Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/195

177 of a commendable inconsistency, the good may be defined in terms of a rational negation of this irrational will to live or in terms of 'playing the game.' Life, either the richest or poorest of concepts, must for a biological system of ethics be the richest, else there is not a sufficient intake in value. But such richness comes only with a well or ill applied notion of purposiveness and the recognition of purposes as factors in evolution. It seems necessary to extend the theory of natural selection to the more complex and more subjective ranges of experience and to ideals that have little or nothing to do with mere living and continuing to live. The earlier evolutionists—Huxley, notably—saw the difficulties of such an extension, and refused to make it; recent writers have sought to make headway by taking simple, concise terms such as natural selection, adjustment, life, widening them and packing them beyond the sustaining power of the method used. Much of dynamic sociology, much of the theory of moral ideals, is nothing but a mass of generalities masked by a barbaric terminology; or if of value, part-product at least of other methods than a purely biological one. The charge to be made against the biological interpretation of moral experience then seems to be this: we are offered an objective method; this method works well as long as the terms are concise, the problems simple and subject to experimental tests; the general point of view from which the method sprang itself demands an extension of it to social and moral problems; at least for the present such an extension has meant little else than an alarming vaporization of terms and a lapse to the subjective, from which we had been promised escape.

The psychological method of interpreting moral experience affords a sharp contrast to the biological. It frankly starts with introspective material, and is therefore the natural and most direct method. It fixes on certain not unusual complications within the consciousness of the individual; certain feelings, impulses, tensions. The concept 'moral experience' in this sense serves to bind together such experiences as: the sense of. obligation, the consciousness of certain final values in conduct, the sense of guilt, the emotional backsweep of a halted conscience,