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KapmonU f . Wtet fRemavial 
 
 lettnreci on STmrnortalitp, ()aman 
 
 (tonUdct, ana 5)ttman 2Dc6ttnp 
 
 WHY WE MAY BELIEVE IN LIFE AFTER 
 DEATH. By Charles Edward Je£Eerson. 
 1911. 
 
 THREE LORDS OF DESTINY. By Samuel 
 McChord Crothers. 1913. 
 
 IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION? By Hast- 
 ings Rashdall. 1914. 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN 
 EMOTION? 
 
EapmonH JF. WtBt iplemartal Lettnrte 
 
 is conscience an 
 "emotion? 
 
 Tbree Lectures on Recent 
 Ethical Theories 
 
 BY 
 
 HASTINGS RASHDALL 
 
 D.UTT., D.C.L., LL.D., FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 FELLOW AND LECTURER OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 CANON RESIDENTIARY OF HEREFORD 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 igi4 
 
V 
 
 NvlO 
 
 COPYRIGHT, I9I4, BY HASTINGS RASHDALL 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published October JQ14 
 
 / 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 This volume represents the third of the series 
 of Raymond F. West Memorial Lectures at the 
 Leland Stanford Junior University. These 
 lectures were delivered on October 8, 9, and 10, 
 19 13, by Dr. Hastings Rashdall, Fellovsr and 
 Lecturer of New College, Oxford, England. 
 The conditions of the lectureship are set forth 
 in the following letter from its founders : 
 
 In memory of our beloved son, Raymond 
 Frederic West, a student in Leland Stanford 
 Junior University, who was drowned in Eel 
 River, in California, on January 18, 1906, be- 
 fore the completion of his college course, we 
 wish to present to the trustees and authorities of 
 the Leland Stanford Junior University, at Palo 
 Alto, California, the honored Alma Mater of 
 our son, the sum of ten thousand dollars 
 ($10,000), to be held as a fund in perpetual 
 trust, for the establishment of a lectureship on 
 V 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 a plan similar to the Dudleian Lectures and the 
 IngersoU Lectures at Harvard University. 
 
 By this plan, in each collegiate year, or on 
 each alternate year, at the discretion of the Board 
 of Trustees, from one to three lectures shall be 
 given on some phase of this subject : " Immor- 
 tality, Human Conduct, and Human Destiny." 
 
 Such lectures shall not form part of the usual 
 college or university course, nor shall they be 
 delivered by any professor or instructor in active 
 service in the institution. Such lecturer may be 
 a clergyman or a layman, a member of any 
 ecclesiastical organization, or of none, but he 
 should be a man of the highest personal charac- 
 ter and of superior intellectual endowment. He 
 shall be chosen by the faculty and the Board of 
 Trustees of said University in such manner as 
 the said Board of Trustees may determine, but 
 the appointment in any case shall be made at 
 least six months before the delivery oi said lecture. 
 
 The above sum is to be safely invested, and 
 the interest thereof is to be divided, at the dis- 
 cretion of the Board of Trustees, into two parts, 
 vi 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 the one an honorarium to the lecturer, the other 
 for the publication of the said lectures, or the 
 gratuitous distribution of a number of copies of 
 the same if published by the author. 
 
 The manuscript of the course of lectures shall 
 become the property of the University, and shall 
 be published by the University unless some 
 other form of publication is more acceptable. 
 
 The course of lectures shall be know^n as the 
 
 "Raymond F. West Memorial Lectures on 
 
 Immortality, Human Conduct, and Human 
 
 Destiny." 
 
 F. W. WEST. 
 MARY B. WEST. 
 
 Seattle, Washington, 
 January j8, iqio. 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 These lectures were delivered as the West 
 Lectures in the Leland Stanford Junior Univer- 
 sity, California, in October, 1913. 
 
 When I published my book on The Theory 
 of Good and Evil (1907), the first volume of 
 Prof essor Westermarck's Origin and Develop- 
 ment of the Moral Ideas had only just appeared 
 — too late for me to undertake any serious criti- 
 cism upon it, while Dr. McDougall's Social 
 Psychology was not published until a year later. 
 I was, therefore, obliged to confine my atten- 
 tion to earlier forms of naturalistic and emo- 
 tionalistic ethics. The present lectures give me 
 the opportunity of attempting some reply to the 
 position taken up by these writers. It was, 
 however, hardly possible to make such a reply 
 intelligible to students not well acquainted with 
 the subject, or to explain my own views to more 
 advanced students of philosophy who had not 
 ix 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 read my book, without to some extent going over 
 ground which I had already traversed in that 
 work. Lecture I, therefore, is devoted to a brief 
 and rather popular discussion of the general 
 question whether our moral judgements are to 
 be considered the work of Reason, and therefore 
 to possess objective validity, or whether they 
 can ultimately be analysed into a kind of feeling 
 or emotion or "Moral Sense." The second lec- 
 ture deals with the arguments in favor of the 
 latter view, which Professor Westermarck and 
 Dr. McDougall base upon the anthropological 
 facts connected with the origin and early history 
 of morality — and which have been considered 
 in some quarters as introducing a new epoch in 
 the history of Ethics, the first, indeed, according 
 to some, which can be described as scientific at 
 all. In Lecture III I have tried to clear up and 
 illustrate what is meant by asserting a definite, 
 intellectual, sui generis concept of " good" or 
 " value," to show the relation in which such 
 judgements of value stand to our desires and 
 emotions, and to meet the attempt made by the 
 X 
 
AUTHOR'S PBIEFACE 
 
 late Professor James and many others to identify 
 the concept of "good "with mere "satisfaction" 
 or " satisfactoriness." 
 
 My appointment to the West Lectureship, 
 one of the conditions of which is that the lectures 
 should be published by the University, may, I 
 hope, be a sufficient apology for the inadequacy 
 of the treatment which was inevitable in so short 
 
 a course. 
 
 H. RASHDALL. 
 Oxford, July, 11)14. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Moral Reason or Moral Sense? i 
 
 II. The Morality of Savages . • 5'2 
 
 III. Value or Satisfaction.-'. . . 142 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN 
 EMOTION? 
 
 MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE? 
 
 We are all of us conscious of approv- 
 ing some kinds of conduct and con- 
 demning others. We all of us attribute 
 some distinctive meaning to the terms 
 " right " and " wrong." In the present 
 lecture I shall venture to assume that 
 inuch — and something more. I shall 
 not occupy your time with examining 
 the attempts which have at various times 
 been made to analyse away altogether 
 these terms — to twist the term "right" 
 into meaning merely " conducive to my 
 I 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 own pleasure," or to explain away the 
 idea of moral obligation into an artificial 
 invention of crafty kings and ■ priests 
 devised for their own benefit, appeal- 
 ing merely to the fears or to the vanity 
 of mankind, and being at bottom, as 
 the old cynic Mandeville expressed it, 
 nothing but the "political progeny of 
 prejudice begot on pride." Such attempts 
 are now abandoned by serious and sci- 
 entific writers. I shall assume in fact the 
 reality of what we popularly call "Con- 
 science," considered simply as a psy- 
 chological phenomenon, as a distinct 
 element in the psychical endowment of 
 the normal human being. The question 
 which I propose to discuss is the nature 
 of this phenomenon — the question. 
 What is the real character and mean- 
 ing of the mental act which takes place 
 
 2 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 in our minds when we call this act right, 
 that one wrong? 
 
 Almost all through the history of 
 moral philosophy there have been two 
 explanations of this mental act. There 
 have been those who treat moral appro- 
 bation as essentially an act of judgement, 
 as the work of Reason, as coming from 
 the intellectual side of our mental na- 
 ture; and there have been those who 
 regard it as simply a particular sort of 
 feeling or emotion or a complex of emo- 
 tions, the share of the intellect in the 
 moral life being reduced to that of reg- 
 istering the occurrence of the feeling. 
 There have been those who treat our 
 ultimate moral judgements as self-evi- 
 dent intellectual propositions, like "two 
 straight lines cannot enclose a space," 
 or 2 + 2 = 4, or "A cannot be both A 
 3 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 and not A at the same time," or "a syl- 
 logism with an undistributed middle in 
 it is invalid." And on the other hand, 
 there have been those who treat moral 
 approbation as an emotion immediately 
 and spontaneously excited by the con- 
 templation of certain conduct, just as 
 we immediately experience a sensation 
 of green on looking at the grass, or an 
 emotion of pity at seeing another human 
 being suffer torture. At first sight the 
 question will probably seem to those 
 who are unfamiliar with such inquiries 
 a rather barren and uninteresting one 
 — at all events, as a technical question 
 of no great practical significance. So 
 long as we know the difference between 
 right and wrong, they may think, what 
 does it matter by what sort of faculty 
 we know it? So long as we have a Con- 
 4 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 science, what does it matter whether 
 we call it " Reason " or a " Moral 
 Sense " ? " A rose by any other name 
 would smell as sweet." I hope I shall 
 be able to show you, before I have done, 
 that in the whole range of philosophy 
 there is hardly another inquiry of such 
 momentous import — whether we look 
 to its bearing upon our general specu- 
 lative view of the universe or to its 
 practical consequences for the well- 
 being of human society. 
 
