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Title: Theoretical Ethics


Author: Milton Valentine



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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.


    CHAPTER I.

    DEFINITION AND GENERAL DIVISIONS.

                                                                   PAGES

    1. Definition and Statement of the Subject-matter              15-17

    2. Historical Glance at the Beginning and Progress of the
           Science                                                 17-20

    3. Theoretical and Practical                                   20-23

    4. Relations to Psychology, Natural Theology, and Christian
         Theology                                                  23-27


    CHAPTER II.

    THE FACT OF MORAL DISTINCTIONS.

    1. Revealed in Personal Consciousness                          28-29

    2. Incorporated in the Social Organism                            29

    3. Witnessed to in History                                     29-31

    4. Shown in the Religious World                                31-33

    5. Pervades Literature                                         33-34

    6. Ethnic and Anthropological Information                      34-35

    7. Unaffected by Theories of its Cause or Significance         35-36


    CHAPTER III.

    FACULTY OF MORAL DISTINCTIONS--THE EXISTENCE OF CONSCIENCE.

    1. The Importance of this Question                             37-39

    2. Proofs of its Existence                                     39-55

         1. The Moral Distinctions in Personal Consciousness
                and the World                                      39-40

         2. The Peculiar Character of its Perceptions              40-44

         3. Special Feelings from its Perceptions                  44-47

         4. Objection from Diversity of Moral Judgments Noticed    47-53

         5. These Proofs Independent of the Mode of the Origin
                of the Power                                       53-55


    CHAPTER IV.

    THE FACULTY OF MORAL DISTINCTIONS--THE NATURE OF CONSCIENCE.

    1. The Importance of Determining its Nature                    56-59

         1. For Scientific Accuracy                                56-57

         2. As Involving the Authority of Conscience               57-59

    2. A Psychological Question                                       59

    3. Conscience in place only in the Total Complex of Man's
           Psychical Powers                                        59-62

    4. Specific Psychology of Conscience                           62-76

         1. Perception of the Ethical Distinction                  62-64

         2. Perception of Obligation                               64-67

         3. Identification of the Moral Quality in Acts            67-68

         4. Perception of Merit and Demerit                        68-72

         5. Emotions Arising from these Perceptions                72-76

    5. Special Characteristics Disclosed                           76-80

         1. Conscience Fundamentally Intellectual                  76-77

         2. Moral Quality its Sole Percept                         77-78

         3. Its Action Marked by Necessity                         78-80

    6. Relation of Phenomenalistic Philosophy to this View         80-83

    7. Effect of Theistic Evolution Theory                         83-85


    CHAPTER V.

    THE SUPREMACY OF CONSCIENCE.

    1. Involved in the Sphere of its Judgments                     86-87

    2. Shown by the Nature of its Action                           87-88

    3. The Absurdity of a Possible Supremacy in any other
           Faculty                                                 88-92

    4. Difficulties Considered                                     92-99


    CHAPTER VI.

    MORAL AGENCY.

    1. Rational Intelligence                                     102-104

    2. The Conscience                                            104-105

    3. Free Will                                                 105-115

    4. Powers of Sensibility and Action                          115-118


    CHAPTER VII.

    THE REALITY OF RIGHT AND WRONG.

    1. The Source of Doubt the Relativity of Knowledge           120-125

    2. Positive Statement of the Reality                         125-129

         1. The Moral Distinctions and Qualities not merely
                Subjective Phenomena but Objectively Real for
                Perception                                       125-126

         2. Independent of the Mental Organization of the Race       127

         3. Immutable and Eternal                                127-129

    3. The Importance of this Truth                              129-130

    4. Marks of the Dividing Line between True and False Moral
           Philosophies                                          130-132

    5. The Relation of Evolutionism to this Reality              132-137

         1. Theistic Evolution                                   132-133

         2. Atheistic and Materialistic Evolution                133-137


    CHAPTER VIII.

    THE GROUND OF RIGHT.

    1. The Question Defined                                      138-139

    2. Leading Views and Theories:
         The Egyptian Teaching--Chinese--Indian--Persian--
             Greek--Roman--Divine Absolutism--Civil
             Authority--Utilitarianism--Evolutionary
             Utilitarianism--Failure of Utilitarianism--
             Plausible Side of Utilitarian Theory--
             Theory of Conformity to Relations--Spiritual
             Excellence Theory--Theory of an Imperative in
             its Own Right                                       140-167


    CHAPTER IX.

    THE GROUND OF RIGHT--CONTINUED.

    1. Statement of Proximate Ground                             168-178

         1. Sustained by the Moral Consciousness in Constant
                Experience                                       171-172

         2. Implied in the Logical Pre-suppositions to
                Responsibility                                   172-175

         3. Verified in the Character of the Various Virtues
                and their Opposite Immoralities                  175-176

         4. Supported by Analogy of Organic and Instinctive
                Action                                           176-177

         5. Assumed in the Conceptions and Language of Common
                Life                                                 178

    2. The Ultimate Ground                                       178-181


    CHAPTER X.

    THE OBJECTS OF THE MORAL JUDGMENT.

    1. Personal Actions                                          182-187

    2. The Various Feelings, Passions, and Desires               187-190

    3. Intentions                                                190-191

    4. The Activities and Uses of the Intellect                  191-192

    5. Acts of the Will                                          192-195


    CHAPTER XI

    THE ETHICAL VIEW UNDER CHRISTIAN TEACHING.

    1. Christianity Recognizes the Truths and Principles
           Established in True Ethical Science                   196-197

    2. It Contributes Immensely to the Ethical View              197-200

    3. The Two Sources of the Christian View                     200-205

         1. Primarily, the Sacred Scriptures                     201-204

         2. Secondarily, the Christian Moral Consciousness       204-205

    4. Particular Features of the Christian View                 205-216

         1. Known Duties Made More Distinct and Definite         205-206

         2. Human Relations Better Disclosed                     206-208

         3. Moral Obligations Disclosed as Duties to God         208-210

         4. Guilt of Offending against Moral Law                 210-213

         5. The Universalism of the Moral Law                    213-215

         6. Fulfilment Requires Regeneration                     215-216


    CHAPTER XII.

    THE ETHICAL TASK UNDER CHRISTIANITY.

    1. Helped by the Completion of the Ethical View              219-220

    2. Quickened by Assurance of Success                         220-222

    3. The Religious Interest Brought to Reinforce the Moral     222-224

    4. The Enlightening and Enforcing Power of the Holy Spirit   224-225

    5. Through Spiritual Regeneration                            225-227




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]

(4) In Epicurus (B. C. 341-270) and his followers eudæmonism descended
into hedonism. The supreme good is happiness in the sense of personal
enjoyment, pleasure. The universe, without theistic ground, was
regarded as eternal, forever evolving in fortuitous concourse of atoms.
It is without rational order, design, or government. The human soul is
material, and at death men cease to be. The good of life consists in
the avoidance of pain and the securing of pleasure. The pleasure may
be intellectual or sensuous and gross, as men may prefer. The pursuit
of it is the highest virtue and best wisdom. Enjoyment is the end of
life. The whole question of ethics thus came to be a calculation and
balancing of pains and pleasures, and the cardinal virtue prudent
selfishness. It was complete subjectivism.

(5) In Stoicism (founded by Zeno of Citium, about 308 B. C.) we have
a view that, in its principal features, was in strong contrast with
Epicureanism. It arose in close relation to the teaching of Socrates.
But it taught that "happiness" was not necessary, and should never be
made the end of endeavor. Virtue itself was the highest good, and to
be sought for its own sake. Itself was sufficient for happiness--not
because it could make men insensible to pain or pleasure, but because
it made them superior to it. Virtue was immutably excellent in itself,
a permanent reality for man's realization, and subordinated everything
else. It consisted essentially in living "according to nature,"[47]
_i. e._ not simply in harmony with one's self, but with the nature of
the universe, with the whole constitution of the world as ordained and
ruled by God, of which a man's own nature forms a part. The stress
was not at all to be laid on self, but upon the great total of being.
Man exists for society, and virtue is impossible apart from the
social state. So Stoic teaching inculcated subordination of self to
more general interests--to family, country, mankind. It taught that
all creatures are "children of one father,"[48] and duty was owed
to all. We may hardly, however, speak of this as "altruism," in the
sense of unselfish benevolence or self-sacrificing goodness; since,
in the general Stoic philosophy, not the sentiment of sympathetic
helpfulness, but of victorious superiority to pain, was the temper
fostered. Love was almost submerged in the stern spirit of duty. The
blessedness of virtue was to stand independent of the sufferings which
befell men. In fact the dreadful inexorableness of fate (εἱμαρμένῃ
[Greek: heimarmenê]), conceived by the Stoic philosophy as eternally
embracing the life of both God and nature, gave to virtue, not so much
the temper of free, loving obedience to either God or righteousness,
as the sternness of a proud intellectual resoluteness in yielding, for
virtue's sake, to the inevitable in the fate-bound universe. Under
this conception the Stoic moral obedience could never rise to the free
joyousness that belongs to the obedient life under the light of the
Christian truth that God is love--eternal love, ruling in absolute
freedom and desiring to exalt His children to the perfect holiness to
which alone happiness forever belongs.

All these Greek theories, except the Stoic, are thus seen to have been
marked by two features. First, they dissolved "the right," which alone
has direct authority and forms moral law, into "the good," which is
simply something offered to us as an object of desire, but which has
no "imperative" for the conscience, and may be innocently foregone.
Secondly, despite the clear better implications supplied to them in
their accepted theistic conceptions of the world, they failed to define
distinctly any grounding of the moral law on anything higher or more
permanent than the subjective elements of the human constitution. For,
even Plato's objective basing of it, for citizen duty, on the law of
the state, assumed only a subjective basis in the person of the ruler
himself. The Stoic theory, however, had glimpses of some higher and
broader ground, though it failed to see it truly.


==Roman Teaching.==

=6.= The Roman moralists adopted substantially the doctrine of the
Greek Stoics. This was finely exhibited and commended, especially by
Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But we have no new theory among
the Roman philosophers.

After the establishment of Christianity, whose progress thenceforward
determined and marked the intellectual activity and advancing
philosophy and culture of mankind, the discussion of ethics became
simply a part of theology. And according to the spirit and method of
theology in the early Church and during the middle ages, even down to
modern times, the discussion was not philosophical, but biblical. It
was concerned simply to set forth human duty, especially the duties
of the Christian life, as taught in the scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments. Resting the moral law upon revealed divine authority, it
paid small attention to the question of its metaphysical validation.
But when modern philosophy began its investigations, it of necessity
soon came upon this point, and inquired after the natural basis or
ultimate ground of the great law whose unique authority both the sacred
Scriptures and the moral consciousness of men agreed in asserting.


==Divine Absolutism.==

=7.= Modern theories begin with that of Divine absolutism--making the
moral law, like physical laws, only a product of God's will. It makes
it rest absolutely optional in His sovereignty of choice. It not only
seeks no ulterior reason, or logical _prius_, for his choice, but
distinctly disconnects it from any. God's will is not the expression or
revelation, but the originator, of the moral distinction, constituting
it, with its obligatoriness, as He has done, when He might have
constituted it otherwise, even the very contrary. He determined "the
right" according to no norm, but as creating and establishing a norm.
Whether there should be any moral distinction and what it should be,
was a matter of the divine choice. The view is a one-sided conception
of God's sovereignty. It was set forth by Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and
René Descartes (1596-1650), and has found prominent advocacy frequently
since. But it collides with both sound theology and an adequate moral
philosophy.

(1) It fails to recognize any eternal essential moral character in
God Himself. The interests of both morality and religion require
faith in Him as Himself eternally the righteous and holy creator
and moral ruler, in His immutable nature. The morally good can not
be something "contingent," but must be absolute, irrepealable and
irreversible even by God. We need for both religion and character, to
hold fast to the great truth which represents God in His moral will
as choosing righteousness as righteousness, loving the "morally good
as good"[49]--not as by mere will originating the moral distinction
and fixing a code of conduct upon arbitrary ordination. For real moral
character in God we must go even further and regard Him as loving
righteousness, not simply as good in Himself, but as good in itself,
good by the immutable quality of its own nature. For a moral government
we must have a moral governor. And God can be such, not by enforcing
responsibility to an arbitrary code, but by ruling according to
distinctions that are _per se_ supreme in eternal reason--enforcing not
a mere rule of power but of essential rightness.

(2) Further, the action of the conscience itself, in discerning right
and wrong where it has received no information as to the will of God,
implies that the distinction is rationally based. To discern it is not
always conditioned on such information. Reason itself--the human in the
image of the divine--in some degree reveals the right. So clear is this
discernment, and so independent of all "contingency" does the right
appear, that even pagan writers have been wont to make virtue superior
even to the displeasure of the gods, nobly standing self-approved.[50]

(3) The true relation between the will of God and the ethically good
must be conceived of as, indeed, involving a profound and indissoluble
identity--what He wills being always and necessarily right, though He
wills it in perfect freedom--but yet as moving in the logical order of
thought, that right is not made right by His willing it, but that He
wills it because it is right.


==Civil Authority.==

=8.= Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), holding the natural state of man as
utterly selfish and a state of war, gave to civil government, as
necessary to the social order, supreme authority, and asserted that the
basis of all moral obligation was positive law issued by the sovereign.
Duty rested on the legal statute, whose direction was final. It knew no
higher law. The theory was a repetition of the travesty of ethics in
Plato's Republic. It has had no following, and needs no confutation.

But a theory that thus ignored individual conscience and essential
right, reducing morality to civic obedience, with no other foundation
than the positive enactment of a monarch, at once and strongly re-acted
in strengthening the conviction of the necessity and truth of the
intuitional view of the moral faculty, and of the importance of finding
a better basis for the ethical principle, both in the constitution of
mankind and in the author of nature.


==The Sympathetic Theory.==

=9.= The Sympathetic Theory is naturally associated with that
conception of conscience which makes it consist fundamentally, not in
intellect, but in instinct or feeling. Taking the suggestion from Hume,
the theory was elaborated by Adam Smith (1723-1790). It explained moral
obligation as produced by the special action of our nature in which
we spontaneously sympathize with certain intentions or conduct of our
fellow-men--this sympathy taking the form of approval. The bond to duty
was viewed as thus formed by these instinctive sentiments pointing
out what is morally good and obligating to corresponding behavior. Of
course the individual's sympathetic appreciation had to be broadened
and trained by the standard of general sentiment. And the explanation
was helped out by noting the adaptation of this rule of conduct to
promote personal and social happiness. But a theory resting duty on a
basis so thoroughly subjective, and so uncertain and changeful as are
men's unguided feelings, likely often to be in sympathy with evil,
could not commend itself to wide acceptance. It presented neither the
ground of right nor a safe rule.


==Utilitarianism.==

=10.= The theory of Utilitarianism had its prototypes in the teachings
of Socrates, Aristotle, and the Epicureans. Its modern forms have been
greatly varied, but they all agree in founding the morally good in
utility. That which experience shows to be useful, as promotive of
personal or social interests and happiness, becomes thereby right,
or the norm of moral choices and conduct. The theory, in all its
modifications, is a "goods" theory,[51] interpreting obligation as
simply the behest to conform life to the attainment of the various
forms of good, even the chief, as happiness or enjoyment, provided for
in man's nature and condition. Named from the object or objects sought,
it is eudæmonism; named from the way or means of its attainment, it
is utilitarianism. Sometimes the good is simply happiness, sometimes
personal well-being, sometimes social welfare. Sometimes it is purely
selfish, sometimes altruistic or in some sense benevolent. But a
few examples will make plain both its general character and chief
variations.

