Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/159

134 both. Our indifference is not the indifference of ignorance, but of knowledge; not of failure to understand either end, but of readiness to realize both ends. Hence it follows that moral skepticism is itself the result of an act, namely, of the act by which we seek to realize in ourselves opposing aims at the same time. This observation is of the greatest importance to us, and we must dwell upon it. It shows us that above all our skepticism is the supreme End that makes the skepticism itself possible.

The ethical aims themselves are all of them the expression of somebody’s will. Their conflict is the conflict of wills. Doubt about them depends upon the realization of their existence and of their opposition. Therefore this doubt depends for its very existence on the conditions of this realization. We have tried to state what the conditions are. To realize opposing ends so completely that one feels a genuine doubt which of them to accept, implies, we say, the simultaneous provisional acceptance of both. And this may be shown in a more popular psychological way, as well as in a more general philosophical way. We take the psychological way first.

How can I know that there is anywhere a will, W, that chooses for itself some end, E? Really to know this implies something more than mere outer observation of the facts. One must repeat in one’s own mind more or less rapidly or imperfectly this will, W, that one conceives to exist in somebody else. And this need of repetition is a well-known psychological truth, very easily illustrated by all sorts of commonplace facts. Let us refer to some of these.