 In the earlier history of philosophy 
 constructive views of ethics were al- 
 ways associated with the rationalistic 
 view of the moral consciousness. All 
 the earlier champions of morality against 
 sceptical assaults — men like Plato and 
 the Stoics in ancient times, men like 
 Cudworth and Cumberland and Clarke 
 5 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 in the seventeenth and early eighteenth 
 centuries — were agreed that moral dis- 
 tinctions were the work of Reason : the 
 only writers who attempted to deny the 
 existence of distinct intellectual con- 
 cepts of good and evil were men like 
 the ancient Epicureans, or Thomas 
 Hobbes and his followers, who reduced 
 the ideas of good and evil to pleasant 
 and painful. 
 
 According to this view Reason had 
 nothing whatever to do with conduct 
 beyond merely determining the means 
 by which our desires could be gratified. 
 And the Reason that does this is, of 
 course, no distinctive moral Reason, but 
 simply the ordinary Understanding by 
 which we generalize from experience. 
 Such thinkers did not admit the exist- 
 ence of any distinctively moral feeling 
 6 
 
NtDRAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 or emotion distinguishable from the 
 mere feeling of pleasure and pain. The 
 first school which asserted that there is 
 such a distinctively ethical feeling was 
 what is generally known as the " Moral 
 Sense " school, of which the third Lord 
 Shaftesbury, the famous author of the 
 " Characteristicks," and the Ulster phil- 
 osopher, Francis Hutcheson, are the 
 classical exponents. 
 
 In its origin this school represents 
 a reaction against the philosophy of 
 John Locke. The philosophy of Locke 
 was really just as empirical, just as 
 hedonistic, as that of Hobbes — though 
 from a practical point of view Locke 
 was quite " on the side of the Angels." 
 Locke continued to use the language 
 of the rationalistic school, but the spirit 
 of it was gone. He talked a great deal 
 
 7 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 about morals being a matter of demon- 
 stration, the work of Reason, and so on; 
 ; but in reality he assigned to Reason 
 no function other than that of calcu- 
 lating what course of action was like- 
 ly to produce most pleasure, and what 
 to produce most pain. At bottom all 
 that Locke meant by moral truths be- 
 ing matter of demonstration was that 
 it could be demonstrated that people 
 would go to hell if they were not 
 moral. He believed that the morality 
 of an act could be demonstrated just 
 because he did not believe in any ulti- 
 mate, intrinsic distinction between right • 
 and wrong. The true ground of moral- 
 ity, according to him, was "the will 
 and law of a God, who sees men in 
 the dark, has in his hands rewards and 
 punishments, and power enough to call 
 8 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 to aooount the proudest offender."' 
 Historically the theory of a " moral 
 sense " was a protest — a very valuable 
 protest in its way — against this system 
 of theological hedonism. To compare 
 morality to mathematics now seemed 
 to have ended in making morality a 
 mere matter of calculation in the com- 
 mercial sense of the word: to compare 
 moral distinctions to mathematical ax- 
 ioms seemed to be turning morality 
 into a mere arithmetic of self-interest. 
 There arose a cry that morality was a 
 matter of heart, not of the head. And 
 this cry found expression in what is 
 known as the " Moral Sense " school. 
 
 Starting from Locke's belief that all 
 our knowledge came to us ultimately 
 from " ideas," by which was practically 
 
 ' Essay, book ii, chap. 3, §6. 
 
 9 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 meant " sensations " or "feelings," these 
 writers sought to place morality upon 
 an unassailable foundation by treating 
 moral approbation as a distinct kind of 
 idea or feeling — a "reflex idea" (as 
 they called it), which entered into our 
 minds when we reflected — turned our 
 thoughts back — upon our own think- 
 ing and our own acting. On contem- 
 plating an act of cruelty, or, rather, on 
 contemplating the motive which in- 
 spired such an action, we immediately 
 and spontaneously experience another 
 idea — an "idea of disapprobation": in 
 contemplating the passion of benevo- 
 lence in our own breasts, or an action 
 suggestive of such a passion in another, 
 we experience a distinct idea or feeling 
 of approbation. There was no attempt 
 to resolve this idea into a mere pleasure 
 
 lO 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 on a level with any other pleasure. The 
 distinctive — indeed, the authoritative 
 — character of this feeling was strongly 
 insisted on. It was supposed to be given 
 us by a distinct kind of sense — which 
 they called the " moral sense." The 
 ideas of this sense were absolutely sui 
 generis — as distinct from any other 
 feelings of our nature as seeing is differ- 
 ent from hearing or the emotion of pity 
 from that of anger. These men had no 
 suspicion that there was anything de- 
 structive or subversive in their teaching. 
 Shaftesbury was, indeed, attacked by 
 the orthodox of his day as a Deist, but 
 he was not irreligious; and his main 
 object in writing about Ethics was to 
 defend the disinterestedness of the moral 
 motive against those who based moral 
 obligation solely upon the fear of hell 
 II 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 and the hope of heaven.' Francis 
 Hutcheson was an earnest Presbyte- 
 rian minister — liberal, according to the 
 standard of his time, but sincerely the- 
 istic and Christian. I cannot resist the 
 temptation of illustrating his theologi- 
 cal attitude by quoting the criticism 
 pronounced by an elder of his father's 
 church upon his first sermon. The fa- 
 ther, himself also a Presbyterian minis- 
 ter, had been preaching elsewhere. On 
 his return to his own manse, this was the 
 way he was greeted by the orthodox 
 elder: "We a' feel muckle wae for your 
 mishap. Reverend Sir, but it canna be 
 concealed. Your silly loon, Frank, has 
 fashed a' the congregation wi' his idle 
 
 ' His ethical views are most fully expressed in the 
 " Inquiry concerning Virtue," in the Characteristichs. 
 The most characteristic writing of Hutcheson is the 
 Inquiry concerning our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. 
 
 12 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 cackle: for he has been babbling this 
 oor aboot a gude and benevolent God, 
 and that the sauls o' the heathen them- 
 sels will gang to Heeven, if they follow 
 the licht o' their ain consciences. Not 
 a word does the daft boy ken, speer, 
 nor say aboot the gude auld comfort- 
 able doctrines o' election, reprobation, 
 original sin and faith. Hoot, mon, awa' 
 wi' sic a fellowl"' It was just this 
 sincere theism of his which prevented 
 his seeing the destructive tendency of 
 his creed. The very reason why such 
 a man did not see in the moral-sense 
 theory anything destructive of the full- 
 est belief in moral obligation was this 
 — that he thought of this distinctive 
 faculty as divinely implanted, a sort 
 
 ' Quoted in the Life of Francis Hutcheson, by W. R. 
 Scott, pp. 30-2I. 
 
 13 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 of divine monitor specially implanted 
 in the human heart by an essentially 
 risrhteous and benevolent God to 
 prompt us to actions agreeable to his 
 will and to warn us against those which 
 He disapproved. Although it was a 
 " sense " which revealed the right course 
 of action to man, it was assumed that 
 God Himself, in giving us this sense, 
 took care to connect it with the right 
 objects. God was thus supposed to be 
 influenced by a real distinction between 
 good and evil inherent in the nature of 
 things. Hutcheson forgot to ask himself 
 what reason, if Conscience meant noth- 
 ing but a comfortable feeling, he had 
 for believing in any essential or eternal 
 distinction between good and evil, for 
 thinking of God as essentially righteous, 
 or for treating the emotion of moral 
 H 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 approbation as throwing light upon the 
 character of God — any more than the 
 emotions of hatred or jealousy or ambi- 
 tion, which are no less original and un- 
 deniable emotions of the human heart, 
 no less, upon the theistic view of the 
 universe, ultimately put into the soul 
 by God. The deliverances of Reason 
 we naturally believe to be the same for 
 God and man: nobody seriously sug- 
 gests that the multiplication table is a 
 merely human affair, and that for God it 
 is quite possible that 2 + 2 = 5. ^^^ why 
 should we assume that God's emotions 
 are exactly the same as ours, or that one 
 emotion of ours influences Him rather 
 than another ? If Conscience means Rea- 
 son, we have every ground for supposing 
 that whatever Conscience approves, is 
 approved by God. If Conscience is 
 
 15 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 merely a "sense," there is no basis 
 whatever for the religious conception 
 which treats the voice of Conscience as 
 the voice of God. 
 
