Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/274

 ri. BEAUSSIBE, LES PRINCIPES DE LA MORALE. 273 " Morale Formelle," which contains an admirably clear exposi- tion of the central ideas of Kant, separated with great care and judgment from the confusing mass of arbitrary technicality and -extravagant paradox in which they are held in solution in the philosopher's own writings. The most obvious difficulties which embarrass the student of Kant who tries to " bring down philo- sophy from heaven to earth " and apply Kantian principles to the conditions of everyday life are (1) the austerity with which the principle of the " autonomy of the will " is carried out, so that an action done from love of one's father is pronounced as completely non-moral as an act motived by avarice or appetite ; (2) the utter failure of Kant to provide a workable criterion of morality without having recourse to the forbidden principle of utility. M. Beaus- sire's mode of dealing with the first of these difficulties is striking and valuable as far as it goes, if it is not completely satisfactory. He treats Kant's principle of duty for duty's sake as an ideal as the formal ideal of a perfectly moral act. In actual life there may be acts which are at every degree of nearness to or remoteness from this ideal, but the moral element in the act is, in all cases, the love of right which it exhibits. We should necessarily have this " formal idea " of a perfectly right action even though no action fully satisfying its conditions had actually been performed. This is vhat seems to be implied in such passages as the follow- ing : " Le premier principe cle la morale ne pent etre un ide"al cle perfection, mai.s un ideal formel, un ideal nu pour ainsi dire, dont la conception et la realisation soient independantes de toutes les conditions si complexes et si variables auxquelles est soumise la nature humaine dans 1'ensemble de ses elements et dans le cours de son evolution atravers les differentes phases de la vie individuelle et de la vie de 1'espece. La volonte autonome offre seul ce caractere. Degagee, par sa definition meme, cle toute consideration -exte*rieure, elle ne demande, pour etre co^ue, qu'un effort d'abstraction et, avant meme de se produire en une idee nette et distincte, elle se realise .sous une forme plus ou moins pure dans tout acte de vertu" (p. 100). The second difficulty, the inability of the principle of " auton- omy," when taken by itself, to furnish any content for the moral law, is fully admitted (p. 173). The clear distinction drawn between " formal " or " subjective " and " objective " good, is one of the great merits of the book. An action is not in the full sense moral, we are told,unlessitis both subjectively and objectively good (p. 172). But neither concept can be deduced or extracted out of the other. The objective good which every subjectively good action must aim at realising includes the formal good, i.e., the subjective Tightness of other wills as well as of the agent's : but it is impossible to get out of a purely formal conception of good into a concrete good such as is capable of forming a TP'<? of action without introducing the notion of happiness. " L'idee de 1'utile est la seule qui puisse donner a la morale un objet precis sans 1'emprunter a la morale elle-merne. Tout ce qui est utile n'est