duty, with equal or unmistaken certainty and exactness, to all the varied motives, feelings and deeds of men. It is clear how differing moral judgments may occur, without any impeachment whatever of either the ethical reality or the existence of the faculty for its discernment.

Infallibility Not Involved.

Fifthly, we must add that the reality of this faculty, as an essential endowment of the human soul, by no means involves infallibility in its action. No one of the human faculties is, in all its range and the application of its data, absolutely infallible, incapable of error or of being misled. The sense-perceptions, the memory, the logical power, the power of applying the notions of time and space, are all liable to error. Yet these are all original, constitutional and normal faculties of man, divinely-given guides for his self-direction and suited to the ends for which they exist. The reality of a faculty is not disproved by its fallibility. Finiteness, limitation and consequent incompetence to exclude mistake or only partial discernment, are no reason for denying the existence of any faculty within the range of its given action and real discriminations. The very errors that appear in its action are at once evidence of its existence and proof of limitations which harmonize it with the aggregate human psychology. The objection against the conscience from its fallibility, which is but another name for this diversity in its applicatory judgments, if applied to all the psychical faculties, would discredit the reality of the aggregate complex of the psychical powers and overthrow the basis of all our knowledge, even of that which is employed to effect such overthrow. No diversity occurs in the primary judgment of distinction between moral good and evil. As already explained, it is easy to see how differences, varied and great, should appear in the application of the distinction to the complicated, obscure and ever-changing aspects and relations of human conduct.

Proofs Independent of Origin.

5. These proofs of conscience as a distinct endowment of the human mind are independent of the whole question of the mode of its origin. For they consist of facts, as clear, peculiar, indisputable and irreducible as are the facts that guarantee any particular science whatever. They are capable of verification under perpetual tests, as they have been verified in the consentient experience of mankind in all its normally developed conditions. And the logic of the facts is altogether irrespective of any theory of the mode of the origin of conscience. It is needful that this point should be clearly fixed in mind, especially in view of the wide favor at present shown to the hypothesis of an evolutionary genesis of man. Except in the materialistic and atheistic form of the hypothesis the theory distinctly presents evolution not as the cause, but only as the mode of the creation of man with all his now given endowments. It is, of course, incumbent on the supporters of the hypothesis, in any form whatever, in order to vindicate its scientific claims, to show its competency to account for the existence and action of the moral faculty with its ethical discernment and law. An hypothesis that fails to solve any of the involved phenomena discredits itself, not the facts. So far as the materialistic, non-teleological form of evolutionism is concerned, which proposes matter and force as the full cause and account of man, it is condemned by its own utter inadequacy to explain the genesis of conscience with its moral law, as well as of the other great psychical realities in the nature and life of man. It is helpless before the task. Its only resource is to seek to resolve both the ethical fact and the ethical faculty into illusion. With respect to theistic evolutionism, which stands simply as an hypothesis of the mode of creation by God, the existence of the moral faculty may still be admitted, as having its all-sufficient cause in the divine creative power as the source of all things. If, instead of an immediate creation of man, the idea of his gradual creation from the inferior animal orders be maintained as the actual method of the divine work, then the law of evolution must be regarded as having been adjusted and used for the production of man with the faculty of moral discernment. The teleological principle, everywhere illuminating the structure of organisms and the constitution of life, must, from the first, have guided the development for this enthronement of right in the human personality. Asserting its method of a progressive genesis of conscience, this kind of evolutionism confesses its existence. Whether or not its account is satisfactory is another question, to be decided according to the evidence furnished. It is more than doubtful if it has yet succeeded in making clear the possibility of its origin under the hypothesis. Some serious difficulties have still to be overcome.[14] If it ever does succeed it must be, not by denial of the conscience, but by showing the evolutionary movement in some way or other competent to its creation.

This lengthened presentation of the evidence of the existence of the conscience as an essential endowment and part of human nature, may seem to the reader to have been unnecessary or beyond the importance of the question involved. But, as will appear hereafter, the firm establishment of this point is vitally needful, in order to exclude various forms of erroneous teaching and secure a firm and immovable foundation for a just ethical system.

[CHAPTER IV.]
THE FACULTY OF MORAL DISTINCTIONS—THE NATURE OF CONSCIENCE.

Right View Necessary.

In close connection with the indubitable fact of conscience, as an essential faculty of the human soul, follows a more careful inquiry into the nature of this faculty. It is necessary to ascertain precisely, if possible, what it is as a peculiar psychical power, as revealed and defined in and by its own action.

1. The importance of determining, at this place, the exact nature of the conscience is apparent from two considerations.

Scientific Accuracy.

(1) Scientific accuracy in the whole ethical view is possible only through a true and thoroughly accurate understanding of the power that gives rise to the whole phenomenon of obligation. The final theoretical view is dependent on finding the truth at this point. Mistake or inexactness here must inevitably introduce, or at least allow, confusion or error in all the dependent questions of the science. A false conception of the conscience will at once mislead. Even an only partial or obscure view of it will fail to afford sufficient light for the subsequent steps of the investigation. A conception of it, with true and false elements combined, must necessarily introduce perplexity or contradiction and weaken or distort the conclusion.

Such differing views have in fact introduced the utmost confusion into the problems of this science. The conscience has sometimes been spoken of as an "instinct," which identifies it with the non-intelligent, blind action in the bee which builds cells after geometrical principles, or in birds or fishes which migrate with the changing seasons. Often it has been represented as but a special "feeling" or "sentiment" that arises inexplicably, if not fortuitously, prior to perception of any ethical quality, itself the basis of judgments of duty.[15] Again it has been made to stand simply for accumulated or established approbative judgments from experiences of pleasure or advantage, transformed and fixed as rules of conduct.[16] Sometimes it has been regarded as an immediate, almost supernatural "voice of God" within men, with its inexplicable direct imperative of duty. It is plain that these and other differing notions of conscience must always affect, as they always have affected, the whole theory of ethics.

Condition of Authority.

(2) A right view of its nature is necessary to a correct conception of its authority. This makes the question more than simply speculative or important for correct ethical theory. It involves the interests of practical morality. The right of the conscience to rule us is sustained or denied according as one or another conception of its nature is entertained.

It is natural that we should feel prompted to examine the nature of a part of our constitution that is constantly obtruding its distinctions and asserting a ruling authority over us. As it has its place within us irrespective of our will and presents laws of duty to the will, we want to see on what ground its asserted authority can be justified. But not all views of its nature afford equal explanation of this peculiarity in its action. For instance, if the conscience be nothing but a blind, irrational "instinct," or a "feeling" without any perception of reality to give rise or right to the feeling, or if it be but a standard judgment of prudence or utility from experiences of what has been helpful or hurtful, perhaps slowly accumulated and hereditarily transmitted, a clear and rational ground of ethical authority cannot be made out. Such a power may indicate what is useful, but can, if this be all, impose on us no obligation. It may tell us what is pleasurable or desirable, but cannot speak to us concerning the other question: What is right? It cannot hold us guilty because we may choose to forego personal advantage or enjoyment. If, however, examination can show that the conscience is a faculty of actual perception, discerning a fundamental distinction between right and wrong and an immutable obligation to apply it in the constituted relations of life, its rightful authority is at once vindicated. It is seen to be an authoritative guide in its sphere of perception, as are the other cognitive powers, each in its own sphere of real knowledge. When it becomes clear that the moral faculty, in the presence of the existing conditions and relations of life, perceives what ought to be done, and what men are obligated to do, and what they cannot disregard without demerit, ill-desert or guilt, then the right of conscience to direct conduct is justified.

At any rate, whether the examination may confirm or discredit this claim of rightful rulership, the inquiry into the nature of the conscience is essential to a correct settlement of the great question of its authority and the grounds of it.

Question of Psychology.

2. The primary and proper source of information to settle the question of the nature of this faculty is to be found, not in speculative theorizing or arbitrary assumptions, but in the actual working of the human mind. It is a psychological question, and must be settled, as all psychological questions must, by the facts as they are discovered in experience and consciousness. The method of inductive inquiry is here the true and essential one. The full phenomena of action must be carefully examined, analyzed and traced to their psychical genesis. Such examination can leave but little doubt in the conclusion. In the facts of consciousness, as found in connection with the operations of our minds in the sphere of moral self-determination and action, the entire movement can be observed, marked and recorded.

Place of Conscience.

3. In a preliminary way, it must be noted and remembered that the power and action of conscience can have place only in connection with the total complex of man's psychical powers. It is not an isolated, independent faculty in the midst of the different powers of the soul. This truth will require fuller consideration in another place, but it is necessary to note it here so far as to show the essential psychological conditions of conscience.

The very possibility of such a faculty or power is conditioned in all the human faculties of intelligence, sensibility and choice, in which man becomes a moral agent. While the soul or self is a unit, its powers act under a law of inter-dependence, exhibiting a striking and beautiful order of conditioning and being conditioned, from the primary and fundamental forms of activity to those that are highest and crown all the rest. At the very base and beginning of its action are sense-perception and consciousness—these furnishing knowledge of the outer and inner worlds, of the realities and relations in the system of things in the midst of which man finds himself. Dependent upon the percepts by the senses and the states of consciousness thus furnished comes the further capacity of "representative knowledge" in the forms of memory and the imagination. Only as the original acts of perception and consciousness have supplied their data, is the memory or the imagination possible. But the representative power and action are then necessary to the action of the higher powers. Without memory the logical power, the discursive function in comparison, judgment and conclusion, in analysis, synthesis and systemization, would have no materials and could do no work. The mind could not do this advance work except upon the basis of work of a different kind done before. And then, too, the reason, as the power of intuitive or a priori truths, would be without a knowledge of the phenomenal world, in the midst of which, or on occasion of the experiences of which, these a priori truths appear and are seen to be necessary. The various kinds of knowing exercised by the undivided and indivisible self are plainly arranged in an ascending order, till at their summit they are crowned with the intuitional power which we may term, as we here do, the reason—the power of discerning necessary universal truths. But it is equally clear that of the powers below the reason—sense-perception and consciousness furnishing facts objective and subjective, memory restoring them before the mental eye, and the logical power rushing to necessary conclusions—none, either singly or together, can stand for the conscience. Sense and consciousness can give us only what is, not what ethically ought to be. The memory can but renew to mental view what was before known. The sense of logical necessity is clearly different from the perception of moral rightness and obligation. But the action of these antecedent powers or faculties supplies the conditions for the existence and action of the conscience—gives knowledge of the personal self and the relations of life, in the midst of which moral right and wrong and obligation and duty are developed and are seen to arise. Upon this knowledge, in which man knows himself and his relations to the world of which he forms a part, the soul rises to an outlook in the clear atmosphere of which the reality of ethical distinctions, duty and responsibility become visible. And to the crowning power of the reason, as rational insight, must be assigned the central function of this ethical perception of right and obligation—somewhat as to it belong, in another field of view, also the intuitions into the realities of time and space and the categories of substance, attribute, and causality.

This position of the conscience as, in its fundamental action, a form of rational intuition, among the summit forms of the mind's powers, makes evident its relation of dependence on the entire complex of psychical faculties which furnish the conditions for its discernments and imperative. But there is something more. As we shall yet see, its total function, in guiding the moral life, includes the action of many of the common functions of both intellect and sensibility.

4. The specific psychology of the conscience itself, under close and complete analysis, will disclose the following clearly distinguishable elements in its action. They reveal the nature of the conscience-power in its total complex reality. These elements are not separable in fact, but are distinguishable in the analytic thinking that examines them.

Ethical Distinctions.

(1) The primary element is a simple irreducible perception of the distinction between right and wrong. This is the first and fundamental ethical idea. In it we have the initial point in the moral action of the mind. "The universal ethical fact is the recognition of a distinction between right and wrong in conduct."[17] This distinction appears among the necessary ideas of the human mind. It is a phenomenon in the psychology of the race. It is developed, in the presence of the facts and relations of life, as something provided for in the normal and necessary action of the rational self-conscious ego. It must be viewed as an "intuition" of the reason. It can not otherwise be accounted for. In its nature it is not a feeling, though it gives rise to feeling. It is not a volition, for it comes irrespective of choice and asserts its own rights before the will. It is not a mere experience, though it arises on occasion of experience. The idea stands for something beyond experience—experience being limited to the profitable, the enjoyable or the painful. We experience the useful and the agreeable, but the right, the ethical idea, must be perceived or rationally seen, as a super-sensible reality in the ideal realm of the demands of duty. It is not a perception of relations themselves, but of a distinction as to something due in human relations and life.

