Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/171

No. 2.] when it is applied to the superiority of the general good over what is just mine, seems to me to get its ethical significance only as it calls up the judgment of triviality; and the trivial differs from the less precisely in the emotional feeling of dislike which accompanies it. Of the feeling, one not unimportant ingredient is in a special sense intellectual,—the dislike which a reasonable being has of falling below the standard of impartiality and intellectual fairness, as he would do were he to exalt the claims of one unit over the—in the eyes of reason—equal claims of others.

If, therefore, I am asked to pronounce on the relative place of intellect and feeling in the ethical judgment, I should attempt to answer somewhat as follows: There is of course no ethical judgment without the exercise of the intellect; and our more complex and matured ones are shot through with intellectual elements. What I shall consider good in the concrete depends on my whole experience of life; my possibilities of appreciation, both positive and negative, represent a progressive refinement of taste which could not go on apart from more and more subtle intellectual distinctions also. Nevertheless, after I have made all these distinctions, there is something still which must not be left outside the picture; and that is the way in which the thing appeals to my feeling. Without this, the 'value' quality in the 'good' and the 'ought,' which distinguishes them from a mere judgment of fact or truth, would not be accounted for. And this emotional element goes back, apparently, not to intellect, but to our given constitution with its emotional possibilities; even the 'intellectual' elements which I have just noticed are in terms,