(1) William Paley (1743-1805), adopting eudæmonistic principles, rested
all obligation to duty on its tendency to secure everlasting happiness.
He says: "Actions are to be estimated by their tendency. Whatever is
expedient is right. It is the utility of any moral rule alone, which
constitutes the obligation to it."[52] "The will of God" is accepted
as "the rule of virtue," seemingly not, however, as the direct ground
of it, but rather as the sure guide as to what has the "tendency" to
gain for us "everlasting happiness." For, Paley explains: "Such is the
divine character that what promotes the general happiness is required
by the will of God." This view makes the spirit of duty, even in
religion, supreme selfishness. It places the self-regarding impulses on
the throne.

(2) Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the chief apostle of modern
utilitarianism, gave it great popularity by making it distinctly
altruistic. Adopting suggestions in this direction by Shaftsbury
(1713), Hutcheson, Butler, and Hume, he measurably lifted its aim above
the individual's care of his own interests, and made the principle of
right authoritative because promotive of "the greatest happiness of the
greatest number." This seemed to subordinate, without excluding, the
individual's advantage to that of the many, and the selfish instinct
to the higher and nobler aims of love. It developed a rule by which
the brotherhood of man could have place, and character could rise and
broaden into magnanimity and worth. It gave an objective standing and
broadly human aim to the principle of obligation. James Mill, J. S.
Mill and Alexander Bain have been conspicuous recent representatives of
this general view, while modifying some particular features of it.

It must be added, however, that this modern "altruism," when analyzed
to its final view, does not become "disinterested benevolence." For
the greatest general good is viewed as conditioning the best good of
each individual, and the individual is to include it for the sake of
his own share. So this so-called "altruism," after all, is still ruled
by the self-regarding aim, and stands only for the broadest and most
successful utilitarianism.

(3) Evolutionist Utilitarianism. This is its recent and present
most characteristic form. The variety of types of evolutionism,
however, has prevented the bringing of it, thus far, into a definite
universally accepted formulation. Although, as already stated,[53]
monistic evolutionism, whether materialistic or pantheistic, by
excluding freedom from the universe, leaves no place for moral action
or responsibility, it still continues to speak about obligation and
the reality of personal character. In this case the "obligation" can
be only acquiescence in the fatalistic onward evolution of nature with
its inevitable events. Theistic evolution, however, holding itself as
only the mode of the divine creation, though it has difficulties in
explaining the genesis of an authoritative conscience, maintains both
its existence in some sense and a ground for the obligation which it
urges. Its utilitarianism differs from earlier forms in substituting an
historical and biological explanation of the origin and force of the
moral sentiments for the purely psychological one. These sentiments
are declared to be "the results of accumulated experiences of utility,
gradually organized and inherited."[54] In its better forms of
statement this process of organizing a guiding instinct or intuition is
represented as the divine work of transferring the moral law over us
into our subjective consciousness--a process, however, that moves on
the principle of utility and is always incomplete.[55]

Against the whole utilitarian theory, as a widely urged explanation
of the ground of right and the sense of obligation, the following
considerations are decisive:

First, the idea of right is generically distinct and different from
that of happiness or utility. However closely related they refuse
to be identified and must not be confounded. In reference to any
particular act or to any general course of conduct, beyond the question
of pleasure or advantage arises the further question: Is it right?
Every day of their lives men are required to forego enjoyment and the
forwarding of what appears to be their interests, in order to do right
and follow their conscience. Perceived adaptations to happiness are not
the same as the obligation to right. Utilitarianism stands apart from
the moral idea, in a by-play with the idea of profit.[56]

Secondly, as a matter of fact, clear in our consciousness, we do not,
in deciding the right or wrong of purposes and conduct, go through the
process of first determining the question of utility or adaptedness to
secure the greatest happiness to the greatest number or even our own
greatest happiness. In actual moral experience, the first fact is the
notion of right and duty. Even when pleasure or advantage is making an
appeal, duty is decided by the further question: Is it right? If it be
claimed that the process of calculation has become largely unnecessary
through the experience which has been teaching lessons and training
into judgments so spontaneous as to seem almost intuitive, there are
still cases enough where the right is a distinct issue, irrespective of
advantage, and where it is chosen in the face of loss and suffering.
This fact shows that right is a distinct principle and higher than
pleasure. To do right rather than seek sensitive good is the noblest
exaltation of character.

It is especially in evolutionist utilitarianism that the absence of
such conscious calculating of advantage in questions of duty, is
supposed to be explained. The enjoyment of the useful is represented as
gradually organized and transformed into moral approbation, and through
hereditary descent appears, as Herbert Spencer says, in "certain
emotions responding to right and wrong, which have no apparent basis in
the individual experiences of utility." But philosophy fails to explain
how the idea of the useful can thus become identical with the idea of
the right, or even explanatory of it. If a lifetime's experience of
utility does not suffice to transmute the idea of one into the other,
why should we think a longer time would do it? If duty does not become
the same as happiness or as the tendency of conduct to promote it, in
the ascending steps of individual evolution, what warrant have we to
assume that it did so in some period far back of the consciousness of
the present individuals of the race?

Thirdly, utilitarianism is inconsistent with the authority which
belongs to right, as witnessed in the moral consciousness. It is
the distinctive peculiarity of conscience that it reveals a law or
principle of obligation, not of our own making, and which our wills
cannot displace. Manifestly this authority is not of the faculty
itself, but belongs to the law of right which it discloses. It
is right, therefore, that is authoritative, with and through the
conscience, because right is a revelation of that absolute authority
not ourselves which makes for righteousness in the world and the whole
universe. It represents the perfections and will of God. No theory of
obligation is adequate which does not square with this fact of unique
authority in right, as recognized and enforced by the moral imperative.
But neither happiness nor the utilities that tend to promote it,
possess it. They are not obligatory in the peculiar sense in which
the ethical behest binds to righteousness. They are offered to our
enjoyment, as sensitive good, but we may forego them or neglect to seek
them, without direct criminality. Duty may, and often does, require us
not to make them a controlling object of desire.

Among pleasures, some are higher or larger than others, and appeal to
some persons more strongly than to others. We can innocently choose
between them. To seek the greater instead of the smaller, or indeed
to neglect them all, is a prudential characteristic, not a moral one.
Where a person has simply foregone pleasure, he may regret it as
an error, but not repent of it as a sin. Considered with respect to
the individual alone, and free from relations that may incidentally
involve other points than his own personal pleasure, a man's happiness
may be regarded as his own free concern. If he chooses to neglect its
pursuit, or sacrifice it to other aims, so far as it is only and purely
a question as between greater or less enjoyment, his choice cannot
be challenged as guilty, but only as poor economy. Unquestionably it
ought to be believed that God desires men to be happy, and has provided
the needful conditions for happiness, but its enjoyment is an offer
of His love, and not a requirement of law. Happiness is a thing to be
gratefully appreciated; right is a thing we are bound to. Happiness
is a thing the less likely to be enjoyed the more covetously it is
sought after; right claims our unforgetful and completest loyalty.
Utilitarianism, therefore, assuming to ground right, which has direct
authority in the moral consciousness, upon happiness which in itself
has none, necessarily falls short of being an adequate theory of the
ethical reality. It attempts to deduce the moral from the non-moral.

This difference between questions of right and questions of utility
easily solves a supposed difficulty in the moral freedom of the
will. If choices were simply between greater or less degrees of
pleasure or advantage, it might easily be imagined that the will
would be necessarily determined by the greater pleasure. As between
inducements of the same kind, the larger would prevail. But the ethical
choices have their place in the presence of motives of different
_kinds_, between right and enjoyment, duty or gain; and here there is
unquestionable room for free ethical choices. The question of freedom
in moral life is at once relieved by taking it out of the utilitarian
view into the clear atmosphere where the profitable is no longer
confounded with the right.

Fourthly, utilitarianism inverts the true relation between right and
utility. Unquestionably the connection between them is very close. In a
moral system true happiness belongs to righteousness. Man cannot attain
his true welfare in sin. Whatever uncertainties and inequalities the
abuse of free agency may bring temporarily into human enjoyment, in
the long run right in its very nature promotes the happiness which has
been intended for us. But the logical order of relations is, not that
an act is right because it is useful, but useful because right. Under a
moral government happiness, in the highest and fullest sense, comes as
the legitimate fruit of righteousness, as wrong-doing, also, brings its
true consequences in suffering, pain and misery. Right is the quality
of highest rank, and all blessedness comes into unity and harmony under
it. Their rightness gives to actions their quality of usefulness, which
cannot, therefore, ground the right. Utilitarianism inverts the real
relation.

This true relation explains how it is that the right stands the very
highest in the grade of values, without its becoming right by its
profitableness. It is of supreme worth, the greatest good, but it is so
by what it is in itself. Its good consequences spring from its nature.

But while utilitarianism is thus utterly inadequate as a statement of
the ground of right, it nevertheless, especially in its altruistic
form, brings to view some genuine and profound principles of the
philosophy of duty. This has given it its plausibility and wide
acceptance. It is proper, therefore, to mark and recognize the truth
that belongs to the theory.

(1) The tendencies of conduct to promote true happiness, or the
contrary, furnish, in fact, a valuable practical rule in questions
of right and duty. For, by the moral constitution of the world,
right-doing, despite the disorders that temporarily obstruct and
confuse the real law of consequences, is the way of true welfare.
Happiness, in the true, though not hedonistic sense, is an end of our
being, and virtue is conducive to it. "The way of the transgressor
is hard," under the law of natural cause and effect. The utilitarian
theory therefore justly appeals to the great lessons of experienced
utility to show the way of duty and guide conduct into righteousness.
So that while utility does not explain why an act is right, it becomes,
if correctly interpreted, a principle of great value in determining the
right.

(2) It is unquestionably true that the altruistic principle of "the
greatest good to the greatest number" presents a principle of genuine
moral authority. It opens to view the whole realm of obligation to
beneficent activity and self-sacrifice. It points to deeds that are
noblest in life and highest in ethical character. It even gives a
reason for their obligatoriness. In this form the theory no longer
bases duty simply on one's own personal enjoyment or advantage,
identifying morality with supreme selfishness, but lifts it into the
sphere of benevolence and doing good. For, in altruism individual
enjoyment and interests are necessarily subordinated to the well-being
of the many. And when utility is thus put into the service of love
or good-will, it carries the quality of right into wide ranges of
purpose and conduct. It will be observed, however, that the theory
thus obtains its appearance of explaining the foundation of right and
duty only after "utility" has been itself changed and identified with
the virtue of active good-will or beneficence which, of course, is
right and obligatory to the degree of every man's ability. In other
words, only when it ceases to be purely and really a utilitarian
theory, and stands in the name and rights of benevolence--getting
ethical authority surreptitiously from the quality of love instead of
"profitableness"--does it also get the plausibility that it seems to
possess.

(3) It is true, too, that a person's opportunities to promote his
own happiness and true interests involve a degree of obligation to
do so, as far as this may be consistent with other duties. A proper
self-regard is right. In general, on the one hand, we may justly make,
as we have done, a distinction between enjoyment, which is offered
to our option, and right, which is required by moral law. Were there
no considerations involved but that of one's own happiness, this
distinction would be unqualified. On the other hand, it must, at
the same time, be confessed that the moral consciousness of mankind
often condemns the conduct of men reckless of their own happiness
or well-being, not simply as "poor economy," but also as morally
wrong. Except in benevolent sacrifice no man can innocently throw away
his own happiness. The explanation of this is easy. There are other
considerations involved than his own happiness. To understand the whole
truth at this point the underlying fact must be borne in mind, that man
is created for two great ends, primarily for excellence of character,
secondarily and consequently for happiness. In moral order the way
to the latter is in and through the former. Character stands as the
irrepealable condition of reaching man's proper and true happiness.
And it is, therefore, true that in throwing away his happiness a man
may be guilty of more than "poor economy," but only in case he does
this by violating the law of right in surrendering his nature to vice.
It is not the consent to surrender enjoyment in itself that involves
guilt. For, one may innocently and virtuously forego this for the sake
of doing right. He may sacrifice pleasure or present happiness to serve
the good of others. In such disregard and sacrifice of enjoyment to do
good, there is no sin against the law of right; for we are not bound to
enjoyment as we are to right. Nor is there in it any sin against the
divine provision for happiness in our own nature; for under the rule of
moral order righteousness and happiness must finally coincide. While,
therefore, there is a sense in which to throw away one's happiness is
morally wrong, as well as bad policy, it is only when it is thrown away
by conduct that is first a violation of the law of right.

There are two other profound ethical facts which help to explain how
men are bound to regard their own happiness, although right is not
grounded in it. One is, that every man sustains relations to the
welfare of his fellow-men, being a unit in the solidarity of social
humanity, making it impossible to separate his own happiness from
the well-being and rights of others. The other is that he sustains
also relations to an intended possible personal destiny. In the first
of these he is bound in duty to his fellow-men. In the second he is
obligated in duty to God. In the former case, he cannot wantonly trifle
with his own interests without wrong and injury to those to whom he is
bound in the relationships of life. In this way a moral wrong comes
in. In the latter case, as God has rights in His plan for each man's
worthy and happy destiny, it is a sin against Him when men make their
own welfare inferior by failure to observe the moral principle which
conditions true happiness in righteousness. Sacrifice of happiness
by such disregard of moral principle is not to be confounded with
sacrifice of it through loyalty to right and holy self-denial in doing
good.

It thus, however, becomes evident, even in this discussion and
exhibition of the truth which utilitarianism has in its favor, that the
theory fails to present the real ground of right. For in its primary
and fundamental form, viewing conduct as right because promotive of
our personal interests and happiness, it plainly resolves morality
into mere calculation of selfishness. It presents supreme egoism. And
in its altruistic form it either maintains its selfish character, by
explaining that only by the rule of "the greatest good to the greatest
number" can the common interest, and consequently each man's share be
fully secured, implying that he is to contribute to the common welfare
for the sake of his own larger portion; or by subordinating the idea
of "utility" to that of "good-will" actively seeking the interests of
others, it practically confesses that it must seek some other ground
than mere utility or the consequences of conduct, in which to find
the principle of right. And this good-will, benevolence or love, thus
added, also fails. For since good-will is a virtue, it cannot be
placed as the ground of virtue, both in itself and in all virtues. The
moral law is by no means exhausted in benevolence; it must include
also justice, purity, veracity and many other duties. A benevolence
that would be unaccompanied by condemnation of the evil-doer and his
wrongs, might quickly go astray. It has often been pointed out that
good-will itself throws no light as to the right methods of realizing
even itself. Itself needs a guide as to how it may proceed--the very
principle of right after whose basis we are inquiring. Love, unless
united with reprobation of evil-doing, is as likely to act immorally as
morally. Benevolent endeavor, however excellent in itself, must subject
its methods to the fundamental principles of right. And not until we
find the relations that require both benevolence and its utilities, do
we reach the ground of right and obligation.


==Theory of Relations.==

=11.= The Theory of _Relations_ is variously modified. As expressed by
Dr. Samuel Clarke, right is based on "the fitness of things." Wollaston
grounded it on "the truth of things," wrong action being in all cases
out of harmony with the realities of existence. Jouffroy found it in
the demands of "universal order," the particular good and duty of each
man being elements or parts of an absolute good and universal order
appearing to reason as obligatory. Dr. Wayland makes right rest upon
"conformity of action to the relations which man sustains in life."[57]

We shall come upon the essential features of this theory in our next
chapter, in our positive account of the development and basis of right.