If we describe this primary and fundamental distinction, as it appears in the action of the conscience, it will be found marked by the following characteristics. First, the distinction is perceived—a datum of the cognitive intellect. As discerned by the knowing faculty, its object, viz.: the distinction, exists. For knowing always involves that the thing known is. The distinction between right and wrong is real in the sphere of moral relations. Second, it is universal, marking the human mind's action everywhere and in all ages. Third, it cannot be obliterated. Through all questions about it and objections to its validity, it remains undestroyed and seemingly indestructible. It disappears only with the wreck of rationality itself. Fourth, it is unique and simple, an original perception, incapable of being resolved into more elementary ideas or deduced from them. Fifth, it is the first of its kind of discernments, i. e. of ethical perceptions.

Obligation Perceived.

(2) Along with, though dependent on, the perception of the moral distinction between right and wrong, there is also a perception of obligation with respect to right and wrong—to do or not to do. This is an essential part of the aggregate conscience-discernment. The perception of the right is thus the discovery also of law for conduct.

The soul, it must be specially noted, perceives this obligation as truly as it does the ethical distinction itself. The term "obligation" may express also a feeling, but the ego, or personal self, perceives the obligation before it feels it. For in all cases rational emotion or feeling can arise in the mind only as the mind discerns something to awaken it.

Belongs to the Agent.

It is to be particularly observed, further, that the obligation, thus perceived and then felt, is perceived and felt as due by the moral agent with respect to right and wrong. The ethical quality of rightness belongs to the act or principle of action. The motive, the intention, the conduct of men, is in itself morally right or wrong, good or evil. But the obligation appears as what is owed by the moral agent to what is right. The relation between right and obligation corresponds to that between right and duty. Right is in the conduct; duty is for the responsible person. The terms express two sides in the ethical reality, the first the objective side, the second the subjective. The two imply and call for each other. The right in the contemplated action means obligation or duty in the person. To the right there is always a corresponding duty; for duty in fact expresses what is due to the right forever by all persons.[18]

This perception of obligation, with its attendant feeling of it, is the central reality of the conscience. It is the very core of it. For in this the moral faculty carries and asserts its "imperative" for the regulation of conduct. On the basis of the idea of right, it affirms duty, and brings mankind under the reality and behests of moral law. The distinction of right and wrong, if conceived of as unattended with this further discernment of obligation, would manifestly fall short of establishing the principle of duty or fixing in the soul a conscious bond to righteousness. But in this further discernment is revealed the nexus that binds together perceived right and man's responsibility to it. Hence, this is the cardinal thing in the conscience, for which the ethical idea prepares, and upon which the moral life rests. It is the point at which humanity is organized under a moral constitution and the behests of moral law. It is the sublime endowment in which man's nature is capacitated for its position, as standing face to face with the sublimer reality of the divine government over the world.

It is to be distinctly observed, however, that the "imperative" disclosed in this perceived obligation, does not mean compulsion. The idea of "obligation" can have no place where there can be no choice as to accepting it. The whole sphere of morals, as we have already seen and shall need often to be reminded, exists, and can exist only in connection with personality or intelligent free agency. Its realm is that of freedom. Law in ethics is something in clear contrast with law in the processes of physical nature. The perception of it is not the perception of what must be or will be, or shall be, but what ought to be. Its appeal is to our freedom, and the duty is ideated before it is performed.

Further, it is well to observe here again how distinctly peculiar is this percept of obligation among the data of our cognitive faculties. The sense-perception notifies us of what is. So does the consciousness. Memory renews to consciousness a knowledge of what was. The logical processes reveal abstract relations. That two and two make four, or that a straight line is the shortest between two points, or that oxygen and hydrogen united in certain proportions form water, are truths distinctly known when the mind is directed to these subjects; but the perception of these truths is without the unique idea of obligation or the duty of cherishing any particular feeling or of conforming to a standard of righteousness. Only through the discernments of right and wrong by the conscience, is there given this peculiar intuition of the reality of obligation.

Moral Quality Identified.

(3) A third thing to be marked in this psychological analysis of the action of conscience, and revealing its nature, is the affirmation of right or wrong to particular acts or principles of conduct. In this the function of conscience passes from its fundamental idea into the form of an applicatory judgment. The ideas of right and obligation are applied to the actual affairs and activities of life. The quality of right or wrong is connected with particular actions, feelings or purposes, and these are affirmed to be right or wrong according as they have or have not such moral quality. This application is both a perception and a judgment—a perception in that it sees the ethical quality in the deed or motive, and a judgment in that it affirms the connection. These judgments take the forms of approval or disapproval, as the conduct is discerned to be morally good or bad. It is plain that such judgments of application would be impossible were there not in the mind the fundamental ethical distinctions already explained.

Manifestly these judgments of application belong to the general judging power of the mind. All knowing may be said to be judging, or at least tends to take the form of judgment. They are specific here, only with respect to the material they take account of. They are the acts of the judging faculty in the sphere of applying the ethical distinctions and obligations. As a basis for the judgments, not only must the ethical distinction exist in the mind, but the action or conduct to be judged must be seen or understood in all its essential relations and motives. As duties are developed by relations, the moral character of the contemplated conduct or deed cannot be determined apart from a correct knowledge of those relations. The judging capacity will err without the light of true and full information concerning the place and purposes of the action. And its insights and affirmations will vary in their approximation to entire correctness according to the degree in which all the elements entering into the particular conduct are understood and considered.

Merit and Demerit Perceived.

(4) The action of the conscience includes also perception of merit and demerit in connection with conduct. The meaning of these terms needs to be carefully defined and limited. They express something more than the simple approval or disapproval already noted in connection with the discernment of the rightness or wrongness of an action. The terms stand for a step of discernment and judgment beyond these, and denote the ethical reality of good-desert or ill-desert for the moral agent who conforms to rightness, or offends against its claims. He who conforms deserves well; he that offends deserves ill. They, therefore, mark distinctly and definitely the point in the psychology of the conscience where the faculty discerns that those who do right ought to receive favor and those who do wrong ought to experience disfavor. They express a principle of just consequences. The principle is, that for right conduct good is due, for wrong done evil is due. The wrong-doer is guilty, i. e. justly subject to punitive action. His deed deserves it for him. On the other hand doing right is worthy of reward, or of the good that befits the good done. The conscience discerns and affirms this reality of good and evil-desert.

Here is reached the psychological source of the great fact of responsibility in the world. It emerges into consciousness and into actual force in human life from this point in the disclosures and affirmations of the moral sense. Hence arises the unspeakably varied but ever persistent human necessity under which men are compelled to regard themselves and others as justly amenable to the law of moral consequences. Its application is seen in every sphere of life, personal, domestic, social, and national. A moral administration is seen in the world only as the administration is found to be conformed to and carrying out the principle of distributing good according to moral desert. Any failure in the adjustment of recompense or given good under this idea is felt to be a lapse from justice and proper order. It stands as something abnormal and monstrous. So firmly does the decision of conscience establish this principle of happy consequences as due to right conduct and punitive effects to wrong-doing, so strongly does it fix the conviction that the divine administration must on the whole adjust award and happiness on this basis, that thoughtful philosophers have ever been wont to find here one of the most assuring guarantees of a future life in which the fragmentary justice of this world will be filled out in fully given recompense.

It must be noted, as is apparent, that this merit or demerit does not belong to men's acts, but to themselves as the moral agents. To action and conduct pertain the moral qualities of rightness and wrongness, but what is done is itself altogether impersonal and not responsible for its own occurrence. The doer of the deed deserves whatever good or evil is due in connection with it.

The practical application of this principle of moral desert is found to be almost infinitely varied, both with respect to the import of the principle and the measure of merit and demerit. With respect to its import, good desert may mean simply that he who chooses the morally right is entitled to his own self-approbation and the approval of others and the moral excellence which he thus prefers. Or it may signify various degrees and kinds of more positive reward which the divine constitution and moral administration of the world may be adjusted to give in the way of happiness and the best external conditions of existence. On the other hand, the demerit of the wrong-doer may mean anything he deserves, from the simple loss of the moral good which he does not choose, to the extremest penalties, objective and subjective, which a righteous divine government may have to employ for the repression of wickedness. In its import, both merit and demerit may refer to endlessly varied experiences and forms of good and evil. With respect to the measure of merit and demerit and the adjustment of due recompense, a similar wide range of difference must be recognized when we come to the application of the principle to human acts and conduct. Conformity to right and offense against it are exhibited in myriad degrees under conditions as varied as are the positions and relations and inner state of all the individuals of the race. The very nature of different persons is in unequal adjustment to virtue and vice. Environment, too, brings stronger temptations to some than to others. Hereditary forces and early training strengthen or weaken the moral perceptions and forces. Thousands of differences perplex the attempt to equate the measure of moral desert to men. It can be determined only in full and perfect view of all the conditions within and the relations surrounding the moral agent; and the apportionment of the due award, it would seem, can be perfectly made only by a being of infinite knowledge and justice.

The measurement of merit and demerit is, however, but another form of judgments of application, in which the moral sense can act in only approximate determinations. Here variation and uncertainty find place. But there can be none as to the fact of good desert and guilt where right and wrong are done.

Emotions Awakened.

(5) Emotions or feelings, awakened by the perceptions of right and wrong, obligation, merit and demerit, complete the action of conscience. These feelings are peculiar and original, unlike the feelings springing from any other perceptions and incapable of being resolved into or deduced from others. Psychologically, it is to be remembered, feeling is in no case a part of perception or cognition, but an additional psychical action of a different kind. "A purely cognitive intelligence might have perfect knowledge of things and their relations to itself; it might know that things, or courses of action, would destroy its own existence; it might even know that its own existence was about to be destroyed; but this knowledge alone would imply no feeling. Such intellect would be like a mirror; it would accurately reflect all that passed before it; but it would be as indifferent as the mirror."[19] But knowing is followed by feeling, a different kind of action of the soul. This is not its action in the form of intellect, but in the form of sensibility. It is action of another order—not itself a cognition, but arising out of cognition. This is the place and relation of these moral feelings. They are awakened in the soul by and through the ethical perceptions. They are determined by these, and form the final element in the total action of the conscience.

These moral feelings, while they form one class, as having their origin in the ethical discriminations, exhibit distinguishing differences. These differences develop in a twofold way, presenting special forms of feeling. They must be noted as they differ by these two conditions of their development.

Correspon­dent to Right or Wrong.

First, according as the moral quality, the perception of which awakens them, is good or evil. The soul cannot discern the great distinctions between right and wrong without correspondent emotional awakening. The sensibility is moved by the perception, and takes the form of a feeling of approval for the morally good, and a feeling of reprobation for the wrong. Our language furnishes no single term to designate either of these feelings, but this phraseology is sufficiently descriptive to point them out. The feeling toward the right may be denoted as moral love; that toward wrong as moral aversion. When the quality of rightness or wrongness is exhibited in specially intense degree in particular conduct, the feelings may take the form of ethical admiration or of abhorrence.

Before and After Action.

Secondly, as arising before or after the moral action. If the feeling is awakened in view of action proposed to be done, it may be described, in the absence of a more specific designation, as a sense of obligation to do or not to do the deed—this feeling of obligation being based on a perception of the obligation. From the intellectual discernment the emotional sensibility springs as a sentiment which forms part of the impelling force of conscience. When the feeling arises with respect to an act already done, it takes the nature of ethical satisfaction, a peculiar pleasure in which are blended a sense of self-approbation and of joy, if the deed be right; of self-reproach and remorse, if wrong. Remorse—"a gnawing sense of guilt," whether the feeling be the slightest disquiet of emotion or of agonizing and unsolaceable compunction—appears to be the aptest term to express this state of mind.

Differences of Degree.

Besides the differences thus arising, there are differences in the degree or intensity of these moral feelings. Innumerable causes may affect the differences in this respect. Personal temperament, acquired character, or external conditions may make the feeling greater or less. The mental organization of some persons is more emotional. Education may have given a peculiar development. Temporary circumstances may heighten the excitation. But other things being equal the degree of positiveness in the moral emotions is generally dependent on two things: (a) the clearness with which the moral distinction and the consequent obligation is discerned, and (b) the pureness and tenderness of the person's moral nature. If the ethical idea and obligation are unclearly seen or hardly seen at all, the impression in the feelings must be comparatively slight. But if seen under strong light and with their supreme import, the intuition impresses with greater force. So, too, the state of the whole moral nature is a reason of higher or lower moral sensibility. The more unblighted is the condition of personal life, the more is it responsive to the ethical discernment. Habitual refusal of duty, easy and indifferent familiarity with wrong-doing, or any continued enslavement of the higher nature to the lower, necessarily blunts the delicateness of the sensibilities and lowers the strength of the moral feelings. The process of injury may go on until a condition of callousness is reached which fulfils the striking description: "Seared as with a hot iron."

Motive Power.

It is through these feelings that the conscience becomes a motive power for moral life. The perception of duty alone, as purely intellectual, would be, as said, "like a mirror accurately reflecting the ethical reality passing before it, but as indifferent as the mirror." But upon the perception the emotional nature springs into action. Knowledge, if at all, always goes into effect mediately through the sensibilities in which the soul is stirred by affections and desires. These may be toward moral good as truly as toward sensuous good. We may love the true and the beautiful and the right. We may love the right as right. According to our choices we make the ethically good our own and mould our life into its excellence and blessedness, or the contrary. These feelings are motive powers, bringing occasions for choices.

