Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/198

180 failure not with reference to some external relational system but with reference to the inherent meaning of moral experience itself. Moral failure then is self-failure. A book is more than so much wood-pulp, printer's ink and binding; to judge its worth in terms of how successfully its bulk might prop a defective table leg or its paper stuff a crack in the wall is to test it in terms of an extraneous system of purposes, and to leave out of account an immanent purposiveness to which its most characteristic quality serves as a clue. There is an analogue of the auto-teleological method in many of our aesthetic judgments—for instance, when within the confines of the art form chosen we distinguish the question of the meaning of a play or picture from questions of technique and execution and critical comparison with other works of art.

So much for a rather general characterization of the auto-teleological method. On the surface it seems strong where the biological and psychological methods are weak. It suggests a sympathetic and exhaustive reading of the meaning of moral experience, and offers an incisive, not a glancing, study of the moral consciousness. On closer inspection, however, these are found to be advantages of promise rather than of solid achievement. The term 'meaning' turns out to be ambiguous, and other confusions and difficulties result.

For purposes of further exposition and criticism I shall discuss two types of the auto-teleological method. They are (1) the Kantian type, and (2) the type current in personal idealism and pragmatism.

(1) It is not my purpose to attempt a criticism of Kantian ethics: I am concerned simply with Kant's interpretation and use of the term 'moral experience.' In the Grundlegung Kant begins with what he calls die gemeine sittliche Vernunfterkenntniss—a term roughly identical with our term commonsense morality. In the preface he distinctly disclaims the psychological and empirical points of view His point of departure is, of course, a psychological datum, but his analysis is professedly as little a psychological one of will relations as his doctrine of space is an empirical analysis of the facts of space-perception. He