Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/83

58 It ought to be a commonplace of morals that there are certain times when the moral reason must cast aside the moral instinct, when the lover of the right must silence the voice of conscience. The more dangerous such moments are, the more dreadful the mistakes that people at such times are apt to make, the more necessary it is that the moralist should discover some criterion whereby to decide when instinct fails. And this criterion cannot be conscience itself. We must seek yet deeper.

Our criticism of conscience is only another example of the method before applied to the criticism of the moral ideals. You make a distinction between right and wrong, you give to this distinction the dignity of a principle, you deduce special moral judgments therefrom. But then some one asks you for any foundation for the principle, beyond your own caprice. You thereupon seek to produce an ultimate reason for your faith. And your ultimate reason — what is it but some fact external to your choice and to your ideal judgments? But such dead external facts were just what you wanted to avoid. You had said that an ideal must have only an ideal foundation. And now you say that the ideally right thing depends on God’s nature, on the existence of the universal Reason, or on the assertions of Conscience. Say thus what you will, have you done what you intended? Have you made evident the necessity of your ideal? If, per impossibile, you