It is proper to take note, however, that it is only the feelings in view of the right or wrong of an act yet to be done, that are directly moral motives. For it is only through these that we are face to face with the question of choosing or refusing the right in the proposed conduct. The feelings that arise, as satisfaction or remorse after wrong acts, have no existence till the conduct is in retrospect, and can have no motive force for it. And when memory brings these experiences as motives for subsequent conduct, they stand mainly, if not wholly, as considerations for enjoyment. They are not feelings of pure obligation to rightness, but remembrances of pleasure or pain influential as prompting or dissuading on the lower ground of comfort. There is a generic and indelible difference between the feeling of duty, under the pure behests of right, and the natural desire to gain the enjoyment or avoid the misery which we have learned to anticipate from experiences in conduct. In the one case it presents love of the right as right; in the other a love of the more agreeable consequences of right. Unquestionably, indeed, a desire of the better consequences is a proper motive for choices. In these consequences virtue is proving its adaptation to bring its own reward. But the merit of virtue is not in seeking the reward, but in seeking virtue itself. The mercenary spirit is not the love of righteousness, nor as high as it.

5. This analysis makes clear the following characteristics of the conscience.

Conscience is Intellectual.

First, it is primarily and fundamentally intellectual. It is a power of rational perception. It perceives, in direct or intuitive way, the primary ethical distinction between right and wrong, perceives the quality of rightness or wrongness in particular acts or conduct, perceives the obligation of the moral agent with respect to right and wrong, as also the merit or demerit of the moral agent. But along with and blended in inseparable concurrence, moves the function of the sensibility, in feelings of approval and obligation, satisfaction or remorse. Both the intellectual and emotional action of the soul are, therefore, included in what is named the conscience—the perceptive action, here as everywhere else, being primary and conditional for the emotional. If there were no ethical distinction perceived, none would be felt. The conscience, taken in its totality, thus includes both sides of the human psychology, the intellect and the sensibility, and it addresses its behests of duty to the will in its own peculiar way of moral law for conduct.

The strife between intuitional theories and sentimental theories of conscience is, therefore, composed by the concurrence of both knowing and feeling in the action of this power. But the intellectual part is necessarily logically prior to the emotional, and conditional for it. To make a feeling of obligation the basal fact in the psychology of conscience would be an inversion of the whole order of dependence revealed in consciousness. And, surely, the feelings here developed are rational, not physiological sensations. They cannot, for a moment, be identified with the physical sensations which condition the sense-perceptions. Their true place is among the rational emotions.

Sole Percept Moral Quality.

Secondly, the sole object of perception by the conscience is moral quality—the quality of rightness or wrongness, together with the correspondent obligation. It is something supersensible and ideal; not actions themselves as known by sense, but their quality as morally good or evil as discovered by the ethical reason. The thing discerned by the conscience is generically different from the things discerned by the sense-perception or consciousness. Through our senses we know the whole world of objective existences, events and their relations; through consciousness the states, acts and experiences of the subjective personal self are given. But the conscience does not furnish us with a knowledge of any of the substances, events or relations which constitute the world about us or the world within us, but solely of the moral quality of conduct and sentiment, as duty is developed in these relations. It takes notice of the ethical character of the actions and motives of intelligent and responsible beings.

Conscience Acts of Necessity.

Thirdly, the action of the conscience is marked by necessity. And by this we are to understand something more than the simple uniformity in which all the psychical activity, except that of the choices of the will, is held under "fixed laws of thought and feeling." The necessity here affirmed is that unique necessity which distinguishes and marks intuitive or a priori cognition, as of time, space, and causality. "Necessity" is justly conceded to be one of the criteria of these and other intuitional "first truths." It is not at the option of the human mind whether it will think the world under the relations of time and space, or events as occurring under the principle of causation. These are "forms of knowledge," knowledge of super-sensible realities, that come not at our choice but by an unavoidable insight. The primary and fundamental ethical distinction belongs to such rational intuition, and is marked by the peculiar necessity of intuitional action. As on occasion of knowing material bodies with three dimensions, or of changes in consciousness or in the outer world, with the fact of co-existence or succession and duration, the phenomenal sphere is necessarily transcended and time and space are necessarily discerned, so when we understand the manifold relations in which our lives are to be lived, in which we may use our personal powers, either in harmony with or in violation of our given adaptations, and with either great injury or rich good to others, in the same necessary way the conscience must discern the distinction of right and wrong and the reality of duty.

The great implication in this necessity, as we shall hereafter see in examining the nature of virtue, is that the principle of righteousness or the law of duty is something that belongs to the objective order of the world as constituted by God, a divine reality permanent and immutable, not produced but perceived by the conscience. It is not made by man but finds him—finds him through the intelligence by which he is informed of the realities to which he must adjust his life. Moral law stands for a reality that rays itself into view in the human reason whether men will or not. The intuitions of it do not come at the call, or desire, or even at the consent of man. The law revealed stands independent of the individual's personality or choices and asserts itself over him. While this is true of the law revealed, the perception of the law becomes a necessity with the moral agent that is normally endowed and developed. Man does not furnish the moral law to himself. He is not the giver of it, but the recipient. The conscience, therefore, is an open window of our being, through which the objective law of righteousness to which the Creator has adjusted our nature and the constitution of the universe may be discerned by us, a sphere of reality enfolding us, with which our freedom is to harmonize our conduct. Francis Newman has admirably marked the position of this conscience-power in our constitution:

"This energy of life within is ours, yet it is not we.
It is in us, belongs to us, yet we cannot control it,
It acts without our bidding, and when we do not think of it,
Nor will it cease its acting at our command, or otherwise obey us,
But while it recalls from evil, and reproaches us for evil,
And is not silenced by our effort, surely it is not we;
Yet it pervades mankind, as one life pervades the trees."[20]

The reason of these intuitions of the conscience is that back of it and around it and above it is a realm of moral obligations which must, without contingency, be made known to us, that we may order our lives aright.

Erroneous Theory.

6. It is proper at this place to express dissent from some forms of theory which are at variance with the truth thus brought to light. Almost all of them are the outcome of the philosophical phenomenalism of which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is the best illustration. It discredits the competency of our cognitive faculties to reach knowledge of things as they really are. We can know, it is said, only phenomena, while the noumena or things in themselves are incognizable; and doubt is raised whether there is a reality corresponding to what our faculties report. It is suggested that the data of these faculties, especially in the forms of intuition and universal judgments, may be mere "forms of thought," forms of knowing but not of real being, created within as well as by the mind itself, and projected thence in connection with apprehended phenomena. They may be mental fictions in whole or in part, in which the ideal must not be held as standing for actual being. Thus while time and space are necessary "forms of thought" under which all bodies and events must be known, yet time and space, it is alleged, may be but subjective forms given to the phenomena by and in the cognitive action. We are obliged, indeed, it is conceded, in practical life to follow the guidance of our necessary forms of thought. But the knowledge is merely regulative for present activity; and being a product created and shaped largely by the particular organization of our minds, this merely relative and regulative perception of truth may be different in other minds or be hereafter so changed as to present changed phenomena, superseding the judgments now given by other judgments under other views. When the adherents of the Positive Philosophy proceed to define matter as merely "a permanent possibility of sensations,"[21] faith in the reliability of our knowledge of the realities about us, as true for those realities, is thoroughly undermined. This tendency toward an invalidating of our knowledge as real for objective truth, has been fostered by recent physiological psychology which, under materialistic implications, magnifies the effect of the physical organization and condition upon the mental products. In these ways extreme idealism and positive materialism join hands in effort to reduce to uncertainty or illusion what our cognitive faculties perceive of reality and truth in both the material and moral systems about us. But ethical science, in harmony with the soundest and best sustained philosophy of the Christian centuries, rejects these agnostic suggestions, as not only unproved but untenable. They form a theory of our intellectual faculties which cuts away the foundations of all knowledge, even of that which is most clear, fixed, necessary and unchangeable in the intelligence of the race. The theory becomes intellectual suicide, as it nullifies the real validity of all the fundamental perceptions of both sense and reason, on which its own conclusion rests. Its suggestions discredit themselves by confessing that their own foundation is but a part of the illusory, phantasmal action of faculties which, instead of perceiving what is, present but forms which they produce. While it is conceded that, even on this agnostic basis, the conscience would still possess "regulative" authority—as it still asserts its imperative "ought" for life—yet rational ethics, like self-respecting philosophy, must not vacate for our cognitive faculties the great function of knowing while attempting to exercise it, nor fail to maintain that they have been organized for real knowledge, within the sphere and measure opened to them, of the genuine realities with which we have to do, in both the material and moral worlds. The conscience, therefore, must be held, not as formative of its peculiar phenomena, but perceptive of the ethical realities of right and obligation.

Consistent with Theistic Evolution.

7. It is proper also to point out here that this view of the nature of the conscience is not necessarily affected by the question of its evolutionary origin. Should the theory of man's derivative origin, under some form of theistic and teleological evolution, ever pass from its position as an hypothesis into that of scientific truth, this would not require us essentially to alter our account of the nature of this faculty. For the nature of the faculty has not been found in considerations of the mode of its origin, but from analysis of the elemental facts in its action. The adherents of the evolution hypothesis have, indeed, found one of their most formidable difficulties in attempting a satisfactory explanation of a possible origination of this faculty in the assumed forces and laws of evolutionary action. Keeping in view the fact that the very center of the conscience-function appears in regulation and often in denial of inherited feelings and habits, the difficulty of attributing its creation to hereditary action is clearly seen and deeply felt. It has been well pointed out that "the injunctions of conscience do not run with the stream of our hereditary tendencies, but rather against them."[22] That a law of the work and victory of hereditary forces should issue in organizing an endowment for control and repression of hereditary tendencies, seems to involve too much of a contradiction to be accepted. That the survival of the strongest in the battle of individual existence, the reign of "tooth and talon," should gradually create a faculty for asserting the obligation and law of love and kindness to the weak, fails to come properly under our conception of the working of cause and effect.[23] Even in the theistic form of the theory, in which evolution offers itself as presenting not the cause but only the mode of creation, it is hard to conceive of the adaptation of such a process for the production of such a result—a result standing apart from the means by a total difference in both their nature and direction. It is as if the flow of the stream should create the principle of repression of flowing. The actual attempts of evolutionist writers to construct an ethical view which shall explain the phenomena of conscience and justify its authority, has added further evidence of the difficulty on this point. No such attempts have thus far been satisfactory. But the nature of the conscience, as has already been shown, is properly settled, not by the mode of its origin, but by an examination of its actual psychology and intrinsic powers. If this makes it clear, as it unquestionably does, that it is primarily intellectual and percipient in its function, then any failure of evolution or any other theory to explain its origin must much rather discredit the theory than disprove the nature of the endowment which stands as a fact. But an origin of the conscience by evolution, should it ever be proved, would introduce no trouble at this point in the science of ethics. For the faculty is competent for its office in virtue of what it is, and not by the mode through which the divine creative power worked in its formation. The necessity in the case would be met should the evolutionary mode be shown to be capable of evolving an intellectual endowment high enough in perceptive power to discern the ethical distinctions and bind their obligations on men.

[CHAPTER V.]
THE SUPREMACY OF CONSCIENCE.

By the supremacy of conscience is meant its right to exercise moral control. It expresses its proper authority. This authority is not to be thought of as original or independent, but as resting on and revealing the absolute authority of God, who has constituted the moral relations of the world and has set the conscience, with its discerning and regulative function, in the human soul. The question involved is not the right of one merely subjective faculty to impose obligation on another faculty or on all the human capacities and powers—one part of the personal self playing the role of sovereign over the other parts. This would be a shallow and misleading notion of this authority. The whole conception of the conscience is theistic, and implies, as it also testifies to, an absolute law of righteousness over all the world, established by Him who is creator and sovereign of all. It is in the discernment of this principle of rightness, with its demand for obedience to it, that the conscience comes into its position of authority and its authority becomes de jure supreme.

1. But the proof that such authority rightly belongs to it needs to be more fully exhibited. It is explained and made unquestionable in the following facts:

Its Sphere of Judgments.

(1) It is involved in the very sphere of its discernments. This sphere is the sphere of right and duty, which, by very conception, subordinate everything else. Its primary perception is of "the right," as having claim on every rational free agent—and then of obligation which immediately presses its moral requirement into the presence of our capacity for conformity to it. There is, indeed, a degree of authority belonging to each and all the psychical faculties, in the functions they fulfil for the direction and welfare of life. But the peculiarity of the conscience is that the realm of its functions and direction is higher than that of the other powers, the realm in which manhood reaches its supreme purpose and worth. Moral goodness, excellence of character, is the summit of the ascent to which human nature is adapted. In this our nature reaches the "supreme" and all-inclusive "good," compared with which all things else are of inferior claim and merit. The authority of the conscience, as a faculty, is thus identified with the supremacy which belongs to the idea of the morally right, of obligation, duty, the irrepealable "ought" for the conduct of life.

