Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/302

 290 F. H. BRADLEY : CAN A MAN SIN AGAINST KNOWLEDGE ? obscure image, take from that the idea of hundredfoldness, and employ this to modify my idea of a horse. And we may strengthen our position by a familiar experience. We all know that as a rule it is impossible to recall either vivid pleasures or vivid pains. But it would be wrong to say that I have not the knowledge that my pleasure or my pain was very great. I do know 'this; but I know it discursively and by the intellectual addition of the idea of intensity to my idea of the feeling. And hence the effect on the imagination and emotions may be very weak ; it may serve in temptation but to sour the pleasure without preventing the sin. In a corrupted state, where the passions are enfeebled and where cruel experience has opened the eyes without changing the heart, we may find the condition described by Lamb, " the sin and the suffering co-instantaneous, or the latter forerunning the former, remorse preceding action ". The result of this is that the idea of a greater pleasure need not in itself be felt as more pleasant, nor the idea of a greater pain as more painful. The increase of feeling, if it takes place at all, need take place in no proportion to the increase thought of. This again must be true of the idea of wrong-doing. I may qualify my idea of a certain act by the addition of immorality, but I may transfer that addition from another and wholly separate image. In this case my knowledge that an act is bad does not rest on an image of the act as bad. It consists primarily in the intellectual use of a symbol, and the secondary effect on the imagination and the feelings may be almost inappreciable. Our ethical paradox, if true at all, will be true only of a mind which is confined to intuition ; and such a mind is not known to exist, except at an early stage of evolution. But any mind which can abstract and reflect and reason discursively will be able to think of an act as being wrong, and yet the feeling of that act's wrong- ness may not pass beyond an ineffective minimum. It is only where the attention is concentred upon the quality of the act, and even then it is only where the act in its wrongful quality is present as a vivid imagination, that the conscience will be irresistible. It is not knowledge, it is a relative degree of feeling excited by a certain kind of knowledge, that coerces the appetite. This, I think, will furnish us with a partial justification of our paradox, and it also may serve as its final refutation.