==Spiritual Excellence Theory.==

=12.= As defined by Dr. Hickok: "The ground in which the ultimate rule
of right is seen, is the intrinsic excellency of spiritual being."...
"Every man has consciously the bond upon him to do that and that only
which is due to his spiritual excellency."[57] But it is a plain matter
of fact that men do not go through a process of correlating their
proposed conduct with the spiritual excellency of their nature, before
deciding on its moral character. And even if they did so, it would give
them but a self-centred rule. Dr. Gregory well says of this attempt to
put one's own spiritual excellency as the principle of right: "It is
only by a self-deification, by making man a god to himself, that it can
be made a supreme end."[58]

==Theory of Intuitions.==

=13.= Some writers search for no ground beyond the immediate intuition.
This view forbears to seek for any basis behind the immediate
affirmation of the moral sense. Right is ultimate in its own intuition.
"The intuition creates law." This seems to be the teaching of Cudworth,
Kant, Coleridge, Calderwood, and others.




CHAPTER IX.

THE GROUND OF RIGHT--CONTINUED.


The review of theories in the last chapter prepares us to apprehend the
real ground of right. All the subjective theories fail, because the
moral quality is objectively real to the percipient conscience. The
endæmonistic and utilitarian explanations are at fault, because they
attempt to deduce the moral from the unmoral and can give no account of
the unique authority which is the characteristic mark of moral law.

The full ground of right, as the essential elements of the problem have
made clearly apparent, must be regarded as twofold, embracing, first,
the proximate or immediate ground, and secondly, the ultimate ground.

==Proximate Ground Stated.==

I. The proximate ground--as becomes easily manifest if we keep our
view close to the witness of consciousness in actual experience--is in
a rational conformity of conduct to the relations which men sustain
to one another and to other beings in the divinely constituted system
of the world. These relations immediately call for fitting conduct.
They create the _ought_ of moral law. The right is found in conforming
to the requirements which they develop and impose. Duty consists in
fulfilling the demands which they involve and express to the moral
reason.

This, it will be noticed, accords with the fundamental principle
already referred to, that the conception of moral law allies itself
normally only with the theistic view of the world, and the truth that
the constituted human relations have been framed under a rational
ideal of order and welfare. These relations form a rational system
in which intelligent free activity is to actualize a divine plan of
excellence and well-being. They require conduct in accordance with
themselves and with the ends of well-being and happiness to which they
have been adapted. The human reason reads the meaning of the relations,
and the moral discernment recognizes the obligation to correspondent
sentiment and action. Moral conduct thus becomes simply the conduct
that actualizes the ideas of divine order to which the framework of
human relations has been constituted. What is right springs immediately
from the relations, as what is due in ideal moral order. The relations
themselves exhibit a moral constitution as the immediate environment
of the human moral personality. They bring the ethical requirement
which they contain to the recognizing capacity of the reason and the
obedience of the will.

It is to be noticed, further, that the term "relations" is to be
understood here in its most comprehensive sense and applicability. It
embraces all relations with respect to which the human personality
in its freedom has to determine and harmonize itself--relations
individual, social, and divine. Social relationship has often been
absurdly mistaken as the only sphere of moral obligation; and the
individual, if contemplated as alone and perfectly isolated, has
sometimes been supposed to be entirely without ethical bonds. In what
concerns himself only, he is imagined to be unbound. But this is an
unwarrantable limitation of the term. For the individual, even viewed
utterly apart from his race, yet sustains relations to the adaptations
and intentions in his own nature. As in society he owes something to
the humanity around him, even alone he would still owe something to
the humanity committed to his own keeping. He cannot absolve himself
from the bond that binds him to that--as in fact he cannot from that
which unites him to his fellow-men. Mere pleasures or enjoyments which
are apart from his essential character he may, indeed, disregard, but
not what concerns its intended excellence and honor. It has been well
said: "Robinson Crusoe did not become a non-moral being when thrown on
the desert island; for he still owed respect to his own humanity."[59]
Many a deed is wrong, not as injuring others, but as violative of the
agent's relation to the purposes lodged in his own constitution. This
is as real as are those that connect him with his fellow-men around him
or with God above him. And it is very superficial thought that finds
no relations but those that are objective. Sometimes, strangely, in
popular thinking, man's relation to God is also omitted from a place
in morality, by a relegation of it to the sphere of religion. But this
relation is the most fundamental and vital of all human relations and
most replete with moral obligations and responsibilities.

This view of the immediate ground of right is fully established by the
following additional considerations:


==Sustained by Moral Consciousness.==

=1.= It is directly sustained by the moral consciousness itself, in
constant experience. As a question of psychological metaphysics the
point must be settled in harmony with the testimony of consciousness.
Appealing to this, there can be no doubt that these relations do
develop and call for the duties which the conscience is constantly
discerning and enforcing. This is simply a fact--a fact which
speculations about the origin of conscience or the education of its
judgments, must not be allowed to obscure. It assures that actual
morality is no abstraction, but concrete conduct rightly answering
to each person's relations in real life. Beyond all question, as
thus witnessed in the universal moral consciousness, these relations
from the most general, that of man to man, down through all special
connections, as between parents and children, husband and wife,
brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, rulers and citizens,
employer and employé, rich and poor, capable and helpless, and all the
other human interrelations in their thousands of diversified forms,
do determine and impose both general and specific duties. The duties
come into view as developed by the relations, and change as they are
modified and changed. This basing of what is right and obligatory
for men on their relations to one another, to God, and to appointed
ends, is not a mere theory, but an unquestionable reality in their
consciousness.

And this accords with the best cosmic philosophy. For this holds all
these relations as parts of a rationally designed system of world-order
for universal well-being, and the moral reason as capacitated to
discern, with more or less clearness and fulness, the moral requirement
which they involve and present for observance. We know of no morality
that exists, or can exist, in human life, apart from them. Strike them
all away, and all duties disappear. Take, as illustration, the most
generic virtue of all the virtues recognized by the ethical judgments,
that of good-will or love. The moral reason recognizes this as resting,
according to eternal fitness, in the broadest and most generic of all
relations, that of one intelligent sentient being to another. In the
inter-human connection it is based in the brotherhood of man. And this
generic good-will, thus required in ideal moral right by the generic
relation, becomes differentiated and modified in thousands of special
types and forms by the endlessly diversified particular relations of
life.


==Presuppositions in Responsibility.==

=2.= It is implied in the logical presuppositions to all moral
responsibility. Among such presuppositions, as conceded by all, are
intelligence to know, and freedom to conform to these relations. These
prerequisites are essential to the very conception of moral action and
amenability. It is the universal sense of the race that creatures that
cannot know themselves and the relations they sustain, and are without
free-will to fulfil them, are morally irresponsible and incapable of
virtue or vice. To them the moral realm becomes a blank, and the moral
judgments become impossible. And equally universal is the admission
that the moral insight is helped and responsibility increased by every
increase of light giving larger and truer knowledge of the complex and
intricate connections of human life. With every broadened and clarified
vision of these connections fresh obligations appear. "A defective
apprehension of the relations in which we stand to God and to our
fellow-men, will prevent our seeing our specific duties."[60] This fact
furnishes direct evidence that right conduct must be held as a certain
intelligent adjustment to the relations sustained.

The value of this point is magnified when we remind ourselves how
it explains and illuminates the sometimes troublesome phenomenon of
different and even conflicting moral judgments in the same case by
different persons, and the fact of progress in moral standards as
civilization and culture advance. Differing apprehension of one or
more of the many elements or factors converging, with confusing force,
into almost every situation which calls for duty, easily accounts
for most of the perplexing diversity. The relations are seen from
different angles, and interpreted in different light. And the advance
of civilizations, with their science and philosophy, brings truer and
completer views of man's place and relations. The moral ideas of the
human reason are, indeed, essentially identical in all men and all
ages, and when human relations are apprehended in the same light,
with equal clearness and fulness, the moral judgments substantially
agree. But the progress of knowledge, throwing increasing light on
these relations, leads the onward civilizations up into truer and
better application of the principles of right in life. The different
codes do not mean a change of primary moral ideas, but merely reflect
and illustrate the changed and advancing apprehension of man's true
relations to which these unchanging ideas are, and are forever to be,
applied.

Another and kindred fact is explained, adding still further
confirmation of the correctness of this theory. With perfect intentions
men fulfil objective duty only in measure. Duty is only approximately
accomplished, in varying degrees, from very faulty success to high
grades of accuracy and completeness. A correct view of the ground of
right must necessarily allow a consistent explanation of this fact.
Sometimes the fact has been looked upon as inconsistent with any
absolute dividing line between right and wrong, on one or the other
side of which every action must fall. Not all good acts are perfect
or faultless; not all evil ones are equally violations of duty. Of
right actions some measure up better than others toward all that full
duty requires. Dr. Martineau, partly in order to account for this
scope of variety in moral correctness, urges a special definition of
right and wrong: "Every action is right, which, in presence of a lower
principle, follows a higher; every action is wrong, which, in presence
of a higher principle, follows a lower."[61] By the great difference in
the rank of moral motives the reason of men's differing grades in the
ascending or descending scale of character seems to come into view.
But while the definition furnishes a rule frequently serviceable for
guidance in questions of duty, it fails to define the ground of right;
for it leaves unsettled the very point in this question, viz.: why one
principle (as a motive) _is_ morally "higher" or "lower" than another,
or why some intentions or actions are right or wrong in any degree.
And the offered explanation is unnecessary; for the unquestionable
principle of moral requirement developed in relations, and discerned
by the intuitive insight of the conscience fully explains the variety,
when we remember the various degrees of accuracy and fulness with
which these relations are understood and estimated. Every relation
calling for duty is composite and complex, the various parts being
often so connected as to come only partially or one-sidedly into view,
preventing full insight of the moral demand, or accurate adjustment of
sentiment and conduct to it. Rarely is any relation simple and alone.
Often, indeed commonly, conscience has to decide duty as a resultant
obligation out of very complicated and even antagonistic relationships.
All this is amply sufficient to explain the different degrees in which
the conduct meets duty. It is the necessary result of the impossibility
of exactly fitting the moral sentiment or act to the demands of the
moral relations. And the transparent explanation which this theory
furnishes of the fact of such degrees strongly corroborates its
scientific correctness.


==Verified in Moral Concepts.==

=3.= It is verified, further, in the character of the various virtues,
and their opposite immoralities. In their very conceptions these
imply relations. They are moulded by them, and carry the shaping thus
received. Justice, for example, in inter-human affairs, is absolute
equity between man and man--exact reciprocity. Veracity expresses
something that is due from one to another among beings whose welfare
requires them to live according to the truth of things. The duty to
speak the truth answers to the need and right of each one to know it.
Love, or good-will, has already been shown to express the feeling
which, in eternal fitness, is due from one sentient rational being
to another, in the most generic relationship. Honesty means seeking
equality of values in dealings one with another. Sincerity signifies
genuineness in the temper and way we relate ourselves to those about
us. We might run through all the precepts of the Christian decalogue
and note that every one is based on some general or special relation,
either of man to God or of men to their fellow-men. No virtue can get
away from relations. The very concept of every one is moulded by them,
and carries the shaping which they enstamp upon it as the coin does
that of the die.


==Supported by Analogy.==

=4.= It is supported also by the analogy of organic and instinctive
action. In organic action, the physically right is adaptation to
environment, in which each part and movement fills its sphere
and accomplishes its functions in the given place and relations.
In instinctive action, the force is adjusted to the position and
connections in which the animal is placed. For example, that of the
bee is made to move correspondently to its relations to the individuals
of its own kind and to the end of supporting and preserving the
species. The instinct of the beaver adjusts its house to its peculiar
surroundings; that of birds constructs their nests in distinct
adaptation to the conditions that surround them. In animals that
harvest and store their food, it suits the action to the particular
environment and changing seasons. In every case instinct fits the
activity to the given place and relations of its subject. This method
by which organic and instinctive functions are set to secure right
action in their special spheres, is exceedingly significant of the
generic principle of all right action. In the light of the analogy, the
morally right is a continuation of the same principle of harmony with
constituted relations which is seen to be omnipresent in all the lower
domain of nature extending up to human personality, but becoming moral
at this point by being subject to free will and accomplished by it. It
is to be remembered that teleologic plan and adaptation run through the
entire cosmic order, from atoms to worlds and from minutest structures
of body to the loftiest endowments of intelligent beings akin to God.
Automatic action secures accordance in the inferior ranges. The grand
distinction of the moral realm appears when, as the crowning ascent
of life is reached, the principle of ethical harmony with divinely
constituted relations is to be accepted and accomplished by the
intelligence and freedom of man and is made the moral _ought_ under
personal responsibility.


==Assumed in Common Life.==

=5.= It adds confirmation to this explanation, that it is implicitly
assumed in all the conceptions and language of common life. Unbiassed
by speculative theories the every-day thinking and speech of mankind
connect duties with men's personal place and relations--duties
modified and fixed according to the form and specialty of individual
situations. The fact of duty itself is not more certain than this
fact of the way in which spontaneous and unperverted thought grounds
it. This fixing of the world's conceptions and speech in this form
cannot be fairly interpreted as a caprice or accident, but as the true
effect of the actual reality, which stands as its cause or warrant.
And it is significant that speculative theorists who have framed for
themselves some other account, whenever momentarily off their guard
or forgetting to act as watch-dog for their theory, have been wont to
turn unconsciously into forms of expression recognizing this relational
ground for human duties.

==The Ultimate Ground.==

II. In thus finding the right grounded directly on conformity to the
relations given men in the constituted order of life, we have not yet
reached the full solution of the great problem. For these relations are
only a part of the aggregate moral constitution, and are not the last
term of moral authority. They do not stand in their own independent
right. Though they do directly create and shape the immediate duties
for which they call, they are not the ultimate reality in which moral
law has its deep foundations. So we must go back to the source and
reason of these relations. The ultimate ground can be found, only in
God himself who, in his underived eternal nature, is the absolute
ground of the whole created universe, with all its interrelations which
develop the reality of moral law.

The true conception of the divine creative action is that in it the
thought and moral character of God become transitive and appear in the
relations established and the ethical requirements which the relations
impose. The constituted connections and order of life, which involve
an ideal standard of right conduct and duty, reveal the divine mind
or intention and in it the ultimate authority. The proximate basis,
already discovered, in ideal conformity to the moral relations in which
the moral agent is placed, therefore represents God, who, as the first
cause and eternal ground of the creation with all its adaptations and
laws, is the ultimate and unchangeable ground of right and of all moral
law.

This statement of the ultimate ground means more than a resting of
right simply on the will of God. A reference of it to his will has
often stood for a claim that the moral law stands merely in the option
of God or as only a product of his choice. Many have represented it as
only an effect whose cause is an act of his will--that will originating
or making "the right" rather than observing and declaring it, and the
moral law having no basis other than such enactment of will. But this
would imply that God himself is without moral character, acting from
no norm of essential right, but simply by mere will ordaining what
should pass as right among mankind. Our fundamental ethical conception
of him, however, is that of a moral being and moral ruler. And to be
moral means to love and choose the right as right. We must keep in
mind here the relation between moral law and will, or the choices of
the will. Moral authority does not exist as will, but as right. The
great conception of the right, as witnessed to in universal conscience,
is of something that appeals to will and requires the will to bow to
its claim. Right is superior and authoritative for will, and cannot,
therefore, be simply an effect of it. The right itself is basal for
right willing, even with God himself. He wills according to it. Hence
the moral law is not to be considered a product of his will, but an
expression of his nature. In perfect freedom he wills the good because
he is good, being in his eternal nature the absolute and infinite moral
Perfection. It is a deep conviction in the moral consciousness of
mankind, that God himself is in his very nature righteous and good, a
conviction which utters itself evermore in the spontaneous exclamation:
"Shall not the judge of all the earth do right!" Out of a non-moral
ground the moral could never arise, and only in the very nature of God
himself as perfect, infinite and unchangeable righteousness, do we
reach the ultimate ground both of the constituted relations of human
life and of the sublime and inextinguishable reality of moral law for
the ordering of these relations. The profound meaning of the poet's
couplet:

        "For right is right since God is God,
        And right the day must win,"

is to identify God and right as united in the eternal foundation of
the moral system. There is thus, for the universe, what has been often
designated "an eternal and immutable morality" whose authority and
standard rest in the very Ground of the universe itself.

