Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/45

 32 PROF. H. SIDGWICK : men in their particular moral judgments judge primarily and essentially of the moral preferability of particular impulses or incentives to action, and that so far as the impulses presented are similar men's judgments of their moral value will also be similar. " However limited the range of our moral con- sciousness, it would lead us all to the same verdicts, had we all the same segment of the series [of impulses] under our cognisance" (p. 61). . . "the instant that any contend- ing principles press their invitations on [a man], there too is the consciousness of their respective rights . . . his duty consists in acting from the right affection, about which he is never left in doubt " (p. 72) unless, that is, he wilfully neglects to use the faculty of moral insight with which he is endowed, for " the inner eye is ever open, unless it droops in wilful sleep". Now I do not find that Dr. Martineau has adduced any suffi- cient reasons for making this fundamental assumption. He can hardly rest it on the agreement of the accounts given of the moral consciousness by the persons who have most sys- tematically reflected on it ; since this class includes, as I shall presently show, moralists who disagree fundamentally with Dr. Martineau. And I see no sign that his assumption is based 011 a careful induction from the accounts actually given by plain men of their moral experience. Indeed in other passages Dr. Martineau seems to admit that the moral judg- ments of mature men do not actually manifest an undeviating harmony with his own scale of preferability. ;"jTo find the true instinct of conscience," he says, " we may more often go with hope to the child than to the grandparents. . . . of most men the earlier years are nobler and purer . . . unfaithfulness inevitably impairs and corrupts the native insight." That there is an element of truth in this I would not deny : it does not, however, appear that Dr. Martineau has made any such careful and extensive observation of the moral judgments of children as would justify him in affirm- ing broadly that they are more in harmony with his own scale than those of mature men ; and, in any case, the assumption that the divergences of the latter are due to " unfaithfulness " is one that seems to me to require a kind of justification that he has not attempted. I have been led both from observation of my con- temporaries and from examination of the morality of other ages and countries to take an essentially differ- ent view of the variation and conflict in men's moral judgments and sentiments which their discourse appears to reveal. I agree, indeed, with Dr. Martineau that