Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/87

62 answers of some recent moralists will illustrate for us afresh the great problem of ethics. We shall find two classes of efforts made to solve the difficulty. On the one hand moralists appear whose tendency is mainly, although not always quite wholly realistic. They say that, assuming the selfish aim as from the beginning self-evident, the unselfish aim soon appears as a necessary concomitant and assistant of the selfish aim. Such writers, from Hobbes to the present day, have insisted upon unselfishness as a more or less refined selfishness, the product of enlightenment. To this view one opposes very naturally the objection that real unselfishness is thus in fact rendered impossible. The moral ideal resulting is therefore, whether right or wrong in itself, at all events at war with other well-known ideals. And hence the explanation satisfies nobody. One still lacks a judge to end the warfare.

On the other hand, however, more idealistic moralists have tried to make unselfishness dependent on some impulse, such as pity or sympathy, whose dictates shall be perfectly definite and self-evident, and yet not, like the supposed dictates of conscience, either abstract or mysterious. But to such a foundation one opposes very naturally again the objection that all such judgments of feeling are capricious, that pity and sympathy are confused and deceitful feelings, wholly unfit to give moral insight, and that no ideal can be founded on the shifting sand of such realities.

The results of such criticisms will once more be skeptical, but the skepticism on which we are here