Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/666

650 consciousness of obligation is inherent in reason itself. But all this is merely to restate the ultimate fact of a reverent submission to the claims of goodness. Now the Intuitionist and Transcendentalist have been prone to take this restatement of the fact for an explanation and even a vindication of it. The former holds that obligation originates from the mind itself and is not imposed on it from without; the latter declares that it transports the moral agent into an intelligible world which transcends the realm of sensible experience. Still, though the fact may thus be surveyed from the point of view of its originating source or of its cosmic range, this is neither to explain it nor to vindicate it. I recognize explicitly that its existence cannot be accounted for nor its worth demonstrated. Goodness is, nevertheless, justified of her children, as life is by the living and (we may fancy) existence by what exists. Our feeling of ideality—what ought to be—stands on precisely the same footing as our feeling of reality—what is; they are indemonstrable, inexplicable, and unanalyzable data of our intelligence.

The empirical theory, on the other hand, gives a true account, not, indeed, of the abstract nature of moral obligation—submission to the recognized authority of goodness—but of the associated feelings which in our concrete experience accompany the sense of duty, foster its growth, and perhaps even make its first emergence in consciousness a possibility. The higher functions of consciousness emerge later than the lower, which, though not identical with the higher, are yet their necessary conditions. Thus the child cannot rise to the stage of volition until, on the one hand, motor material is furnished by the reflexes of the involuntary mechanism, and, on the other, intelligence is sufficiently developed to form from recollection of passively received pleasures and pains the conception of desirable ends. Yet a voluntary movement would not be adequately described by a history embracing even all the child's sensations and memories and all his automatic, instinctive, and reflex actions. It is the same with moral obligation. And the sole mistake of the empirical moralist is