of morality is not pleasure or happiness, but the preservation of life, "virtuous activity," welfare, development, progress, perfection, realization. We might call the adherents of this school anti-hedonists, or according to their more positive tenets, vitalists (vita, life), perfectionists, realizationists, or energists.1 The energists or perfectionists hold that acts are good which tend to preserve and develop human life. We may have here, as above: (a) egoistic or individualistic energism; and (b) altruistic or universalistic energism. According to the former, the end of morality is the preservation and development of individual life; according to the latter, of the life of the species.

7. Summary. The following table attempts to summarize the views mentioned in this chapter 2:

1 A term employed by Paulsen, derived from the Greek évépyela (energeia), energy, work, action. The advocates of this view are also called eudæmonists by some. The word eudæmonia means happiness, but for Aristotle and others happiness is identical with virtuous activity. The different senses in which this word eudomonia is used by different writers often causes confusion.

2 These views are by no means, as is usually supposed, necessarily antagonistic to each other. The statements, An act is right or wrong because conscience tells me so, and An act is right or wrong because of the effects it tends to produce, do not necessarily exclude each other. They can both be true. Similarly, the statements, An act is right or wrong because God wills it to be so, and An act is right or wrong because conscience tells me so, and An act is right or wrong because its effects make it so, can be easily harmonized. See chap. v, §§ 1, 11, 12.

Theologico-Teleological School: An act is good or bad because God wills it, and God wills it because of its effects.

CHAPTER V

THE TELEOLOGICAL VIEW 1

BEFORE attempting to discuss the problems suggested in the last chapter, let us examine a little more carefully our fundamental thesis that the moral worth of acts ultimately depends upon the effects which they naturally tend to produce, and consider some objections which may be urged against it.

1. Conscience and Teleology. When we say that the end which morality subserves is its ground or reason for being, we do not mean to imply that the agent always has the end or purpose clearly in

1 Advocates of the Teleological View: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; Butler, Sermons upon Human Nature; Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Virtue and Beauty; Hume, Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals; Paley, Moral Philosophy; Mill, Utilitarianism, chap. ii; Spencer, Data of Ethics, chaps. iiii; Stephen, Science of Ethics, chaps. iv-v; Höffding, Ethik, chap. vii; Jhering, Der Zweck im Recht, Vol. II, pp. 95 ff.; Wundt, Ethics, Part III, chaps. ii-iv; Paulsen, Ethics, pp. 222 ff.; Sutherland, The Moral Instinct, especially Vol. II, pp. 32 ff.; and all the thinkers mentioned in next two chapters. Opponents of the Teleological View: Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, Abbott's translation, pp. 9 ff.; Lecky, History of European Morals, chap. i; Bradley, Ethical Studies; Martineau, Types, Vol. II; Spencer, Social Statics, first edition.

view. We have already pointed out in our chapter on conscience that he pronounces judgment upon an act immediately or instinctively, so to speak, that he calls the act right or wrong because his conscience tells him so. He may not be conscious of the utility of the act which he approves or feels himself obliged to perform. Our theory does not at all assert that he performs acts because of their effects. Moral acts are not necessarily prompted by the conscious desire on part of the doer to produce certain consequences. We eat without being conscious of the utility of eating and without intending to preserve our bodies, but because we feel hungry. Still, we may say, and have the right to say, that the taking of nourishment produces beneficial results, and that these constitute the reason or ground for our taking food. There is no contradiction whatever between the statement that we call stealing wrong because we feel it to be wrong, or because conscience tells us so, and the statement that stealing is wrong because of its effects. In the former case we give the psychological reason or ground for the wrongness

1 See Stephen, The Science of Ethics, chap. iv, ii, "The Moral Law." See also supra, p. 72, note 3.

2 See Williams, A Review of Evolutional Ethics, pp. 326 ff. See Butler, Human Nature: “It may be added that as persons without any conviction from reason of the desirableness of life, would yet, of course, preserve it merely from the appetite of hunger; so, by acting merely from regard (suppose) to reputation, without any consideration of the good of others, men often contribute to public good."

of the act; in the latter we point out the real

reason.

It is just as easy and just as hard, in the last analysis, to explain why we should perform certain acts without being conscious of their utility, why we should feel obliged to pursue certain modes of conduct, the purpose of which turns out to be useful, without being conscious of their purposiveness, as it is to tell why animals should feel impelled to do the very things which they ought to do in order to preserve life, without knowing anything of the end or purpose realized by their impulses. The attempts which have been made to account for this apparently preestablished harmony in the latter case greatly resemble those employed to explain the former. According to some, God has implanted certain ideas and feelings in the soul of the bird for the purpose of enabling it to do what it does. It knows what is good for it, because God has given it a faculty of knowing it. Others simply declare that instincts are innate capacities for acting in a certain useful way. Still others try to explain them as the results of a long line of development, as products of evolution; but in every case the utility of the instinct is confessed to be the ground of the animal's possessing it.

The fact that conscience prescribes acts which are useful, without knowing of their usefulness, is accounted for in the same ways, as we have already seen.1 According to some, God has given us a 1 See chap. ii.