Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/256

242 the strict obligations of duty. A. Comte supposed that human nature would change in the future and that the cerebral organs which produce altruism (?) would destroy those which produce egoism; in saying this he very likely bore in mind the fact that moral decision is instantaneous, and, like instinct, comes from the depth of man's nature.

At times Proudhon is reduced, like Kant, to appeal to a kind of scholasticism for an explanation of the paradox of moral law. "To feel himself in others, to the point of sacrificing every other interest to this sentiment, to demand for others the same respect as for himself, and to be angry with the unworthy creature who suffers others to be lacking in respect for him, as if the care of his dignity did not concern himself alone, such a faculty at first sight seems a strange one. …. There is a tendency in every man to develop and force the acceptance of that which is essentially himself—which is, in fact, his own dignity. It results from this that the essential in man being identical and one for all humanity, each of us is aware of himself at the same time as individual and as species; and that an insult is felt by a third party and by the offender himself as well as by the injured person, that in consequence the protest is common. This precisely is what is meant by Justice."

Religious ethics claim to possess this source of action which is wanting in lay ethics, but here it is necessary to make a distinction if an error, into which so many authors have fallen, is to be avoided. The great mass of Christians do not carry out the real Christian ethic, that which the philosopher considers as really peculiar to their religion; worldly people who profess Catholicism are chiefly preoccupied with probabilism, mechanical