Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/178

164 as using within fixed limits this physical organism is an experience too unique to come within nerve-actions and reactions before pleasure and pain.

There is no need to multiply illustrations of the exercise of will in holding muscles still against pain or of those higher manifestations where we endure agony, not from any present suffering, but to avoid future loss.

In conclusion, and for completeness, reference should be made to the moral consciousness, i. e., the knowledge of obligation. This, too, is a fact in human experience, and as such demands to be traced to its ultimates. A significant thing, from the philosophical side, is Mr. Spencer's anticipatory publication of the "Data of Ethics." By this publication Mr. Spencer has recognized, what many of his smaller adherents fail to know, that, in ethics, as an attempt to give a rational account of the consciousness of obligation, all thinking finds its highest and most serious application.

We discover in the nervous system no provision for the consciousness of duty; indeed, put in this bald way, no materialist would look there for any such consciousness. Duty as something to be done for its own sake, apart from creed, or sect, or party, or consequences, is properly considered an evidence of culture in thought and action. It is futile to attempt to resist the application of evolution to ethics by any appeal to the transcendent beauty of the moral ideal. The rose is a transcendent thing in color, fragrance, and outline; still, it develops from that which has none of these.

Development of some kind is a fact. The stress of inquiry in ethics is, I think, here: Can the sense of right and wrong, however rudimentary, be produced by pains and pleasures? In the nervous system we have the physical antecedents for pain and pleasure; though no such sensations are in the nervous system, they are in us. Ethics therefore presents the development theory a further difficulty, viz., the one of passing rationally from pains and pleasures to right and wrong. Even Mr. Spencer's form of the development theory, which would seek to find in the conduct called ethical but a part of conduct in general, and to regard all conduct, both ethical and non-ethical, as adjustments of means to ends; even this form of the theory must be able to make it plain that the transition from conduct non-ethical to conduct ethical is gradual, composed of many steps, and not, as experience seems to teach, sudden, distinct, and sharp.

What belief, then, does reason require in our present state of knowledge as to the relation between nerve-matter and consciousness? We distinguish two series, two kinds of experiences; these stand to one another as outward and inward, physical and spiritual, compound and simple. We do not know the nature of either. The terms matter and soul are our highest generalizations from experience. The materialist errs when he pronounces upon the character of matter, affirming that