The conclusion thus apparent is vindicated by the very conception
of the authority which binds men ethically. Mere "might cannot make
right" or be that which has the reverence of the moral nature. Moral
sovereignty does not attach to a simple absolutism of power. The
ethical will bows to the right only. It would be a great contradiction
to think of the power to which the moral submission of the soul is due
as itself anything other than an ethical power, the morally good power,
the morally good Being.

This ultimate ground of right, thus found, makes plain why ethics,
in its full meaning and issue, is so closely allied to religion.
Religion, in its spirit and aim, means fellowship with God, accordance
of desire, will, and life with him. And ethics, even in the view of
its early student Plato, looks to the same goal, "likeness to God."
The supreme aim of Christianity is ethical, the transformation and
exaltation of human conduct and character into the excellence and
happiness of righteousness. That the moral life of man may, out of his
broken, corrupt and disabled state of sin, thus become again harmonized
with God and the divine constitution of things, redemption comes
with its supernatural powers and help for human nature, enabling and
accomplishing a realization of the ethical law in human character.




CHAPTER X.

THE OBJECTS OF MORAL JUDGMENT.


A full view of the ethical reality and its meaning for us requires yet
an examination into the question: Of what may we justly affirm moral
quality? Where does the conscience apply the distinctions of right and
wrong? What are properly the objects, and the only objects, of moral
approval or condemnation? Or, to put it in a way possibly more easily
understood, to what human activities or features of life does moral
quality belong?

It has already been noted in general that only personal beings
can be moral agents or become, in what they are and do, objects
of moral judgment. Apart from personality, no place for virtue or
vice can be found. Of things, whether natural products or products
of human industry, as rock or star or stream, or ship or watch or
engine, we cannot predicate moral character. We may speak of them
as beautiful, useful, or perfect, or as ugly, useless, or faulty,
but all distinctly ethical terms are inapplicable to them. The moral
approbation or condemnation which we feel for the temper, words, and
actions of men is felt toward them as personal phenomena. Detached from
personality they would no more be subjects of praise or blame than
the temperature of the sea, the noise of the wind, or the down-pour
of rain Moral character belongs to them only as the characteristics
and manifestations of the self-conscious and self-directed life of a
moral agent. To the question what activities of a moral agent may have
ethical quality, it ought to be sufficient to say that it belongs to
all his conscious and self-directed conduct. Obligation claims sway
over the whole personality. But for clearness and definiteness, it is
necessary to specify.


==Personal Actions.==

=1.= The action itself, in its external form, may be right or wrong, as
in conformity to moral relations or incongruous with them. It may be
either the deed that is due to the relations and a fulfilment of the
duty they call for, or it may be one that clashes with their rational
and actual requirement. It may be in itself just the action in which
conduct is rightly adjusted to the actual relations--an act that ought
to appear in them. Or it may be in itself an action whose very form
contradicts the moral demand of the relations, and which ought not to
be done, no matter how good a motive may prompt the deed. For example,
the motive to use them in a worthy charity could never justify a theft
of goods or money, nor could filial care of a helpless parent be in
itself wrong, even should a bad motive inspire it. Moral law repudiates
the first deed; it condemns the wrong motive in the second, but
declares the material of the deed itself to be right and good.

We must here distinguish between the moral character of the doer and of
the deed. The quality of right and wrong belongs to the action; guilt
or innocence belongs to the person. This is the basis of the well
known fact that in some cases the doer of a wrong act may nevertheless
be held as innocent and even virtuous in it. He may have honestly
meant to do right, and acted from praiseworthy motives, but from not
understanding correctly or fully the situation, may have done what has
violated the moral call of the relations. The action may be condemned,
while he himself may be acquitted of guilt. The full ethical demand,
however, requires such a use of all our faculties of knowledge and
behavior, as not only to maintain a good intention, but to keep our
outward conduct in harmony with objective righteousness.

Many writers have shown a disposition to deny moral quality to the
external action. Locating it all in the inner sentiment or intention,
their analysis separates the visible part from its source, and
holds up to view the action, so separated, as mere physical motion,
characterizable as useful and expedient or the contrary, but neither
moral nor immoral. Independently of its motive it is resolved into mere
natural movement, as non-ethical as a muscular spasm, sleepwalking,
the dashing of a wave, or the biting of frost. But this is as
misleading as it is plausible. The error becomes clear by the following
considerations:

(1) The supposed separation of the deed from the inward intention
falsifies the actual facts in the case. The essential element in the
problem is that we are contemplating, not physical movement only,
like spasms or waves, but personal deeds, as acts of moral agents.
Of course, moral quality does not attach to the action of non-moral
beings, as the striking of clocks or the barking of dogs, but to deeds
of self-directing personality. Let it be freely admitted that the inner
sentiment does give quality to conduct. The obligation to the conduct
that shall fulfil duty attaches to the personal agent; the innocence
or guilt also belongs to him. But there is obligation upon him with
respect to conduct only because conduct, in its external forms as well
as inward springs, forms the total material of morality. There could be
no responsibility for conduct if no moral quality belonged to actions.
To separate--after the manner referred to--the action from the personal
moral agent and think of it as physical motion only, makes it no longer
the action about whose character we are inquiring.

(2) We must bear in mind several just distinctions in the application
of the term right. Along with duty, obligation, merit, innocence,
or guilt, it may be affirmed of the moral agent. We may say, "he is
right," in doing so or so. We may speak of the inner sentiment as
right or wrong. So we may of the external action. For the true and
full extent of moral quality, we must make it cover the agent himself,
and both the inner and outer sides of his personal conduct. Conduct
has an internal and an external part. The motive is only one part. An
action is relatively right, with respect to the agent, when he has the
right will in right motive; it is absolutely right only when it is
also shaped into accordance with the relations so as to realize the
moral demand upon the person. The distinction, often made, between
formal right and material right, throws the point into clear light. It
is well stated by Prof. Bowne: "The former depends upon the attitude
of the agent's will toward his ideal of right, the latter depends on
the harmony of the act with the laws of reality and its resulting
tendency to produce and promote well-being. Conduct which is formally
right may be materially wrong; and conduct which is materially right
may be formally wrong; but no conduct can be even formally right when
the agent does not aim to be materially right. The ideal of conduct
demands both formal and material rightness, and as long as either is
lacking the outcome is imperfect.... If one does 'the best he knows,'
it is often said nothing more can be demanded of him. And yet it is
plain that this formal righteousness is altogether insufficient for
the person's well-being. The reason is that the law of well-being
is independent of our will. If we misconceive that law and act
accordingly, we may be formally right, but because of the misconception
we should be materially wrong. It is, then, by no means sufficient
that one be formally right, that is, true to his convictions of duty;
he must also be materially right, that is, in harmony with reality
and its laws. Formal rightness, of course, is ethically the more
important, as it involves the good will; but material rightness is only
less important, as without it our action is out of harmony with the
universe."[62]

(3) The moral consciousness, when unperverted by speculative theory,
does in fact judge the actions of men. It steadily holds them as
essentially right or wrong, over and above all question as to the
motives for them. It is found perpetually condemning even well-meant
deeds as traversing duty and righteousness, hardly able to excuse the
blundering ignorance to which they are due. This feeling of reprobation
is genuine, normal, and wholesome. On the other hand the overthrow of
this feeling and the adoption of the claim of a non-ethical character
for actions, tends directly and strongly to consequences which witness
against the validity of the claim. The demoralizing effect has often
been illustrated. The resolving of duty into a mere matter of good
intentions has led off into ways and forms of behavior shocking to
enlightened consciences. It has made quite plausible the illusion
that "the end sanctifies the means," and in the name of religion has
stretched men on the rack and lighted the faggots at the stake. Under a
fancy that purity is simply a thing of the heart, men have been known
to excuse not a little sensualism of life. While ethics must lay stress
on the inner good-will, it must also look after the harmony of the
outward acts with the law of right relations. No amount of good motive
can make blasphemy or murder right or virtuous.


==The Feelings, Passions and Desires.==

=2.= The various feelings, passions, and desires are not only springs
of action that may issue in conduct, but are in themselves either right
or wrong, according as they are exercised in harmony with moral law or
in conflict with it.

(1) Though our feelings spring spontaneously and immediately out of
our knowledge and fundamental psychical character, they are subject to
training and regulation by the will, and their states and movements
are part of our moral life. And though by natural unperverted
constitution all these primary feelings and affections have right
and good functions, their activities, under noxious stimulation, may
run into forms and in directions thoroughly immoral. Love, which,
in its holiest direction, toward God, and in its purest forms of
benevolence, toward men, is the highest virtue, may take forbidden
directions and corrupt and disorder life. Hate, the reverse of love,
instead of being directed against evil which ought to be hated, often
emits its venom against that which ought to be loved for its goodness.
Self-esteem, as a proper respect for what has been put into a person's
being to be cared for and enjoyed, frequently runs into condemnable
selfishness. Many of the "desires" are apt to be in offense because of
over-development, clashing in anarchic insubordination in the soul, or
rushing toward unlawful objects. Desire for possessions tends to grow
into covetousness, desire for honor into unscrupulous ambition, desire
for pleasure into a ruling passion. Such feelings as malice and envy,
mongrel products of selfishness and ill-will, are at once adjudged to
be sinful.

(2) Were further proof needed that morality attaches to the affections
and desires, it is found in their relations as motives to conduct.
We have not traced actions completely to their moral source when we
have ascertained the volition from which they proceed. We must go a
step further back and mark the impulses that either rightly or wrongly
influenced the will. We must do as do courts of justice in seeking the
character of an act, and ascertain not only that the act was done in
free-will, but also what feelings influenced the free-will in doing
it. An act of volition may have very different motives behind it. The
immoral character of the volition is not only from the immorally-acting
will itself, but also from the wrong feelings or desires acting on
the will. Indeed, the very will is betrayed into wrong-doing by their
perverting persuasions. It becomes clear, therefore, that if it be at
all true that "actions take moral character from their motives," this
character must be predicable of these motive sensibilities.

(3) A special question has place here--whether moral quality belongs
even to the personal dispositions, propensities and inclinations
that lie back of the _exercise_ of the feelings, as attitudes or
habitudes of the soul with respect to good and evil? The facts of life
unquestionably show the existence of such propensities or tendencies
derived through heredity and descending from generation to generation.
The scientific theory of evolution recognizes them and draws many of
its conclusions, both psychological and moral, from them. They express
rather a state of the personal constitution than any exercise of its
faculties. They denote so basally the psychical life-condition, that
they characterize rather what the person is than what he does morally.
Since they, as states of the personal agent, constitute his attitude,
among other things, toward good and evil, an attitude either right or
wrong, this question manifestly requires an affirmative answer.


==Aims and Intentions.==

=3.= Intentions. In judging conduct we inquire especially into the aim,
purpose, intention, which directed it. We look at the end sought. And
in a peculiar degree conduct is pronounced right or wrong according to
this. For the intention is pre-eminently the very heart and informing
principle of the moral act. Besides largely shaping the material action
in agreement or conflict with objective duty it is the inner soul of
the total deed.

It may make an act that in its external form is morally indifferent
thoroughly virtuous or deeply criminal--such as that of handing a sum
of money to another, in one case to relieve suffering, in another to
secure murder. The intention to do what is known to be wrong, even
when the overt deed is prevented, stamps upon the person its own moral
character.

In intentions we find the teleology of the ethical conduct--the chosen
ends at which men are aiming in their constant endeavor--and they have
a place of importance corresponding to this directive relation. Life
moves as these turn, and the great body of human activity, in its
mighty sweep of purposive conduct, whether rising into its loftiest and
purest virtues or descending to its lowest and most horrid crimes, is
their result. In this teleological position they differ as "motives"
from the motives found in the simple feelings, affections and passions
which act non-voluntarily and unconscious of ends, but are springs of
impulse and incentives from the subjective psychical organization.
Intentions are deliberate voluntary purposes aiming at chosen objects
and adjusting means to ends. For this class of motives, therefore, we
are peculiarly and pre-eminently responsible.


==Activities of the Intellect.==

=4.= The activities and uses of the intellect. Often theorists have
denied any moral element in these, mainly because of a certain
"necessity" in intellect under psychical law, and because its function
is simply "to know." It does nothing, either good or bad; "it only
knows." Its sphere is the sphere of knowledge, not of conduct. But
this is a very inadequate view of its total activity, and of its place
in the moral agent's life. As to the question of "necessity," the
activities of the intellect are as much under the command of the moral
agent as are his sensibilities, his affections, desires, and passions.
It would be difficult to see why he should be amenable for the
direction and regulation of these desires and passions, and not also
for the direction and character of his intellectual work and the use
he makes of these high endowments. As to the question of the non-moral
character of cognitive or thought activities, they are correctly
conceded to be, in very large measure, without any ethical quality. But
it is also true, that there may be activities, as for example, in the
imagination, and in purposive scheming, which are impure and grossly
violative of justice and right. Because the intellect in itself, as
contradistinguished from the will, does not choose and has no choice,
we may not, indeed, say of its activity: "It is guilty," "it is under
obligation," since obligation and guilt pertain not to the act but
to the moral person; but yet we may speak of intellectual activity
or work as morally "right" or "wrong," according as it is in harmony
or in conflict with the true ends for which the intellectual powers
have been framed and the well-being they are designed to serve. It
would be difficult to see why the intellectual activity which plans
out the details of a theft or a murder is not as really immoral,
_i. e._ something morally condemnable, as is the desire or wish to
commit it, or why the person is less blameworthy for the one than the
other. In both cases it is part of his personal activity. And if he is
"blameworthy," it is only because the activity is in itself "wrong." Is
he any less guilty for allowing his intellect to think out the wrong
than his feelings to desire it? The moral sense must condemn this
intellectual work as inconsistent with the relations of the intellect
to human well-being and righteousness. In these days of worship of
intellectual brilliancy, and the large prostitution of the imagination
to activities which flood literature with thoughts that defile and
suggestions that carry moral blight and desolation, producing every
form of vice and crime, it is of prime importance to recognize that
this intellectualism does not stand altogether apart from moral
quality, and that men are under the completest obligation to keep it
all in harmony with righteousness and the ethical ends of life.


==Acts of the Will.==

=5.= Our view of intentions has touched on part of the functions of
the _will_ with respect to moral quality, but its acts in the stricter
sense and more specific forms require further statement. "Intentions"
are, indeed, under the command of the will, yet they are there as
motives, whose force and quality stand specially in the objects desired
and aimed at. They draw their quality rather from the ends sought than
from the working of the will which consents to the ends. We must see
yet whether the conscience judges also the proper and specific acts of
the will.

