Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/439

425 of Ethical Theory are selected as the subject for examination. To test these statements, a series of ten questions was recently given to the members of the psychological classes in the University of Wisconsin, resulting in the receipt of 152 sets of answers. The replies exhibit fundamental divergences and contradictions in regard to the matter, immediacy, certainty, and object of moral judgments. Attention is called to the possibilities afforded by such a method of objective investigation into the causes of moral judgments. If the various answers to questions such as those given can be correlated with various mental traits, with the power of abstraction, the power and habitual direction of the imagination, with temperament, age, sex, and environment; or if, when brought face to face with his own inconsistencies, the person questioned can be led to describe the nature of the difference between his various attitudes toward a series of similar problems; if this and much more of the same kind can be done, the foundation will have been laid for a theory of the conditions of moral judgment, which shall not be at the mercy of either the ideals or the whims of individuals, or passing generations. Some fragmentary data of the kind demanded have been suggested to the. writer in the course of his investigations, but he has thought it advisable to withhold them because they can acquire real significance only as part of a system of facts, most of which still await the discoverer.

The author rejects all the current hypotheses with regard to the nature of the ethical motive, and maintains that the recent studies in the "psychology of economic activity" enable us for the first time to discover the origin of moral impulses, and the conditions of their growth. He starts with the theory that utility and value are not qualities inherent in objective things or conditions, but "phenomena that diminish as the consumption of the means of satisfying desire increases." Every want admits of satisfaction, and every satisfaction may become satiety. This theory implies (1) that 'economic satisfaction' is the pleasurable activity of a particular organ or group of organs at a particular time and in a particular way; (2) that, if certain organs suffer deprivation while particular organs are being fully satisfied, the neglected organs set up a protest. This hunger of the neglected parts of our nature, and this protest of the entire organism against the over-indulgence of any one appetite, is the ethical motive in its original physiological form. There is thus a fundamental difference between the 'economic motive' and the ethical motive. The former is a desire for a particular satisfaction of a particular organ in a particular way at a particular time; the latter is the desire for the varied satisfaction of the entire organism through continuing time. This account of the subject is of course entirely physiological, but "no modern psychologist will object to