Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/664

648 bring us to understand, love, and acquiesce in goodness as the supreme fact in the life of man and God! The non-religious adoration of duty for the sake of duty is a consciousness not easily maintained. In strong natures it passes easily into stoical and even cynical heartlessness, in formal natures into prudery, in weaklings into license, and in the average man into indifference. What the abstract sense of obligation, divorced from piety, is likely to become, has been told us by the prophet of the new era of natural, as contrasted with supernatural morality. The pure sense of duty, Mr. Herbert Spencer declares, will decline with the progress of evolution and ultimately disappear. This prediction is, it is true, largely based on an empirical theory of the origin of the consciousness of obligation. And we may refuse to believe that a day will ever arrive when men will be irresponsive to the solemn claims of moral law. But, be that as it may, there seems to be no good reason for exalting the abstract feeling of duty above the mixed or concrete consciousness of obligation, which is as imperishable as man's social, rational, and religious nature. The project of naturalizing morality deserves more consideration than it has yet received, if, as would seem to be the case, the intention is to set aside as superfluous the religious grounds and sanctions of obligation. These are facts for the plain man; and is not his experience as much entitled to a hearing as the experience of the moralist? Here, as in remorse, is a point where moral life and ethical theories act and react upon one another. Perhaps a fuller recognition of the diversities of the former would lead to greater harmony among the latter.

Obligation is one we all bow to the authority of the law; obligation is diverse we submit ourselves for different reasons. But these reasons, it should be noticed, all have reference, ultimately, to some principle of our nature. In other words, the ground of obligation is always purely subjective. If we say that society puts us under obligation, the meaning is that the sympathetic impulses of our nature combined with our fear of social punishment lead us to do the right. If we say the ground of obligation is the will or nature of God, the