 The real tendency of this moral sense 
 theory was first brought out by the 
 arch-destroyer, David Hume. Hume 
 was far too observant a student of hu- 
 . man nature to deny the existence, or 
 the distinctive character, of the " reflex 
 idea of approbation" as a matter of mere 
 psychological fact. But his whole theory 
 of knowledge compelled him to regard 
 it as being at bottom (like all our other 
 " ideas ") nothing but a particular sort 
 of sensation; and he saw with unerring 
 insight that the mere distinctiveness of 
 this sensation could not give it any claim 
 to authority or superiority over other 
 emotions. The contemplation of certain 
 i6 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 kinds of action gives us a certain dis- 
 tinctive feeling wHeTi tnay be called a 
 feeling of approbation. This feeling was, 
 he recognized, a very distinctive kind 
 of feeling — quite unlike, for instance, 
 the pleasures of eating and drinking. But 
 after all, if the sense of approbation is 
 merely a particular kind of feeling, there 
 was no reason for preferring this partic- 
 ular feeling to any other if you happened 
 to like another feeling better. The only 
 ground for its being preferred must be 
 that it is found more pleasant than other 
 feelings. If the idea of approbation is 
 simply a feeling, there is no reason why 
 it should be attended to except in so far 
 as it is found pleasant. " 'T is evident," 
 says Hume, " that under the term jSl^as- 
 ure, we comprehend sensations which 
 are very different from each other, and 
 17 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 which have only such a distant resem- 
 blance, as is requisite to make them be 
 express'd by the same abstract term. 
 A good composition of music and a 
 bottle of good wine equally produce 
 pleasure; and what is more, their good- 
 ness is determined merely by the pleas- 
 ure. But shall we say upon that account 
 that the wine is harmonious, or the 
 music of a good flavour?"' No one 
 would contend that, so long as we look 
 at them merely as pleasures, a man who 
 happens to prefer music to wine should 
 not do so merely because the taste of 
 wine is a very distinctive taste, a taste 
 which the purveyors of temperance 
 drinks have unfortunately never suc- 
 ceeded in imitating. Equally little rea- 
 
 • "Treatise of Human Nature," in Philosophical 
 Works, ed. Green & Grose, vol. ii, p. 247-248. 
 
 18 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 son is there for attributing any superior 
 authority to the feeling of approbation if 
 one happens to preferto take one's pleas- 
 ure in some other kind of satisfaction. 
 The feeling of approbation is pleasant, 
 no doubt; but the feelings occasioned by 
 unpopularity — to say nothing of the 
 rack or the thumbscrew — are decidedly 
 unpleasant. If I happen to prefer to do 
 without the pleasant feeling of self-ap- 
 probation and so to avoid the unpleas- 
 antness of being laughed at or thumb- 
 screwed for adopting a particular course 
 of conduct, nobody can. give me any 
 reason why I should not do so, even if 
 the immunity could only be purcTiasei 
 by the accusation of an innocent person. 
 Moreover, when we have once re- 
 duced our moral ideas to feelings or 
 emotions of approbation or disapproba- 
 
 19 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 tion, it is probable that we shall not be 
 content to regard them as simple and 
 unanalysable feelings, and shall try to 
 explain the fact of our feeling pleasure 
 in contemplating one kind of conduct 
 and condemning another. This explana- 
 tion Hume persuaded himself that he 
 had found in the disinterested sympathy 
 which we spontaneously feel with the 
 pleasure of others. We approve certain 
 qualities in others because we sympa- 
 thize with the utility of these qualities 
 either to their possessors or to others. 
 It is, therefore, most conspicuously the 
 benevolent and social affections which 
 excite this feeling; or qualities useful in 
 the long run to society at large, such as 
 Justice and Loyalty. But Hume by no 
 means excludes from the category of 
 moral qualities personal gifts or graces 
 20 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAt SENSE 
 
 which may be a source of pleasure to 
 the possessor, or even external advan- 
 tages such as the possession of fine 
 clothes, since we do actually feel a dis- 
 interested sympathy with the posses- 
 sors of such advantages. They do very 
 often procure no less popularity than 
 the qualities to which more austere 
 thinkers have been in the habit of con- 
 fining the term " moral." Hume might 
 have supported his theory by quoting 
 the penetrating observation of the 
 Psalmist: "So long as thou doest well 
 unto thyself, men will speak good of 
 thee." 
 
 " Let us examine any hypothesis," 
 he wrote, "by which we can account 
 for the regard paid to the rich and 
 powerful: we shall find none satisfac- 
 tory, but that which derives it from the 
 
 21 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 enjoyment communicated to the spec- 
 tator by the images of prosperity, hap- 
 piness, ease, plenty, authority, and the 
 gratification of every appetite. . . . 
 When we approach a man, who is, as 
 we say, at his ease, we are presented 
 with the pleasing ideas of plenty, satis- 
 faction, cleanliness, warmth; a chearful 
 house, elegant furniture, ready service, 
 and whatever is desirable in meat, drink, 
 or apparel. On the contrary, when a 
 poor man appears, the disagreeable im- 
 ages of want, penury, hard labour, dirty 
 furniture, coarse or ragged cloaths, 
 nauseous meat and distasteful liquor, 
 immediately strike our fancy. What 
 else do we mean by saying that one is 
 rich, the other poor } And as regard or 
 contempt is the natural consequence of 
 those different situations in life, it is 
 
 22 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 easily seen what additional light and 
 evidence this throws on our preceding 
 theory, with regard to all moral distinc- 
 tions."' The theory of the moral sense 
 thus turns out to be at bottom an apothe- 
 osis of flunkeyism. The disinterested 
 love of virtue is put on a level with the 
 "respect" (if that is the word for it) 
 which a poor man may feel for a rich 
 one from whom he is not even anticipat- 
 ing an invitation to dinner. 
 
 Many of you may be familiar with the 
 portraits of eminent philosophers con- 
 tained in a well-known series of prints 
 published in this country. I have them 
 hanging on the staircase of my house 
 at Oxford, and I observe that of all the 
 philosophers Hume is by far the most 
 
 ' Yiume, Enquiry concerning Morals,yo\.l\, pp. 228- 
 23 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 gorgeously attired. He was determined 
 that he at least would be a man of virtue. 
 Further, it is to be observed that on 
 this view it is not necessary that the 
 qualities which excite the feeling of ap- 
 probation should be qualities really use- 
 ful or productive of pleasure to any one. 
 It is enough that they should be sup- 
 posed to be useful. If they do excite 
 the distinctive feeling of approbation, 
 ij[)so facto they are virtuous — no mat- 
 ter how disastrous their actual effects 
 may be to any one else or to society at 
 large. "The distinction of moral good 
 and evil," he tells us, "is founded on 
 the pleasure or pain, which results from 
 the view of any sentiment or character; 
 and as that pleasure or pain cannot be 
 unknown to the person who feels it, it 
 follows that there is just so much vice 
 24 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 or virtue in any character, as every one 
 places in it, and that 't is impossible in 
 this particular we can ever be mis- 
 taken." ' Virtue is defined to be " what- 
 ever mental action or quality gives to 
 the spectator the pleasing feeling of ap- 
 probation."* Actions, in fact, are not 
 approved because they are moral, they 
 are moral because they are approved.' 
 Morality, then, according to Hume, 
 is simply a name for the fact of social 
 approbation: and Hume represents the 
 logical outcome of the moral sense the- 
 ory. It is clear that all notion of an in- 
 trinsic, moral obligation, of an absolute 
 
 ' Treatise, vol. II, p. 311. 
 
 * Enquiry, vol. iv, p. 261. 
 
 ^ To show that this line of thought is not obsolete, 
 1 may mention that substantially the same position, 
 adapted to the requirements of Darwinism, is taken 
 up by Professor Alexander in his Moral Order and 
 Progress. 
 
 25 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 "ought," of ethical objectivity, must 
 disappear from such a system aS thig. 
 For one and the same quality or action 
 may excite the liveliest feelings of ap- 
 probation in one man and equally lively 
 feelings of disapprobation in another. 
 The effort to make other people better 
 is regarded by many as one of the most 
 virtuous kinds of activity. There is 
 none which is more highly applauded 
 in the pulpit or at meetings of Church 
 societies, or non-religious ethical soci- 
 eties. But I once heard a not undistin- 
 guished Oxford tutor remark, "There 
 is nothing I hate so much as the people 
 who want to make other people better." 
 And nobody who heard the tone in 
 which the oracle was uttered could 
 doubt either the sincerity or the vio- 
 lence of the " disapprobation " which 
 26 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 that type of character excited in that 
 particular breast. According to Hume, 
 people who go about trying to do what 
 is commonly called " good " are actu- 
 ally bad so far as they are actually hated. 
 The man contemplated by Plato, who 
 combined the maximum reputation of 
 justice with the maximum reputation 
 for injustice, and who ended a life of 
 social disapprobation by being cruci- 
 fied, would have been, according to 
 Hume's definition, a very bad man. 
 However enormous the increase of 
 pleasure which might have been caused 
 to the world by his efforts, his conduct 
 would be wrong in so far as it actually 
 made him unpopular. If an act excites 
 approbation in some minds and disap- 
 probation in others, it is right and wrong 
 at the same time. The only objectivity 
 27 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 which our moral judgements on this 
 view can possibly possess must depend 
 upon the counting of heads. To put the 
 matter in the plainest possible way, Mo- 
 rality, according to those who reduce 
 moral approbation to a feeling, is made 
 by public opinion. Such a system is as 
 fatal to the utilitarian as to any other 
 objective standard of morality. Utility, 
 according to Hume, is the true crite- 
 rion of morality just so far as utility 
 actually pleases. But real utility does 
 not always please. The public does not 
 always know its own interests; and 
 what is useful to one circle is perni- 
 cious to others. What really matters 
 most to a man, after all, is the approval 
 of his own circle. Among thieves the 
 best thief will be the most popular. In 
 English county society we are some- 
 28 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 times told that the man who is suspected 
 of shooting a fox is more unpopular 
 than he who has undoubtedly shot a 
 man. According to Hume the man- 
 slayer would, in such a milieu^ be actu- 
 ally the more wicked person, while he 
 who preserves most foxes will be the 
 best. 
 
