Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/336

 THE FINAL AIM OF MORAL ACTION. 335 confounded with the delight that comes of merely contem- plating moral ideals in general. The latter arises from seeing the ideal realised in another person or from merely picturing it in imagination, while the former arises only from seeing it realised in ourselves in the moment immediately at hand. The one is aesthetic and sentimental, the other moral and practical ; the one, to be enjoyed, demands rapt contem- plation amid the creations of poetic fancy, the other demands action and self-examination. This distinction must be kept clearly in mind in our discussion of the inner moral sanction as the final aim of conduct ; for it makes a great difference, whether by inner sanction we mean the pleasure of seeing the ideal realised in one's own conduct at each moment, or the pleasure of beholding it in another person or perhaps in some fanciful creation. The latter could be the end of conduct only according to quite another standard of moral worth than the tendency to promote universal happiness. It could be the end of conduct, as Schleiermacher points out, only in a system of ethics where the happiness of the individual is made the criterion of right action. But Schleierrnacher's eloquent logic against indulgence in the pleasures of sympathetic emotion merely by means of the imagination, without moving hand or foot for the good of others, cannot be turned against the pursuit of the inner moral sanction as the end of conduct. Shaftesbury may have erred in trying to prove that the pleasure of the moral sense would always constitute the greatest possible happiness, as though the happiness of the individual were the standard of moral worth ; and Schleiermacher was perhaps justified in maintaining against him, that from the point of view of the individual's greatest happiness the pleasures of contemplating imaginary excellence would have as much worth as the pleasures which arise out of one's own conscious moral action. But from the point of view of universal happiness the former pleasures have not so great worth as the latter ; indeed they are positively immoral, they tend to divert one from the obligation to act. Therefore it would be perfectly logical, from the point of view of universal happiness, to object to the former and not to the latter as the end of conduct. The existence of the inner moral sanction and its peculiar nature may be determined by an observation of subjective moral experience. Whoever examines all the states of consciousness which the conviction that one is doing right or is doing wrong awakens will find that those which the thought of doing wrong awakens form a group by them-