Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/658

644 clear that a moral judgment of some such import as the following is implied,—that the agent ought to have possessed, and ought, therefore, previously to have acquired, the greater knowledge possessed by the external observer; or that he ought to have used greater deliberation before the act. In either case, it is not the knowledge as such, but a willingness to acquire and employ knowledge, that is deemed requisite and is thus posited in the moral ideal. But if knowledge of the consequences of conduct has no assured place in the ideal, it becomes at least doubtful whether any knowledge is thus distinguished.

It may interest us in this connection, to recall to mind a certain very profound change which has affected the moral ideal in the course of the history of civilization,—the gradual inwardizing of the ideal, its purging of all that is external to the volitional disposition of the agent. Thus strength and personal beauty have been stripped away, together with excellence of birth and reputation. Only in highly organized societies is intentional injury legally distinguished from unintentional, both being in earlier societies equally exposed to the resentment and vengeance of the injured party; and, according to the religious belief of even highly civilized peoples, divine punishment falls as rigorously upon the unwilling as upon the willing offender. Now the unexpected outcome of an act is as thoroughly external to the disposition which the act evinces as physical strength is to integrity. And so one might be tempted to describe any disagreement with Clifford and Meinong in this matter, as an ethical atavism,—a reversion to an earlier, though very recent, type of conscience.

What has just been said will fail altogether of its object, if it be understood as an argument against what I have called 'intellectual pragmatism.' My purpose has been simply to show that if intellectual pragmatism is to be maintained, it may well be in a form not inconsistent with ethical subjectivism. As for the eclectic's notion of subjectivism, that, as I hope to make clear, is