 It may, of course, be alleged that the 
 emotionalist is not bound to accept the 
 whole of Hume's system. He need not 
 be a hedonist; he need not believe that 
 sympathy with other people's pleasure 
 is the only thing which excites the emo- 
 tion known as moral approbation. And 
 the older moral sense writers were un- 
 doubtedly not hedonists. But for our 
 present purpose it does not matter what 
 kind of emotion it is to which you ap- 
 peal. You may with Hume reduce the 
 29 
 
IS CONSaENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 distinctive moral feeling to a particular 
 kind of pleasure excited by sympathy; 
 or you may reduce it (with Adam 
 Smith and many others) to a more dis- 
 interested kind of sympathy; or you 
 may with Hutcheson insist that it is 
 none of these things, but something ab- 
 solutely sui generis. These distinctions 
 may be important from other points of 
 view; but they can make no difference 
 as regards the objectivity of the moral 
 judgement. Feelings or emotions pos- 
 sess no objectivity. And "without ob- 
 jectivity," in the words of Edouard von 
 Hartmann, "Ethic has no meaning."' 
 
 The objection to this moral sense 
 theory, be it observed, is not simply 
 the practical difficulty of deciding which 
 of two disputants in a moral dispute is 
 
 ' Das sittliche Betvusstsein, p. 92. 
 30 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 right and which is wrong. We do not 
 secure ethical unanimity by simply la- 
 beling the moral consciousness Reason. 
 On any view it must be admitted that 
 there are considerable differences of 
 opinion upon moral questions, just as 
 there are differences of opinion upon 
 questions of history and questions of sci- 
 ence. The point is that on the moral 
 view there is simply no meaning in 
 asking which of the disputants is right 
 and which is wrong. A color-blind 
 man is not wrong when he sees no dif- 
 ference between a red light and a green 
 one, unless he supposes that what ap- 
 pears a vague gray to him is a vague 
 gray to normal-sighted persons. The 
 color really is gray to him as much as 
 it is red to a normal-sighted person. 
 Mustard is not objectively nice or ob- 
 
 31 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 jectively nasty. It is simply nice to one 
 man and nasty to another: and that is 
 the whole truth about the matter. It 
 would, in the emotional view, be sim- 
 ply meaningless to ask which was right 
 and which was wrong. If morality were 
 a mere matter of feeling or emotion, 
 our moral judgments would be in ex- 
 actly the same case. It would be sense- 
 less to ask which was right, Nero and 
 the Roman mob of his time to whom 
 the torments endured by Christians in 
 the amphitheatre were simply good 
 sport, — " noble sport " they would 
 probably have called it, — or the early 
 Christians to whom they were brutal 
 murders, and the modern world which 
 for the most part agrees with the early 
 Christians. The difference is merely a 
 difference of taste. Of course, if you 
 32 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 suggest that the one taste is higher than 
 another, if you insist that the feeling 
 which condemns such atrocities is some- 
 thing higher or more authoritative than 
 the feeling which exults in them, you 
 are really appealing to a judging faculty 
 at the back of the mere emotional ap- 
 probation; and then you have really 
 dethroned the moral sense from the po- 
 sition of chief arbiter in morals and set 
 up this new judging faculty in its place." 
 That is really to give up the moral 
 sense view altogether. If you want to 
 be consistent, you must accept the the- 
 ory with all its consequences. You must 
 frankly admit that, if anybody does not 
 mind the so-called pains of Conscience 
 and has no taste for its pleasures, there 
 
 ' Hutcheson himself got very near to this position 
 in his later ethical writings. 
 
 33 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 is no reason why he should bother 
 about them, except in so far as the ma- 
 jority may express their feelings of dis- 
 approbation in such a practical form as 
 to make the following of Conscience 
 into the more convenient course. And 
 if you treat the pains of Conscience 
 merely as so many disagreeable feel- 
 ings, it will probably be found that 
 they are feelings which it is pretty easy 
 to live down. 
 
 Now the question is whether we are 
 prepared to accept this view of the 
 matter. Can we really persuade our- 
 selves that there is no such thing in our 
 minds as the sense — or to speak more 
 accurately — the consciousness of an 
 objective duty? Is not this idea of ob- 
 jectivity just the most fundamental of 
 our moral convictions? I am not ask- 
 34 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 ing, be it observed, how we ascertain 
 that a particular course of action is 
 right and another wrong: that is a ques- 
 tion I have not yet touched upon. The 
 question is whether we have not got in 
 our minds this idea of " oughtness " or 
 " duty," no matter to what particular 
 actions we apply it; and whether this 
 conception does not imply that, if I am 
 right in judging a certain course of ac- 
 tion to be right, you cannot be equally 
 right in thinking it wrong? Do we not 
 often feel most certain that there is a 
 really right course of action just when 
 we find our individual judgement in col- 
 lision with somebody else's, or when 
 we ourselves feel most in doubt as to 
 what is actually the right course of ac- 
 tion in some particular complication of 
 circumstances ? I cannot, of course, pro- 
 35 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 fess to explain what this notion means 
 to any one who is destitute of it. If it 
 is an ultimate notion, we can as little 
 define it as we can explain what is the 
 meaning of space or quantity or oaus- 
 ality to a mind which does not poSSeg^ 
 these conceptions. I only want to point 
 out to yon that, if there is in the human 
 mind this consciousness of an objective 
 " ought," it must be derived from the 
 intellectual part of our nature. No mere 
 emotion could give me such an idea. 
 Such a concept may be accompanied by 
 emotion; it may inspire emotion, but it 
 is not itself mere emotion. The emotion 
 itself presupposes the intellectual notion 
 or category of duty. 
 
 Does any one ask, " How am I to tell 
 that the notion of duty is not a mere 
 emotion in disguise or a product of 
 36 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 several emotions ? " I reply, " How do 
 you know that the multiplication table 
 is not the same thing as a feeling of ac- 
 quisitiveness ? How do you know that 
 your judgement that six is greater than 
 four is not a mere wish on your part — 
 a penchant for six in preference to four? 
 How do you know that your judge- 
 ment that if A is B and B is C, then A 
 is C, does not express a mere personal 
 prejudice? " You will answer that you 
 immediately see and know that it is not 
 so. You immediately know the differ- 
 ence between a desire of money and a 
 mathematical truth, or between a valid 
 syllogism and one with a fallacy in it. 
 To me, at least, it is equally clear that 
 my judgement, " This act of injustice is 
 wrong," is not an emotion of sympathy 
 with the person who might be injured 
 37 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 by it, an instinct of tribal vengeance, a 
 fear of hostile crowds or of ancestral 
 ghosts, or any of the other emotions 
 into which people have attempted to 
 analyse away the consciousness of right 
 or wrong. 
 
 Or does any one suggest that, though 
 as a matter of psychological fact there 
 is this notion of an objective good and 
 evil in the human mind, it possesses 
 no objective validity, but is, as one dis- 
 tinguished philosopher has put it,' a 
 merely "subjective category"? How do 
 we know that it is not a mere subjec- 
 tive delusion, if not of the individual, at 
 least of the race? I answer, "What 
 reason have you for supposing that the 
 judgement two and two make four may 
 
 ' Simmel, Einleitung in die Moralvjissensckaft, vol. 
 ". P- 347- 
 
 38 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 not be a subjective illusion, or that two 
 straight lines cannot enclose a space?" 
 We have no reason for believing any- 
 thing except the fact that we cannot 
 help believing it. If the notion of duty 
 is as inexpugnable a notion of the hu- 
 man mind as the notion of quantity or 
 cause or substance or the like, we have 
 every reason that we can possibly have 
 for believing in its objective validity 
 — every reason that we possess for 
 confidence in the validity of those other 
 categories. I do not contend that the 
 consensus is as great about these ethical 
 axioms as about the simplest axioms 
 of mathematics. Self-evident truths are 
 not equally evident to every one. Men 
 vary enormously in their capacity for 
 seeing the difference between a cord 
 and a discord, and there are many who 
 
 39 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 are quite incapable of following even 
 very simple mathematical reasoning. 
 
