Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/75

50 Instincts in general are useful, not because they are infallible, much less because they are rational (for they are neither), but because they work quickly and are less capricious than are our less habitual impulses, and so, in common life, are our substitutes for reason. But, in theory, no act is good merely because the instinct called conscience approves of it; nor does conscience in any man always instinctively approve of good acts. Therefore conscience is, for the purpose of founding an ethical theory, as useless as if it were a mere fiction. It gives no foundation for moral distinctions.

To be sure, we must be understood as referring here not to the moral consciousness of man in its highest rational manifestations; for that there is a rational and well-founded moral consciousness we ourselves desire to show. The conscience that we criticise is conscience as an instinct. When people say that so and so is the right because the immediate declaration of conscience shows it to be the right, they generally mean that so and so is right because it feels right. And when moralists found their ethical doctrine on conscience, they are in great danger of making their whole appeal to mere feeling. But such mere feeling can only give us problems; it cannot solve problems. To illustrate by a notable case: When Butler, in analyzing the data of conscience, in his “Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue,” comes upon the fact that benevolence, or the effort to increase the general happiness, is, for our common