Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/172

160 not of specific intellectual truths perceived by the mind in the normal exercise of its functions, but of the emotional possibilities of our general intellectual constitution and its interests. I can quite readily conceive a being who should, intellectually, look upon an act of cruelty as I do, see what it means, and what are its consequences, and still have no repugnance to it; in that case I do not see what he could mean by calling it bad, or in saying that a life spent in cruelty is intrinsically worse than one spent in benevolence. Or, on the positive side, I can conceive a being contemplating artistic excellence, and feeling no sentiment of approval; in that case it would be meaningless to call it good. And since for all I know human beings might differ indefinitely in both their instinctive approvals and disapprovals, whereas it is less easy to conceive of them as differing in their judgments of intellectual truth when they have the same data before them, I am forced to say that the judgment of goodness is determined, in the end, not by the perception of an intellectual content or relationship, but by a certain feeling attitude toward a content, which possesses indeed many intellectual elements; and when this whole situation is reflected on, it gives me what I mean by good. Similarly of the ought: feeling seems to be necessary if we are to have that recognition of a qualitative difference which enables us to go beyond the good, and speak of the better, or the right. So far as I can at present see, the ought is reducible in the end to a sense of dislike which serves as an inhibitive force, and pulls us away from the thing to which desire may possibly be leading us, a situation only made possible indeed by our ability as rational beings to free ourselves from the sway of momentary passion, and look at this in its wider bearings, but which yet would have no motive power were not the wider end itself backed by feeling. And it has its intellectual justification in the fact that we find it a persistent force in human nature, a sort of feeling which reflection, and further experience, tend to encourage us in; its objectivity consists in this recognition, plus the general faith which we have, also by natural endowment, that to the requirements of human nature the universe is somehow fitted.

But such a statement will fail to carry quite its right meaning,