 So far I have not touched upon the 
 question what in detail are these judge- 
 ments which the moral reason gives 
 us. I have not, for instance, touched 
 upon the question whether there are a 
 host of isolated unrelated judgements 
 about particular acts or about classes 
 of acts which we pass immediately and 
 as it were instinctively, without any 
 calculation as to their consequences for 
 social well-being; or whether acts are 
 right or wrong according as they tend 
 or do not tend to produce social well- 
 being. I do not propose to discuss this 
 question in these lectures. Both views 
 have been taken by thinkers who agree 
 in the fundamental doctrine that moral 
 judgements are the work of Reason. I 
 40 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 want as far as possible to keep this 
 issue — the old controversy between 
 the intuitionists and the utilitarians — 
 out of sight in these lectures. But, as I 
 am inviting you to believe that there 
 are such things as self-evident moral 
 judgements, I think it will conduce to 
 clearness if I tell you what in my 
 opinion these propositions are. I do not 
 believe that an act can be pronounced 
 right or wrong without any reference 
 to its consequences so far as such con- 
 sequences can be foreseen; but the 
 judgement, " The greater good ought al- 
 ways to be preferred to the less," or (to 
 put it in another form), "It is always 
 right to promote the greatest possible 
 good," does present itself to me as ab- 
 solutely self-evident. So is the judge- 
 ment, " One man's good is of equal in- 
 41 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 trinsic value with the like good of any 
 other," with its implication, " I ought 
 always, so far as possible, to produce 
 an equal distribution of good among all 
 the people who can be afTected by my 
 action." To these two axioms of ra- 
 tional benevolence and equity or jus- 
 tice, Sidgwick adds an "axiom of 
 prudence": "Where my own good is 
 concerned, it is always reasonable for 
 me to prefer my own greater good to 
 my own lesser good." But this is farelyj 
 contained in the axiom of rational be- 
 nevolence, and need not be treated as 
 an independent axiom. It is, however, 
 extremely important to observe that 
 these axioms will never tell us what 
 particular actions are right or wrong 
 till we have settled what is this "good" 
 which ought to be promoted equally or 
 42 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 impartially for all mankind. And, there- 
 fore, at bottom, the real ethical judge- 
 ment is the judgement of value which 
 affirms that such and such things are 
 good. For our present purpose it makes 
 no difference what it is which we pro- 
 nounce good. The utilitarian who de- 
 clares that it is always a man's duty to 
 promote the greatest possible pleasure, 
 or the austere moralist who says that 
 nothing is good but virtue, is equally 
 appealing to what seems to him a self- 
 evident truth, an intuition, an a priori 
 judgement. 
 
 What is this supreme end or good 
 by reference to which we ought to pro- 
 nounce acts right or wrong, it is not my 
 present task to decide. It must suffice 
 to say that I do not myself accept the 
 hedonistic conception of the good. I do 
 
 43 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 believe that pleasure is good, but it is 
 not the good. It seems to me the clear- 
 est of all deliverances of the moral con- 
 sciousness that virtue or goodness or the 
 good-will possesses an intrinsic value — 
 a higher intrinsic value than any other 
 good. Knowledge, intellectual activity, 
 aesthetic culture, and the like also ap- 
 pear to me goods, the value of which 
 is not to be measured by the amount of 
 pleasure which they bring with them; 
 or (to express the same doctrine in 
 other words), pleasures differ in kind, 
 and their value does not depend merely 
 upon their quantity. 
 
 Such is my own view of the matter. 
 But, once more, to determine the rela- 
 tive value of different goods or ele- 
 ments in the good is not my present 
 subject. I have only touched upon that 
 44 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 problem in order to explain what I 
 mean by saying that the ultimate moral 
 judgement is a judgement of value. It 
 pronounces this or that to be good; and 
 out of the different judgements as to 
 particular goods it builds up an ideal 
 of life as a whole. To take this view 
 does not in any way get rid of the fun- 
 damental analysable character of the 
 concept of "duty"; for the idea of 
 good implies the idea of right. The 
 good means just what ought to be pro- 
 moted — by every one who has the 
 power of doing so. If an end is good, 
 it must be my dut}' to promote it so far 
 as it does not interfere with any greater 
 good. If an end is the good, it must be 
 the ultimate end aimed at by every 
 right action. Equally true is it to say 
 that the idea of duty implies the notion 
 45 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 of good : for upon reflection it appears 
 that my duty must consist in the pro- 
 motion of the good. The good and the 
 right are correlative conceptions which 
 imply each other, just as the convex 
 implies the concave and the concave 
 the convex. They both involve the same 
 single analysable idea which can be ex- 
 pressed in many ways but can never 
 be defined — the good, oughtness, value, 
 duty, the reasonable in conduct, the end 
 of life, and so on. On the whole, the 
 word which best expresses the notion 
 which lies at the root of all morality is 
 the word " value." 
 
 I have tried to give you reasons for 
 rejecting the view that our moral judge- 
 ments are merely a formulated result 
 of some kind of feeling or emotion, and 
 for believing that they come from the 
 46 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 rational or intellectual part of our na- 
 ture — that they represent one particu- 
 lar activity of that same self which also 
 gives us the fundamental intellectual 
 truths which are presupposed by all 
 thinking and all knowing; and there- 
 fore can claim the same kind of objec- 
 tive truth or validity as the axioms of 
 mathematics or those self-evident laws 
 of thought upon which in the last 
 result all scientific reasoning depends. 
 In opposition to this something like the 
 old moral sense view is still occasion- 
 ally defended in modern times — for 
 instance, in the writings of the late 
 Professor Gizycki, till recently a pro- 
 fessor at Berlin.' But most of those who 
 now seek to dissolve our moral judge- 
 
 ' See An Introduction to the Study of Ethics^ adapted 
 from the German of G. M. Gizycki, by Stanton Coit, 
 Ph.D., pp. 87 sq. 
 
 47 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 merits into emotions do so in a very 
 different way. Some of you will, I fear, 
 feel that there is something rather ob- 
 solete and academic in this controversy 
 between moral reason and moral sense 
 with which I have to-day been dealing. 
 They will suggest that the idea of a 
 moral sense is as obsolete as the notion 
 of a moral reason; and will desiderate 
 some reference to more modern views 
 on the subject — to such views as those 
 maintained by evolutionary or natural- 
 istic moralists like Professor Wester- 
 marck and Dr. McDougall. In my next 
 lecture I shall come to close quarters 
 with such theories. I will only say by 
 way of apology for the present lecture 
 that I hope to show you next time that 
 the considerations which I have urged 
 against the old moral sense view of 
 48 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 ethics are just as valid against the more 
 modern, more evolutionary, forms of 
 emotionalism which have taken their 
 place. 
 
 Meanwhile, let me say a word as to 
 the importance of the position which I 
 have been trying to defend. It is only 
 upon the assumption that our ultimate 
 moral judgements represent real deliv- 
 erances of Reason — self-evident judge- 
 ments about the real nature of things 
 — that we are justified in using them 
 to interpret to ourselves the nature and 
 meaning of the Universe in which we 
 live. There are many lines of thought 
 which lead up to the great conviction 
 that the ultimate Reality is spiritual, 
 and if spiritual, then purposeful. But as 
 to what the purpose is, there is only one 
 possible source of information; and that 
 49 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 is the moral consciousness of man. If 
 our judgements of value are valid pro- 
 inouncements of Reason, we have the 
 right to claim that in the moral con- 
 sciousness of man at its highest there 
 is contained a true revelation of the 
 rational Will which expresses itself in 
 nature. If we accept that clue to the 
 meaning of the Universe, we may, on 
 the testimony of our moral judgements, 
 proceed to the further assertion that the 
 character of God is best summed up in 
 the one word " Love." And upon that 
 fact must rest the main burden of the 
 hope that this present life — with all its 
 inequalities and its injustices, with all its 
 sinfulness and imperfection and unful- 
 filled aspiration — is not the whole life 
 of man, but only a stage — a preparatory 
 or educational stage — in the develop- 
 50 
 
MORAL REASON OR MORAL SENSE 
 
 ment that is designed for human souls 
 by the greater Spirit from which their 
 being is derived. The hope of Immor- 
 tality must rest mainly upon our belief 
 in a righteous and loving God, and the 
 belief in a righteous God is in the main 
 an inference based upon the perfectly 
 clear and definite pronouncements of 
 the moral consciousness — that moral 
 consciousness which, as I have endeav- 
 ored to show you, is no mere sense or 
 emotion, but a particular activity of that 
 selfsame Reason, the validity of which 
 is presupposed by all our knowledge. 
 