Shown by Nature of Action.

(2) This is more distinctly apparent when we recall the nature of its action. Psychologically, the conscience does not stand as a thing of our own personal will, or as in any way making the obligation which it presents. When we examine it, as it appears in our consciousness, its movement is in the form of a necessary perception of an obligation that is upon us irrespective of our will, a law of duty not of our own framing, but imposing itself on us and demanding the homage of our will. It possesses its authority, therefore, in the fact that it is the discernment of something higher than our will or ourselves, a principle transcending our personality and appearing as supreme law for our life and conduct. And the law connotes a lawgiver and a judge. The conscience thus puts us in the presence of One who has sovereign and absolute right to rule in us and over us. It thus becomes authoritative by its being the power or faculty through which is made known to us the principle or law of righteousness which God has established for the moral order of the world.[24]

The Contrary is Absurd.

(3) These facts, at once psychologically and metaphysically well certified, would themselves be sufficient to explain and vindicate the peculiar right of supremacy almost universally conceded to belong to the moral sense. But the proof, thus given, is confirmed by the fact that the contrary conclusion involves a manifest absurdity.

In the first place, it is incredible to suppose that man, as an intelligent, rational, free agent, capable of character, should have no provision in his mental make-up, no faculty of knowledge, furnishing a principle of guidance for meeting the responsibilities of life. For, such an absence of endowment for this purpose, would necessarily mean, either that responsibility is an illusion, a conclusion belied by the hard fact that the organization of human life inexorably treats and exacts it as real, or that man's nature is constructed in a falsehood, being bound to a high task for which it contains no endowment. Somewhere, therefore, among the human faculties, must appear a power or complex of powers whose disclosures or impulses shall furnish a rightful principle of control. To say that there is no rightful principle—that the morally good has no more right than the morally bad—would be not only absurd to reason, but fly in the face of the spontaneous and ineradicable sense of mankind, which makes the moral distinction.

Further: While the authority for self-control, to meet the ethical task and responsibilities of life, must thus be found somewhere in man's constitution, careful consideration makes it also clear that the right of supremacy cannot be attributed to any other capacity, function or impulse of our nature. The well-known argumentum ad absurdum is fully applicable here.

Besides the conscience itself, the only other motive-forces for conduct are the physiological appetites, the desires for enjoyment, and the benevolent affections. The right of supreme control cannot be supposed to belong to the physical appetites and passions. The supremacy of these would be subversive of character and deadly to personal and social welfare. This is not simply the judgment of reason, but a fact attested by the most melancholy experiences in which blight and woe have fallen on men. Nor can the right of ruling authority belong to the desire of enjoyment. When this dominates it becomes the reign of selfishness, which, according to the consent of mankind, is utterly inconsistent with the development of noble character, or the discharge of those inter-human duties on which both individual and social well-being depends. It forms the soul of anarchy, in which the family, society, and the state would be dissolved. The true excellence and happiness of man would be impossible. The rulership of this class of motive forces is thus inconsistent with the highest and best ends to which his nature has been correlated.

Nor can the supremacy belong to the benevolent affections. These, summed up in the word love, are indeed very high and must be regarded as among the worthiest and best elements of character and principles of action. "God is love," and so near does love come to being the very essence of virtue, that it is declared to be "the fulfilling of the law." But the "love" that God is said to be is not alone in His character, nor does it rule without regard to holiness, justice, purity, or righteousness. It cannot be conceived as subordinating these to a desire to make creatures happy. On the other hand we are obliged to think of love as able to confer its favors only in accordance with the principle of righteousness. Even in its supreme exhibition, in the salvation of men, in giving its gifts, it could only act through a way that declared the divine righteousness while granting forgiveness to those that repent and forsake wrong. In human life, the love that in its own degree and order helps to the fulfillment of the law is not alone, or unregulated, or superior to the principle of duty, of truth, purity and holiness. It cannot get above these, but is itself right only when it holds its ends, of making its objects happy, in subordination to what is morally good. We must remind ourselves exactly what the supremacy of the benevolent affections would mean. Unless guided in the action through which they reach their object, they would subject everything to their own ends and take no account of the character of the ways and means, as right or wrong. As unregulated love they would lack an essential element for the office of moral control. If it be true, as it unquestionably is, that some things are wrong, no matter how lovingly they may be done, the benevolent affections cannot be the supreme guide for even the loving activities of life. Blind affection may run, as it does in thousands of relations and instances, into the widest departures from good character and into gross vices. However high the benevolent feeling may be as a motive, all its purposes and the activities through which these purposes are accomplished need the guidance of the law of righteousness, if they are to be maintained in harmony with essential virtue, holy character and human welfare. Their function must therefore be held subordinate to the authority of conscience as the capacity through which the law of rectitude, with its obligation, is presented and kept before the mental view. This conclusion does not remove love from its high position, at the very summit of things that are right and good and essential for character. It allows it to stand, as it does all other springs of action, in its full rights and value among human motives and virtues in determining duty in conduct. But it is the conscience, and not love itself, that judges and decides the obligation to it and the high rank that ought to be given it as an element of character. Thus the regulative function, even for benevolence, belongs to the ethical sense, through perception of what sentiments and acts are right in conduct. And so the peculiar business of the conscience is to watch all the forces of our nature and keep each in its place.

The view which gives the right of moral control to the conscience is thus vindicated by the plain fact that there is no other faculty or spring of action in the human constitution adapted to this function, so unquestionably requisite for the order and welfare of life.

Difficulties.

2. An apparent difficulty, however, arises in connection with this conclusion. It calls for a brief consideration, lest it should be thought to form a refutation of the correctness of our view:

It comes from the acknowledged fallibility of the conscience. This seems, at first sight, inconsistent with a right to such ruling authority. If its discernment of duty in particular relations may not be fully clear and is liable to be misled, how can it be justly regarded as having this authoritative office? If its applicatory judgments are often found erroneous and need to be revised and superseded by better judgments, can we fairly hold it as charged with such regulative function? In different men, as already stated, it exhibits differing and even conflicting directions. In different nations and times its indications of duty fail to agree. Advance in civilization, knowledge and culture is marked by higher ethical standards, modifying, if not reversing, former judgments. But this large fact, so unquestionable and, apparently, so formidable, becomes, when analyzed, easily reconcilable with the position of authority given to the conscience-discernments and imperatives. For a faculty may be highest in human nature, and yet, like every other capacity, limited. Its functional action may be comparatively undeveloped, or may be strengthened and clarified. In its applicatory judgments, for fixing the ethical law of right in all the varied and complex relations and conditions of human life, it is dependent on all the subordinate faculties for the requisite light. Whatever limitations may rest on its ability, whatever partialness may mark its development, whatever complications may perplex it in adjusting duty to all the actual situations in human life, it yet remains the faculty through which the law of duty is disclosed to view, and if duty is not indicated through it, it is not indicated through any human insight at all. But no faculty loses its own particular special authority in its own place by its natural limitations and liability to error. Authority must not be confounded with infallibility. Despite its fallibility every faculty of the soul carries the authority for its own psychical office—the intellect for knowledge, the sensibility for feeling, the will for choices. The sense-perception has decisive authority for phenomena about us, the logical faculty for just conclusions from given data, the memory for recall of past experiences, the intuitional reason for axiomatic truths and first principles. If the liability to error in the psychic functions and their application to the myriad conditions in which their immediate data are used, does not vacate their place of authority in their spheres, no more does the similar liability vacate the unique authority of the conscience, which it has by its action in the supreme realm of the right and of moral obligation. Its position of authority in its sphere remains, and remains supreme, because the sphere of its action and discernments is, as pointed out, the supreme sphere of eternal righteousness and obligation.

But a further question arises at this point. If it is sometimes in error and, like an imperfect watch, gives an incorrect indication, should the conscience always be followed? Does not this fact, if it does not wholly take away its right to supremacy, at least modify the positiveness of our duty to follow its dictates? This has sometimes been a perplexing casuistic question. But the perplexity arises from failure to keep in mind the precise points involved in the problem, and to take account of the whole process through which particular duties become apparent and obligatory. Since the decision of the conscience, when rightly and fully reached, is, at the time it is given and as to the point it decides, the soul's conviction as to what is right and duty, to violate or disregard it becomes necessarily the very essence of the immoral spirit and conduct. To go contrary to what the soul sees as duty, through the only capacity it has for knowing it, is essentially moral rottenness. Whewell's statement: "To disobey the commands and prohibitions of conscience, under any circumstances, is utterly immoral: it is the very essence of immorality,"[25] is hardly too emphatic. To some writers this has seemed extravagant, in view of the fact that some of the greatest wrongs and foulest crimes of history, such as the burning of Latimer and Ridley, the St. Bartholomew massacre, the gun-powder plot, might be palliated or even justified under the plea of conscientiousness in the perpetrators.[26] But the reconciliation of this seeming conflict between conscience and real duty is made plain by remembering two things:

First, that the conscience, being a complex faculty or power, its particular judgments of duty in particular cases, being judgments of application of the principle of rightness, are reached often through very complex processes, in which the obscuration of imperfect information, or misconception of the relations involved, or the misleading effect of prejudice created by wrong training, or some falsely imagined divine authority, may leave not only a state of doubt as to duty, but throw the decision into error. Examples of the process occur in daily experience. A question of duty is presented. We come to it with sincere, honest mind, and study it by taking into consideration all the facts and relations concerned. We get all the light we can, and we decide what the moral principle requires of us. This is the course that fair dealing with ourselves and duty requires us to pursue. But suppose that, after all this, in the fallibility of the applicatory judgments, we are thus led to do the very thing that "ought not" to be done, and violate instead of fulfil the duty which the actual relations call for from us. The following of conscience may thus have put "wrong" conduct, objectively viewed, in place of the "right" conduct which was due from us in the case. The deed, in its external form and bearing, may have been unfitting and one that ought not to have been done. But this is not the whole view or full account of the matter. For though, while in obeying our fallible conscience, we have thus failed to bring our whole outward action in the case into harmony with full duty, or have even done what to others about us or to God above us was wrong, we have maintained our own subjective personal moral integrity, in maintaining that which is the fundamental and essential element of all morality, the right intention and effort. This is the prime and the grandest element of all moral character, and is itself more than "four-fifths of conduct." There is such a thing as being innocent even when we have done what, viewed objectively, ought not to have been done. The aim, in genuine integrity of moral purpose, was to do right. The deed was a mistake. The moral status in which we may thus be placed as a result of following our conscience, is, ethically, at the opposite pole from that which we make ours when we disregard duty as fixed for us in and by our own moral judgments. This is disobedience to obligations as perceived and felt—an attitude in its nature immoral.

Secondly, the crimes and wrongs often attributed to obeying the conscience are, probably, not fairly credited to the action of conscience at all. We must distinguish what men, even conscientious men, have done or do in the name of conscience, and what the moral judgment itself has pointed out and urged as duty. It is safe to affirm that nearly all these crimes have come not by the light and dictates of the conscience, but by its suppression. There are, as all history, observation and experience testify, many other strong and bad motive-forces in human nature. The appetites and passions, the lusts of ambition, the desire of wealth and power, the striving for place and fame, the willfulness of selfishness and prejudice, are forever suggesting their objects, filling the soul with their varied and plausible pleadings, until life is driven hither and thither under the restless forces. In some men these forces hardly allow any place for the conscience to act. Not from the intuition of the moral sense or the force of conscience, but from the suggestion and direction of other motives, come the crimes that are credited to zeal inspired by conscience. Conscience is not at the helm in this business. The wrongs are a result of failure to consult its dictates—of the force and direction of other elements and tendencies of action in human nature. It was not conscience that burnt Latimer and Ridley, but intolerant fanatical hate, hot passion ruling the hour. It was not conscience that made St. Bartholomew's day full of cruelty, blood and horror, but prejudice, hatred, the unreasoning rush of excited passions. It may, indeed, seem plausible to say "that day was made by the Church's conscience asserting the duty of repressing or overthrowing heresy." And it is conceivable that that conscience should testify against the evil of heresy, and the duty of endeavoring to overcome it. But the suggestion of torture, blood and slaughter as the means of such repression, was not the work of conscience. Its guidance was thrust aside in that conduct. For this use of violence, cruelty and murder, with all their repulsive horrors, conscience did not give the command, even as God did not.

