fer our affections from these to the things which procure them, and love virtue for virtue's sake.1

(7) The most careful and detailed explanation of the moral faculty from this standpoint is given by Alexander Bain.2 According to him, conscience is an imitation within ourselves of the government without us. The first lesson that the child learns as a moral agent is obedience. "The child's susceptibility to pleasure and pain is made use of to bring about this obedience, and a mental association is rapidly formed between disobedience and apprehended pain, more or less magnified by fear." Forbidden

actions arouse a certain dread; the fear of encountering pain is conscience in its earliest germ. The sentiment of love or respect toward persons in authority infuses a different species of dread, the dread of giving pain to a beloved object. Later on, the child learns to appreciate the reasons or motives that led to the imposition of the rules of conduct. "When the young mind is able to take notice of the use and meaning of the prohibitions imposed upon it, and to approve of the end intended by them, a new motive is added, and the conscience is then a triple compound, and begirds the action in

1 On Man, Vol. I, pp. 473-475; Vol. II, 338 f. See Lecky, Vol. I, pp. 22 ff., 67 note; Ribot, La psychologie anglaise contemporaine. This view is developed by James Mill (Analysis of the Human Mind, Vol. II), and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Utilitarianism, especially pp. 40-42, 44, 45, 46, 53 ff.

2 Born 1818. The Emotions and the Will; Mental and Moral Science.

question with a threefold fear; the last ingredient being paramount in the maturity of the sympathies and the reason. All that we understand by the authority of conscience, the sentiment of obligation, the feeling of right, the sting of remorse, can be nothing else than so many modes of expressing the acquired aversion and dread toward actions associated in the mind with the consequences now stated."

But there may not be present to a man's mind any of these motives, namely, the fear of retribution, or the respect to the authority commanding, affection or sympathy toward the persons or interests for whose sake the duty is imposed, his own advantage indirectly concerned, his religious feeling, his individual sentiments in accord with the spirit of the precept, or the infection of example. "Just as in the love of money for its own sake, one may come to form a habit of acting in a particular way, although the special impulses that were the original moving causes no longer recur to the mind." Here we have a case of the sense of duty in the abstract. This does not prove, however, that there exists a primitive sentiment of duty in the abstract, any more than the conduct of the miser proves that we are born with the love of gold in the abstract. "It is the tendency of association to erect new centres of force, detached from the particulars that originally gave them meaning; which new creations will sometimes assemble round themselves a more powerful body of

sentiment than could be inspired by any one of the constituent realities."1

We have examined the extreme rationalistic and empiristic views of conscience. According to one school, conscience is a natural endowment of man; the moral truths are inherent in his very nature; his soul is a tablet with moral laws written upon it. According to the other, conscience is not original, but acquired in the life of the individual. The soul is at birth an empty tablet, having no moral truths written upon it.

7. Reconciliation of Intuitionism and Empiricism. Let us now consider some attempts that have been made to reconcile this opposition. Kant approaches the problem from the rationalistic side, Spencer from the empiristic.2 Kant repudiates the extreme rationalistic thesis that we have an innate knowledge of particular moral truths, and regards as the a priori element the category of obligation, a general moral form whose content is filled by experience. Spencer, on the other hand, concedes the

1 Emotions, 3d ed., chap. xv, §§ 18 ff.; The Will, chap. x, especially §§ 8 ff.; also chapter on "Moral Faculty," in Mental and Moral Science. For criticism of Bain, see Calderwood, Handbook, Part. I, Div. II, chap. iii.

2 It is worthy of note that both of these philosophers were at one time believers in the moral-sense doctrine of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. See p. 41, note 3, and Spencer's first edition of the Social Statics.

3 His theory reminds one of the medieval conception of the synderesis.

presence of an a priori element, and denies that the conscience is merely an acquisition of individual experience. Let us examine the views of these thinkers a little more in detail.

(1) In his Kritik of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant 1 asks the question, How is knowledge possible, or how is it possible that man can make synthetic judgments a priori? Experience furnishes us with only a limited number of cases; it cannot give us universality and necessity. Are these universal and necessary truths innate, as old rationalism asserted? Not exactly, Kant an

swers.

The mind is endowed with certain functions or principles or forms or categories, which are ́not derived from experience, but are prior to experience, hence a priori or pure. Though we may not be conscious of them, they act in every rational creature. The senses furnish the mind with the raw materials, while the sensibility and the understanding, the two powers of the mind, arrange them according to the forms of space, time, causality, etc. Thus, for example, I see all things in space because my mind functions according to the space form. When I judge that heat expands bodies, I have ideas of heat, expansion, and bodies, elements ultimately furnished by sensation, and the idea that the heat is the cause of the expansion, the notion of

1 1729-1804. For Kant's ethics, see Cohen, Kant's Begründung der Ethik; Schurman, Kantian Ethics and the Ethics of Evolution; Porter, Kant's Ethics; Paulsen, Kant; translation of Kant's ethical writings by Abbott, Kant's Theory of Ethics.

causality, which is not derived from sensation, but which is a way my intellect has of looking at things. These forms or categories are, as it were, the colored glasses through which the theoretical reason views the world.1.

However, we approach the world not merely from the theoretical standpoint, but from the practical or moral standpoint; we say not only what is, but what ought to be. The son not only arranges its phenomena in space, time, and according to the causal law, but also commands that they be arranged according to the moral law. Its commands are unconditional, absolute, or categorical imperatives; it speaks with authority: Thou shalt, Thou shalt not. "The theoretical use of reason is that by which I know a priori (as necessary) that something is, while the practical use of reason is that by which I know a priori what ought to be." I assume that there really exist pure moral laws, which determine completely a priori the conduct of every rational creature. I can with justice presuppose the proposition because I can appeal not only to the proofs of the most enlightened moralists, but also to the moral judgment of every human being.2

Now the question is, How is all this possible? Knowledge is possible, as we have seen, because of

1 For Kant's theory of knowledge, see the histories of philosophy, e.g., Weber, where a bibliography is found.

2 Kritik of Pure Reason, Max Müller's translation, pp. 510, 647. See also Abbott's translation of the ethical writings, pp. 28, 97 f., 119, 136.