Of course that which we name "the will" is simply the soul's power of
choosing, or rather, it is the personal self as causal for choices
and executive action. Its acts are "volitions." Does moral quality
attach to these? There can be no doubt of it. Upon these volitions,
preferential and executive choices, electing between duty and its
opposite, between conduct in harmony or in conflict with moral
requirement, between indulgence of good or wicked feelings, between
virtuous and evil intentions, between higher and lower motives, between
actions materially right or wrong, making the decision for or against
righteousness and goodness and purity, in all the questions of daily
behavior in which life rises into ethical excellence and blessedness
or descends into wrong, vice, crime, and consequent wretchedness,
the moral sense of mankind pours its most unequivocal approvals or
reprobations. It not only judges them as right or wrong in themselves,
but as, among all human activities, most creative or most destructive
of moral character. It is a fundamental postulate in ethical thinking
that moral law binds the will.[63]

In the action of the will the moral judgment finds its object of
highest approval and of most thorough condemnation. It is to the will,
_i. e._ the personal self, that moral law presents its claims. It is
the point in which personality is summed up in free and responsible
selfhood, and where the great reality of responsibility is pivoted. The
will, as another name for the soul's power of choosing, sustains the
decisive relation between all the motives that precede and the actions
which follow the volitions. The action contemplated may be right or
wrong, the motive may be good or bad, but when the question is brought
by the conscience into the presence of the will, the place of supreme
and final responsibility for virtue or sin is reached.

This justifies the conclusion that moral character belongs to the
exercise of the will as it does not to any other activity of our
moral nature. For it is the point, and the only point, of freedom
in our whole constitution. Necessity marks the action of each and
every part from the lowest functions up to the will; and beyond this
there stretches on another realm of necessity in the consequences
of volition. For example, necessity rules in the physical nature.
The processes go on under fixed uniform laws, with no freedom or
choice. So in the intellect and the sensibility. We begin to think in
non-optional spontaneity, or we would not think at all. In perception,
representation, in the discursive and intuitive powers, and in the
emotions, affections and desires that arise from the activity of the
intellect, the movement is bound up under laws of cause and effect.
Whatever power of regulation, change or control we possess over these
functions does not belong to the powers themselves, but to the will or
the personal capacity of free choice and self-regulation. It is only
through our will-power that we can handle and direct our thinking or
control the direction and force of our feelings. So, too, the ideas of
right and wrong, the perceptions of duty and the sense of obligation
come into the presence of the will of necessity. All before the will
is of necessity. Thus men see the right and perceive obligation. At
this point all the responsibility of character is thrown upon the will.
If contemplated action appear right or wrong, as action that ought or
ought not to be done, the will must decide whether it shall be done. If
good or bad motives plead for rulership, the will must say which shall
prevail. If feelings are out of harmony with duty and right in the
relations of life, with respect to God or man, it is to be remembered
that the feelings cannot choose, and the will alone can guide them in
virtuous action. To it, therefore, virtue or guilt belongs as nowhere
else. For it not only accepts and makes its own all the right or wrong
that appears elsewhere, but it also remains true or becomes false to
its own supreme duty and obligation to moral law, when, under the
behests of conscience, it directs life and character either up the
heights of moral excellence and happiness, or into the wrong and guilt
and miseries of immorality. Where the will is moral the man is moral;
for the will is the zenith of personality. Where it is immoral the man
is immoral.




CHAPTER XI.

THE ETHICAL VIEW UNDER CHRISTIAN TEACHING.


These conclusions with respect to the nature and office of conscience,
the ethical distinction, its theistic implications, its transcendental
character and objective validity, its relation to personality and
freedom, the proximate and ultimate ground of right, and the different
parts of human activity to which moral quality belongs, are conclusions
reached by the scientific method and stand on the warrant of reason.
They arise from phenomena of history and life, and form, in their
essential statements, a body of scientific and philosophical knowledge
of equal certainty and authority with the most assured results of
other branches of rational investigation. Ethics, therefore, finds its
fundamental truths in the natural constitution of the world, and is
able to build these truths into a science possessed of all the rights
and force of systematized and established knowledge.


==Christianity Recognizes Ethics.==

=1.= Christianity fully recognizes these truths and all the essential
principles which ethical science formulates and certifies. It does
more. It magnifies their importance by building upon them its own
divine view of moral requirement and the way of its realization. All
that ethical science shows to be true in the moral constitution of man,
in the reality of moral law for the free regulation of his conduct,
and in respect to the source and immutable authority of that law,
abides as fundamental presuppositions in the divine superstructure
of religion and duty presented by Christianity. Redemption starts
and works upon the basal facts of human nature and man's condition,
relations, duties, responsibilities and needs. If Christianity assumes
the existence and rulership of God, a moral constitution of human life,
and the existence of conscience with its perceptions of duty and sense
of obligation; if it assumes man to be a free agent and yet bound in
the exercise of his autonomy by laws of obligation and responsibility;
if it assumes the law of right to be essentially unalterable and
irrepealable, a reality to which God himself conforms, all these are
great truths fully certified in the rational conclusions of ethical
science.


==Contributions to Ethical View.==

=2.= But Christianity contributes immensely to the ethical view. It is,
indeed, a great misconception to think that supernatural revelation
has been given simply to teach morality, or to look on Christianity
as merely a code of ethics. But though its first great object is
redemption, presenting God to our view in redeeming love and activity,
and offering deliverance from the guilt and life of sin, it necessarily
also aims to recover men to personal righteousness. Indeed, both
forgiveness and renewal look to this as the goal to which redemption is
to bring its subjects. While primarily Christianity is a religion and
redemptory, its ultimate aim is the establishment of men in obedience
to God, righteousness, and excellence. The very summit of its purpose,
the Alp that rises above every other Alp, is character and right life.
So the very law of its movement is supremely ethical. Forgiveness of
sin, justification by faith, stands as only the first step in the
application of redemption, and beyond this Christianity pre-eminently
means a life, the increasing recovery and perfection of human nature in
its ethical character and action, enthroning the principles of duty,
love, and righteousness in the conscience and the heart, and bringing
personal conduct into rhythmic harmony with eternal righteousness and
goodness.

And the science of ethics has not properly completed its view until
it has fully included the distinctive teaching of Christianity. For
beyond all question the data of this teaching have produced the purest
and loftiest moral life that the world has seen, the best product of
the moral history of mankind. Its ideal is confessedly the highest and
the best sustained. Even apart from the question of the well-proved
supernatural claims of Christianity, its ethical work lifts its moral
teachings to the most authoritative place, the supreme court, for the
decisions and formulations of the complete scientific view.

The total contribution of Christianity to morality comes along two
lines of help: 1. In the way of fuller disclosure of moral principles
and of essential duties; and 2. In the way of furnishing an efficient
dynamic for their fulfilment. The first of these two topics claims
attention in this chapter; the second must be left for the next.

The need of larger knowledge, than that furnished by simply
naturalistic ethics, for the perfection of moral life, has everywhere
been evident. The debasement of moral thought and the worse debasement
of moral life frequently found among peoples outside of the atmosphere
illuminated by Christian truth, is sad proof how crying this need
of right knowledge may become. The strife of conflicting opinions
as to the root and validity of moral principles, even among many
in Christendom who look at the subject with faces averted from
Christianity, is perpetual remembrancer of the room for more and better
information. And the perplexing phenomenon of wide diversity of moral
judgments in daily life, to which we have had occasion several times
already to refer, resulting from the different degrees of correctness
with which the relations of life are understood and interpreted,
enforces the same truth. The moral power is educable. It sees its
objects in the light, not in darkness, nor fully in dawn. It acts
best when flooded with the fullest knowledge. Men can discern duty
accurately and fully only when they comprehend all their relations to
God above them, their fellow-men around them, their destiny before
them, and the significance and moral demand of these relations. From
the high origin of their nature, "in the image of God," they may
carry some impress of the moral law from God in their hearts, in the
inner order of insight and spiritual vision, and in measure "read
God's thoughts after Him" about love and justice and truth and other
essential virtues. But this rational reading of duty from the law
of right within them and from the moral constitution about them,
is grandly helped when revelation throws its illumination on the
nature and relations of men, the meaning of life and the reach of its
responsibilities. Whatever has been the short-coming of Christianity's
professors in exemplifying its moral teaching, the history of its
work is full proof of its containing the best ethical direction and
power the earth has yet seen. In individuals and communities in which
its teachings have been worthily turned into character and life, it
presents an inspiring suggestion of what it is capable of doing for
human exaltation when its instruction is truly followed. It is the
completing factor for moral guidance, and the scientific view is false
to itself when it fails to include the teachings and the phenomena
of the Christian consciousness and life. Since Christianity has come
and given the world its highest civilizations and elevations, its
grandest progress in philosophy, science, art, literature, invention,
enterprise and prosperity, all the purest and most beautiful amenities
of life, and is still leading the best nations onward and upward, it
is surely worse than idle to think of forcing ethical science back
to a pagan or merely naturalistic standpoint. This would ignore the
greatest moral phenomenon of history and the most impressive facts in
the present condition of the world. "Christian ethics is ethics in the
highest--ethics raised to the highest power--the last and fullest moral
interpretation of the world and its history."[64]

=3.= The Christian ethical view has its special moral conceptions from
two sources. The one is primary and principal; the other secondary and
auxiliary.

==Sources of Christian View.==

(1) The principal source is the Sacred Scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments. Along with their distinctively religious purpose and
teaching, these pages of God's supernatural revelation, from first
to last, look to ethical ends, and are replete with principles,
laws, and precepts for duty and righteousness. As for a knowledge of
Christianity as a religion we must come to these writings as its own
accredited records, presenting its truths and requirements, so also for
a knowledge of its moral teachings. Whatever help may be obtainable
from other sources, say from study of the Christian consciousness or of
the effects of Christianity on personal and social life, the chief and
highest source is these Sacred Scriptures. For the best Christian life
falls short of the ideal standard of conduct there presented. It would
be unfair to study it or judge it only in the partial, fragmentary,
one-sided, imperfect illustrations of it. Every ideal thus gained must
be corrected and greatly up-raised before it can stand for the complete
divine ideal that shines out from the teachings of the Scriptures and
the life of the Christ therein revealed. The perfect image of Christian
ethics has never been fully reflected by either the inward or outward
life of the believer. The Sacred Scriptures, therefore, are the only
infallible normative authority for Christian ethics, as they are for
Christian theology.

This use of the Scriptures as the determinative authority, however,
must take account of the fact that they present an historical
and progressive revelation. As God's redemptive action advanced
historically, unfolding religious truth and grace gradually and
educationally, so the moral ideal, which Christianity in its fulness
of provision and power should exhibit, is found more and more clearly
revealed till the view is completed. This accounts for the higher
ethical view reached in the New Testament.

The Old Testament, which is the record of the earlier stages of the
Christian revelation, distinctly preparatory and prophetic, forms a
continual instruction in duty and righteousness. It grounds the moral
life essentially in the religious, but religion must walk in holiness.
Fundamental in it stands the decalogue, a summary of moral law, of
most profound and comprehensive sweep, which is still the great code
of duty for the guidance of human conduct, and so clearly beyond the
mere thinking of Moses or the people he led, as to prove its divine
origin. All the types and symbols of the Old Testament, its sacrifices
of cleansing and expiation, are impressive condemnations of sin and
calls to repentance. The ever-ringing voices of prophecy are thrilling
rebukes to wrong-doing and clarion appeals for righteousness. Its
psalms and music are but echoing praise for the divine grace that
renews the heart and restores the life to the blessedness of obedience
to the moral laws of God. The lofty ethical demands of the Hebrew
Scriptures, along with their revelation of grace, form a unique and
distinguishing feature among ancient literatures. Their ceaseless
voice is: "Keep judgment and do righteousness"; "Cease to do evil and
learn to do well"; "Offer to God the sacrifices of righteousness."
Nowhere else at that day was the moral ideal lifted so high, or with
such imperative authority. The Old Testament ethics was a fit prophecy
and preparation for the full Christian teaching. "If the ethics of the
old dispensation had not passed into the fulfilment of the new, the
Hebrew prophets and poets would still be the world's most inspiring
teachers of high ethical hopes and ideals, and the moral code of Israel
would be the school of righteousness, reverence, and law, to which the
generations should go for the loftiest instruction."[65]

The New Testament, which completes the authoritative records of
Christianity, completes also Christianity's normative statement of the
truths and principles of duty. These appear in the threefold form of
(1) Christ's recorded teaching, (2) His personal example, and (3) the
inspired interpretations of Christian duty in the apostolic writings.
The teaching of Jesus, all through the gospels, while primarily
religious and religiously spiritual, deals with the great realities of
character and conduct, and, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount,
ascends to the very heights and penetrates to the very depths of the
laws of duty. It carries those laws into a spirituality, solemnity, and
glory before unknown, and forms a representation which stands before
the moral sense of the race as the unsurpassed and the unequalled
ethical ideal. The view is carried up to the goal: "Be ye perfect, even
as your Father in heaven is perfect." This divine teaching is at the
same time reflected from the personal life of Christ. It is presented
in living form. The example is part of the teaching--an example which
is never lowered below the exalted range of the given precepts, and
which has been instructing and inspiring all the centuries since.
In the apostolic writings, under the guiding Spirit of truth, the
teaching and pattern of Christ, together with his redemptive gospel,
are applied to wide and varied ranges of practical life, the apostles
themselves being filled with an ever-increasing appreciation of their
divine import and transcendence. These inspired Scriptures, because of
their unique and supreme authority for Christianity itself, are the
fundamental and decisive standard of Christian ethics.

(2) But there is a secondary and auxiliary source for formulation
of Christian ethics--in the Christian moral consciousness. In this,
Christianity exhibits its moral principles and meaning as they enter
into the inner experience of men, where they may be studied and
estimated. Christianity is a "life," a "new life," in whose moral
consciousness its principles and forces are acting formatively for
character. Not only of "the life" that in Christ was "the light of
men,"[66] but of all the pure life that is from him, is it true: "the
life is the light of men." The ethicised Christian consciousness
reveals the principles and laws that have come into it. It is a maxim
in theology that only the regenerated and sanctified mind has a clear
interpretative insight into spiritual truth, and can form the true
theologian. The maxim holds, just as truly, with respect to moral
truth. The spiritual and moral are inseparably united, and no man
can judge with unhindered and reliable discrimination in matters
of Christian ethics whose heart is unsympathetic or averse to the
duties of the Christian life. The light shines in the darkness, but
the darkness comprehends it not. Christian ethics, therefore, in
formulating its ideas and completing its theoretical view rightly,
draws upon the Christian consciousness, as that consciousness is
scripturally determined, and interprets, not the Scriptures alone, but
also, in auxiliary relation, the ethicised life of Christian humanity.
While, therefore, it is the science of Biblical morality, it is also
of the whole moral development of Christianized life, both in personal
consciousness and in the observed historical fruitage of Scripture
doctrine.

=4.= It is necessary to look at some of the particular elements or
features of the clearer and fuller ethical view which comes from these
sources.

==Duties made More Definite.==

(1) Most of the duties naturally discerned by the conscience from the
known relations of life are brought into more distinct and definite
view by Christian revelation and experience. The natural discernment is
often unclear, uncertain, partial, and faulty. The blindness, mistakes
and misgivings of the moral sense form a large and perplexing chapter
in the story of non-Christian morality. It has often led to doubt
whether there is such a thing as a fixed, sure, immutable morality. A
remedy for this has been needed. By its immense number of specific
_precepts_ for particular relations and circumstances, revelation gives
correctness, minuteness, and fulness of application to the general
principles of duty asserted by the moral sense. In manifold cases
the conscience would be in the dark, or have only obscure or partial
view, without the instruction and guidance thus supplied. Scarcely
a situation or emergency in life can be named for which precept and
counsel have not been given. When the sun rises the eye sees not
only farther, but more minutely and with more certainty. Myriads of
objects and relations before unseen flash into view. So by the light
of the Scriptures, more of duty is known and better known. By common
consent, even among skeptics as to the Christian religion, the ethical
precepts of Christianity, in their purity and elevation, in their
quickening directness and radical thoroughness, in their explicitness
and universality, form an aggregate moral directory unapproached by the
best codes of pagan sages or human philosophies, and add a grand aid to
the moral judgments.

