Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/665

649 is that we lead virtuous lives because of our hope of future reward or our fear of future punishment, or because our hearts yearn to be in conformity with the holiness of God. If men were insensible to pleasures and pains, if they had no sense of divine things, the voice of a God-given law would not arrest them. Similarly those who set the ground of moral obligation in the majesty of the law really find it in man's recognition of the law, his interest in it, and reverence for it. If this feeling be dead or inactive, the law will appeal in vain. That it is not active in the masses of mankind, we have already seen. Perhaps the majority are influenced by considerations of religion and social requirement and legal penalty. Whatever makes men sensitive to the claims of moral law, has its place and worth in the evolution of human character; but the noblest spring of obligation is a love of goodness which is fed by love of God and love of our fellow-men.

We have now advanced far enough in this analysis of facts to form an estimate of the different ethical theories of obligation. As previously suggested, we shall find that these theories are all justified by isolated aspects of our total concrete sense of obligation.

The indispensable and quintessential element of moral obligation is free homage to a law or ideal of goodness. It is the merit of the theory sometimes called Intuitional and sometimes Transcendental to have fixed upon this fact as the heart of the matter. No other theory has so fully recognized our sense of unconditional duty. Many other theories have, indeed, by implication, if not outspokenly, repudiated this moral experience as illusory or factitious. The facts, therefore, need to be reëxamined; and current psychology will incline the investigator to look for considerable individual differences. Nevertheless, so far as I can make out, it will not be denied that every, moral agent recognizes something (whatever it be) as absolutely desirable, as good, and as therefore obligatory. If we try to conceive a human being divested of this sense of obligation, we figure him as a lunatic or a monster. If reason is the differentia of the human species, we may say that the