Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/48

 MORAL OBLIGATION. 37 logical consistency be rejected if anything else is accepted that I am perfectly ' parsimonious ' in accepting them ; but if I do no more I have only chosen the other horn of the dilemma and cannot defend myself from the suspicion of delusion. Whether to criticise an ethical doctrine or to make one, it is equally necessary to discover what precisely is the postulate from which to begin. If no inviolable pos- tulate can be found, our morality can only be a more or less systematised theory of practice as in Hume ; or if it professes to be anything else, it will fall into the logical chaos which he was able to avoid. It has already been said that no one fact of experience as such can have any claim of itself to superiority in com- parison with any other fact. The difference between con- tingent and necessary truth is a difference not of the validity of fact as fact, but of the function which we find facts displaying. The bare feeling of any characteristic of a particular fact is undoubtedly the key to its importance in the unreflecting consciousness. But in philosophy no such subjective criterion can be applied without dogmatism. It is not subjective but objective certainty that we require, and the problem of philosophy is just this : to convert our sub- jective certainty our faith in the uniformity of nature, in freedom, in subjection to moral law into objective cer- tainty. How can I who feel bound to obey a moral law say that every one is bound to obey it ? I may analyse my state of consciousness to the utmost, but I can get nothing beyond it in my analytical judgment. Whatever feelings of necessity, universality, immediacy I find it containing, I can only say they are so for me. To say that I recognise the law itself as that which contains necessity is still to say that / recognise only. So long, indeed, as I merely adopt the subjective position of common self-consciousness, so long is it possible for another to say that I may be deluded. I, as an individual, cannot from a mere individual's standpoint from the purest fact of my consciousness prove that I am capable (as I am capable) of legislating for the world. As little, on the same conditions, can the world legislate for me. What it legislates for me is no moral obligation but force, unless it corresponds with what I legislate for myself. On the con- trary, when I claim to legislate for society or society claims to legislate for me, both presuppose a system of law which is peculiar neither to society as such as a majority say nor to me as an individual. In one sense then we can derive neither objective from subjective obligation nor subjective from objective. Yet in