Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/388

 374 HENRY STURT : the works of other persons in a spirit of appreciation which, where active expression is possible, shows itself as devotion. Most of our actual conduct is of mixed quality ; it is partly self-regarding, partly unselfish. But the two elements are distinguishable on analysis. 8 6. The precise significance for ethics of this division of conduct is that in unselfish action we have a peculiar feeling of doing what is, in the Aristotelian phrase " fair and noble," a feeling which is wanting in the self-regarding kind of con- duct, and is often replaced by the contrary feeling of doing what is ignoble. It is on the ground of these feelings that we say that unselfish conduct is morally good, while self- regarding action is either neutral or bad. 7. It is no weakening of our doctrine to point out that we cannot, within the limits of moral philosophy, explain this unselfish appreciation. Ethics cannot tell us why, for example, we have a devotion towards a friend whom we think to be very much better than ourselves. Even if the fact were totally inexplicable we should have to accept it if we found it in our moral experience. But the truth is that in each of the separate disciplines of philosophy we come upon fundamental facts which that discipline cannot explain, and can only hand over for explanation to the higher co- ordination of metaphysics. It is thus that the theory of art and the theory of knowledge, no less than the theory of morals, bring grist to the metaphysical mill. But in a final attempt to co-ordinate the main issues of philosophy, the fundamental moral fact would not, I appre- hend, give any special, difficulty. It is one manifestion of our admiration for fulness and perfection of personal life, parallel in its nature to those other admirations which are the motive springs of art and knowledge. Nor is this devo- tion to life a strange thing if we believe that the universe beneath its veil of materiature conceals the life of God, who, himself the source of human existence, lives with a life not wholly dissimilar to our own, but carried up to an unim- aginable pitch of intensity and perfection. However, our adoption or rejection of this metaphysical line should make no difference to our recognition of the moral fact, which is equally real whether an explanation for it be forthcoming or no. 8. To this explanation we may add that the antithesis between self-regarding and unselfish action is not quite the same as that between selfishness and unselfishness in com- mon language. My phrases embody the same general idea but they are intended to have a more precise and scientific