II 
 
 THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 In my last lecture I examined the 
 question whether our moral judgements 
 are in ultimate analysis merely state- 
 ments asserting the existence of a par- 
 ticular kind of feeling in particular 
 minds, or whether they are intellec- 
 tual judgements of universal validity — 
 judgements, of course, of a very pecul- 
 iar and distinctive kind, but just as much 
 intellectual and universal judgements 
 about the nature of Reality as the judge- 
 ments 2 + 2 = 4, or " this is a good infer- 
 ence and that is a bad one." I tried to 
 show you that on the former view our 
 moral judgements could possess no ob- 
 jective validity — no more so than the 
 judgements which express my personal 
 52 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 liking for mustard or somebody else's 
 personal dislike for it. And yet I con- 
 tended that we do, most of us, feel at 
 the bottom of our minds a strong and 
 ineradicable conviction that there is 
 this eternal, irreducible distinction be- 
 tween right and wrong — that it belongs 
 (as it were) to the innermost essence of 
 things, so much so that in many minds 
 it leads to the further conviction that 
 the whole universe must in some way 
 be governed in accordance with those 
 laws of right and wrong which are re- 
 vealed in the moral consciousness of 
 man, — that conviction which expresses 
 itself in the familiar words of Words- 
 worth's impassioned "Ode to Duty": — 
 
 " Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong ; 
 And the most ancient heavens, through thee, 
 are fresh and strong." 
 
 S3 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 I am not, for the moment, asking how 
 far this further inference is warranted. 
 I am only appealing to the fact that it 
 is drawn as a proof of the depth of the 
 conviction that the distinction between 
 right and wrong is objectively valid, 
 and not a mere statement as to the emo- 
 tional constitution of a particular indi- 
 vidual or even a particular species. All 
 such convictions will have to be treated 
 as mere illusions if it could be shown 
 that the moral consciousness is at bot- 
 tom nothing but a particular kind of 
 feeling excited by the contemplation of 
 certain types of character or conduct. 
 
 In the present lecture I propose to 
 examine a new form of what may be 
 comprehensively called "Emotionalism 
 in Ethics." The older moral sense 
 school of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson 
 54 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 believed in a single distinctive feeling 
 of approbation or disapprobation. Even 
 Hume did not deny the existence of 
 such a specific feeling, though he recog- 
 nized more distinctly than his predeces- 
 sors that such a feeling could have no 
 greater authority or validity than it de- 
 rived from its actual pleasurableness to 
 the individual. Many recent writers on 
 Ethics, who approach the subject from 
 a purely anthropological or psycholog- 
 ical point of view, altogether deny the 
 existence of any such specific moral 
 feeling or emotion. They treat the moral 
 consciousness as a complex of many 
 different feelings or emotions. And 
 further, they rest their position, not 
 upon a mere analysis of the moral con- 
 sciousness as it exists in the developed 
 mind of the modern civilized man, but 
 
 55 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 upon a wide survey of the evolution of 
 morality out of the non-moral con- 
 sciousness of the lower animals and 
 the imperfectly moral consciousness 
 of the savage. This line of thought 
 (though, of course, it does not repre- 
 sent anything fundamentally new) has 
 received a new lease of life through the 
 enormous accumulation of illustrative 
 facts accumulated by Professor Wester- 
 marck in his " Origin and Development 
 of the Moral Ideas." But, valuable as is 
 his great history of moral ideas as a piece 
 of pure anthropology, he really adds 
 little to the arguments used before him 
 by such writers as Hume in favor of 
 the emotional theory. A far stronger 
 case for the emotional view is presented 
 by an Oxford Reader in Psychology, 
 Dr. McDougall, in his book on " Social 
 56 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 Psychology." The tendency of previ- 
 ous writers who approached morality 
 from a more or less naturalistic stand- 
 point was either to explain morality 
 entirely by what Mill called "the sym- 
 pathetic feelings of mankind," or to 
 make all moral rules the results of de- 
 liberate utilitarian calculation on the 
 part of primitive societies, or to base it 
 on some combination of instinctive sym- 
 pathy and deliberate calculation. Dr. 
 McDougall knows a great deal too 
 much about primitive man to suppose 
 that either he or his animal ancestors 
 were the cold-blooded utilitarians which 
 the older naturalistic theories supposed. 
 He knows that primitive man was gov- 
 erned for the most part by instinct, and 
 the emotions accompanying instinct, 
 rather than by deliberate calculation, 
 57 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 and he knows that the emotions by 
 which he is influenced are by no means 
 all of them emotions of a sympathetic 
 or altruistic character. Dr. McDougall 
 traces the emergence of human moral- 
 ity to the development, under the influ- 
 ence of growing intelligence, of many 
 different instincts which exist in the 
 lower animals, together with the emo- 
 tional excitements which accompany 
 the exercise of these instincts. 
 
 The instincts which have, according 
 to Dr. McDougall, played the largest 
 part in the evolution of morality, are 
 these: (i) the reproductive and paren- 
 tal instincts, with which is connected 
 what Dr. McDougall calls "tender 
 emotion," the earliest form of social 
 feeling; (2) the instinct of pugnacity, 
 with which are connected the emotions 
 58 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 of resentment and revenge, broadening, 
 through complications with other in- 
 stincts, into indignation at various kinds 
 of anti-social conduct and giving rise 
 to the practice of punishment and the 
 whole machinery of criminal justice; 
 (3) the instinct of kind, or the gregari- 
 ous instinct, which inclines an animal to 
 be more friendly to members of its own 
 species than to other species, resulting 
 in the formation of tribes and other com- 
 munities, and forming the basis of the 
 emotion which produces loyalty toward 
 the community and the chief; (4) the 
 instincts of acquisition and construction, 
 which have been developed with the 
 idea of property and the moral judg- 
 ments connected therewith;' (5) thie in- 
 
 ' Other writers attach much importance to a dis- 
 tinct instinct of Imitation. The idea that the usual or 
 
 59 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 stincts of self-abasement (or subjection) 
 and of self-assertion (or self-display), 
 with which are connected the emotions 
 called by M. Guyau "positive and nega- 
 tive self-feeling," but which Dr. Mc- 
 Dougall prefers to call, more simply, the 
 emotions of " subjection " and " elation." 
 The instinct of subjection is invoked to 
 explain the respect paid to superiors 
 divine or human: the instinct of elation 
 is the basis of self-respect. I will not 
 attempt to reproduce in detail Dr. Mc- 
 Dougall's attempts to trace the forma- 
 tion of sentiments which he distin- 
 guishes from emotions as *' organized 
 systems of emotional tendencies cen- 
 tered about some object." Of these sen- 
 
 habitual mode of behaviour comes to be looked upon 
 as moral has been specially developed by Simmel in 
 his Moral-Tvissenschaft. 
 
 60 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 timents the most important from a moral 
 point of view are love, hatred, respect, 
 admiration. These psychological details 
 do not much concern us here. The prob- 
 lem which I wish to discuss is not so 
 much the question "What is the origin 
 of particular moral judgements, or into 
 what particular emotions can our moral 
 judgements be analysed?" as the wider 
 problem, " Can moral approbation or 
 disapprobation be analysed into any 
 emotions whatever?" It may be ad- 
 mitted that, if the thing could be done 
 at all, Dr. McDougall's account of the 
 matter is the most plausible that has 
 yet been given. 
 
 There can be no doubt that anthropol- 
 ogy is the trump card of the emotional 
 moralists. It must be admitted, I think, 
 that ethical writers who have approached 
 6i 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 the subject from the point of view of met- 
 aphysics and metaphysical ethics have 
 not come to sufficiently close quarters 
 with the problem suggested by these an- 
 thropological evolutionists. They have 
 too often simply washed their hands of 
 primitive man and his morality, and in- 
 deed of all questions about the gradual 
 growth of the moral consciousness, 
 whether in the race or in the individual. 
 They have protested (in the hackneyed 
 formula) that questions of origin have 
 nothing to do with the question of va- 
 lidity, and confined themselves to ana- 
 lysing the moral consciousness of the 
 developed adult in a developed society. 
 Consequently they have not always rec- 
 ognized the elements of truth which are 
 to be found in anthropological theories 
 of morality, and have failed to win re- 
 62 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 spect for their own speculations on the 
 part of those who are familiar with the 
 facts which they ignore. For my own 
 part, 1 find it impossible to read such 
 books as those of Professor Wester- 
 marck and Dr. McDougall without be- 
 ing convinced of this much — that the 
 instincts and accompanying emotions on 
 which they insist really have a great 
 deal to do with the origin of what is or- 
 dinarily called morality — morality as it 
 was in its earliest stage of develop- 
 ment. It cannot, I think, be denied that 
 the explanation why certain particular 
 kinds of conduct first came to be ap- 
 proved or disapproved really is to be 
 found in emotions of a kind which in a 
 simpler and more primitive form are 
 shared by the loweranimals. And, even 
 when we turn to the savage's notion 
 
