Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/246

230 of the theory of the rise of the ethical sense as held by many of the Association psychologists, I may state the lack it has in the view of those of other schools of thought who have criticised it. The lack is this:—that the theory of habit does not afford any adequate account of the sense we have in our acutest ethical experiences that what we ought to do may run counter to our habitual tendencies. On the habit view, only that kind of action would get the right to have ethical feeling attached to it which was so prevalent and regular in the normal life of the individual as to be reflected in his everyday conduct. But the oft-recurring antithesis in practice, no less than the recognition of the same antithesis in ethical theory—see, for example, the statement of it from the pen of a scientist in the Evolution and Ethics of Huxley—between the 'is' and the 'ought,' serves to set the objection to this theory clearly in the light. According to Mr. Huxley the habit of being immoral should make the immoral come to seem right.

This criticism of the habit theory may be put in the terms of the view of the child's social growth without any trouble; and that may serve to show it more forcibly. The child has, as we have seen, a habitual self. It is the outcome of the assimilations and actions which he has already learned. So the tendencies to conduct in realizing the behests of this self are, it is easy to see, the same actions which the advocates of the habit theory bring forward as the acts which, as due to habit or custom, are morally right. Now if we agree with this theory, and say that those acts which are guaranteed by habit are the right ones, then what shall we do with all the tendencies to action which come from the presence of the other self which we have found the child entertaining also, the accommodating self? The accommodating self is the learning self; the thought of self which comes to imitate, to be teachable, sympathetic, generous. I think it only needs to be put into words that both these selves are equally real to convince us that those sharp approvals or condemnations of ourselves which we experience in our judgments of right and wrong, are not always administered in favor of the self of habit.