cept as veracious the immediate depositions of our faculties, and that the postulates, without which the mind cannot exert its activity at all, possess the highest certainty." We ask no more than this on behalf of our ethical psychology. Let perception be dictator among the objects of sense; conscience, as to the conditions of duty.1

Now we have an irresistible tendency to approve and disapprove, to pass judgments of right and wrong. We judge persons, not things, and we judge always the inner spring of action. Hence, we judge first ourselves, then others. We could. not judge other men's actions if what they signified were not already familiar to us by our own inner experience. But we cannot judge an inner spring of action if it is the only thing in consciousness. A plurality of inner principles is an indispensable condition of moral judgment.3 There must be several impulses (incompatible impulses) present. Without them the moral consciousness would sleep. As soon as this condition is realized, "we are sensible of a contrast between them other than of mere intensity or of qualitative variety not analogous to the difference between loud and soft, or between red and bitter, but requiring quite a separate phraseology for its expression, such as this that one is higher, worthier, than the other, and in comparison with it has the clear right to us.

1 Types, Vol. II, Part II, Introduction. 2 Ib., pp. 18 ff.

8 Ib., p. 37.

1

This apprehension is no mediate discovery of ours, of which we can give an account, but is immediately inherent in the very experience of the principles themselves a revelation inseparable from their appearance side by side." It is unique and unanalyzable. "The whole ground of ethical procedure consists in this that we are sensible of a graduated scale of excellence among our natural principles, quite distinct from the order of their intensity and irrespective of the range of their external effects." The sensibility of the mind to the gradations of the scale is conscience, the knowledge with oneself of the better and the worse.2 It is the critical perception we have of the relative authority of our own several principles of action. All moral discrimination has its native seat in conscience; we first feel differences in our own springs of action, and then apply this knowledge to the corresponding ones betrayed in others by their conduct.

But how comes it that men are not unanimous in their apparent moral judgments? This is easy to understand. "The whole scale of inner principles is open only to the survey of the ripest mind, and to be perfect in its appreciation is to have exhausted the permutations of human experience. To all actual men, a part only is familiar, often a deplorably small part. Still, however limited the range of our moral consciousness, it would lead us all to the 1 Types, Vol. II, Part II, p. 44.

2 lb., p. 53. See also p. 266, where Martineau gives a table of the springs of action in the ascending order of worth.

same verdicts had we all the same segment of the series under cognizance."1

Conscience speaks with authority. This authority is a simple feeling, admitting of little analysis or explanation. But it is not simply subjective, not of my own making, not a mere self-assertion of my own will. How can that be a mere self-assertion of my own will, to which my own will is the first to bend in homage? "The authority which reveals itself within us reports itself, not only as underived from our will, but as independent of our idiosyncrasies altogether." 8 If the sense of authority means anything, it means the discernment of something higher than we, no mere part of ourself, but transcending our personality. It is more than part and parcel of myself, "it is the communion of God's life and guiding love entering and abiding with an apprehensive capacity in myself. Here we encounter an objective authority without quitting our own centre of consciousness." A man is a "law unto himself," not by "autonomy of the individual" (as Green would say), but by "self-communication of the infinite spirit to the soul"; and the law itself, the idea of an absolute "should be," is authoritative with conscience, because it is a deliverance of the eternal perfection to a mind that has to grow, and is imposed, therefore, by the infinite upon the finite.5

1 Types, Vol. II, Part II, p. 61. 3 Ib., p. 102.

2 Ib., p. 99.

4 Ib., p. 105.

5 For Lecky's view, see the first chapter of his History of European Morals, especially pp. 55, 68 ff., 75, 120, 121 note, 122 ff.

The thinkers whom we have considered thus far are all intuitionists, either rational, emotional, or perceptional. According to them we have an innate knowledge of moral distinctions. The truths are either engraved on the mind, or revealed by a superior rational faculty; or we feel or perceive immediately upon the presentation in consciousness of a certain motive or act that it is right or wrong. Conscience is an ultimate, original factor, not further to be explained, except perhaps by conceiving it as implanted in the soul of man by God.

6. The Empiricists. But there is another school of moralists, which denies that the conscience is innate, and attempts to explain it as an acquisition,1 as a product of experience. We have no special moral faculty which intuitively distinguishes between right and wrong. Our knowledge of morality is, like all other knowledge, acquired by experience. We may call the advocates of this view empiricists (from the Greek word eμπepía, empeiria, experience).

(1) Thus Thomas Hobbes2 says: "It is either science or opinion which we commonly mean by the word conscience; for men say that such a thing is true in or upon their conscience; which they never do when

1 Some of the later medieval thinkers, like Duns Scotus and Occam, reject the view that we have an innate knowledge of morality, and hold that we know right and wrong simply because God reveals it to us in the Scriptures. See Lecky, European Morals, chap. i, p. 17.

2 1588-1679. Selections from Hobbes's ethical writings by Sneath, and in Selby-Bigge, British Moralists, Vol. II.

they think it doubtful, and therefore they know, or think they know it to be true. But men, when they say things upon their conscience, are not therefore presumed certainly to know the truth of what they say it remaineth then that that word is used by them that have an opinion, not only of the truth of a thing, but also of their knowledge of it; to which the truth of the proposition is consequent. Conscience I therefore define to be opinion of evidence.”1 Again: "I conceive that when a man deliberates whether he shall do a thing or not do it, he does nothing else but consider whether it be better for himself to do it or not to do it."2 "Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good and evil in the conversation and society of mankind. Good and evil are names, that signify our appetites and aversions, which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men are different, and divers men differ not only in their judgment on the senses of what is pleasant and unpleasant-but also of what is conformable or disagreeable to reason in the actions of common life." "3

(2) With all this John Locke practically agrees. He, too, rejects the teaching that there are innate ideas or truths, either "speculative" or "practical." Nature has put into man a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery, and these are natural tendencies 2 On Liberty and Necessity.

1 Human Nature, chap. vi, § 8. 8 Leviathan, chap. xv. See Lecky, European Morals, chap. i. For bibliography see Weber, History of Philosophy, p. 301 note.

4 1632-1704.