Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/83

No. 1.] influence upon our accounts of moral phenomena. For in the latter science, if we start with a dualistic epistemology, we must trace all the more complex phenomena back to the 'pure' experiences, which, as ' actual,' rather than 'symbolic,' must be the source of validity. But if we hold that knowing is all of a piece, and that in knowledge there is no such distinction as 'speculative' and 'real,' we look upon our latest and most highly developed judgments of moral phenomena as the explicated truth and validity of all that was implied in the earliest and simplest experiences. From this view-point, psychology can in no sense claim to give an account of the real facts, since its whole procedure is based upon abstractions which are made solely for methodological purposes.—It may not be irrelevant to say, by way of an additional remark, that the only manner in which we can escape from subjectivism in ethics, as in matters pertaining to truth and knowledge, lies in a recognition of the fact that the consistency at which we aim is not solely an inner agreement within the circle of our own individual experiences, but an agreement between our experiences and an order of reality which has its being without us—a truth of which Locke, in spite of his definition of knowledge, was fully aware. When one passes from "I ought" to "you ought," one does not mean, in the opinion of the reviewer, simply "you must if your theory is to correspond with your practice," or "you must unless you are prepared to play false to your own scheme of life, "or to the code of your class of society or nation (cf. pp. 357 ff.), but one means also that you are obligated in virtue of the fact that we all in common possess an essential moral nature. If one asserts that "you ought" to accept the conclusion of a syllogism, one means it not merely hypothetically (i.e., if your theory is to be consistent), but that you must recognize its validity in virtue of the very constitution of rationality in which we all are participants. Furthermore, this kind of 'objectivity' can be explained only on the conviction that what holds good for reason depends upon and is valid for an order of reality without us.

"The Goal of Ethics," which is the title of Chapter VII, raises the question how far and on what lines the duality of the moral ideal is "soluble within the limits of the ethical experience and how far that experience would need to be modified in order to set it finally free from the taint of self-contradiction." "In attempting to free itself from its inherent inconsistencies morality will be found to transform itself into religion." The present chapter, however, attacks the problem without trespassing beyond "the limits of ethical science." Within such limits, it follows from the general position advanced that