==Human Relations.==

(2) The human _relations_, on which duty rests, have been brought
into broader and fuller view by Christian teaching. Much of the
disability, under which morality has suffered, has always come from a
faulty understanding, if not total ignorance, of the varied relations
which are to be filled out with their exact and full measure of duty.
The idea of God and man's relation to him has often been falsely or
misleadingly conceived. The history of thought as to inter-human
relations, from the closest to the most extended, presents a sad story
of misapprehension, error, ignorance and consequent wrong. When these
great vital relations are themselves misconceived, looked at from a
false or obscuring view-point, one of the prime conditions for correct
moral judgments is absent. Positive misdirection is in play. When our
knowledge has not yet shown us clearly man's place in God's plan of the
world, or the adaptations and purposes in human nature itself; when
neither the great fact of personality nor that of human solidarity is
correctly understood, as for example, when the individual is reduced,
as has often been the case, to mere material for the state or for
possible enslavement by captors, or he is, on the other hand, looked
upon as an isolated and unrelated unit; or when the reality and meaning
of the universal brotherhood of man, under the universal fatherhood of
God, is not seen, the duties and obligations of life must necessarily
be much obscured and unperceived.

But here the Christian revelation comes in with one of its great
forms of help--a divine disclosure of our moral relations. It reveals
some otherwise undiscoverable relations, opening to view additional
obligations and responsibilities. It sets before us our solemn
relations to God, to his renewing and saving grace, as well as to
his creating and preserving love, to offered blessings, gracious
rewards, and eternal destinies. The whole horizon of life is lifted
and broadened, and the sphere of the moral activity and consequences
extends into a future life. Man becomes a child of immortality and his
home is eternity. The world and human life have a grandly changed
meaning under the gospel. Man's place in the system of things, as to
the past, present, and future is revealed in a light increased and
broadened like that on the landscape when morning rises upon night;
and in this light he sees a thousand new responsibilities on which he
is touching every moment, and which stretch out and on in illimitable
ranges. Conscience is enabled to act in view of all these new relations
as well as the irradiated old ones, and taught to hold the heart
and life, the will and activities to the moral requirements of this
enlarged and illuminated ethical domain.

==Moral Duties Divine Obligations.==

(3) Christian teaching has elevated the ethical view in closely
uniting all moral obligation with duty to God. Natural ethics, when
its implications are rationally followed up, is, indeed, theistic,
and finds the seat of moral law in God as the absolute ground of the
whole moral constitution. But from this movement, rising from the
law of right in the conscience and in the moral constitution of the
world, such ethics has yet this limitation, that duty is thought of
from the human side, and not from the standpoint of God, who in his
personal nature and will is both the source and goal of moral law. In
this mode of forming the theory God is apt to be left remote, virtue
is abstractly conceived and remains a reality too much by itself
and separated from any enforcing or helping authority. It becomes
too abstract and simply humanistic. But our view of moral good must
be lifted into closer and more living connection with God. And so,
Christianity, to transfuse the ethical sense with religious light and
motives, teaches us to look upon right and duty from the standpoint
of God. This is in accordance with the very design of Christianity as
a redemptive and saving religion, seeking to bring man into true and
practical fellowship with God. The moral discernment is to be filled
and animated by the religious spirit, so that the moral training may be
carried on and completed together with the development and consummation
of the Christian life. Thus the form of the appeal is: "Be ye holy, for
I am holy." "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect."
In a high and peculiar emphasis all duty is required to be done as unto
God. "Forasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these, ye have done
it unto me." "We should so fear and love God," as not to offend against
any part of the law or fail in doing good. Through the Christian
revelation alone the ethical conception and relation of God is truly
attained, and with it a right conception of man and the highest spirit
of duty.

In thus teaching that all duties should be fulfilled as something due
to God, and under inspiration of love to Him, Christian ethics is not
to be understood to mean that rational ethical theory is mistaken when
it claims that men are to "do right because it is right." But it means
to remind us where alone the absolute right is found--only in God. And
it means that both the religious and the ethical life is to upraise and
anchor us to Him, and to eternal righteousness as it is in Him. All
duty is owed finally to God, because He is the one absolute righteous
Being to whom the whole universe owes its very existence and all its
blessings. Thus Christian ethics sets forth fully what rational thought
has often caught a glimpse of and hinted at, but wanted vision to see
clearly, viz.: that the goal of the ethical aim is to be "like God."
Its aim, as is that of religion itself, is to bring our moral life into
living fellowship with Him and His blessedness. This marked feature of
Christian teaching presents the ethical view in its highest elevation,
purification and power.

==Moral Guilt.==

(4) In harmony with this close connection of the moral with the
religious life, a further special feature of Christian ethics is a
peculiar emphasis upon the guilt of offence against the moral law.
In pagan ethics, often with no clear perception of the existence of
God, always without just conception of his character, though the moral
distinction was recognized and wrong was regarded as condemnable, yet
because the wrong was viewed as traversing only an abstract principle
or an accredited usage or order of best happiness, it evoked no strong
sense of guilt. Right was always little else than a conforming of one's
self to "nature," or "reason," or "civil authority," or conditions
of "well-being" or "enjoyment," or at best to an ideal conception of
virtue. In the ethical view which materialistic philosophies present,
though the phenomenon of conscience is acknowledged and obedience
to its direction admitted to be necessary for proper right order,
yet the condemnatory judgment on immorality is rather a judgment
of it as unwise, imprudent, and injurious than as guilty and worthy
of punishment. It is at most a non-conformity to an impersonal,
mechanically determined, ongoing nature. The whole utilitarian
conception of morality, which makes it consist essentially in following
the teachings of experience as to what is most advantageous and useful,
may hold disregard of it as a great "evil," economically viewed, but
almost annuls, if it does not completely remove, the idea of guilt, by
substituting that of loss. Even in simply rational _theistic_ ethics,
despite theistic pre-suppositions and conclusions, the view may still
deal too much with abstractions and rest too much on abstract ideas or
impersonal things. Right and wrong are, indeed, developed by natural
relations, to which men are bound to conform, but only because these
relations, by being divinely established, represent God, who in the
perfections of his nature and will, is at once the free Creator and
righteous personal Ruler of the universe. Moral law not only applies
alone to free personality, but has its source and authority in the
Absolute Personality whose holy and beneficent will has constituted the
moral relations and requirements of life. Morality pertains, not to the
relations of mere things to things, or of persons to simply impersonal
nature, but of persons to persons. Inter-human relations create and
exhibit obligations because God's plan and will speak in them, but the
full solemnity of moral obligation appears only when all inter-human
obligations are seen carried up and united in the supreme and
all-embracing obligation to God, to whom all duty is due. When these
inter-human duties are refused, they are refused to God who requires
them and has expressed that requirement to reason through the relations
themselves and through his word. Not only the religious duties, as
faith and love and gratitude and prayer, but all human duties are owed
to Him. Here all religious duties become moral obligations; and all
moral obligations become religious duties. And the guilt of wrong-doing
is heightened by the fact that it is a sin against the just, holy,
supreme authority and will of God, the absolute personal ground of the
right order and blessedness of the universe. In Him the moral authority
is identified with the rights of the Creator to whom every good in
the universe is owed. This emphasis upon the transcendent authority
and sanctity of moral law and consequent guilt of its violation is a
special feature in the Christian ethical view and necessary for the
true force and efficiency of the moral sense.

Any separation of morality from the position of something due to God
personally, obscures and weakens the ethical view. This has been
the bane not only of pagan, materialistic, atheistic, or grossly
utilitarian theories, but also of many other forms of representation.
Whenever the sense of duty is resolved into an instinct, or blind
feeling, or sympathy, or a product of custom, its true authority is
kept out of sight. The guilt of neglect of it disappears. Though
fervently regarded by many great thinkers as a sublime statement
of the moral principle, even the Kantian "categorical imperative,"
an immediate behest of the reason, saying: "Do this, or do that,"
giving no account of itself or ground for its authority, but speaking
autocratically in its own right, and as sufficient and final in its
own imperative, under the abstract rule: "Act as if the maxims of thy
action were to become by thy will the law of the universe," holds the
whole moral authority too abstractly and remote from God for complete
theory or effective power. He is not brought clearly into view or made
livingly near, but left in the background--a Being whose existence,
along with freedom and immortality, is only inferred and to be believed
because this ideal "law" requires Him for its maintenance. Sublime as
the "categorical imperative" may often have seemed, this shaping of
the theory of obligation is not suited to fill and vivify the moral
consciousness of men as does a sense of the sublimer reality of the
holy will and supreme authority of God, as present in and speaking
through that moral consciousness. But the Christian view brings us
face to face with this righteous will and authority in every moral
obligation, and teaches us to see in all the established personal
relations of life a divine call to right and duty.

==Moral Law Universal.==

(5) The Christian view makes uniquely clear the universalism of
the moral law. In natural theories the reach and identity of the
law has failed rightly to appear. The theory has formed only an
ethics for a race, a nation, a condition or caste. It has been
particularistic, limited by race lines, tribal or national boundaries,
class distinctions, or ancestral traditions. Codes of duty have
been shaped to local and exclusive conditions. So we have a national
ethics created by civil law, or a class ethics, as of free citizens
contra-distinguished from slaves, or of Brahmans as different from
low caste people. Or we have an ethics of individuals, in which the
code of duty of each is determined by his own personal "instincts,"
"feelings," swing of "sympathy," preference in "pleasure," development
of "reason," calculations of "utility," ancestral "inheritance," or a
mysterious "categorical imperative." Moral codes have been immensely
and confusingly diversified. A self-identical and common standard
does not appear, nor the clear, sure foundation of any. The moral law
is not exhibited in its universality and permanence. Its grandeur is
unseen by reason of the kaleidoscopic variations presented by the
moving fragmentary theories. Its authority is brought into doubt. The
great want has been a view of morality for man as man, authoritative
everywhere and always, co-extensive with humanity.

The defect of the theories has been twofold. 1. They have not brought
the whole race of man together in the essential sameness of a universal
humanity, each individual being endowed with the high attributes of a
personality, made in the image of God, and all bound together in one
all-inclusive brotherhood. 2. They have failed clearly to unite this
total humanity, in all its personalities, with God, whose nature and
will is the only and absolute source of the moral law which sweeps
round and through all the world. The Christian Scriptures and the
Christian consciousness supply the needed completion of view by
throwing both these truths into clear light. Christianity invests
human personality with a worth, sacredness, and responsibility never
elsewhere recognized. It is at the point of personality that each
individual is to be united in fellowship with the personal God, who,
as righteousness and love, sits upon the throne. Christianity seeks
to make so real and living the brotherhood of man, that the throb
of love and sympathy may be felt across all national lines and race
distinctions around the earth. And while it thus strengthens the
vitality and sacred force of the relations that thus bind men together,
it teaches that the moral duties to men which these relations require,
are to be done as unto God. Monotheism brings _mono-nomism_. The moral
law, which is absolute, self-identical, eternal and immutable in the
holy nature and will of God, becomes universal and irrepealable not
only for the earth but for all the moral universe.

==Condition of Fulfillment.==

(6) A special extension in the Christian ethical view is the truth that
the moral law can be truly fulfilled only in and through a spiritual
regeneration and renovation of the personal life. This is a truth
which simply rational theories fail to formulate, though they are not
without materials to justify the formulation of it. Few facts of life
and history are more conspicuous than the impotence of the ethical
perceptions and motives to get and maintain rightful rulership. Some
hindering and disabling depravity in the human condition prevents
attainment of the moral ideal. Apart from the dreadful sway of vice
and crime and cruel wrong, even with the well-disposed, full duty to
neither God nor man is completely realized. The words put by Ovid in
the mouth of Medea: "_Video meliora, proboque, detereora sequor_"
(I see and approve the better, I follow the worse), voice the moral
weakness felt even in pagan consciousness. This incompetency of the
ethical behests to accomplish the true and required life, Christianity
confirms and emphasizes; and upon its basis unfolds the necessity of a
deep, radical renewal of personal character.

In Christianity, let it be remembered, the moral law is a diviner and
deeper reality than natural notions of men make it. It looks, with
its divine eye, down into the very depths of the heart, and demands
loyal and full duty through the whole range of personal relations with
respect to both God and man. It spreads the force of moral obligation
over religious duties, joining them in indissoluble union. "The law
of the Lord is perfect," and requires this wholeness of duty and
righteousness. Hence Christianity holds a merely natural morality
always to be faulty, leaving men under the law's condemnation. Without
a divine quickening and spiritual enabling, men can never be brought to
true and full obedience and transformed into moral harmony and likeness
with God. And the proclamation, looking to this part of the redemptive
process, is: "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of
God." Thus it becomes a unique distinction of the Christian ethical
view, that it proposes to bring men to spiritual and moral endeavor
and victory from the starting-point of a conviction and recognition
of their own thorough incompetence for the moral task. It furnishes
a true and adequate ability where it has broken up dependence on an
insufficient one.

But this brings to us the moral task, which belongs to the next
chapter.




CHAPTER XII.

THE ETHICAL TASK UNDER CHRISTIANITY.


The ethical task is to fulfil the moral law, to actualize the ethical
ideal in conduct and character. It is to turn obligations into life.
It is not enough to know duty, even in completest theory. It must be
realized. In its most important and final view, ethics is a question of
moral power.

The impotence of the conscience before the moral task has always been
an impressive fact. The perception of duty has lacked efficiency for
the enforcement of duty. Vision of the right largely fails to secure
conformity to it. Even the clearest intellectual discriminations and
illuminations of the moral law have often been only as the play of
cold light, almost like the aurora of the north quickening nothing
into life or fruitage. Here is found the chief point of failure in
natural ethics. It has power to dictate, but not to move. It wants an
efficient dynamic for overcoming the moral evil that has established
itself in human nature and life--evil so positive and dominant as to
justify an apostle in representing the better ethical will as disabled:
"Ye cannot do the things that ye would." Prof. Flint says: "The wisdom
of the heathen world, at its very best, was utterly inadequate to
the accomplishment of such a task as creating a due abhorrence of
sin, controlling the passions, purifying the heart, and ennobling the
conduct."[67]

The aim of Christianity is supremely practical. It seeks to save
from sin and bring to righteousness. It wastes no effort for simply
speculative results. It comes "not in word only, but in power." Besides
its service to morals in confirming and extending our needed knowledge
of duty, its greatest ethical service is in supplying the needed
dynamic or efficacious force for the realization of the holy life. How
does it enable the moral task?


==Completion of the Ethical View.==

=1.= In some degree by the completion of the ethical view itself. The
clearer light is forceful and efficacious for a better realization of
the moral task. "Knowledge is power," especially knowledge which throws
into view the most impressive realities and relations, and appeals
with the most cogent motives. By the strong illumination shed upon the
general principles of right and virtue, by the definiteness and detail
of the instruction and precepts for all situations in life, by the
elevation of view in which the moral horizon is widened and extended,
so as to show a living brotherhood of every man with every other
round the world and a range of moral interests and responsibilities
interminable as eternity, by the emphasis with which men are made
amenable to God for all moral duties, even those to men, thus vivifying
the whole moral consciousness with a sense of a close, unescapable
accountability to God the conscience is better enlightened and
quickened for its task, strengthened by the fullest certainty and under
the vigor of a new inspiration. It has more light for direction; it
bears grander motive forces before the will.


