Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/515

No. 3.] somewhat as the meaning of justice was known at the outset to the Socratic enquirer.

(b) In so far as the will in seeking its cause or causes must choose from empirically given materials, Royce's ethics is an ethics 'from below.' As a psychological doctrine, Royce accepts the entire dependence of the will upon previous experience for its contents, quite as James stated the case. "We can never consciously and directly will any really novel course of action. We can directly will an act only when we have before done that act, and have so experienced the nature of it." This principle holds good not alone for choices of physical alternatives, but for moral choices as well: we cannot choose to be self-controlled unless we have first experienced what self-control means. It is through imitation that we first find ourselves taking attitudes which have moral value: and having thus become, as it were, involuntarily good, we may then deliberately pursue goodness. But the first data for all voluntary behavior are furnished by instinctive actions. These instincts, as we inherit them, are "planlessly numerous" (p. 373); their existence imposes upon us a problem of organization. Certainly it is experience which here drives us on to morals.

''(c) But neither for Holt nor for Royce can the principle of choice or selection be given with the materials for choice as a datum of experience. This principle of choice has its psychological expression as an 'instinct' of greater generality. To this extent, ethics can be neither 'from below' nor 'from above,' but from within.'' All evaluations make use of a standard of evaluation; and however the things to be chosen or estimated may be found in experience, and the standard itself come to consciousness only with the material of the problem, it is not the data which have furnished the standard.

Royce follows James in treating the psychology of choice as a matter of selective attention, an "attentive furthering of our interest in one act or desire as against another." Such