Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/497

No. 3.] to know which are edible, and (if we wish) to eat them. "Right is that conduct, attained through discrimination of the facts, which fulfils all of a man's wishes at once, suppressing none." (p. 131).

There are thus two conditions which conduct must satisfy in order to be moral. It must be autonomous, and it must fulfil my wishes. It must be free in the sense of containing within my own knowledge all the reasons for my conduct; and it must be free in the further sense of liberating that in me which craves an outlet. The condition of the repressed individual is unfree; his will is divided against itself; while he does one thing, there is a secretly rebellious fraction of himself which longs for something else, the forbidden fruit. He cherishes the delusion that some actions are 'delightful, yet sinful'; and so far, while rejecting them, he remains privately attached to them, hence in bondage, rebellious, and unmoral.

The way of moral improvement is in general such as to satisfy both these conditions at once; for it is by a process of 'discrimination' that one finds it possible to satisfy the repressed wish. For example, I have a wish for social amusement and relaxation. The world of facts provides me with companions and places of amusement. But the censor has declared that the available amusements, theaters perhaps, are bad; and I am in the position of one who faces a field of poisonous mushrooms: my wishes must be repressed. What is needed is a discrimination; if I trust my own eyes, there is 'the easily perceivable fact that the theater is partly good and partly bad'; and with this bit of wisdom comes the release of my rightful desires. This use of the word bad as applied to theaters, etc., invites some attention; for there is no doubt that the bad theater has the power of satisfying just those wishes that were repressed. And one who freely indulges in bad theaters is not guilty of that fear of experience which marks the dominance of the censor. If we condemn this indulgence it would seem at first sight to be on some as yet unacknowledged ground. Holt himself makes an apparently extra-scientific appeal to 'conscience' (p. 120), or to "a sound prejudice against unbridled frivolity, and a normal