The truth with respect to the authority of conscience may be summed up as its right to control our lives in all things involving moral quality or character. Specifically: (1) In the regulation of our physical appetencies; (2) In the use to which we put our intellectual endowments and capacities; (3) In the direction and relations in which we use our emotional and affectional capacities, embracing our natural disposition, desires and aims; (4) In deciding our choices or the way we use our power of free self-determination, covering our intentions and aims; and (5) In the use we make of our capacities for physical action by which thought, feeling and the preferences of choice are turned into conduct which either fulfils or violates the duties which are evolved by our relations to being around us or above us.

The authority of conscience touches at each and all of these different points, because at each and all human life is taking shape in moral character, as either conformed to duty or variant from it. Our personal life is, in its deepest reality, a single self-conscious unit, and the action of all its capacities and powers needs to be rhythmically adjusted to the morally good. But the imperative of the conscience addresses itself pre-eminently and peculiarly to the will, or the personal self as free in choosing, and thus capable of directing and using all the personal capacities and functions. It is upon the self as free-will, as the self-determining and directive power, that the responsibility for the conduct of life is thrown, and through it, if at all, the responsibility is to be met.

And this authority becomes supreme not by any arbitrary right of one subjective faculty over another or over all the rest, but from the fact of the supremacy of what the conscience discerns and discloses, the authority of right over wrong, the obligation to eternal righteousness. Righteousness is king.

[CHAPTER VI.]
MORAL AGENCY.

Our consideration of the great truth of the distinction between right and wrong which marks human life in all ages and places, and of the existence and nature of the moral faculty discerning and enforcing this distinction, leads up to an inquiry into the aggregate complex of endowments which are essential to moral agency. The great fact of moral agency is implied and made certain in what has already been brought into view. But the pre-supposition of such moral agency is manifestly the moral agent, with all the requisite endowments for the sublime reality of ethical life. What are the constituents of the moral nature, in which man rises to the lofty grade of moral agency?

There are two special reasons for examining and fixing the truth on this point. First, it is needful in order to complete the scientific ethical view. Such view must be comprehensive enough to include the sum total of the powers or faculties concerned in living the moral life. The view remains faulty if any parts or features of the actual constitution are omitted or their relations to each other and to the whole are misconceived. Secondly, false and confusing representations have often been made on this point. For instance, because all the moral life moves so closely about the conscience there has been a tendency to think of the conscience and the moral nature as the same. In the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Dr. Alexander taught: "The moral nature of man is summed up in the word conscience. Moral nature and conscience are two names for the same thing. An analysis of conscience, therefore, will unfold man's moral nature." This resolves the whole of our moral nature into this one particular faculty. A full and correct statement must make it embrace much more. Though the conscience may be the culminating thing, it is by no means all that is requisite to endow a being with the capacities necessary for moral agency.

The truth of this is easily made clear. It is self-evident that all the essentials for moral action must be embraced in the moral nature. Some of these, manifestly, are not identical with the faculty of conscience, however closely allied to it they may be. For example, the general function of knowing is not the same as the conscience, yet it is necessary to moral action. The faculty of choice is not itself conscience or a part of conscience. Still moral action is impossible without it. Some of these essential elemental functions may in themselves possess no moral character whatever. For instance, "to know" is not itself a moral act, yet it is necessary for moral agency. The faculty of feeling is not per se moral. The emotions arise necessarily or at least spontaneously from acts of knowledge, and may be neither meritorious nor blameworthy. Yet the emotional function, through which thought passes into action and conduct, is involved in meeting the obligations of life. Thus it becomes plainly evident that besides the conscience by which the ethical quality and obligation are perceived, other powers by which conduct may be conformed to this obligation are requisite to fit beings for the responsibilities of moral agency. In other words, our moral nature is not only the conscience by which we approve and condemn, but also all the other endowments by which we originate or work out what is approvable or condemnable. Illustrations of this appear in our lives every day. Conscience does not love, yet love of what is good is a moral act or temper. Conscience does not care for the sick or feed the hungry, yet such charities are acts of the moral life.

We must, therefore, mark the constituents which together form man's moral constitution.

Rational Intelligence.

1. The first and fundamental thing, unquestionably, is his rational intelligence. A being incapable of knowledge is incapable of the idea or sense of duty. In a world in which creative production should present no creature able to know or think, there could be no moral agency whatever. Between rocks and trees and irrational living organisms no moral relations can exist nor duties be developed. Rational intelligence, which is the basal reality of personality, is the first essential for moral agency. And this must be understood to mean the whole intellectual endowment, embracing self-consciousness, perception, memory, imagination, intuitional insight, and the varied powers of reflection and the discursive understanding. Since, as will hereafter appear (Chapter IX), duties are developed by the relations in which men stand in the system of which they are made to form a part, a knowledge of themselves and of their relations is clearly essential to a discharge of these duties. Their very constitution carries also an adaptation to an end which they must know, in order to meet their duty to themselves and others.

This dependence of ethical life upon knowledge makes itself impressively clear in the experiences and course of common life and the lessons of history. While the absence of rational intelligence, as in the case of idiocy, annuls all possibility of character and responsibility, the lower the grade of men and races in mental development, the poorer is their equipment for the demands of the full ethical standard of conduct. It is almost axiomatic that we should not look for as high grade of moral ideals and rules among ignorant people and savage tribes as in the life of intelligent civilizations. Though the principle of duty is not always turned into character in proportion to the measure of mental development and secular culture, yet experience and history affirm a clear tendency in increased knowledge to bring better sense of obligation and more prevalent rectitude of life. So well established is the recognition of this relation between intelligence and conduct, that the advocates of the evolutionist origin of man with one consent represent the emergence of intelligence as conditional for the appearance of moral agency. A knowledge of one's self and of his relations to the world around him and God above him, and the destiny to which his powers appoint him, is thus fundamental in the constitution of a nature for the sphere and reality of moral life.

The Conscience.

2. The conscience—resting in the general rational intelligence and rising into the peculiar discernments and judgments which mark it—is another constituent. This is universally conceded by moral philosophy. There is, therefore, need here only to recall the place and relations of this special power in the total organism of psychical powers. The conscience, in its essential perceptions and judgments, as appears from the analysis already given, is part of the rational intelligence. It designates the power and function of the intelligent ego, or personal self, for discernment in the sphere of right and duty—for insight into the reality of ethical law and obligation which belong to good conduct among rational, self-directing beings. It expresses, therefore, the highest ascent of the rational intelligence, where, overlooking the whole realm of existence and relations known in other forms of knowledge, it sees, and through the emotional nature, feels, how to live as life ought to be lived.

Further, while thus the summit point in the rational intelligence, the conscience employs for its perceptions and judgments the data of all the other functions of the mind. Its discernments are made in the light of all the truth which in any way illuminates the understanding. This explains why and how the conscience is educable. It is dependent on all the other intellectual powers for a knowledge of the relations of life which develop duties and in view of which every duty is to be determined and judged. The very position of the conscience, as highest of all the powers of the intelligence, makes it, not the most independent, but the most dependent of all. All knowledge should supply light for the right conduct of life. The clearer the light, other things being equal, the clearer and more correct will be the ethical judgments. Ignorance is a darkened atmosphere to see duty in. The advance of general civilization, the progress of knowledge, the widening of the realm of science, the supernatural information given by special divine revelation, are all, therefore, if used as they should be, factors in developing the faculty of conscience into its best ability for insight into duty and for practical morality.

Free Will.

3. Free-will. The only truly satisfactory psychological account of the will is that which presents it as the soul's power of causation for choices. It is the capacity of the personal ego or self for real choosing or free election. As in intellectual action the soul is causal for knowing or thinking, and in the sensibility it is causal for feeling or really feels, so in will the ego or rational self is acting as the cause of the choices which it makes. Using the term for this capacity of the personal self to choose, the will is self-determining. It originates movement. It is creative of its own acts. It is causal of its volutions. Morality consists in deliberate self-submission to the law of rectitude. Duty must be freely chosen; and the autonomy of the will, i. e. of the personal self, is involved in the very conception of virtue. Freedom must, therefore, be a prime characteristic of a moral nature. The whole fabric of obligation and responsibility is built upon it. It is this, as well as rational intelligence, that lifts man above the order and ongoing of material nature and makes him amenable to the claims of right and duty. It is essential to personality and its presence or absence makes and marks the deepest difference between persons and "things." We can imagine intellectual automatism; but the most brilliant intellectuality, a corruscation of mental mechanism, without reaching up into a capacity for free choice and voluntary action, would, manifestly, not make a free agent or exalt into the high realm of ethical life. The idea of duty is inapplicable except in the sphere of freedom. Moral responsibility is inconceivable without it.

In this, more than in anything else, the whole aggregation of human endowments comes to its crown. In it man becomes, in a real sense, a supra-natural being, endowed with the lofty distinction of self-direction, self-dominion and self-rulership in the presence of the great realities of right and obligation. He becomes capable of character and answerable for his conduct, as he shapes that character and determines that conduct.

And this freedom cannot be merely the freedom of simple spontaneity or voluntariness. It must be the capacity of alternative choice.[27] There could not be real choice without capacity and room to elect between different possibilities. It is a well known definition: "Free will is possessed when, the conditions of doing something being given, one can either do or not do it."[28] A capacity simply to act, even though it should be through intelligence and consciousness, in a way that can have no alternative and allows no choice or option, could not open a field of personal virtue or responsibility. Where only one thing is really made possible in action, and that one possible thing is already somehow necessitated, there can be no place for choice. It presents no sphere for the exercise of election—even though the faculty of election should exist. A field of choice and the faculty of choice imply and call for each other. Both are necessary for the freedom implied in responsibility. Human responsibility rests on the possession of a real capacity to make decision between real alternatives. Without these there could be no more place for morality among men than there is among the atoms or molecules of the chemical elements in their behavior in the laboratory.

The proof of free-will, in this sense, might be left to rest upon the fact that it is a necessary pre-supposition to the very conception of morality and of actual accountability. This accountability, recognized in conscience and exacted by the constitution of the world, is an omnipresent and inerasable reality. So must free-will also be. Freedom is part of the moral idea, and the idea falls apart and lapses into contradiction and confusion without it. The same necessity that obliges us to accept the truth of morality itself, obliges us to assert free-will as an attribute of a moral nature and a condition of moral agency.

But the truth of freedom is sustained by other proofs. It is proper to recall and fix clearly in mind several of these.

(1) The testimony of consciousness. This is clear and explicit. We are directly conscious of free choice. And there can be no evidence more immediate and authoritative than that of consciousness. It is the form of evidence in which all psychical facts, activities, powers, and laws, are made known and stand certified in our knowledge. It is the certifying element for both the form and reality of all our knowing. It is that in which we "know that we know," and without which there can be no knowledge. It is, therefore, the foundation certitude. Our systems of science, our conclusions in philosophy, our intuitions into first truths and laws, and all the confidence with which we accept truth in all these great realms of mental life, rest back on the observations, reasonings and conclusions for whose reality and order consciousness is our most fundamental voucher. To its tests and verifications all the processes of knowing must submit. No truth is even visible except in the light in which consciousness holds all our acts and forms of intelligence. No form of our knowing can be surer than this. To discredit it is to discredit that without whose help not a step in knowledge can be taken. Upon this fundamental and unsurpassable evidence rests the great fact of free-will. No person, in the simple light of his unperverted and unperplexed consciousness, doubts his free-will. He finds himself in exercise and use of it every day and every hour. He knows himself to be perpetually making decisions within his own liberty, if he knows anything. The witness to it is direct, and he holds himself, and others hold him, responsible for his choices and the deeds he does in carrying them out. He deliberately and consciously elects his way through clearly seen open alternative possibilities. If he is to believe that in reality he does not do so, he must believe that his consciousness is a perpetual fraud upon him. But thus the authority for the reality of all his psychical capacities and acts is overthrown, and he does not "know that he knows" in any of his knowing.

It is not a sufficient answer to all this, when it is said that in this way of proof we are making the testimony of consciousness reach further than it actually does. Some psychologies undertake to limit consciousness to a disclosure of simply the actual volition, or other psychical acts, and not of acts or volitions which we imagine might have been but were not. Thus, it is said, the proof of another possible choice, as an alternative to that of the actual volition, fails to be covered by the consciousness. The supposed act is outside of its reach of purview and testimony. But such a psychology is untrue to the full deliverance of the consciousness. A just and full account of it, as is clearly seen in our experience, must hold it as covering not only the act of choice, but the power to choose. The human consciousness is a self-consciousness, and in it we truly know the personal self as the power for the various forms of activity which it reveals. Not more truly are we conscious of the power really to think or feel than really to choose, among diverse possibilities. We have direct knowledge of the power of electing in the very act of election. And thus, not only the untutored consciousness, but one trained to the sharpest and deepest self-inspection, will be found a full witness to free-will as a capacity of alternative choice.

