Page:Ethical Studies (reprint 1911).djvu/45

 would not to the vulgar seem similar nonsense, if they only were aware what those premises did really stand for and signify.

We have dwelt too long on this matter. If the self is ignored in the psychology of our Determinists, or recognized in a sense which is not the vulgar sense, then responsibility and punishment and all the beliefs intellectual and moral, which hang from (as we have seen) and involve in their being the reality of the vulgar sense, with the non-reality thereof fall and are destroyed; or survive, at most, in a form and in a shape which, whatever and however much better it may be, is absolutely irreconcilable with the notions of the people. A criminal is as ‘responsible’ for his acts of last year as the Thames at London is responsible for an accident on the Isis at Oxford, and he is no more responsible. And to punish that criminal, in the vulgar sense, is to repeat the story of Xerxes and the Hellespont. It may be true that, by operating on a stream in one place, you may make that stream much better in all places lower down, and possibly also may influence other streams; but if you think that, because of this, the stream is punishable and the water responsible in anything like the way in which we use the words, then you do most grossly deceive yourselves. And our conclusion must be this, that of ‘the two great schools’ which divide our philosophy, as the one, so the other stands out of relation to vulgar morality; that for both alike responsibility (as we believe in it) is a word altogether devoid of signification and impossible of explanation.

Now, if this conclusion be the true one, and, it not being mine in particular, I may say that I do not doubt that it is true; and further, if the drawing of morals be not out of the fashion, it would seem that there are several morals, which here might well be drawn. And the first is the vulgar one, that seeing all we have of philosophy looks away (to a higher sphere doubtless) from