Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/608

 J. M. WILSON AND T. FOWLER, PRINCIPLES OF MORALS. 595 tion of the good of an organic being with the "end" for which it is naturally fitted. Does the " end" mean the purpose which it is actually capable, as ascertained by experience, of serving? If so, it is difficult to see how any human being can fail to attain his "end," and hence the conception of the "end" of man be- comes incapable of serving as a guide to conduct. Does it mean the end which a person or thing ought to attain? If so, how can the end be discovered except by the aid of some idea of good which cannot be found in sensible experience? If the end be ascertainable by experience, what factor in experience is it which among the numerous results of an action is it which shows whether or not the end of the creature's being has been attained by it ? If the resultant pleasure, we go back to the Hedonism out of which Prof. Fowler's half - unconscious Aristotelianism is struggling to emancipate him. If he reply ' pleasure measured by a non-quantitative standard,' what is that standard, and by what faculty is it recognised? This is where Prof. Fowler's treatment of the ethical re'Xo? admirable as it is from a practical point of view leaves us speculatively unsatisfied. Another point on which Prof. Fowler seems to me to approxi- mate to the position of moralists whom he would perhaps describe as Intuitionists, is in the prominence given to Eeason in Morality. It is there that he very emphatically rejects the claim of Eeason to supply "the sole spring of action" (p. 279) ; but he clearly makes the essence or at least an essential element of Conscience to be a "judgment" (p. 173). "Man is constituted a moral being by his possession of a nature capable of reflecting on its own acts and, as a consequence of that reflection, capable of passing on them a definitive sentence of approval or disapproval" (p. 261). True, he say, that " our ends are always suggested by some pas- sion, appetite, desire or affection, in short, by some emotion". But if it is the "reflection," i.e., the Eeason, that stamps them as moral, if it is by the Eeason that "the co-ordination of our several desires and feelings, sympathetic, self-regarding, semi-social and resentful, is effected " (p. 283), then Eeason is pronounced to be essentially the Moral Faculty. It is true, of course, that before that which the Moral Faculty decrees to be done can be actually performed, there must be a " desire " of some kind or, as Prof. Fowler calls it, a " moral feeling " in the mind of the agent ; but that is fully admitted in substance (though Kant chose to call it an ' interest ') by the most thorough-going Eationalists. Whence Eeason gets its conception of the standard by which our desires are to be "correlated," of the "ends" by reference to which actions become subjects of " approbation " or " disapprobation," is (as I have tried to show) a question not to be satisfactorily answered without the admission of that " ultimate and analy sable idea of right " against which Prof. Fowler so strenuously protests. I feel that this review has been at once very inadequate and much too polemical. I have been critical rather than appreciative