Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/623

607 whether this formal element be called reason, conscience, or moral sense, it represents a something pointing beyond the individual and his momentary feeling. The only point in common between an authority such as this, and that represented by pleasure, is that in both we find a motor force recognized by the individual. Pleasure actually does influence conduct, and the conscious adoption of an end by reason means just this, that the individual binds himself to its pursuit. The explicit adoption is but the expression of the devotion of the self to its ideals. Whether the feeling of obligation necessarily implies the recognition of a higher will to which the subject is bound need not be discussed here. The question of authority is settled by the recognition of the law.

The non-psychological theories of authority may be dismissed briefly. They are not properly theories of authority at all, in the sense in which that term is here used, but are rather theories which have been unconsciously used as substitutes for such by those who had not been roused to the existence of the problem. They are ontological or theological systems, and their authors have replied to the psychologists by reiterating the assertion of the existence of an objective order, either established in the existence of things, or dependent on the will or nature of God. These writers take no explicit notice of the subjective side of morality, in so far as it is concerned with the interest of the individual in the law, but look at the fixity of its contents, and, in their concern to guard it against the caprice of the individual, fail to show its authority over him.

That which renders such unconsciousness possible, is the dogmatic character of their philosophy, including its intellectualism. Their appeal is always to reason as against sense, but to reason in its revealing, not in its constitutive or practical character. That is, they lay the emphasis on the content of the rational ideas, rather than on the fact that these ideas are elements of the self. Consequently, not only are the latter open to skepticism as cognitive elements, but this skepticism also seems to involve their subjective value as regulative ideas