==Assurance of Success.==

=2.= By giving assurance of success. In the face of the greatest
hindrances and natural incompetence, it certifies an inspiring goal of
the moral endeavor. Pointing to redemptive grace, it makes manifest
that the administration of this world is not on the side of moral
evil, or indifferent to its wrong and blight, but is working for its
overthrow, the deliverance of its subjects, and their triumph over
it. It proclaims an established and ever-advancing "kingdom," whose
consummation will bring all those who, as its subjects, "hunger and
thirst after righteousness," triumphantly through and beyond the
present militant stage of the moral life into final victory over evil,
"a new earth and a new heaven wherein dwelleth righteousness." In this
divine assurance that the domination of moral evil, with its anarchy
and misery in the soul, is no necessity, that its overthrow is provided
for, and that God's government is so in the interest of righteousness
and love as to guarantee victory to even the feeblest that in faith
appropriate his grace and help, there comes the full inspiration, not
only of hope, but of sure success in the moral endeavor. Moral effort
is not compelled to be

        "Like ships that sailed for sunny isles,
        But never came to shore."

It has the certainty that

        "To him who sides with God
        No chance is lost."

The moral help thus supplied by Christianity is well illustrated by
the contrast which it presents to some other teaching, say as seen in
Buddhism, extolled in poetry as "The Light of Asia." This is known as
one of "the great religions." It is, rather, a philosophy of life, a
directory for conduct. It is an atheistic, or at best a pantheistic
philosophy, recognizing no personal God and emptying the idea of Deity
of practical validity. It had its origin in a deep and oppressive sense
of the evil and misery of life, and aimed at their solution and the
way of deliverance. On the basis of the oriental "metempsychosis,"
with its supposed perpetual re-births, on account of earlier sins,
into successive distressful lives, it elaborated, for deliverance, a
code of duty pervaded by the ascetic spirit and demanding the severest
self-discipline. In many of its separate precepts it rises, indeed,
here and there to elevations and beauties of moral idea that seem
almost akin to the finest and purest of New Testament inculcations.
But whether viewed as a philosophy or a religion Buddhism has no
personal God, who loves and values men as his own children made in
his own image, and ready to come to their help. It has heard, and in
its atheistic cosmos, can hear, no voice of redemption, knows of no
manifestation of a loving God for deliverance of his sinful children
from their sins and their exaltation to the dignity and happiness
of fellowship with Himself. In this despair of help from God, in
this dolefully pessimistic view of the world and life, and driven
to depend only on self-help, is it any wonder that the moral task
is directed, not to the development, elevation and joy of personal
life, but to its repression, subjugation, and reduction, so as to
bring it, at its earthly close, to Nirvana, extinction of conscious
individual existence, as the greatest good! By as much as this theory
of despair is suited to atrophy all nerve for the ethical task, and
sink personality from its true intended elevation of divine fellowship
and excellence into the inanity of unconscious being, by so much does
the Christian truth of the assured success and victory of right and
goodness in the advancing kingdom of God's grace and eternal love,
exalting the worth and force of personality to the highest, inspire and
sustain the moral endeavor. "Forasmuch as ye know that your labor is
not in vain in the Lord."

Much has been written in late years about "the evolution of the moral
life," by writers who seek to account for it through the action of
merely naturalistic forces in the human constitution and in its
physical environment. The above contrast is suggestive of factors in
the problem which many of these writers overlook.


==Religious Interest.==

=3.= By uniting the moral side of life with the religious, and so
bringing all the powers of the religious interest in vital help for
the moral task. The common false diremption between morality and
religion, classifying duties to God as religious, and only duties to
fellow-men or self as moral, each standing in isolation, and largely of
separate accomplishment, allowing men to be "moral" while repudiating
all their duties to God, or "religious" while without a conscience
enforcing duty to men, leaves flabby nerve for moral endeavor. All the
mighty motives from the Godward side are lost. No quickening force for
inter-human duties comes from a consciousness of God and his authority,
or the future life. Any view that severs morality from God and is
bounded by this world and temporal good, must fail to realize the
moral life of man. But the Christian view allows no such separation.
It unites the two as two sides of the same life of duty, out of one
conscience, with vision of both God and men, and one heart true to
the indivisible spirit of right. As religious duties are all moral,
as obligations to God, and all moral duties are religious, as due to
Him, the Christian consciousness of God must re-inforce and vivify with
new efficiency the whole twofold moral endeavor. All the distinctly
religious interests and forces, reverence of Deity, repentance before
God, gratitude, faith, love, hope, spiritual joy, aspiration, desire
of immortality and endless blessedness, thus brought into concurrent
action with the Christianly enlightened natural conscience, bring an
immensely advantageous condition for the actualization of the ethical
life. "To believe in an ever-living and perfect Mind, supreme over
the universe, is to invest moral distinctions with immensity and
eternity, and lift them from the provincial stage of human society to
the imperishable theatre of all being. When planted thus in the very
substance of things, they justify and support the ideal estimates of
the conscience; they deepen every guilty shame; they guarantee every
righteous hope; and they help the will with a Divine casting-vote in
every balance of temptation."[68]


==Power of Holy Spirit.==

=4.= By the enlightening and obligating force of the Holy Spirit.
This reality is assured both in the teaching of the Scriptures and
the testimony of the Christian consciousness. We must distinguish
between the simply natural action of conscience and the quickening
and helping by the divine Spirit. Revelation fully recognizes the
natural conscience and its obligating energy, Rom. 2:15; 1:20. It
designates it by the term συνείδησις [Greek: syneidêsis] from σύνοιδα
[Greek: synoida], _conscius sum_--a knowing with, _i. e._ a conjoined
consciousness of self and of right, or a knowing with God, whose law
it discerns. Its natural functions of discernment and imperative are
not set aside by the Spirit, but enlightened and re-inforced. His part
must not be counted zero. "When the Spirit is come, He will convince
the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment," John 16:8. He
works through the truth, in and through men's natural faculties. While
the Christian's own conscience is acting in its natural functions, it
is not acting alone. It is not alone; for the Holy Spirit is there as
a quickening and helping power. In this is fulfilled the experience
expressed by St. Paul: "My conscience also bearing me witness in the
Holy Ghost," Rom. 9:1. This is a Christian conscience, one acting not
alone and unaided, but embraced within and filled by the influence of
the Holy Spirit. This influence has been well expressed as "like the
energy of the sunshine in the fruit."


==Spiritual Regeneration.==

=5.= Through spiritual regeneration and renovation. It is through this
profound reality that Christianity accomplishes its great ethical
result. It places the principle of holiness, of duty to God and men, in
the very heart of human nature and life. It writes the law in the love
of the soul.

The divine wisdom of Christianity is marked by the stress which it
places upon a purification of the inner life, "the heart," the very
fountain of thought, purpose, and conduct. It points to the immoral
source of the immoralities of conduct: "Out of the heart proceed
murders, adulteries," etc. The remedy must purify the fountain. When
this is secured and the law of holiness is established there, the
ethical life, in its manifoldness and many-sidedness, comes into
realization.

It is thus that the conscience gains control. Its failures result
from the strength of opposing passions, desires, and perverted
inclination, excited often by temptations without. The affections do
not find their centre and rest in God and righteousness. They are
irregular, often sordid and misleading. The appetites and passions
obscure the moral discernments and resist the moral judgments. There
is a law of "sin in the members." The will, which should bow to the
direction of the conscience, is swayed by wrong motives. The scepter
of the moral faculty is broken by the rebellion of desires at war
with right and duty. The faintest whisper of conscience ought to be
decisive, but against the imperious ascendency of wrong affections
its loudest imperatives prove impotent. But in this moral renovation,
giving its "new heart and right spirit," the affections come into
harmony with God and all that is good. It is the "writing of the law
again in the heart," in the understanding and love. To this new life
in the affections, duty becomes a pleasure. The conscience, no longer
perplexed and overborne by evil desires, becomes able to assert its
rightful authority. The will attains its rightful freedom and power to
control efficiently in the domain of righteousness, and to hold the
life in the harmonies of right and duty.

Put these different elements of the Christian ethical dynamic together.
They aggregate the final moral power. Christianity completes the
ethical view, flooding all the principles of right and duty with
impressive light. It throws broad and strong illumination over all
the moral relations of men, extending the view into the future life,
and giving certifying precepts for guidance and support. It gives
the inspiring assurance of the triumph of righteousness in the
kingdom which God's love is establishing for it. It unites all moral
duties under the sanctions and solemnities of obligation to God, and
re-inforces them by all the motives and appeals which the religious
sentiments and interests address to men. It supplies an exhaustless
wealth of truths which give nerve to moral endeavor and are directly
convertible into character. And, as expressing the line along which
these elements all pass into full effect, by its regenerative action it
secures for the innermost sources of conduct a transforming influence
which does for the life what making the tree good does for its fruit.
Love of right turns convictions of right into character. The efficiency
of the conscience no longer stands only in the intellectual judgments,
but also in affection for the morally good. With love toward what
is good a feebler conscience could sway the life aright. But under
this deep inward change, we have clearer moral vision and stronger
imperative, together with a transformation of the whole nature into
predominant love of righteousness. As the Christian life advances,
the principles of duty are more and more established in the heart and
conduct as life-forces, and the conscience becomes more and more _de
facto_, as it is _de jure_, sovereign for moral obedience. And thus
Christianity supplies the divine and sufficient dynamic for the full
realization of the ethical life.




INDEX.


  Absolutism, Divine, 149-151.

  Actions, objects of moral judgment, 183-187.

  Affections, benevolent, not supreme, 90-92.

  Agnostic tendencies, 81-83, 120-124.

  Aim, ethical, in Christianity, 197-198.

  Altruism, 154, 161.

  Analogy, supports relational theory, 176-177.

  Anthropological testimony, 34.

  Applicatory moral judgments, 51-52, 67-68, 92-97, 128.

  Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 25.

  Aristotle, 16, 18, 33, 152.

  Assyria, 43.

  Assurance of success, quickening to moral endeavor, 220-222.

  Aurelius, Marcus, 33.

  Authority, moral, belongs not to utility or pleasure, 158-160;
    nor to "the beautiful," 144;
    but to "the right," supremely, 79-80, 87-88, 126-136, 158-159,
            178-191;
    to conscience, as discerning the right, 57-58, 86-99, 104.


  Bain, Alexander, 121, 154.

  Benevolent affections, not supreme, 90-92.

  Bentham, Jeremy, 154.

  Book of the Dead, 33.

  Bowne, Prof. Borden P., 29, 36, 62, 153, 170, 186.

  Brahmanism, 32, 142.

  Buckle, 43.

  Buddhism, 32, 126, 142, 221-222.

  Butler, Bishop, 110-111, 154.


  Calderwood, 167.

  Cato, 33.

  Christ, personal embodiment of his own teaching, 203-204.

  Christian ethics, completes the ethical view, 198-200;
    sources of, 200-205;
    special features of, 205-217.

  Christianity, relation of, to rational ethics, 26-27, 196-198;
    its distinctive teachings, 205-217;
    affords power for the moral task, 218-227.

  Cicero, 16, 33.

  Clarke, Samuel, 166.

  Cocker, B. D., quoted, 173.

  Coleridge, 167.

  Confucianism, 32.

  Confucius, 141.

  Conscience, simple or complex, 37-39; its existence proved, 39-55;
    its psychological place, 59-62;
    its nature determined, 62-83;
    theistic, 79-80, 86-88;
    supremacy of, 83-92;
    acts of necessity, 78-80;
    educable, 104, 199-200;
    conceivably formed through theistic evolution, 83-85;
    enlightened by Christian teaching, 198-217;
    becomes efficient through Christian forces, 218-227.

  Consciousness, testimony as to freedom, 108-110;
    Christian, source for formulation of ethics, 204-205.

  Cudworth, 167.


  Demerit, import and measure of, 70-72.

  Deontology, 16 (note).

  Des Cartes, René, 150.

  Dividing line between true and false ethical theories, 130-132.

  Diversity of moral judgments, 48, 173.

  Dorner, Dr., quoted, 150.

  Druidism, 32.

  Duty defined, 65.

  Dynamic, moral, 198, 218-227.


  Education of conscience, 74, 104.

  Egypt, 43, 126.

  Epictetus, 148.

  Ethics, defined, 15-17;
    historically sketched, 17-20;
    how divided, 21-23;
    relation to psychology, 23;
    to natural theology, 24;
    to Christian theology, 25;
    partly psychological, 21-22, 59;
    partly metaphysical, 21-22, 119-120;
    relation of evolution to, 54-55, 83-85, 132-137;
    illuminated by Christianity, 196-217;
    task of, under Christianity, 218-227.

  Eudæmonism, 144-153.

  Evolution, in relation to conscience, 54-55, 83-85, 132;
    to objective moral law, 132-137, 154-155.


  Fact, the primary ethical, 28-36.

  Faculty, as applied to the conscience, 37-38;
    psychologically described, 62-80.

  Failure of utilitarianism, 155-160.

  Fallibility of conscience, 52, 92-94, 103-105.

  Fatalism, in Stoic virtue, 147.

  Feelings, moral, a part of conscience, 72-77;
   feelings, objects of moral judgment, 187-189.

  Flint, Prof., quoted, 218.

  Freedom, personal, abridged in ancient nations, 17-18.

  Free-will, necessary to moral agency, 66, 105-106;
    alternative choice, 106-107, 159;
    proof of, 107-112;
    excluded by materialism, 112-113.


  God, existence of required by moral law, 79-80, 87-88, 135;
    relation to moral law, 126, 135-136, 149-151, 158, 169, 172,
            178-181, 208-215;
    moral duties due to Him, 169-170, 222-223.

  Good, the chief, 143, 145, 146, 148.

  Greece, 17, 43, 143-148.

  Gregory, Dr. D. S., 166.

  Grote, 123.

  Grotius, Hugo, 149-150.

  Ground of right, the point defined, 139;
    sometimes confounded with ground of obligation, 138-139;
    various theories, 140-167;
    Egyptian, 140;
    Chinese, 141;
    Indian, 142;
    Zoroastrian, 142-143;
    Greek, 143-148;
    Roman, 148;
    Divine absolutism, 149-150;
    of Hobbes, 151;
    sympathetic, 152;
    utilitarian, 152-165;
    of relations, 165;
    spiritual excellence, 166;
    direct intuition, 167;
    as subjective or objective, 139-140, 168;
    proximate ground, 168-178;
    ultimate, 178-181;
    not in mere "will" of God, 179-180.

  Guilt of wrong-doing, 210-212.


  Hamilton, Sir William, 121, 122.

  Happiness, an end, but not supreme, 161-163;
    idea of, not identical with that of right, 156;
    without the moral imperative, 158-160.

  Hedonism, 146.

  Herbert Spencer, on moralizing effects of intellectualism, 43;
    on relativity of knowledge, 122;
    explanation of the moral sentiments, 35, 155.

  Heredity and conscience, 83-84.

  Hickock, Dr. Laurens P., 166.

  Historical witness to the ethical distinctions, 29-31.

  History of ethics, glance at, 17-20.

  Hobbes, 151.

  Horace, 33.

  Hume, 152, 154.

  Hutcheson, 154.


  Imperative, the moral, 65-66, 99, 158, 212-213.

  Instinct, not conscience, 57-58.

  Intentions, have moral quality, 190;
    teleological motives, 190.

  Intuitional, the conscience perceptions, 60-63, 76, 78-79.


