Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/664

650 It has been a familiar subject of inquiry, whether to moral worth corresponds a specific appetite or desire,—as hunger is distinct from fatigue, and both from the craving for society. Of late, it has been customary to answer in the negative, on the ground that the satisfaction of this appetite would be but another element in the synthesis of character, to be restricted like the rest. The answer is essentially correct, but the problem is obscured by the crude psychology in which it had its origin. Any conceivable experience may be connected in consciousness with a pleasant or unpleasant affective reaction, and thus be correlated with a specific desire. I may have a desire to do right, just as I may desire to desire food; and these desires, like any others, have their appropriate limits in a well ordered life. But the limits of the desire to do right or be good are practically infinite, because the satisfaction of this desire cannot interfere with the proper satisfaction of any other desire; except, perhaps, that an absorbed regard to so general an end might interfere with a man's attention to each particular occasion for action. In so far, then, the above answer is erroneous; for there may well enough be a desire to do right; and, as a matter of fact, such a desire operates strongly in the life of normal men. Whether this desire is ever stimulated or reinforced by a peculiar organic complex comparable to hunger or fatigue, need not concern us here. But we note that the answer which we have criticised is correct in this,—that to any particular act of right conduct the general desire to do right is not essential. No other desire is necessary than the desire for the object in question. Moral worth attaches, indeed, not to the desired object as such, but to the desire itself as a manifestation of character. We are pleased or displeased at being pleased or displeased to act thus and thus,—a species of affective self-consciousness.

A thorough-going subjectivism would now declare that every act to which a moral judgment can apply must be preceded (or accompanied) by a moral sentiment with its implicated judgment of right and wrong; for, according to such a theory, any later judgment of the act is simply an approximate reproduction of that which gave the act its moral quality. As we have already