Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/445

431 is the agreeable feeling which arises from the harmony of nerve function. Bonnet's psychology of feeling is interesting. He distinguishes feeling and sensation. Sensation is objective; while feeling is subjective pleasure-pain. Pleasure arises in a moderate degree of nerve-activity, but the cause of pain is a violent activity. In his discussion of the activity of the soul he distinguishes between attention and volition. This activity is will. It is volition proper when directed upon the motor-nerves of the body, but when directed upon the nerves of the brain, it is attention. In his discussion of the nature of the soul, he criticises the faculty-psychology of the Wolffian school, and rules it out on the ground of physiological difficulties, and in this he was followed by Irwing, Lossius and Hissmann. They looked upon the mind as a unity with different activities, and endeavored to reduce them all to one primitive force (Grundkraff). Some claimed that sensation was fundamental, but Tetens objected to this and held that sensation, presentation, and thought are grades of the self-activity of the soul. Bonnet applies physiological explanations to many of the activities of the mind, and by this method accounted for the simpler functions, but did not extend it to comparison and judgment which he considered psychical. For Bonnet feeling is an important element in mind; it is feeling which moves the will, and it is in feeling that the consciousness of personal identity rests.

The rigorism of Kant's ethics is not a consequence of his rationalism. The former is not contained analytically in the latter, but a third term is required to connect them. Rationalism may claim that the imperative character of duty comes from reason alone; it may also distinguish between moral and practical good, between categorical and hypothetical imperatives, but this is not rigorism. Rigorism maintains that moral action is action without inclination, for the sake of the moral law. This rigorism is conditioned by Kant's view of the method of scientific ethics. Originally an adherent of the English school of ethics, Kant became so convinced of its theoretical weakness and its practical harmfulness that his own ethics takes the form of a passionate protest against it. In the first place, the ethics of feeling rests on a false method, which deduces the practical law from the notion of the good. This, according to Kant, is to base morality on feeling, and to destroy all morality. In the second place, Kant maintained that no science of morals can be founded on feeling, but that, on the contrary, the concept of a pure practical law is destroyed. If pleasure is the good, the peculiar worth and unconditioned obligation which attach to moral judgments disappear. From this Kant concluded that a scientific ethics must exclude all feeling. The nature of a categorical imperative must first be determined, and an object of the will is then