Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/665

651 observed, it will be necessary for us to dissent from this view, on the ground that it asserts an unreal atomism of moral acts, as if each in itself were a complete moral life. We must therefore restrict the proposition to acts in themselves moral, and to these in so far as they are in themselves moral; recognizing that an act, whether with or without a rightness or wrongness of its own (when viewed in isolation), may be given a new moral significance when regarded as the continued expression of previous sentiments and choices. With this reservation in mind, we may then hold that every moral act is accompanied by a specific sentiment which determines its quality as right or wrong.

Perhaps this position may be made more clear by contrast with a certain celebrated theory, to which it bears an external resemblance. It has been held that the desire to do right (which we have admitted to be a possible desire) must accompany every right action; so that in such action the particular end in view is desired only for the general end of doing right. The experience of men has not confirmed this theory, and it has not now a wide acceptance. The misconception upon which it rests is apparent when we consider the parallel proposition for negative worth. That every morally wrong action is accompanied by a desire to do wrong (which, by the way, is a perfectly possible desire); that wrong conduct is essentially constituted as such by the desire to do wrong, so that the immediate end is desired only for the sake of the ultimate end of wrong-doing,—these are propositions which no one would for a moment consider; yet they are scarcely more unreasonable or untrue to fact than the above. Our own belief is far simpler,—that in moral conduct the agent is conscious of his volition as right or wrong.

If even this proposition seems too extreme, that may be due to the narrowness of our terminology, according to which a whole host of apparent exceptions (hereafter to be briefly considered) must be recognized as only apparent. Or the disagreement may be in a measure due to a current misapprehension of the problem, whether any conduct (conscious human action) is ethically indifferent. The question, be it observed, is not whether between right and wrong there is a neutral region, a null-point;