Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/200

182 logical, or functional complexity of moral experience. Morality is thought of as the one white strand in a riotous tangle of color or as the one unimpassioned demand amid a tumult of heated pleas and contentious desires. Its convincingness and its simplicity are dwelt on. Kant in giving too simple a reading to the meaning of moral experience shares the failing of most constructive moralists—an excessive use of simplifying devices. Of psychological complexity moral experience is cleared far beyond the legitimate point. Much as ethics has at times suffered from that wastrel of good material, the psychologizing moralist, it has on the whole suffered more from that admirer of beggared meanings, the ultra-formal moralist. Of functional complexity moral experience is not even suspected. It might be objected that all sciences aim at the simplification of their subject-matter; that it is impossible to carry the concrete moral life bodily over into ethics. It is true that science is much too sober-minded for the motley of experience, and that the concreteness of things disappears as thought washes the color out of existence. To this loss in sense-value we willingly submit on condition that there is a gain in thought-value, that the complexity of the sense-world is replaced by a complex but orderly system of relations. The customary functional simplification of moral experience yields no such gain. Formulas like the Kantian do not admit of a system of principles corresponding to the intricate network of relations in a science like physics. They do not get full value out of the concept 'moral experience.' Morality is defined as a constructive, purposive process with a meaning of its own, but that meaning is misread. Kant's reading is too simple and too formal. In its simplicity there is something of the vigor but also of the unloveliness of a devotee of the sense of duty; in its formalism there is an excessive concern about the problem of legitimacy, prompted by dread of the bar sinister of everything empirical. The result is an ethical system all the poorer for its mistaken intellectual economy, facing the problem of a sound investment in values with no resources of its own and no outlook on help.

A third objection might be urged against the Kantian variety