Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/78

62 approval and disapproval. As rational beings, we demand the ratio cur of our approval. Moral judgments are indeed based upon the moral sentiments, but, in beings who are rational as well as sentient, reason demands that our 'sentiments' be capable of rationalization. Is not the old formulation of this distinction still relevant? The psychology of ethics can tell us by what inner processes we recognize the virtuous act, or what the nature of the feelings is with which men regard it, but it cannot answer the cognate question, which to some of us seems to be the uniquely ethical problem, "What constitutes morality?" or, "What is the quality in any act which leads men to pronounce it virtuous?" Of course Mr. Taylor, like all other writers on ethics, has an answer to the latter question. The rationale of our pronouncements of worth, as gathered from the context now under review, lies in the fact that some satisfactions have greater 'permanence' and 'unconditionality' than others. This is certainly one theory which is not lightly to be put aside, and which in various forms has frequently found systematic expression. But it cannot claim for itself any securer basis in empirical fact than many another rival theory. Such a theory is just as much or just as little 'speculative' as any other theory of morals, and is not to be enforced upon us by the magic word 'empirical.' In the concluding pages of this important third chapter, Mr. Taylor explains why the terms 'desire' and 'will' have been avoided in the preceding portions of his treatise. His object evidently was to indicate his "agreement with those psychologists who refuse to recognize 'conation' as an original and unanalyzable feature of experience by the side of cognition and feeling" (p. 170). He thinks that, according to the believers in the 'tripartite' character of mind, the element of conation is necessary to account for "the execution of movements adapted towards securing the experiences which are anticipated with pleasure or avoiding those anticipated with pain." But there remains nothing that cannot be resolved into cognitive and emotional elements, if we remember that psychologically motion is nothing but a succession of complex sensations accompanied by changes of feeling-tone. The misbegotten belief in conation as an ultimate element is due to the abstractions of the physicist or the physiologist, for motion in their sense of the word "is not movement as actually experienced, but a mere abstraction from experience." There have been other and, in my opinion, possibly weightier arguments advanced, for a belief in the 'will,' than the one which the author thus dismisses. But, however that may be, one may surely say that the psychic processes which the 'new psychology' regards as primary are, as Professor Münsterberg