become fixed and habitual, and be transmitted to offspring.

But, the question may be asked, how did the first man who ever felt obligation, etc., come to feel that way? What is the first origin of the feeling? Even if we should maintain that it is a form of vague fear, we should still have to inquire, Whence did it spring? It is as hard to solve this problem as it is to solve the problem of first beginnings in general. How did any feeling, or in fact anything, originally arise? We do not know. We do not know how consciousness arose, or, indeed, how it arises every day in new human beings, or how one thought springs from the other. We think and feel and will, and think and feel and will about our own thinking, feeling, and willing; but how all that is possible we are utterly at a loss to understand. I can explain to you the antecedent and concomitant processes, both physical and mental, which go with certain ideas and feelings and volitions, but if you ask me how such a state as a conscious process is possible at all, I must remain silent. I know that consciousness is; what it is in the last analysis, and how it came to be, I cannot tell. We have reached the confines of our science at this point. Here the moralist must take leave of you, and hand you over to the tender mercies of the theologian or metaphysician. Did God create the feeling of obligation? Well, if He created you, He created all of you, and there is no need of singling out one particular feel

ing. Is the feeling of obligation the self-imposed law of your own personality? Yes, in the sense that you are your feeling of obligation, that the feeling is not outside of you, something standing over and against you, but in you and of you.

10. The Infallibility and Immediacy of Conscience. After the foregoing, it will not be difficult to discover our attitude toward several questions which are frequently asked with respect to the conscience. Is conscience infallible? Kant calls an erring conscience" a chimera.”1 Before we can answer this question we must understand its meaning. If all such acts are right as are preceded by the feeling of obligation, i.e., if the criterion of their goodness is the fact that they are dictated by conscience, then, of course, whatever conscience tells me is right, is right, and to say that conscience errs, is to contradict oneself. "An erring conscience" is, indeed, "a chimera," if conscience is the sole criterion of the rightness and wrongness of acts.

But we notice that the popular consciousness often condemns acts which have the approval of an individual conscience, and that history frequently reverses its judgments. It would appear from this that a mistake has been made somewhere, and that there is perhaps a principle by which we judge even the dictates of an individual conscience. If it is true, as some hold, that the goodness of acts ultimately depends upon the effects which they tend to 1 Abbott's translation, p. 311.

produce, and if it is true that the feeling of obligation may be connected with the ideas of acts which do not produce such effects, then an erring conscience is not a chimera. Ignorance, inexperience, and superstition may cause acts to be clothed with the authority of the law which succeeding generations may stamp with their disapproval. Then again, conditions may change and make new evaluations necessary. The conscience of the race represents the experience of the race, and grows as the latter grows. But the race conscience develops slowly, and may be outstripped by the individual conscience. An individual conscience may be in advance of its age; it may feel bound to forms of conduct which the future will adopt. Every great moral reformer who has been persecuted for conscience' sake was in advance of his times.1

Can conscience be educated? If our standpoint is correct, it can. Indeed, a man's conscience is largely the product of education, as we noticed before. Our teachers, past and present, surround the ideas of certain acts with moral feelings, and so educate us into morality. Even if we regard conscience as a form of obligation without regard to content, we must hold that its existence depends on training. The feeling of obligation will not appear unless consciousness as a whole is developed.

Does conscience immediately tell us what is right and wrong? Not in every instance. A member of 1 See Paulsen, Ethics, pp. 357 ff.

our civilization cannot help disapproving of certain acts immediately, the wrongfulness of which has been impressed upon him from childhood. But there are many courses of conduct which baffle many consciences. We are sometimes in doubt as to what would really be the dutiful course to pursue, until we can bring the case under a general formula. The success with which a person judges the moral worth of an act will often depend upon his ability to refer it to a class concerning which there is no doubt.

11. Conscience and Inclination. Another point deserves to be considered. Kant teaches that such acts are moral as are done from a sense of duty, from a respect for the moral law. Acts which are done from inclination have no moral worth. If you do good from a love of it, there is no merit in your act. If you delight in being kind to others, and help them because you love them, you are not moral. If, however, you have no such inclination, or if you have an antipathy against doing it, and still aid others from a sense of duty, then you are moral.1

Of course, in a matter of this kind everything depends upon one's standpoint. If the criterion of morality is the sense of duty, or obligation, then, to be sure, no act can be moral that is not prompted by reverence for the law. But it is begging the entire question to insist upon this thesis. Do we really call only such acts moral as are held by Kant to be

1 See Kant's Metaphysik der Sitten.

moral? If we do, we must regard as moral the murderer who acts from a sense of duty. No, Kant would object, you cannot call the murderer moral, nor can he call himself moral, because he cannot will that his conduct become universal law. Well, we ask, why not? Why cannot he will that the killing of tyrants become universal, so long as it is prompted by a sense of duty? Besides, Kant here introduces a new principle or criterion: the fitness of the act to become a universal maxim. First he says that an act is moral when it is prompted by the sense of duty, then he tells me to "act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law." If he adheres to the first proposition, the murderer is moral; if to the second, then the sense of duty is not the criterion; if to both, we have either a contradiction, or two criteria which must be harmonized in some way.1

The main thing, it seems to me, is that a man do the right. Now, if he does it from inclination, because he loves to do it, why should he not be adjudged moral? Spencer believes that the time will come when the sense of duty or moral obligation will pass away. "The observation is not infrequent," he says, "that persistence in performing a

1 For criticism of the Kantian view, see Paulsen, Ethics, pp. 350 ff.; Janet, Theory of Morals, Bk. III, chap. v; Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics, chap. iv; Muirhead, Elements of Ethics, § 56; Bradley, Ethical Studies, IV.