Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/48

Rh not therefore turn out to be the ideal. The judgments: This is, and, This is good, are once for all different; and they have to be reached by widely different methods of investigation.” — Such are the two opposing views. We cannot yet repeat in detail the arguments for each, but we can suggest a few of them.

“See,” says the supporter of the first view, “how absurd it is to evolve moral theories out of one’s inner consciousness. What happens to such theories? Either nature favors them, and then they survive in the struggle for life, or they are unequal to the tasks of the real world, and then their supporters go mad, or die. But in the first case they are merely such theories as could have been much better reached by a process, not of guessing at truth, but of studying nature’s laws. In the second case, the result is enough for common sense people. The moral theory that is destined to die out for want of supporters can hardly triumph over more useful opinions. If we want a moral theory, we must therefore consider what kind of action, what rule of life, wins in the battle of existence, and tends most to outlive its rivals. That rule is the one destined to become universal.”

The maintainers of the second view are ready with their answer. “What sort of morality is this?” they say. “Is this the morality of the martyrs? Is this an ideal that can satisfy us? The preservation of truly valuable life may indeed be an end in itself, and therefore an action that tends, on the whole, to destroy rather than to save such life may be bad from any point of view; but the moral thinker is not, on