(2) The implications of the natural constitution of the world. Mankind are in fact framed into and held under the principle of freedom. The whole system of which man forms a part answers to the testimony of consciousness. Bishop Butler, in his immortal Analogy, has shown with resistless clearness and force that in the constitutional organism of society and the experiences of actual life free-will is assumed for human nature.[29] Both by natural and moral law men are governed as free agents. The physical order of the earth, as a place where bodily and moral welfare are conditioned on obedience to discoverable relations and principles, pre-supposes human intelligence and liberty. Nature in her ongoings requires every individual to adjust himself carefully to its laws of health, safety and happiness. There is an incessant appeal to him to use his intelligence and liberty in accordance with the demands of his ever-changing conditions and relations in life. The idea that everything takes place by necessity is not only at variance with his sense of freedom, but is found utterly inapplicable in practical living. A youth, if such a case be supposed, trained under the notion that he must not be held responsible for his acts, since they take place by necessity, would soon find his dream of irresponsibility disturbed and disallowed. At every turn he would find the inexorable forces of nature and society refusing to recognize his claim. Government, law, administration, all the various functions through which human affairs are held together in orderly movement, assume the individual's power and obligation to determine his conduct and hold him chargeable with consequences. Though supposed speculatively true, the doctrine proves false in practice. It is in fact untrue to the constitution of human life. "The thing here insisted on," says Butler, "is that under the present natural government of the world we find ourselves treated and dealt with as if we were free, prior to all consideration whether we are or not. Were this opinion, therefore, of necessity admitted to be ever so true, yet such is in fact our condition and the natural course of things, that whenever we apply it to life and practice, this application of it always misleads us, and cannot but mislead us, in a most dreadful manner, with regard to our present interests." Beyond all question, as is evident to every thoughtful person, mankind deal one with another on the pre-supposition and principle of freedom, and of the responsibility which is ethically unthinkable except on that freedom. Personal, social, and governmental relations are framed upon this principle, and are a perpetual expression of it. Men universally treat each other—and under the actual inter-relations of life cannot but treat each other—as free beings. The inference is direct and necessary that they are such, unless we concede that human life is organized into a necessary order of living that is false to their real nature and unjust in its penalties.

(3) It is to be further noted that while freedom rests thus on the direct and positive evidence of consciousness and the actual order of life, the contrary doctrine of necessity or determinism arises only from assumptions or implications of speculative thought. This is a fact that needs to be clearly and fully fixed in mind. Necessitarianism is without any direct witness of consciousness, and is not forced or even suggested by the natural sense of mankind. It is not required as a working theory for the business or natural conduct of life. It is only a product of speculation or ideal theorizing. It is constructed from different standpoints of thought. In some speculation it rests simply on certain ontological assumptions, sometimes pantheistic as in Spinozism, sometimes materialistic as in non-theistic evolutionism. In both these cases freedom disappears in the absoluteness with which the substance of the universe unfolds into all its products and manifestations.[30] In some other speculations it appears as a conclusion from certain metaphysical views of the law of causation and its supposed application in the realm of psychical activity. In this form of theory every volition is viewed as standing in the relation of a mere effect to a cause which determines the will to it, in fixed connection and force of antecedence and consequence. The volition comes, it is represented, as the necessary result—not as a real choice by self-determining personality, but produced by environment, mental structure, and disposition. Not the ego or personal self, as free spirit endowed with capacity for real election, but the environment, motives, and disposition decide and fix the volition for the person, which by an illusion of consciousness appears as done by himself. In still other speculation necessitarianism comes as an inference from conceptions formed as to the divine sovereignty and the absoluteness with which it must direct creature movement. The doctrine thus has its plausibility, not from the conscious working of the human mind or the natural order of conduct and welfare, but as theoretical conclusions from certain forms of speculative thinking. It is therefore the product of metaphysical theorizing. It is not a datum of pure psychology. It is not taught by life. It is not known as a fact. It is not called for by the practical needs of daily self-direction. It has only secondary forms of suggestion and support—the precarious evidence from special theorizing in ontology and metaphysics. And it introduces more difficulties than it shuts off, while it collides with the moral consciousness of mankind and its sense of responsibility for conduct and the formation of character. In the light of these truths it ought not to be regarded as having any validity. It is surely incredible that the doctrine of necessity should be true when the actual constitution of human life, in all its personal, social, and governmental relations, requires us to treat it as false, being practically inapplicable. Utterly beyond belief is it that while the inexorable necessities of daily behavior bind us to the principle of freedom and responsibility, there should be in the real constitution of the world no actual freedom in deciding on choices or determining our conduct.[31] Moral agency must be free agency, in open alternatives of choice. It involves both the subjective capacity to choose and a realm for its exercise in diverse possibilities.

Sensibility and Actions.

4. Powers of sensibility and action, by which the dictates of conscience may be turned into actual conduct and character, complete the moral constitution.

(1) It has already been seen (pages 44–47) that in the complex action of the conscience itself the sensibility awakened in the form of emotion, as a feeling of obligation arising from a perception of obligation. This has already shown the sensibility to be a part of the moral organization. Conscience itself includes emotion. Duty perceived becomes duty felt, if the moral life is normal; and the feeling is motive-force for the choice and the fulfillment of duty. Emotional powers are thus constituent in the structure of man's moral nature. The moral emotions are occasions for ethical choices and deeds.

(2) But, further, the movements of the sensibilities are themselves either morally good or evil, and form a sphere of personal life to which moral quality belongs. Man's affections and desires, his loves and hatreds, his enjoyments and aversions, constitute a domain where the ethical distinctions are to be applied. They hold and exhibit elements of character. We may not, indeed, say that a being of pure intellect, void of all emotion, would be utterly incapable of character and irresponsible, but we are compelled to think that the moral life in such case would be without what forms the highest ethical excellence and glory of character, viz.: love, benevolence, delight in righteousness and joy in pure affection. The regulation of the affections and passions, the purification of the inmost "thoughts" of what the sacred scriptures call "the heart" is vital to right character. The capacity to love is an equipment for the moral life. It is virtuous to love what ought to be loved. The capacity to hate is also such an equipment—the obligation being to hate what ought to be hated as morally wrong. Benevolence may not be, as some have contended it is, the essence or ground of all virtue, but, unquestionably, it is a virtue of highest rank, and the capacity for it is a prominent element in man's moral organization. The same is true of the whole emotional and affectional capacity in the human soul. It is part of the constitution for true character and life.

(3) Still further, man's powers of action, in which the ethical distinctions and choices are wrought out into their proper deeds, are part of his organization for the true moralities of life. However deeply the foundations of ethics may be laid in personal individuality, the ethical life concerns more than self, and finds its largest field in inter-human relations. Human solidarity is as real as human individuality. Humanity is an organism, in which each person has his place and mission. The individual's sphere of duty is not simply his own soul, but the broad reach of all his relations to the world about him, in which duties are developed and right conduct is required. In all this wide sphere obligation can be met only through his endowment with power to carry into effect, in action, his moral judgments and convictions of right. Moral science must consider man not merely as a knower and contemplator or lover of the right, but also as a doer of it in righteous deeds. Hence man's moral nature, as his endowment for the moral life, is not all brought under review until it is seen to include the realm of his feelings and those executive powers which turn the ethical discriminations and choices into righteous conduct.

We thus sum up the constituents of man's moral nature: intelligence, the conscience, free-will, and capacities for affection and doing. Where these are united the subject is organized for knowing duty and fulfilling it. But a final fact, of profound import, needs yet to be added, not as a further faculty, but rather as a consequence resultant from the union and co-action of these endowments, viz.: that this organism of faculties presents not simply a capacity as a possibility of the moral life, but a positive, vital motive adjustment and organic pre-disposition toward it. It is not simply framed to it as an articulation of dead timber, but is adapted to it as a complex of living forces for normal movement. The moral constitution, if not disordered or wrecked, carries thus a living trend or impulse toward knowing duty and doing it. This impulse, seemingly pervading, if not standing behind, the whole mental activity, as a sub-conscious pre-disposition, appears as an original aptitude or incorporated purpose in the total human psychical organization. Hence human nature, if normal, is not indifferent to right and wrong. Its true life is one of positive affinity for the good. If, under internal disorder or particular circumstances, counter-tendencies appear and prevail, this does not disprove the fundamental and normal set of humanity for the moral life. Man is made for the right as he is made for God. This conception of the positiveness of his total moral organization is necessary to complete the view of man as a moral agent.[32]

[CHAPTER VII.]
THE REALITY OF RIGHT AND WRONG.

In this chapter we pass the dividing line between the two great parts of ethics. Thus far we have considered only the facts and manifestations of our moral nature. We have traced the unquestionable phenomena of moral distinctions and obligation in human thinking, feeling, and conviction. We have found the explanation of these phenomena in the action of a faculty or complex of faculties of the human soul, that discerns and affirms these distinctions. We have studied this power and marked its data from its initial perception of the ethical distinction through its further discernments, emotions and judgments to its full assertion of moral responsibility. We have seen its unique authority explained by the supremacy of the law of right and duty which it reveals, and have noted the aggregate of endowments belonging to man's moral agency.

But the mere registry of these moral phenomena is not the full explanation of them. We must examine yet what they imply. From the faculty that perceives we must turn to look at the nature of that which is perceived. We may call the part already traversed the science of ethics, as dealing with and systematizing the facts of experience. The part that remains takes us into the metaphysics of ethics, as exhibiting the abiding verities so perceived and to which we find ourselves so responsibly related—not what is in us, but what is above and over us to which our moral consciousness corresponds. Having visited "the moral consciousness in its own home" and listened to its story of "right" and "duty" and "responsibility," we must go forth and explore the realm that answers to that story. This realm is the objective moral system to which human conduct is to be adjusted.

The precise question of this chapter is whether the distinction of right or wrong, subjectively and psychologically made, is also objectively true and real, marking an actual qualitative difference in the deeds and intentions of men, or is a mere appearance, a fiction and illusion of our own minds. Is the principle of duty a reality for right life, as something belonging to the constitution of the world, or only an idea which our minds have manufactured—only our own thought reflected back upon us, as is our face that seems so real in the mirror?

It would seem that the very asking of this question should be itself a sufficient answer. But doubt has been raised by speculative metaphysics. Hence we must examine it.

Source of Doubt.

1. The doubt comes from misleading representations of the relativity of knowledge. Unquestionably there is a sense in which our knowledge may justly be said to be "relative." It is not absolute, unconditioned or unlimited. We can know only as we have facilities for knowing, and under the conditions and aspects in which objects are presented to them. We are restricted to the modes and degrees of our given capacities. There are probably many realities about us of which we can know nothing. We have no organs for their perception. Even the things that we do know reach off into transcendent relations. Philosophy has long confessed the relative character of our knowledge. Even the percepts of sense-experience, say for instance, of sight or hearing, when analyzed in physical science are found to be, in their objective cause or material conditions, somewhat different from the simple report of the organ of sense—color being the subjective sensation of light-rays on the retina of the eye, and sound the effect of vibrations of the atmosphere upon the sensorium. But in recent times various theories have represented our knowing faculties as largely untrustworthy and their data as invalid in spheres where their functions appear most certain and explicit. Locke gave basis for a movement in this direction by teaching that the immediate objects of the mind are not things, but "ideas." Berkeley's idealism repudiated the sufficiency of sense-perception to prove the objective existence of the material world. Hume questioned the substantial existence of both matter and mind. In the view of Kant human knowledge reaches only to "phenomena," the appearance of things, while the things as they are "in themselves" can not be known. The mind projects and imposes its own subjective forms of thought upon the universe. Sir Wm. Hamilton, Dean Mansel, J. S. Mill, Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer have developed theories, variously modified but agreeing in this, that even our necessary forms of rational perception are not to be held as standing for more than relative truth, i. e. subjective impressions in our minds in the presence of environment. Doubt is cast upon the point whether what is true to our necessary or actual thought is also really true for the objective world.

The teaching will be best understood by several quotations. Sir Wm. Hamilton, though a natural realist, influenced by the speculations of Kant, while acknowledging an underlying reality for phenomena, taught that we can never know them except "under modifications determined by our own faculties."[33]

J. S. Mill, going further, says: "Our knowledge of objects, and even our fancies about objects, consist in nothing but the sensations they excite, or which we imagine them exciting in ourselves.... This knowledge is merely phenomenal.... The object is known to us only in one special relation, namely, as that which produces, or is capable of producing certain impressions on our senses; and all that we really know is these impressions."[34]

Herbert Spencer asserts the relativity of all knowledge, and says: "Clearly as we seem to know it, our apparent knowledge proves on examination to be utterly irreconcilable with itself. Ultimate religious ideas and ultimate scientific ideas, alike turn out to be merely symbols of the actual, not cognitions of it."[35]

Plainly these theories do not make our knowledge a genuine apprehension of reality, but merely internal and unreliable mental states. It is only a subjective phenomenon. We cannot know that it stands for the real truth of things. Rather, we are told, it does not. It is but an effect within the mind, determined, it may be, by things without, but modified, if not created, by the constitution and action of the mind itself. The receiving mind, like the receiving lens, determines the shape and color of the apprehended phenomenon. If there be any reality behind it and correspondent to it, we can never assure ourselves of it. The theory thoroughly discredits the trustworthiness of our faculties, both of sense-perception and of reason. They do not report the things of the world as they really are, but merely as they affect us. Our necessary conceptions, such as time, space, beauty, cause, moral law, cannot be proved to be anything else than phenomena within us. The conclusion is well stated in the language of Mr. Grote in his explanation of the views of the Greek sophists: "As things appear to me, so they are to me; as they appear to you, so they are to you."[36] It is altogether a subjective matter. We can have only a relative morality—not conformed to an objective and universal standard, but to the particular impressions we find within us.

