not self-evident. In other words, we have an innate feeling of preference for the good.1

5. The Perceptional Intuitionists. In this class belong Bishop Butler, James Martineau, and W. E. H. Lecky. With them conscience is intuitive, but neither a feeling, as the foregoing thinkers declare, nor the product of reason in the Cudworthian sense, but an inner perception.

(1) According to Butler, there is a superior principle of reflection or conscience in every man, which distinguishes between the internal principles of his heart as well as his external actions; which passes judgment upon himself and them, and pronounces determinately some actions to be in themselves evil, wrong, unjust; which without being consulted, without being advised with, magisterially exerts itself, and approves or condemns him the doer of them accordingly. It is by this faculty, natural to man, that he is a moral agent, that he is a law to himself, but this faculty, not to be considered merely as a principle in his heart, which is to have some influence as well as others, but considered as a faculty in kind and in nature supreme over all others, and which bears its own authority of being You cannot form a notion of this faculty, con

So.

1 Hermann Schwarz, Grundzüge der Ethik, is an emotional intuitionist of the Hutcheson stamp. We feel intuitively the worth of sympathy to be higher than that of selfishness.

2 1692-1752. Sermons upon Human Nature. See also Dissertation upon Virtue. Works edited by Gladstone, 1897. Selections in Selby-Bigge, British Moralists, Vol. I. See Collins, Butler.

science, without taking in judgment, direction, superintendency. This is a constituent part of the idea, that is, of the faculty itself, and to preside and govern, from the very economy and constitution of man, belongs to it. Had it strength, as it had right, had it power as it had manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world. "What obligations are we under to attend to and follow it?Your obligation to obey this law is its being the law of your nature. That your conscience approves of

and attests to such a course of action is itself alone an obligation. Conscience does not only offer itself to show us the way we should walk in, but it likewise carries its own authority with it, that it is our natural guide, the guide assigned us by the author of our nature," etc.1 "The whole moral law is as much matter of revealed command, as positive institutions are, for the Scripture enjoins every moral virtue. In this respect, then, they are both upon a level. But the moral law is moreover written upon our hearts, interwoven into our very nature. And this is a plain intimation of the author of it, which is to be preferred when they interfere."2

(2) Martineau's modification of the intuitional theory is unique. On the simple testimony of our perceptive faculty, he says, we believe in the perceived object and the perceiving self. "This dual conviction rests upon the axiom that we must ac

1 Sermon iii.

8 1805-1900.

2 Analogy of Religion, Part II, chap. i.

Types of Ethical Theory.

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.2 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 varietynot 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.

:

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.2 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." 3 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.4 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.

4 Ib., p. 105.

2 Ib., p. 99.

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.