Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/45

20 with a description of the “moral sentiments,” or with a panegyric of the “moral principle in man,” or in these days especially, with a great deal of talk about savages and about the “evolution of the moral sense.” Having occupied so many pages in entertaining digressions, when they come, if they ever do come, to the central problem, namely, the nature of moral distinctions considered purely as such, such writers have no time to do more than to appeal to the common sense of readers, and then to pass on to consequences. It seldom occurs to them that a description of the “moral faculties” in this man or in that, or a history of moral and immoral notions and practices as they have come up among men in the order of evolution, is no more a “moral philosophy,” in the proper sense, than is a description of the coinage or of the products of any country or of the world a true explanation of the difference between commercial solvency and insolvency.

We for our part shall be obliged, however, by our limited space, to aim forthwith at the heart of the problem of a philosophical ethic. What is the real nature of this distinction between right and wrong? What truth is there in this distinction? Is this truth relative to particular conditions, or independent thereof? What ideal of life results? These things we want to know; and we do not want to spend our time more than we shall be obliged to do in irrelevant descriptions of the mental states of this or that man. All mental states now interest us only in so far as we first see what logical bearing they may have upon our problem. We shall have to