Evidently this doctrine of relativity lands us in universal intellectual skepticism. It gives us agnosticism. Nothing is sure in a single department of knowledge. If our minds are forever presenting to us internal "forms of thought" that stand not really for the "forms of being" in the real world, if they are actually creating or painting for us what we seem to perceive and what appear to be realities objective to our faculties and existing independently of them, there is no possibility of reaching truth of any kind. But in the domain of morals this theory would prove peculiarly destructive. If the qualities of right and wrong be not in very truth real, if they be not verities of conduct in the constituted relations of human life, if the ideas answer not to a true distinction set before us for our recognition and conformity, then virtue is a dream, obligation an illusion, and conscience a fraud.

Over against this false we must place the true conception of the relativity of knowledge. We must hold, as the spontaneous sense of mankind and the best sustained psychology and philosophy of the centuries affirm, that our cognitive powers are genuine faculties for discerning the truth of things, that, while not infallible nor unlimited, they give us substantially correct knowledge, as far as it goes, of the realities of the natural and moral world in which we are placed. These powers of intelligence are not set to act delusively and imprison us in phantasmagoria or a factitious system false to that which actually exists. The correct theory, the only one that is really rational and can be lived out, must ever be that, as far as we have faculties to know at all and use them loyally, we know what is and because it is. The true reason of our knowing is the real existence of knowable realities.[37] Instead of knowing only appearances, we know the very things that appear—not perfectly, or without possibility of mistake, but yet truly. The end of knowledge is not to give us a phantasmagorical world for endless illusion, but the actual world, with its divine constitution and movement, in which we are to live, and with whose facts and laws, physical and moral, we are to harmonize our lives.

2. The false conception of the relativity of knowledge being thus set aside, and the psychological law, that the correlate of knowing is reality, being recognized, we are prepared to see the truth on the point of inquiry in this chapter, as follows:

Objective Reality.

(1) The qualities of right and wrong, involved in the ethical distinction, are not merely subjective impressions or appearances, imposed on conduct by the human mind, but are objective, belonging to the external world of relations and action, real for apprehension and conformity. They are without us as well as within us. And they come within us because they are realities without us for us to know and observe. The moral qualities, as real features of required behavior of free beings in their given relations to each other, belong to the constitution of the world as well as to the faculties of the human mind. They are real qualities of action and motives to action whether men perceive or take note of them or not. As truly as the starry sky is above us, before we open our eyes to see it, so the principle of righteousness is established for life before we enter it or our faculties awake to discover it. The principle of moral law is framed into the constitution of the world and human life. It is back of the discernment of it, imbedded in the demand which the constituted relations of nature make for proper behavior of free, intelligent beings. The law of duty is fixed in these relations. It abides there to be recognized and fulfilled by all beings endowed with moral perception and freedom. Moral law is a profounder and broader thing than a simple uncertain mental fiction in personal thinking. It belongs to the immense, almost infinite realm of creature inter-relations of the universe.

The reality, however, is not to be thought of as a material entity or substantive essence, but solely as a quality of the intentions and conduct demanded by and in the relations sustained by men and other moral beings. It is the reality of an established obligation. It belongs to character.

The right, as moral law, has ever been venerated as something supersensible, absolute, and divine. The early Egyptian teaching represented its home as in Deity. Buddhistic philosophy conceives of it as an imperishable dominion over gods and men. Christianity has enforced it as based in the very nature of God, and as a principle of order ordained for the whole universe of personal life and behavior. Not more real are the solid rocks of the mountain or the strong waves of the sea. Not more real for the material realm is the law of gravitation than is the law of ethical righteousness for the spiritual realm, the realm of free conduct. And the latter is superior and of higher value than the former. This truth speaks in the old apothegm: "fiat justitia, ruat cœlum."

Not Dependent on Organization.

(2) The qualities of right and wrong in conduct are not dependent on the peculiar mental organization or temperament of the race. This results from the objectivity of the law of obligation. Only the perception of them is so dependent, while the moral qualities are abidingly real for all beings high enough in the scale of being to discern them. Just as we must believe that the sun exists as an extended body independently of our eyes or minds, and would have to be so apprehended by any inhabitant of Neptune or Jupiter endowed with capacity to perceive it as it is, so we must believe that truth and love and kindness are right, and falsehood, injustice, malignity and ingratitude are wrong, not as made so by our peculiar personal constitution, but per se, in any inhabited world of the stellar heavens; and that the only subjective condition for their so appearing is the possession of the faculty for perception of moral quality.

There may, indeed, be a doubt among finite moral agents, with limited knowledge, how far a certain thing may be true or false, kind or malignant, just or unjust, but the quality of truth or falsehood, kindness or malignity, justice or injustice being perceived in it, it is impossible that such truth, kindness and justice should not be judged right and their opposites wrong. The ethical distinction, objectively viewed, is an ethical difference, perceived as such, if perceived at all.

Immutable and Eternal.

(3) The moral distinctions, with the moral qualities involved, being thus objective, and not the product of a special temporary organization of the percipient, are immutable and eternal. This is involved in the very nature of the qualities themselves. By eternal necessity of what they are, justice and love must be unchangeably and forever right. They are not thus right because we think or feel them so, but we think and feel them so because they are so, because of the immutable and enduring nature of justice and love themselves. They hold and carry the kind of motive and action that ought to prevail in the relations of intelligent personal life, everywhere and in all time. So malignity, injustice, falsehood, and cruelty are wrong by the very nature of the qualities that make and mark them; and the personal intentions and conduct that hold them can never be right any more than a thing can be itself and yet other than itself.

Men's judgments as to whether particular conduct is fair or just or kind or honest, may change and do change. Different nations and ages class certain acts and ways of men very differently. But these are only judgments of application, and so only secondary ethical judgments. This has already been pointed out in Chap. IV, pp. [67]–[68]. They depend on the degree to which the moral qualities of the conduct may be discerned amid the complicated relations and obscurities that often perplex a right understanding of it. But while men change their judgments of the justice, benevolence, or truth of particular forms of behavior, they do not change their judgments that justice, love and truth are right—necessarily and immutably so. The behests of duty are imbedded in the necessary relations of intelligent free beings. Virtue is no shifting subjective illusion, shaped by our inner mental mould. No change of the percipient's intellectual constitution can change the realities of right and wrong. No removal from world to world can change them. No distant age in eternity can reverse them, and discover virtue to be wrong or sin right, or either as without moral quality. The distinction is eternal, and no future can arrest our responsibility with respect to it. God calls us to identify ourselves with what is right and shun all wrong, as realities with which we stand in immutable, unending relation, for good or evil.

Grandeur of Moral Law.

3. The truth thus reached on this point is one of exceeding importance. It brings to view the grandeur of the moral law. It shows this law to be truly transcendental, belonging not to transient material forms or physiological structure, nor to special psychical constitutions of men or races, nor organized instinct, nor subjective mental illusion, nor peculiar hereditary experience, nor transformed sense of realized or supposed utility, nor any local adventitious circumstances and training, but to the supreme super-sensible realm of universal and necessary ideas and truth, in which the universe of rational thought and divine order lives and moves and has its being and welfare. In this truth, therefore, the moral law begins to appear in its true greatness and value, in its universal dominion and infinite importance. It comes down upon us with a mighty impression. It thrills us into enthusiasm. As long as the moral idea is accounted a mere product of environment and biological evolution or experienced utility, a blind hereditary instinct, an organized impulse, a fiction of education, or a temporary behest of individual or racial organization, it is a thing of but little dignity and of limited moment. It is worthy of no more reverence than a form of protoplasm or a passing mental impression. Not reflecting an objective reality of universal, supreme and permanent validity, but only a special phenomenon of the human organization and this transient life, it can inspire but small respect. Only in the truth here reached does the authority of the moral law stand out in its majesty and illimitable range and sweep. Only in it can that law be rightly effective for the good conduct of men and the safe formation of character in the mould of immortal excellence.

Reality is Dividing Line.

4. The recognition of the objective validity of the moral distinctions marks one of the chief dividing lines between true and false theories of moral philosophy. A failure to recognize this point not only leaves the point itself a blank, but usually means error both in the conception of the nature and function of conscience and of the grounds and claims of right and virtue. With respect to conscience the failure reduces it from a power of true discernment of what is, into an instinct acting blindly or a make-believe of obligation through judgments indistinguishable from those of utility, pleasure or advantage, or into a passing product of racial experience or education. So instead of explaining the unique authority of the conscience it undermine and dissolves that authority into non-moral elements. Obligation itself becomes but a synonym for an impulse toward certain forms of pleasure or advantage. As to the grounds and claims of right, these are thus caused to disappear in the non-moral elements into which right and wrong are dissolved. The ethical distinctions, the great moral phenomena of the ages, with all the interests of practical morality, instead of being explained and justified, are explained away. If, therefore, ethical theory is to exhibit the metaphysical validity of the moral consciousness of men, no view can reasonably be regarded as correct that dissipates the very reality which the conscience assumes to see and without which the moral judgments lose their rational foundations. For if the objective and transcendent character of the ethical distinction be denied, morality necessarily drops down into, at best, a temporary biological provision for the utilities of this ephemeral life, or, at worst, into a deep fraud of our faculties, estopping the use of our freedom by a phantom bugbear of moral distinctions. If, therefore, virtue is not to be disrobed of its honor, if righteousness is not to be cast down from the supreme place which the reason of mankind has ever accorded it, if the idea of duty is not to be belittled, invalidated and overthrown, ethical theory must recognize and emphasize the objective and permanent reality of the moral law as an unchanging law of obligation and responsibility for the conduct of free agents. Otherwise the so-called ethical theory is not a theory of the ethical reality, but one that sinks the supposed ethical reality into non-moral elements and illusion. To vindicate the authority of conscience, the immutable foundations of righteousness must be maintained, not dissolved.

Relation to Evolution.

5. The relation of this truth to the wide-spread hypothesis of the evolutionary origin of man dare not be ignored at this place. Frank admission has already been made that this hypothesis, as setting forth a mere mode of creation by God, does not appear to be necessarily inconsistent with the existence of conscience. Any mode that can produce a faculty of mental power capable of perceiving or making the ethical distinction, suffices on that point—though grave difficulties stand in the way of accounting for it under any evolutionist explanation thus far given. But how is it with respect to the supersensible reality of the moral law, as the reality perceived by the conscience? Can evolution account for it, or even allow any place for it?

Theistic Evolution.

To these questions, the answer must be, first, that evolution, in the theistic conception, if supposed capable of developing the faculty of conscience, must also be regarded as consistent with existence and place of the moral law. The infinite intelligence and purpose back of the creative evolution, and through it originating a power for ethical perception, must be conceded to be equally capable, in that method of forming the universe, of establishing the principle and law of duty in the relations in which rational and self-determining creatures are to live. Provided only that a rational first cause be assumed and the plan of the world be viewed as laid in aims of divine order, a moral system as well as moral agents may, surely, be created by slow advance of life no less completely than by instantaneous fiat of power. The theistic theory of evolution, assuming the cosmic system to be grounded in the will and power of God and filled with his ever-working presence does not necessarily bring any trouble into the question of fixed moral law. The moral law, resting in the same divine source whence arise the laws that are revealed in physical nature, comes into play as soon as moral agents are created in relations which call for right sentiments and conduct. The rational purpose which ordained physical laws, in necessity, for material order, ordains moral law for order of personal agents acting in freedom. The question, therefore, with respect to this kind of evolution need not embarrass the question of the reality of immutable moral law—at least when the theory of evolution is so shaped as to give its fundamental assumptions full and consistent place and force.

Atheistic Evolution.