  Jouffroy, Theo. Simon, 166.

  Judgments, moral, universal, 29;
    conflict of, 47;
    agreement, 48-51;
    primary, 62-67;
    secondary, 51, 128;
    not infallible, 52.


  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 81;
    phenomenalism, 121-122;
    on the ground of right, 167;
    "categorical imperative," 212-213.

  Knowledge, relation of, to moral judgments, 51-52, 59-62, 67-68,
          92-93, 95-96, 102-105, 172-175, 205-209.


  Lecky, quoted, 157 (note).

  Literature, its testimony to the moral sense, 33.


  Mansel, Dean, 121.

  Marcus Aurelius, 148.

  Martineau, James, 88, 174, 223-224.

  Merit and demerit, import of, 68-70;
    measure of, 71.

  Metaphysics of ethics, 21, 119-195.

  Mill, James, 154.

  Mill, J. Stuart, 82, 121-122, 154.

  Mohammedanism, 32.

  Monism, material, 133-137, 155.

  Moral agency, 100-118, 172, 182.

  Moral distinctions, fact of, 28-36;
    faculty of, 37-85;
    objectively real, 125-126;
    not made by mental organization, 127;
    intuitions, 63;
    immutable and eternal, 127-128.

  Moral emotions, 44-47.

  Moral Law, perceived obligation, 64-66;
    theistic, 79-80, 87-88, 135;
    only for free agents, 136;
    grandeur of, 129-130;
    universal, 213-215.

  Morality, relation of Christianity to, 197-198.

  Moral motives, 73, 75-76.

  Moral qualities, predicable of personal beings, 182;
    external acts, 183-187;
    feelings, desires, etc., 187-189;
    hereditary propensities, 189;
    intellectual activities, 191;
    intentions, 190;
    will, 193-195.


  Necessitarianism, 112-115.

  Necessity, in the action of conscience, 78;
    in intellect and sensibility, 174-175.

  Nemesis, in history, 31.

  Newman, Francis, 80.

  Nirvana, 142, 222.


  Obligation, perceived, 64;
    felt, 64-65;
    belongs to moral agent, 65;
    central in conscience, 65;
    implies objective moral law, 125-137.

  Old Testament ethics, 202-203.


  Paley, William, 153.

  Pascal, 47.

  Peculiarity of the moral perceptions, 40.

  Persistence of the moral sense, 48, 64.

  Phenicia, 43.

  Phenomenalism, 81, 121-125.

  Philosophical part of ethics, 21.

  Plato, 18, 33, 144, 148, 152.

  Plausibility of utilitarianism, 161-165.

  Positive Philosophy, 82.

  Principles, higher and lower, Dr. Martineau's rules, 174-175.

  Presuppositions to responsibility, 102-103, 105-108, 172.

  Psychology, relation to ethics, 23;
    in study of conscience, 59;
    shows the place of conscience, 59-62.


  Quatrefages, 32.


  Regeneration, to realize the ethical life, 215-217, 225-226.

  Relativity of knowledge, 81, 120-125.

  Religion, witness to the ethical distinctions, 31-33;
    becomes moral obligation, 169-170, 222-223.

  Right, rated in value, 160.

  Robinson Crusoe, 170.

  Roman teaching, 148.

  Rome, 43.


  Seneca, 33, 148.

  Sensibility, the, as related to the conscience, 72-76;
    to moral agency, 115.

  Shaftesbury, 154.

  Shintoism, 32.

  Skepticism, intellectual, 123.

  Smith, Adam, 151.

  Smyth, Dr. Newman, quoted, 200, 203.

  Society, ethical constituted, 29, 116.

  Socrates, 17, 143, 144, 153.

  Solidarity of humanity, 164.

  Sophocles, 33.

  Spencer, Herbert, 35, 43, 122, 157.

  Spinozism, 112.

  Stoic ethics, 146-148.

  Supremacy of conscience, 86-99.

  Sympathetic Theory, 151.


  Tâoism, 32.

  Theology, relation to ethics, 24, 25.

  Theoretical and practical ethics distinguished, 21-23.


  Universalism of moral law, 127-130, 213-215.

  Utilitarianism, 35, 152-164;
    error of, 155-160;
    measure of truth involved in, 161-165;
    evolutionist, 155-156, 159;
    Lecky on, 157 (note).


  Value of the morally good, 160.

  Volitions, objects of moral judgment, 193-196.


  Wayland, Dr. Francis, 166.

  Whewell, 95.

  Will, free, 106-112;
    point of personal responsibility, 194-195.

  Will of God, not itself the absolute ground of right, 179-181.

  Wollaston, 166.

  Wolseley, Lord, 43.


  Zoroastrianism, 32, 142.




FOOTNOTES:


[1] Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Chap. I.

[2] The term Deontology, from τὸ δέον [Greek: to deon], what is due
or binding, and λόγος [Greek: logos], discourse, has been used by
some modern writers as a fit designation of moral science. Though it
has never come into general use, it is etymologically well adapted to
express the element of obligation involved in the moral sense. See
Krauth-Flemming Vocabulary of the Philosophical Sciences, p. 132.

[3] De Fato, Cap. I, 1.

[4] See Wuttke's Christian Ethics, Vol. I, pp. 69-122.

[5] Wuttke's Christian Ethics, I, p. 95. Int. to Aristotle's Ethics, p.
vi (Bohn's Ed.).

[6] Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, Chap. I.

[7] Philosophy of Theism, Harper & Brothers, N. Y., p. 220.

[8] See The Oldest Book in the World, Bibliotheca Sacra, October, 1882
(Vol. XLV). Also C. Loring Brace's The Unknown God (A. C. Armstrong &
Son, New York, 1890), pp. 1-40.

[9] Prof. Borden P. Bowne. Philosophy of Theism, p. 216.

[10] History of Civilization, p. 125 (D. Appleton & Co., N. Y.).

[11] Study of Sociology, p. 363.

[12] Fortnightly Review, December, 1888.

[13] See, for instance, Paley's Moral Philosophy, Chap. V.

[14] See Chap. IV, p. 83.

[15] So Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Brown.

[16] Jeremy Bentham, Jas. Mill, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer.

[17] Borden P. Bowne, Int. to Psychological Theory (Harper &
Brothers, N. Y., 1887), p. 206. Prof. Bowne thinks, indeed, that this
distinction, traced to its roots, depends on "a feeling of approval or
disapproval in connection with the aims and principles of conduct,"
and that the ideal of life and the law of conduct spring out of "this
basal feeling." He asserts that "we can only represent the motives and
actions to ourselves, and wait for the immediate feeling of approval or
disapproval to manifest itself." He maintains that nothing is gained
by regarding the distinction as an intuition of the reason instead of
a feeling, because, he says, "its universality depends on its content,
and not upon its psychological classification." But we may well ask
if it really does make no difference whether this distinction, the
"ethical ideal," comes as a perception of reality, the action of a
knowing power, or as a "feeling" which perceives nothing and to account
for which there is no perceived ethical reality, no discernment of the
elemental ideas of right and wrong, upon which approval or disapproval
can arise and rest. We are entitled to ask: How can there be a feeling
of ethical approval when there is no insight of the distinction between
moral good and evil? The "feeling" that arises from no perception of
anything to approve, or that approves without any perceived principle
or law of approval, is blind. It has no standard or reason for an
ethical approval. Moreover, Prof. Bowne admits: "As long as they [the
aims and principles of conduct] are unrecognized there is no moral
life. As long as they are unclearly perceived, there are only the germs
of a moral life. When they are brought out into clear recognition, the
self-conscious moral life begins."

[18] See Wuttke's Christian Ethics (Nelson & Phillips, N. Y.), Vol. II,
pp. 139, 140.

[19] Borden P. Bowne's Int. to Psychological Theory (Harper & Bros.,
N.Y., 1887), p. 184.

[20] Theism, p. 13. Quoted from William Knight's Essays in Philosophy
(Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1890), p. 276.

[21] J. Stuart Mill.

[22] "The Crisis in Morals," by Jas. Thomas Bixby, Ph. D. (Boston,
Roberts Brothers, 1891).

[23] Prof. Huxley, in one of his latest utterances, puts this point
strongly: "The practice of what is ethically best--what we call
goodness or virtue--involves a course of conduct which, in all
respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic
struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion, it demands
self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all
competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect,
but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to
the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible
to survive." Lecture at Oxford on "Ethics and Evolution."

[24] See Dr. Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory, II, pp. 5, 99-110.

[25] W. Whewell, Elements of Morality, Sect. 275.

[26] The Doctrine of Morality, by Dr. R. B. Fairbairn (Whitaker, N. Y.,
1887), pp. 109-113.

[27] This feature is recognized in what is usually termed "formal
freedom," _i. e._ that psychical capacity of rational choice which
is essentially formative of "personality." To lose this would be the
loss of personality. Whether the power of free choice between good
and evil is impaired in man's corrupt state, being put in bondage or
subserviency to a depraved love of sin, is quite a different question.

[28] "Liberum arbitrium habetur, quando positis ad agendum requisitis,
potest quis agere vel non agere." Quoted from W. S. Lilly's Right and
Wrong, p. 104, 2d Ed., London, Chapman and Hall.

[29] Part I, Chap. VI.

[30] Materialistic evolution, which holds matter as being the energy
and cause of all things, leaves no place for free-will, because in
truth it leaves no place for mind. For "mind" or "soul" as a real
entity or being which thinks, feels and wills, it substitutes mere
"mentality" as an effect of atomic or molecular changes in the brain.
"Mind," as a self-conscious spirit that itself self-knowingly acts,
is repudiated. Nothing is left but a series of sensations, thoughts
and wishes that are as truly physically-produced effects as are the
varied perfumes of flowers, the fall of rain or the waves of the sea.
No selfhood remains in man but the physical organism which, in material
causation, gives out the various forms of products or manifestations
denominated "mental." But this materialistic theory is not science. It
not only stands contradicted by the common judgment of mankind in all
ages, but breaks down utterly in the presence of scientific psychology.
For this finds among its unquestionable and irreducible facts a
real self-conscious subject or self back of the series of thoughts,
emotions and volitions, holding all these psychical experiences in its
unitary consciousness, and, with its memories of the past, carrying
its personal identity through present activity on into the future.
The series of mental experiences, in the theory, are independent of
each other and dependent only on the brain changes which directly
produce them, and thus, by necessity, ignorant of each other. Personal
identity, therefore, is full disproof of the theory. For personal
identity rests in a single abiding consciousness, in which all separate
mental acts are known as its own acts, the materials for memory and
comparison. The truth is, that all moral distinctions arise out of the
conviction that each individual, in the center of his personality, is a
soul, itself determining its rational choices and responsible for the
conduct of life.

[31] The contradiction thus involved is well put by Prof. E. D. Roe,
of Oberlin, O., in Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct., 1894: "This law (autonomy)
pre-supposes the freedom of the will, for without freedom 'oughtness,'
'responsibility' and 'repentance' would possess no significance. Every
one, as the necessarians admit, acts under the idea of freedom. Their
hypothesis to explain this is, that the subject acts under illusion
(necessary illusion, of course). But here an hypothesis is necessary to
explain the hypothesis. Why, if necessity is the truth, is the subject
necessitated to believe falsity? A very strange truth it is which
necessitates itself to be disbelieved." Pp. 656, 657.

[32] See Introduction to the Study of Philosophy, by J. H. W.
Stuckenberg, D. D. (Armstrong & Sons, New York, 1888), pp. 321, 322.

[33] Metaphysics, Lect. VIII.

[34] See Dr. McCosh's Defense of Fundamental Truth, Chap. X, 3.

[35] First Principles, Chap. IV, § 22.

[36] Quoted from Dr. McCosh. Fundamental Truths, Chap. X, 3.

[37] This is the old apothem: The _ratio cognoscendi_ is grounded in
the _ratio essendi_.

[38] See A. Alexander's Moral Science, Chap. VII.

[39] Brace's The Unknown God (A. C. Armstrong & Son, N. Y.), pp. 1-40;
The Oldest Book in the World, in Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct., 1888.

[40] Quoted by Prof. Jas. Legge, in The Religions of China, from
Confucius's Doctrine of the Mean (Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York), p.
139.

[41] Wuttke's Christian Ethics, I, pp. 47-52.

[42] Wuttke's Christian Ethics, I, p. 59; Brace's Unknown God, pp.
182-197; S. D. F. Salmond's The Christian Doctrine of Immortality (F. &
T. Clark, 1895), Chap. VI.

[43] εὐδαιμονία [Greek: eudaimonia].

[44] Republic X, 613a; Theaet., 176.

[45] See Wuttke's Christian Ethics, Vol. I, Sec. 14, and Martineau's
Types of Ethical Theory, Book I, Branch I.

[46] See Luthardt's Christian Ethics (T. & T. Clark), Vol. I, p. 9.

[47] ὁμολογουμένως τῇ φύσει ζῆν [Greek: homologoumenôs tê physei zên],
Diogenes, L. VII, 87.

[48] The quotation, Acts 17:28, is probably from the Phænomena of the
Stoic poet Aratus.

[49] See Dr. Dorner's System of Christian Doc., II, p. 14.

[50] See Horace, Book III, Ode III. Sophocles' Œdipus Tyrannus, lines
863-871. Peter Bayne's Testimony of Christ to Christianity, p. 44.

[51] Prof. Borden P. Bowne designates this teaching as "the goods
ethics." Principles of Ethics (Harper & Bros.), Ch. I.

[52] Moral and Political Philosophy, Chap. VI.

[53] See pp. 133-137.

[54] Herbert Spencer, Data of Ethics, § 45.

[55] What is Reality? by Francis Howe Johnson (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,
Boston), pp. 475-498.

[56] Lecky, in History of European Morals, says: "In all nations and
in all ages, the ideas of interest and utility on the one hand and of
virtue on the other, have been regarded by the multitude as perfectly
distinct, and all languages recognize the distinction. The terms
honor, justice, rectitude, or virtue, and their equivalents in every
language, present to the mind ideas essentially and broadly differing
from the terms prudence, sagacity, or interest. The two lines of
conduct may coincide, but they are never confused, and we have not the
slightest difficulty in imagining them antagonistic. When we say a
man is governed by a high sense of honor, or by strong moral feeling,
we do not mean that he is prudently pursuing either his own interests
or the interests of society." ... "There is no fact more conspicuous
in human nature than the broad distinction, both in kind and degree,
drawn between the moral and the other parts of our nature. But this on
utilitarian principles is altogether unaccountable. If the excellence
of virtue consists solely in its utility or tendency to promote the
happiness of men, we should be compelled to canonize a crowd of acts
which are utterly remote from all ordinary motives of morality." Vol.
I, Chap. I.

[57] Moral Science (Boston, 1867), pp. 39-44.

[58] Christian Ethics, p. 104.

[59] Borden P. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, p. 113.

[60] B. F. Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, p. 377.

[61] Types of Ethical Theory, Vol. II, § 15.

[62] Principles of Ethics, pp. 39-40. For a clear exposition of this
distinction, see Dr. D. S. Gregory's Christian Ethics, Pt. I, Divis.
III, sec. 1.

[63] Martensen's Christian Ethics (General), § 7.

[64] Newman Smyth's Christian Ethics (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892),
p. 3.

[65] Newman Smyth's Christian Ethics, p. 60.

[66] John 1:4; 8: 12; 9: 5.

[67] "Theism," p. 305.

[68] James Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, Vol. I, quoted by Prof.
Drummond in "Natural Law in the Spiritual World" (J. Pott & Co., New
York), p. 168.




      *      *      *      *      *




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