Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/110

96 in part to traverse Mr. Schiller's notion that everything may be considered as 'evolved,' for it insists that original data, laws, and relations must be presupposed in every evolutionary account. Moreover it ends by an assimilation of Darwinism to Aristotle's conception of final cause, and thus, at least by implication, makes teleology universalistic, whilst I understand most of the other essayists to admit, at any rate as a possibility, that the general teleology displayed by the universe may be a resultant of the several 'purposive impulses,' exhibited by its parts.

In Mr. K. B. Marett's important Essay 'Origin and Validity in Ethics,' we again meet with the distinction which Mr. Gibson drew. We can explain a moral judgment by the conditions under which it comes to be made, in other words by its 'origin'; or we can take the immediate feeling of 'validity' in it by which the subject of it is possessed. Both points of view are essential for completely understanding a given moral judgment. The more refined and spiritual senses of validity arise, according to the current evolutionism, as 'by-products' of preferences originally ministerial to biological need. Mr. Marett tries to show that, whatever their origin may be, they tend to become independent ethical forces, and in many cases to supersede the more animal preferences in which they are supposed to arise. They have so far not interfered with survival, and prima facie are as valid biologically as anything else. Nevertheless the two orders of judgment are connected with each other, and he who considers the more animally useful promptings alone may fall into an opportunism as coarse as the Quixotism is extravagant by which the devotee of purely spiritual validities may be swayed. Moreover those who use considerations of origin to criticise feelings of validity by, must in the end appeal to validities somewhere accepted by themselves, and the upshot of the whole discussion, characterised, it seems to me, by a very concrete sentiment of moral reality, is to vindicate the essentially tentative and experimental character of the whole ethical sphere of life. Standards as well as acts are established experiendo, the author seems to affirm.

Mr. Sturt's paper, 'Art and Personality,' is a well- written attempt to show that 'Art' as a personal activity in the artist is normally inspired by an enthusiastic objective interest in what expresses or seems to express aspects of personal character in man. This interest is not derived from other interests; and the validity of our artistic judgments cannot be based on any principles elsewhere derived. In the last resort the 'good' in art is what men individually so pronounce, though an individual's taste may be called abnormal if it contradicts a general consensus the other way.

Mr. F. W. Bussell, in 'The Future of Ethics: Effort or Abstention?' makes a weighty plea for the former alternative which, as the Judaeo-Christian ideal, he contrasts with the