 63 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 of " right " and " wrong " in general, it 
 must be granted that the state of mind 
 which induces him to resent anti-social, 
 or even any sort of uncustomary con- 
 duct, is very like the state of mind which 
 impels a flock of wild birds to put to 
 death (if the popular belief be true) the 
 escaped cage-bird, whose behavior is 
 unlike that of its wild fellow creatures; 
 which inspires an elephant with re- 
 vengeful feelings toward the man who 
 has injured it, sometimes a year or more 
 ago; which induces gregarious animals 
 to unite in defending one another against 
 the common foe. I find it impossible to 
 deny that when we see a squirrel mak- 
 ing a little hoard of nuts and resenting 
 the action of any other squirrel which 
 interferes with them, we do see before 
 us the beginning of the tendency which 
 64 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 culminates in the fully developed no- 
 tion of property, or that the monoga- 
 mous instinct of the higher apes is the 
 basis of the hardly less instinctive mo- 
 nogamy of most savage tribes. There is, 
 no doubt, room for much criticism upon 
 the details of Dr. McDougall's analysis. 
 He does not quite escape, as it seems to 
 me, what is known as the fallacy of 
 " mental chemistry " — the tendency to 
 forget that, where two feelings or emo- 
 tions combine to make another, the re- 
 sulting emotion is not really the same 
 as the two others put together, but 
 something quite new: that the combined 
 emotions do not really underlie the re- 
 sultant emotion as the oxygen and the 
 hydrogen are, according to chemical 
 theory, present in the water which their 
 combination calls into existence. Emo- 
 65 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 tions which are not actually present in 
 consciousness do not in fact exist at all. 
 Nor does he allow sufficiently, perhaps, 
 for the alteration which is effected in 
 human emotions by the growth of the 
 general intelligence which accompanies 
 them. The human mother's affection 
 for her child becomes a different thing 
 from the animal mother's instinctive 
 rush to rescue her offspring from dan- 
 ger, just because it is more reflective, 
 because a rational regard for the child's 
 welfare as a whole enters into the mo- 
 tives of the mother in a way in which 
 it cannot be supposed to do in the case 
 of the animal." But such criticisms do 
 not really go to the root of the matter. 
 
 • This modification is very carefully traced by Pro- 
 fessor L. T. Hobhouse in his two books, The Intelli- 
 gence of Animals, and Morals in Evolution. 
 
 66 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 The question remains, " Is there any- 
 thing in the idea of right and wrong 
 which is not mere emotion? Can we 
 admit all these evolutionary facts, and 
 still adhere to the old rationalistic posi- 
 tion — that our judgments of right and 
 wrong, good and evil, represent dis- 
 tinct, irreducible categories or ultimate 
 intellectual notions, just as little capa- 
 ble of being analysed away into emo- 
 tions, no matter how subtle or how 
 much complicated by fusion with one 
 another or how much directed by intel- 
 ligence and foresight, as the intellectual 
 notions which underlie the multiplica- 
 tion table or the rules of the syllogism ? " 
 I proceed, then, to ask how far we 
 can discern in the consciousness of the 
 lowest savages the notion of duty as it 
 exists in the developed moral conscious- 
 67 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 ness. It must be acknowledged that 
 it is difficult to detect. In the savage 
 mother's love of her offspring, in the 
 savage warrior's admiration for cour- 
 age, in his resentment against the vio- 
 lation of tribal custom, in his hatred of 
 his tribe's enemies, in his passionate 
 desire to avenge the death of a slaught- 
 ered kinsman, in his jealous indignation 
 against interference with his marital 
 rights, it is difficult to detect anything 
 which is not ejusdem generis with the 
 passions which, in less developed form, 
 may be inferred, from his outward be- 
 havior under similar circumstances, to 
 exist in the breast of the savage's re- 
 mote simian ancestor. The savage has 
 no such concepts as those which writ- 
 ers like Kant regard as the fundamental 
 conceptions of morality. He has no no- 
 68 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 tion of the intrinsic worth of the human 
 being as such: for he attributes no value 
 to the life of a man belonging to an- 
 other tribe, or at least of a hostile tribe. 
 He has no notion that what is right for 
 him would be right for any other man 
 under the same circumstances, for his 
 morality does not rise above obedience 
 to tribal custom. He expects another 
 tribe to have other customs, and he 
 draws little or no distinction between 
 what we should call principles of eter- 
 nal and immutable morality and the 
 most arbitrary rule of his particular 
 tribe. That he should not marry a mem- 
 ber of a particular clan is as binding and 
 as ultimate a rule with him as that he 
 should not deprive another man of his 
 wife. That he should not kill the totem 
 animal, except by way of sacrifice, is as 
 69 
 
IS CONSQENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 sacred a law as that he should not kill 
 his fellow tribesman. If it is the tribal 
 custom to black the teeth, the omission 
 to do so is looked upon exactly in the 
 same light as what we should call vice 
 or crime. That most of the savage's 
 actual morality and of his intellectual 
 beliefs about morality can be satisfac- 
 torily explained upon the emotional 
 view seems to me clear. I should even 
 be prepared to admit that quite possibly 
 the whole of it might be so explained. 
 Indeed, if we only go low enough in 
 the scale of evolution, such an admis- 
 sion is inevitable. Nobody contends for 
 the existence of a category of duty or of 
 absolute value in the dog or even in the 
 monkey. And it is at least quite con- 
 ceivable that these fundamental notions 
 of developed morality may be equally 
 70 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 absent in the lowest savages. It would 
 not matter, for the purpose of our argu- 
 ment, if we had to ascend to a compara- 
 tively advanced stage in the develop- 
 ment of morality before we reached any 
 ideas about human conduct that could, 
 with the most liberal allowance for the 
 difference between an explicit and an 
 implicit notion, be described as a sense 
 of duty. Let us suppose, for instance, 
 (to put the matter in an extreme way) 
 that Socrates was the first man who 
 ever definitely conceived, and was influ- 
 enced by, the idea of duty; that will not 
 alter the fact that such a notion did ex- 
 ist in the mind of Socrates, and in many 
 men since Socrates. Nor will it in the 
 slightest degree affect the validity of 
 the concept. If there is such a notion in 
 the developed human being, and if it 
 71 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 was absent in the beast from whom he 
 is descended, it must have had a begin- 
 ning at some time or other. For ethical 
 purposes, it will make no difference 
 whether that beginning is to be traced 
 in the earliest mammals who were ca- 
 pable of speech, or whether it appeared 
 for the first time in the Homeric age, or 
 whether we pronounce that Socrates's 
 father and mother were still in the stage 
 of merely emotional morality; while 
 Socrates himself was the first human 
 being to make a distinct moral judg- 
 ment definitely involving the category 
 of duty. Once rid ourselves of the no- 
 tion that because the appearance in 
 consciousness of an intellectual notion 
 or concept had (so far as human minds 
 are concerned) a beginning in time, it is 
 shown to be a delusion and an impos- 
 72 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 ture or a mere amalgam of simpler con- 
 cepts or of feelings which were not con- 
 cepts at all — once recognize that the 
 late appearance of a notion in the his- 
 torical development of the human mind 
 has nothing to do with the question of 
 its validity, and the enquiry -when hu- 
 man morality ceased to be merely emo- 
 tional and became what ethical Ration- 
 alists have taken it to be, becomes a 
 matter of merely historical or biological 
 interest. The notion of duty, or the no- 
 tion of an absolute good which really 
 carries with it the notion of duty, if it 
 exists in the developed human intellect 
 of to-day, is not shown to be invalid 
 because our ancestors — human, sub- 
 human, or animal — had it not, any 
 more than the validity of the multipli- 
 cation table is affected by the discovery 
 73 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 (if discovery it be) that some savages 
 cannot count more than five, or by the 
 undeniable fact that we have all passed 
 through a mental stage of mental devel- 
 opment in which we could not count 
 even up to five. 
 
 Granted, then, that it is conceivable 
 that primitive morality was all a matter 
 of emotion, guided, of course, by the 
 ordinary understanding, the question 
 may be raised, " What reason is there 
 for supposing that this is not so with 
 the developed morality of the civilized 
 man ? " I can only reply once more that 
 the existence of a distinct category of 
 moral obligation or value must be a 
 matter of immediate consciousness. I 
 know by immediate introspection that 
 I can form these judgements of value. I 
 know that such assertions as, "This 
 74 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 ought to be," or "Happiness is part of 
 the true end of human life and pain is 
 not," or " Goodness is of more value than 
 pleasure," or " Intellectual pleasures are 
 intrinsically better than the pleasures of 
 eating and drinking," or " It is unjust 
 to treat one man in a different way from 
 that in which I treat another man of 
 equal intrinsic worth in the same cir- 
 cumstances," or " A larger amount of 
 good is always more valuable than a 
 smaller amount, and therefore I ought 
 not to prefer a smaller amount of my 
 own good to a larger amount of other 
 people's " — I know that such judge- 
 ments present to my mind a distinct 
 meaning, and a quite different meaning 
 from the assertion, " I personally desire 
 happiness for myself or for others," or 
 " 1 am afraid of tribal vengeance or of 
 75 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 social disapproval if I do not promote 
 the general well-being," or " I feel 
 within me an instinct of pugnacity 
 which induces me to avenge an insult 
 to my tribe or my family." The notion 
 is undoubtedly there in my mind — 
 that is a matter of direct psychological 
 analysis. And if the question be not as 
 to the existence of this ultimate notion, 
 but as to its validity, I can only ask 
 what reason I have for believing the 
 multiplication table to be objectively 
 valid which I have not for believing in 
 the validity of my judgement, " Pain is 
 bad but sin is worse." 
 
