believe that He is in favor of the law, that it is His will that I obey the law. And what is to hinder me from believing that His voice speaks in the experience of the race, that the voice of the people is the voice of God in moral matters, that mankind ultimately hit upon the right and transmit their knowledge from generation to generation? When the theory of evolution first appeared, it was attacked as dangerous to morality and religion, on the ground that if man grew out of simple beginnings and was not directly created by God, then there would be no need of a God. We are coming to understand, however, that even if the evolutionistic hypothesis should be true, God could still reign. Why could not God, instead of having made man out of clay and having breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, have created simple elements from which a being like man eventually had to evolve? The latter belief is surely as reasonable as the former. And so, too, why can we not believe, if we wish, that God made a universe which was bound to produce a human consciousness and a human conscience? Why should not God let soul-life grow as He lets plant-life grow, and why should we not admire a conscience that has been produced naturally as much as we admire other products of nature?

(3) Even if an insight into the origin of the ought-feeling could lead to the elimination of the feeling, would that mean the overthrow of morality?

I do not believe it. If the habitual performance of good deeds ends in their being done joyfully, why should not a person learn to do the right because he loves to do it? And if he can do it from love, why should the loss of the sense of duty mean the defeat of all righteousness? Moreover, the man who is intelligent enough to understand the arguments which make for the historical view, will, at the same time, be intelligent enough to see that morality serves a purpose in the world, that the rules of conduct are not mere arbitrary commands, but that they represent the necessary means of human existence. And if he believes that, why should he despise morality? Nay, would he not be more inclined to uphold the right than before? I believe that the race could not exist without morality, I believe that I could not live and grow in an environment in which the laws of morality are constantly broken, I believe that the universe is so arranged that immorality cannot thrive in it in the long run, — then why should I become immoral simply because I have discovered that the voice within me which urges me in the direction of the right was not made in a day and that it will tell me better things as the world rolls on?1

1 Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics: "The Utilitarian must repudiate altogether that temper of rebellion against the established morality, as something purely external and conventional, into which the reflective mind is always apt to fall when it is first convinced that its rules are not intrinsically reasonable. He must, of course, also repudiate as superstitious that awe of it as an absolute or Divine code

(4) There are no a priori reasons why a person who understands the genesis of his moral nature should lose it. Nor do the facts, which after all furnish the most important testimony, prove that such is the case. I do not believe that the advocates of the historical theory, men like the Mills, Darwin, Spencer, Wundt, Höffding, and Paulsen, are less moral than Kant and Martineau. An insight into its genesis no more destroys conscience than an understanding of the psychology of courage makes a man cowardly, or a knowledge of the conditions of sight and hearing makes a man blind and deaf. It is not an easy thing to break down the training of a lifetime.1 It would require systematic efforts to loosen the association between the

which intuitional moralists inculcate. (At the same time this sentiment, which Kant, among others, has expressed with peculiar force, is in no way incompatible with Utilitarianism: only it must not attach itself to any subordinate rules of conduct.) Still, he will naturally contemplate it with reverence and wonder, as a marvellous product of nature, the result of long centuries of growth, showing in many parts the same fine adaptation of means to complex exigencies as the most elaborate structures of physical organisms exhibit: he will handle it with respectful delicacy as a mechanism, constructed of the fluid element of opinions and dispositions, by the indispensable aid of which the actual quantum of human happiness is continually being produced, a mechanism which no 'politicians or philosophers' could create, yet without which the harder and coarser machinery of Positive Law could not be permanently maintained, and the life of man would become― as Hobbes forcibly expresses it'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.'""

1 See Turgénev's novels, New; Fathers and Sons; and Dostoievski's Crime and Punishment.

ideas of certain modes of conduct and the moral sentiments. Why should the philosopher who understands the utility of these feelings attempt to eradicate them? Nay, will he not rather seek to develop and to strengthen them, to attach them to forms of conduct which his growing intelligence finds to be the best?

Our philosophical and theological beliefs have, as Paulsen points out, much less influence on our actions than is commonly supposed. Many men who honestly believe in conscience as the voice of God, and who believe that there is a future life in which the just will be rewarded and the unjust punished, act as though they had neither conscience nor fear of hell. Conduct depends upon character, character depends upon impulses, feelings, and ideas together, not on ideas alone. Train a child properly, work moral habits into his very nature, arouse in him a fellow-feeling for all mankind, and you may turn him loose upon the world without fear. If, however, you tell him that he must obey the moral law simply because it is God's will, and for no other reason, then, if he ever loses his faith in God, his morality will be without support, and he will disregard the law simply to prove his freedom and enlightenment.

CHAPTER IV

THE ULTIMATE GROUND OF MORAL DISTINCTIONS1

1. Conscience as the Standard.

- Our first ques

tion was, Why do men judge or evaluate as they do in morals? Why do they call acts right and wrong? We answered this question psychologically, that is, we pointed out the psychical states upon which moral judgment depends. We found that certain feelings cluster around certain ideas of acts, and that it is in virtue of these feelings that we pronounce moral judgments. We embraced all these mental conditions of moral judgment under the term conscience, and declared that men judge as they do because they have a conscience. We also examined the views of the different schools with regard to the innateness of conscience, and came to the conclusion that conscience is neither original in the human soul in the sense in which the intuitionists take it, nor the product of individual experience, as their opponents hold, but that there is an element of truth in both schools. We agreed with the former in saying that conscience is an intuition, with the latter, that it has an origin and development. But we are not yet satisfied with the results which we have reached. Men judge as they do because

1 See references under chap. v.