Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/167

142 effort of will one thinking being can realize the will of another. But does this tell me that I ought thus to realize the conflicting wills that are in the world? And if I do not, what significance has this physical fact for me? But, on the other hand, physical facts aside, is not your doctrine just your capricious determination to respect the conflicting aims that exist in the world?”

This objection, if made, would be founded on a misunderstanding of what we have discovered. We have discovered something that has a value for us quite independently of its importance as a mere physical fact. We set out to find a distinction between right and wrong. Our difficulty always was that, since this distinction involves the acceptance of a highest aim as the standard of judgment, and since there are numerous aims possible, we always were confused by the fact that among these manifold aims there was found no ground of choice. For to show any reason why we have chosen in a given way between two of these aims, is to have a third aim that includes one and excludes the other. And the choice of this third aim seemed again just as accidental as the first choice would have been without this third aim to justify it. Thus our original thought of an aim, as the foundation of an ethical doctrine, had been shattered before our eyes into a spray of separate possible or actual aims, and we saw no way of collecting this spray again into unity. If that was the reason for our skepticism, then of course anything more that we may say about ethics must presuppose a hearer who can feel such skepticism, at