Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/441

425 sense both red and not red, any more than there is in an object weighing both a pound and less than a pound, if the first pound is troy weight and the second avoirdupois. But you tell me that Smith, too, finds the rose red, and say it with an air as if that clinched it. Who is Smith that he can give the rose a redness which it did not have before? His eye is but another standard; not a better one. Or is it that you and Smith are two; and that Jones, who opposes you, is only one? The omnipotence of two to one I admit in practical affairs, but you must not introduce politics into metaphysics. The rose before was both red and green; now that Smith is introduced it is red twice over and green,—red according to your eye, and red according to Smith's. Just as a pound troy weight is less than a pound avoirdupois and less than a Roman pound. Even if you and Jones and Smith all agreed on the color, there would still be no unity of standard; the rose would be red three times over, simply. The majority vote would simply be replaced by a vote by acclamation. This in the sphere of color. I need not say that in the sphere of morality all this is, if not more true, at least more striking. In judgments of color, the general agreement (which, by-the-bye, is popularly overestimated) obscures in one the fact that each opinion was stamped in a different mint, from a different die. In judgments on morality the agreement is much less striking, and the multiplicity of standard much less obscured. If so, this second definition of the words moral and good leads quite as plainly to a conflict of duties and ideals as the first definition did.

Up to this point we have been considering moral ideals. That one is obliged to act in accordance with these ideals is, I believe, always assumed. It is our present purpose to ascertain in what sense one is obliged to do so. To this it is pertinent to call to mind the familiar fact that there are certain sciences whose controlling object is knowledge, and certain others whose controlling object is application of knowledge to practice. Sciences of the practical stamp—logic and hygiene, for example—purport to assign the means to some given end. Each of them consists, or, if completed, would consist, of a