Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/439

423 good is simply to say that one's conscience approves it, the term morally good means a different thing in reference to every different person; it means in reference to me what my conscience approves, and in reference to you what your conscience approves, and so on. If my conscience sanctions duelling or blood-revenge, they are right, not for me alone, but for every one. To arrange it that every one shall obey the dictates of his own conscience and let other people obey the dictates of their own consciences, is, within certain limits, a very good practical measure; but it receives no justification from the theory that conscience is the test of right and wrong. On the contrary, this arrangement is wrong in every one of the million senses of that word, which this theory recognizes. Everybody is, on this theory, in strictness obliged to obey the dictates of everybody else's conscience quite as much as those of his own.

To this it may be said that I have pushed the point too far; that I attribute to the isolated individual an authority which he does not possess. This may be brought out by the illustration of color. The final test, it was said, of the color of things is the eye, but not your eye nor my eye. You and I may see a green object where other people see a red one; if we do so, it will not be said that the thing is both red and green, but that it is red, and that you and I are color-blind. Just so in matters of morality. At any given time and place there is a very general agreement in what people have no conscientious scruples about doing. The few who are eccentric should be recognized as such,—as morally blind. It is quite true that one time and people may differ widely from another in what its conscience sanctions. It is also true that times and peoples differ widely in justness of visual perception. We do not see footprints easily detected by the Indians. It took the genius of the early impressionists to see their pictures in the world about them; if we admit their portrayals to be true, it is not because they show us what we always saw, but because we can see it now. The same may be said of every advance in knowledge. One need not