Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/466

450 paradigm of 'perceptual' experience a 'conceptual abstract.' To leave it quite undescribed is to expose it to the chief objections that are urged against a thing-in-itself. When the author says, "I can receive a sense-impression without recognizing it, or a sense-impression does not involve consciousness" (p. 45, cf. p. 102), the reader may feel that the choice between a 'thing' that exists apart from experience, and an 'impression' that exists apart from consciousness, is a choice between the wolf and the wolf in sheep's clothing. Only a failure to grasp the historical motives for a 'metaphysical fetish' could make it possible for one to laugh the 'thing' out of countenance and invite the 'in-itselfness' to join in the chorus.

This course of lectures contains in outline a system of ethics worked out from the perfectionist point of view, and largely dominated by the spirit of Kant. Regard for what we have, and what we are; and, by sympathy, regard for what others have, and what they are, give us the four essentially independent and basal motives of conduct—egoism, self-respect, altruism, and respect for others. As psychological factors all motives are good. The object of our moral judgment is, however, not a motive as such, but the relation of motives, or the relative energy of their effect in us. Thus, the pleasure in cruelty is, like the feeling for tragedy, dependent on a definite relation of the effect of the pleasure and displeasure elements. "Cruelty arises and can arise only when the displeasure at the pain of the victim (i.e., sympathy), is small in comparison with the pleasure in the consciousness of power" (p. 53). All that is positive in man is good. "Not the willing of man is evil, but his not willing." Just as in the intellectual realm, the single experience always contains an element of truth, and it is only the judgment which is a relation between experiences that can be false, so the single motive in itself is good, and it is only in relation to others that evil can arise. Such parallels as this between the intellectual and the practical are a favorite devise with the author, and sometimes give him support for his argument which is more apparent than real. Thus the question as to the existence of an absolute morality is answered by pointing to our conviction in a universally valid truth in physics, despite the errors of the past and the unsettled problems of the present.

Utilitarianism and eudemonism, or the ethics of happiness, are criticized for placing the higher value upon what we have, rather than upon what we are. A moral disposition is what gives a man moral worth. Moral worth is nothing else than worth of personality. "All values which we know are either values for man or values of man. And the latter are the moral values" (p. 132).