Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/193

175 destroy at one blow our intellectual solace and our practical comfort. Metaphysical occultism with its shadow play and its lack of vital practical touch seems quite as profitless.

Small wonder then that in this difficulty moralists use the term 'moral experience' as the saving clause. It must be admitted that to interpret ethics as a system of certain values of experience and to inquire into the general phases and laws which underlie that experience might result in avoiding subjectivism in its worst form. Again there seems to be a distinct gain in an intellectual retrenchment whereby values are limited to the circle of experience, construed as the conditioning factors of experience and given full sway within that circle.

Still, the gain will be only apparent unless the term 'moral experience' is clearly defined and skilfully handled. It is my purpose to show that as it appears in current interpretations of ethics it is too vague or too shallow or too plastic to be of any real service, and that it at best disguises helplessness. I ought to add by way of caution that I leave untouched the more general problem of the ultimate justification of empiricism in ethics. My task is the more modest one of looking into the meaning of a single concept, moral experience, and of attempting whatever criticism and reconstruction of it the ambitious and difficult program of ethics seems to demand.

Moral experience is usually marked off from the rest of experience in one of three ways: in terms of either (1) a peculiar psychical complication or (2) peculiar biological bearings or (3) peculiar teleological connections. These three methods of interpreting moral experience we shall now briefly consider; discussing for the sake of convenient grouping the biological method before the others, although it is neither the most direct nor the most natural of the three.

The biological method, with genuine distrust of the subjective, is aimed at an objective test. The criterion of life is driven deep into the problem of moral values. It is the wedge that splits moral experience from non-moral experience. Moral experience is meant to comprise all biologically vital activities: that is, whatever has a bearing on the existence and persistence of life.