But, secondly, on the other hand, answer must be made, that under no theory of atheistic and merely materialistic and naturalistic evolution can the objective existence of moral law be logically or rationally maintained. This kind of evolutionism is not only helpless before the task of accounting for it, but logically excludes the possibility of it. For any theory that presents the cosmos as a pure naturalism of matter, or is agnostic as to an intelligent author of nature, furnishes no realm or materials for moral law. This becomes evident, beyond doubt, from the following considerations:

(1) According to the hypothesis "the potency of all things" is in matter with its energy and modes of motion. This is the "all and the one" τὸ πᾶν καὶ ἕν ([Greek: to pan kai hen]) of the universe, at once the only essence and ground of its existence and ongoing. No intelligent first cause is assumed, no creative reason to begin or determine the evolution. There is no ordering mind or purpose in it—for its origin, in the process, or as to its end. It is avowedly a purely mechanical theory of the universe—matter and force acting in self-contained energy without design. All rational, purposive, or teleological idea is wanting. Now it is evident that this pure mechanism of matter and energy must be not only without any moral element whatever, but necessarily incapable of evolving the moral. It is an infinite and endless automatism. Though it should run on æon after æon it is still only a mechanism of atoms in eternally unfree material movement. The unmoral elements can never produce moral law; and, ex hypothesi, there is no intelligent free moral being behind or in the movement to create or establish moral law through it.

(2) Further, this form of evolutionism, returning, as it does, to the ancient notion of the universe as a perpetual flux, even if imagined to be able to evolve the moral out of non-moral elements, could present no permanent and stable ethical law. In such evolution, without beginning and without end, all things are only a continual becoming, "an eternal process moving on." There is and can be nothing fixed, whether of forms or relations, but only a shifting, necessitated, everlasting scene of aimless beginnings and disappearances. Could we even conceive—which we cannot, because the concept is possible only in connection with purpose and ideal order—that the ethical "ought" should momentarily appear, it would soon be broken up and passed by, like the bubble on a stream,

"A moment here, then gone forever."

Manifestly, this perpetual motion, forever changing and superseding its own forms and products, cannot be considered father to even a rational stable conscience, much less a sure abiding moral law for its steady recognition and eternally reverent regard. "The child of contingency remains contingent." And so the advocates of this empirical, materialistic, and atheistic evolutionism consistently maintain that there is no absolute moral law, and that what seems so is only shifting hereditary judgments generated by experience and utility or some instinct formed by biological processes.

(3) But further. In this merely naturalistic evolution all the essential presuppositions of moral law are wanting and excluded. This is easily seen. (a) It has already been pointed out that the action of conscience is theistic, its authority arising from its perception of a law of duty imposed on it and representing a moral law-giver (See Chap. IV, pp. [79]–[80]; Chap. V, pp. [87]–[88]). So moral law, as a rule of ethical righteousness, is necessarily theistic. It is thinkable only as a requirement made by rational intelligence for fitting conduct among personal agents. It rests in a world-system of rational ends and ideal requirements. The standard is established by intelligence. Should it be objected, that we may regard the standard as made by the mind of men only, and altogether a human and subjective thing, it is enough to remind the reader that according to the hypothesis, there is no human mind as a different entity from matter, the only "mentality" left being merely particular effects of molecular or brain activity, and therefore only successive passive products, simply revealing what, if it exists at all, must exist as the molecular matter behind them. The autocratic moral law which the conscience finds, but does not make, is conceivable therefore, only as part of intelligent ordering in a rational world-system. But according to the hypothesis no moral reason has framed or regulates the order of the physical forces that create the relations of life. (b) Moral law, with responsibility, is inconceivable except in connection with personal freedom in the subject of it. But in this kind of evolutionism, everything is reduced to the mechanism of matter; and its supporters agree that our personal freedom is an illusion. There can be no more morality in the thoughts, aims and conduct of men than in the digestion of food or the growth and decay of a tree.

While, therefore, theistic evolution does not present anything inconsistent with the reality and recognition of moral law, every hypothesis which exhibits the world, in its ground and processes, as the mere mechanism of material forces, stands in logical and irreconcilable antagonism. This antagonism, however, is not to be taken as overthrowing or even weakening the truth set forth in this chapter. Rather, the antagonistic hypothesis, which fails in so many other respects to meet the necessities of a rational or scientific account of the phenomena of the universe, discredits itself still further by its incongruity on this great point.

[CHAPTER VIII.]
THE GROUND OF RIGHT.

This topic carries the inquiry concerning moral law one step further than that determined in the last chapter. It being settled that that law is objectively and permanently real, for the recognition of conscience, we must yet seek some explanation of the basis of the reality. Why are some things right and others wrong? What is the reason of the difference? On what is the law of right grounded? We seek the explanation of its existence and the obligation it imposes.

It must be remembered that even those who hold the moral behests to be merely subjective, products in some way of the psychological constitution, nevertheless endeavor to account for them in some relations or forces back of themselves. These accounts, as will appear, are exceedingly varied. Inasmuch, therefore, as nearly all the differing ethical theories seek to give some explanation and ground for moral obligation, the inquiry now before us presents the point about which the chief contests of moral philosophy have been waged. The different answers have been the main determinants of the different systems.

Our examination must include three things: a clear definition of the point of inquiry; some notice of the leading theories; and a positive statement of the ground as demanded by reason and the interests of moral life.

The Question Defined.

I. Definition. This is necessary because it has sometimes been confounded with the question: What is the ground of obligation?[38] We must distinguish between the "ground of right" and the "ground of obligation." The point before us is not why we are under obligation to do a right act, but why the act is right. Manifestly the rightness of the proposed action is the ground of the obligation to do it; that is, the obligation is grounded on the right. The exact inquiry is—and must be, in order to reach the real and abiding moral foundations—on what is the right, whose perception obligates, grounded? A quest after the ground of the "obligation" simply, might satisfy those who reduce conscience to a mere instinct or sentiment, and the moral standard to a mere internal product of association, education or of biological organization. To them it might seem enough to give an explanation of the felt obligation. In such case they might plausibly, as they often do, affirm that the moral bond, being thus organically insured and fixed in the moral consciousness, must remain the same, no matter what theories, even though purely materialistic, may be formed of its genesis and nature. But so soon as the ethical reality is seen in its cosmic place and transcendental character we want an explanation not only of the ground of obligation to right conduct, but also of the ground of the right which evokes the sense of obligation.

Various Theories.

II. Leading Theories. We must include, in this review, both the theories which offer only an explanation of the phenomenon of obligation and those that seek an elucidation of the principle of righteousness as objective moral law. In the long continued discussion of the subject these theories have been immensely varied and modified, but the differences thus noted divide all explanations into two classes, viz., those which make the moral stand in something subjective and those that find it objective. In the cursory rehearsal of them, here needed, we will present them in chronological order, irrespective of their belonging to one class or the other, noting, however, their relation to this distinction which divides them. Such historical glance will give an outline of the development of thought on the subject, and help us to reach and appreciate the true conclusion.

Egyptian Teaching.

1. Egypt's golden age was in the morning of the world's historical period, and we must look far back for its best ethical thought. With the Egyptians morality and religion were closely identified. The ethical view was united with the theological and determined by it. They, however, dealt with the subject of duty only in separate maxims and precepts, without framing a theory of obligation. But the purity and elevation of these precepts have been a wonder to many in our modern days. It is, however, easily explained. Their religion was monotheistic. God was a good and righteous Being, with power and rulership, the source of all things for man. The Egyptians connected all that was pure and good with God and recognized their dependence on Him and their duty to live according to His will. Thus their moral consciousness rose above the function of a mere subjective instinct or a feeling of responsibility to their fellow-men, and included a sense of direct amenability to divine authority. The goal of the moral endeavor, ever overcoming evil, was regarded as attained, not in this, but in a future life of blessedness under the divine approval. Their view grounded all duty objectively, and practically identified it with piety.[39]

Chinese Teaching.

2. Chinese teaching, too, was theological. The theology was essentially monotheistic, but overgrown with superstitions and idolatrous practices. It taught that man is the creature of God, and was endowed by heaven with a nature for the practice of good, a nature that, if followed properly—i. e. in the "golden mean"—invariably leads men aright. The path indicated by nature is the will of God concerning duty. "What heaven has conferred is called the nature; an accordance with this nature is called the path of duty; the regulation of this path is called instruction."[40] The chief contribution to the Chinese teaching by the sage Confucius (B. C. 551–478) was his proclamation of the principle of "reciprocity," i. e. doing as we would have others do to us. Though the elements of the moral problem were thus included fairly well for ordinary conduct, they were not framed into a distinct philosophy of the ground of right.

Views in India.

3. India's sacred books abound in moral maxims and counsels. Brahmanism is substantially a philosophy of life rather than a religion. But its pantheism and doctrine of the pre-existence and transmigration of souls have distorted and misdirected the moral idea. Its pantheism confounds the human with the divine, both in its origin and destination. Its belief in transmigration, with its perpetual succession of rebirths into conditions of woeful individual life unless the soul's unhappy agitations and unrest should be composed by virtue, shapes the moral task mainly, not only into restraint of the appetites and passions, but into such austerity and stern self-abnegation as may prepare the soul, on the death of the body, to attain the perfect repose of Nirvana the complete extinction of human passions, or, as Buddhism represents, annihilation of conscious individuality in reabsorption into the absolute existence. In this system the aim of morality is not "the right," but the desired good of tranquil happiness, or the final goal of merging self-conscious personality back again into the Great All from which it arose. The ground of the moral striving—it can hardly be called obligation—is the adaptedness of it to secure this result.[41]

Persian Teaching.

4. Zoroastrianism (Mazdæism), from about B. C. 1500–1000, confessedly presents an ethical teaching that, among oriental views, is second only to that of the Hebrews. Its theological dualism, which seems to have encroached upon an earlier purer monotheism, of two eternal principles or powers, Ormuzed (Ahura Mazda) the good power, and Ahriman (Angra Mainyou) the evil power, manifestly arose from the effort to solve the dread problem of evil in the world. Zoroastrian teaching represents Ormuzed as the all-knowing and the holy creator of the world. He cannot create evil. He is the source of all purity, order and righteousness. Wrong and misery have come into the world from Ahriman, the opposite contending power in the universe. Zoroastrianism thus gives the world-system a moral foundation and law of order. The moral life is a holy conflict with the forces of evil within human nature and assailing it. The supreme end of life is to increase the ascendency of righteousness and establish its everlasting reign of truth and goodness. The goal of it comes in a future life of blessedness. The ground of righteousness is thus placed in the nature and will of the eternal creator, to whom obedience is due, against the influences of the malign power of evil.[42]

Greek Theories.

5. Among the Greeks ethical philosophy began with Socrates. Their earlier writers dealt with the subject of duty but little in a speculative way. When the philosophy of it came to be sought the theories mainly connected it closely with "the good" or "the highest good," the summum bonum of life. This designation was ambiguous. "The good" (τὸ ἀγαθόν, τὰ ἀγαθά [Greek: to agathon], [Greek: ta agatha]) might be conceived of as either intellectual or sensuous good, as consisting in one's intrinsic state or in outward condition, as either happiness or personal well-being. And because this method failed to distinguish clearly and fully between this indefinite "good"—having at best no more authority than "the beautiful"—and "the right" which forms the true essence of the ethical principle, their explanations failed to become clear, and stopped short of being actual explanations of the ground of right. Hence their theories, though not always consistently exhibited, and variously interpreted by expounders of them, were substantially eudæmonistic[43] and utilitarian. Specifically:

(1) Socrates made all virtue consist in knowledge, especially self knowledge or wisdom, leading men to proper self-regulation and happiness. He put emphasis upon man's rational nature as essentially good, and to this rational nature belonged the office of self-mastery and control of all appetites, dispositions, and passions. The life in knowledge became the good and happy life. Though this great sage maintained that the world is governed by a supreme intelligence, he failed to connect clearly and closely the moral law with this high source, and rested the moral life simply subjectively.

(2) Plato developed his view substantially on the basis of that of Socrates. He identified the highest good with the intellect rather than the sensibility, and looked upon all virtues as united in knowledge, not only as guiding the soul in acting out its proper destination, but, according to some statements, even as in itself all-sufficing. Though Plato's speculative view of the universe contains the elements for the construction of a sublime immutable ethical standard, and he even suggests God-likeness as the goal of man's moral life,[44] the implications of his view are not consistently carried out; and when he comes to apply his ideas to life in his ideal Republic he lapses into what seems a caricature of his better thought, and is content to rest morality simply on the authority and laws of the state.[45]

(3) Aristotle, in whom Plato's theistic view of the world receded into the background, made the "chief good" consist in happiness or felt well-being, which depends on man's living according to his rational nature. Such living includes both the activities of the mind and habitual conduct. The reason must not only develop its own energies, but rule the lower powers and passions. On this double requirement he founded two kinds of virtue, the intellectual (dianoetic) and the practical. The one consists in "knowledge" or "wisdom," the other in formed "habits" or "character." The moral life, therefore, consists in the true use, without abuse, of our rational nature. The rule for it, as taught by Aristotle, is to avoid extremes and pursue the golden mean. The theory thus rests morality wholly on subjective good and identifies it with the calculations of prudence. It is simply secularistic, without religious element or appeal.[46]