Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/196

178 the tension of a divided duty and a blocked will. For introspective psychological analysis they would present themselves as experiences marked by poignancy, incisiveness and carrying power; for objective analysis they are compounds of simpler emotional and intellectual elements and elementary relations; for functional analysis they are psychic forces of tremendous influence in the shaping of conduct and the directing of judgment. With a veering emphasis on one or the other of these types of method we may get the crudeness of an experience meeting, the dissecting mania of presentational psychology, or the unlooked-for shifts of functional psychology.

In criticizing the psychological interpretation of moral experience it seems best to take presentational psychology as the representative type. That is what the method itself would consistently demand, and its adherents would look with distrust on any merger with the third, the teleological, method. What the relation is between the purity of their scientific ideal and the meagreness of their resources in dealing with complex appreciative processes even on the descriptive side, it is not for us to say; this much, however, is certain that ethics has little to gain by aristocratic penury. The presentational psychologist never gets the full import of a moral experience, for he is everywhere working away from the concrete synthetic meaning side. Ethics when in the grip of such a method is in danger of being reduced to a descriptive science. Objectively, this may or may not be a calamity; subjectively, from the point of view of ethics itself, it is nothing short of disaster. If ethics means to be normative, its psychology must be schematic, and its method not exclusively the psychological. As a matter of fact, ethics ignores many interesting complications. For example, it ignores the results of psychiatry, such facts as dissociation of personality, congenital aberrations of moral sensibility found among criminals. It ignores the results of individual and variational psychology. To what extent such an attitude is defensible, it is hard to say, but it is impossible to deny all force to the following lines of defense. The first is this. Ethics is in aim and spirit normative and constructive, and constructive in quite a distinct sense. A