 The question, be it remembered, is 
 not as to the infallibility of my personal 
 judgement. The individual human intel- 
 lect is not infallible, whether in science, 
 in mathematics, or in morals. Every 
 76 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 schoolmaster knows that mistakes are 
 made even in doing sums of simple 
 arithmetic : but that does not make any 
 sensible person doubt the objective va- 
 lidity of our mathematical judgments 
 in general. When two schoolboys bring 
 out a different answer to the same sum, 
 the one point about which both agree 
 is that, if A's answer is right, B's must 
 be wrong: it never occurs to the least 
 mathematical child to say to his master, 
 "True, you and the arithmetic book 
 make 50 + 100 = 150, but my mind is 
 differently constituted and for me they 
 make 151, and it is mere dogmatism 
 on your part to insist that your answer 
 is any more objectively right than 
 mine." And so, when one of my aus- 
 terer friends assures me that in his 
 opinion pleasure is not a good at all, 
 77 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 and pain no evil, that does not in any 
 way shake my belief in the validity of 
 ethical judgements in general. I may 
 strongly suspect that he really thinks 
 much as I do: I may observe that he 
 acts not only in his self-regarding 
 conduct — when, for instance, he in- 
 hales laughing-gas before a dental op- 
 eration, and has no scruple in paying 
 money for it, but also in his philan- 
 thropic activities — very much as if he 
 did think that pain was an evil. I may 
 suspect that he is betrayed by ambigui- 
 ties of language or misleading associa- 
 tions into using words which do not 
 express his real conviction. Still, I am 
 not bound to deny that some people 
 really do think that pleasure is bad — 
 just as there are others who equally 
 differ from me in supposing it to be the 
 78 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 only good. But that no more makes me 
 doubt the validity of the ethical judge- 
 ment as such than my belief in the laws 
 of the syllogism is shaken by the fact 
 that, in every political campaign, the 
 platforms on both sides are liberally 
 strewn with syllogisms containing un- 
 distributed middles and similar logical 
 enormities. In the judgement of my aus- 
 tere friend that pleasure is bad, I can 
 detect the presence of the same cate- 
 gory of value which I employ in my 
 own judgement that some pleasures are 
 very good. It does not shake my belief 
 in the validity of that category that it is 
 sometimes misapplied, any more than I 
 doubt the validity of the category of 
 causality or of the laws of thought, be- 
 cause two equally eminent men of sci- 
 ence may draw different inferences from 
 
 79 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 the same facts. If we ever take to doubt- 
 ing whether what we really cannot help 
 thinking is true, we embark upon a line 
 of thought which must end in pure 
 skepticism — a skepticism which will 
 leave us no ground for asserting the 
 truth of anything — about ethics or 
 any other subject. Such a position will 
 be as fatal to the contentions of Professor 
 Westermarck and Dr. McDougall as to 
 those of Kant or of Hegel. 
 
 On these grounds, the fullest demon- 
 stration of the purely emotional charac- 
 ter of morality as it appears in primi- 
 tive man would not shake my conviction 
 that in the moral judgements of devel- 
 oped man — the judgements that I am 
 conscious of making myself, and the 
 judgements I find others making, includ- 
 80 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 ing very often (in their unguarded mo- 
 ments) the keenest supporters of ethical 
 subjectivity — there is to be found a 
 distinct category of human thought, 
 with just as much title to objective va- 
 lidity as any other of our ultimate intel- 
 lectual categories. 
 
 The objection which will probably 
 be made by any one to whom such a 
 position may seem novel, lies in the 
 difficulty of envisaging the transition 
 from the merely emotional, quasi-in- 
 stinctive, customary morality of the 
 savage and the rational morality of civ- 
 ilized antiquity or of modern Europe. 
 I suggested as an abstract possibility 
 that, even if Socrates were the first man 
 in whose ethical judgements the category 
 of duty could be detected, that would not 
 involve the denial of its validity. But, 
 8i 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 of course, the hypothesis would be an 
 extreme one. Categories do not spring 
 up suddenly in the human mind per 
 saltum, any more than they do in the 
 evolution of an individual child. Their 
 appearance is usually so gradual that it 
 would never be possible to say, " This 
 intelligent child has the notion, but his 
 father and his mother were wholly in- 
 nocent of it." To trace in detail the 
 gradual evolution of purely emotional 
 into rational morality would be a great 
 task, — a task for the performance of 
 which we should want a thinker who 
 should be as well acquainted with an- 
 thropological facts and theories as Pro- 
 fessor Westermarck, as well acquainted 
 with comparative and social psychol- 
 ogy as Dr. McDougall, but who was 
 at the same time a thoroughly trained 
 82 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 metaphysician, capable of fully under- 
 standing what was meant by the great 
 philosophers of the past when they 
 declared that the moral faculty was 
 Reason. The most valuable contribu- 
 tion toward a solution of this problem 
 which I know is to be found in Pro- 
 fessor L. T. Hobhouse's " Morals in 
 Evolution." Professor Hobhouse shows, 
 I cannot but think, far more apprecia- 
 tion of the real problem at issue than 
 either of the two writers whom I have 
 mentioned. But his work is primarily 
 a history rather than an argument, and 
 he has not very explicitly attempted to 
 answer the precise problem with which 
 I am now dealing. I feel sure that on the 
 whole I may appeal to Professor Hob- 
 house's authority in support of the view 
 which I am endeavoring to set before 
 
 83 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 you, but I prefer to deal with the matter 
 in my own way without attempting any 
 exposition or criticism of his very able 
 work. I will offer three suggestions 
 which may help you to envisage the 
 way in which transition between purely 
 emotional and rational morality may 
 have taken place: — 
 
 (i) Some help maybe derived from 
 the analogy of other intellectual notions. 
 Take the category of quantity. Where 
 in the scale of evolution does it begin 
 to manifest itself? The lowest kinds of 
 conscious beings in all probability do 
 not possess it at all : it is improbable that 
 the amoeba, if it can be said to judge, 
 judges quantitatively. But a bird can at 
 least recognize that its nest has been 
 disturbed and some of its eggs ab- 
 stracted. It has sometimes been con- 
 84 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 tended that such a recognition involves 
 no notion of quantity as distinct from 
 quality. The animal merely recognizes, 
 it is suggested, a certain dissimilarity 
 between the condition of the nest as it 
 was and as it is. And yet, when the dis- 
 similarity is analysed, it does in point of 
 fact consist in the fact that, whereas 
 there were five eggs, now there are four. 
 It can hardly, therefore, be denied, that 
 something quantitative has found some 
 kind of entrance into the animal's mind 
 in however obscure a form. There may 
 be some truth in the ordinary school- 
 boy tradition that a bird will miss two 
 eggs in a nest of six, but will not miss 
 one: but still, to appreciate the differ- 
 ence between four eggs and six implies 
 a certain awareness of quantity. And 
 yet, what a gulf between such an ap- 
 
 85 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 prehension of quantity and the notion of 
 it entertained by the stupidest savage, 
 who would at once discern that his ten 
 children had been reduced to nine, and 
 understand quite clearly what was 
 meant by that assertion. And what a 
 gulf between the savage's state of mind 
 and such an abstract notion of quantity 
 as is possessed by a civilized child of 
 ten who had learned a little arithmetic 
 and a little geometry! And yet even the 
 child's notion of quantity is not that of 
 the advanced mathematician; and even 
 the totally unphilosophical mathemati- 
 cian may possibly be said (if the audac- 
 ity of the suggestion may be pardoned) 
 to have a less distinct and abstract no- 
 tion of quantity than the logician or 
 metaphysician who has had his attention 
 specially directed to such questions as 
 86 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 the difference between quality and quan- 
 tity. An equally good illustration might 
 be supplied by an examination of the 
 idea of cause. It is possible, for instance, 
 that at the lowest level of human 
 thought there is hardly any apprecia- 
 tion of the difference between neces- 
 sary connection and habitual associa- 
 tion, and that it was only gradually — 
 at a tolerably late stage of intellectual 
 development — that the distinction was 
 fully grasped, while even now it is by no 
 means thoroughly appreciated by un- 
 educated persons. If so, that would be 
 a pretty close parallel to what I sup- 
 pose to have taken place in the case of 
 morality.' 
 
 ' It is true that the savage always seems to possess 
 the notion of activity vfhich he derives from his own 
 consciousness of volition, but, in so far as he applies 
 the idea of causality to entities not thought of as con- 
 
 87 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 (2) While I have been prepared to 
 admit as a possibility that, in the very 
 lowest stages of savage morality, the 
 notion of moral obligation may be ab- 
 sent altogether, analogy would lead us 
 to believe that at a fairly early stage it 
 would be present in some rudimentary 
 form. For the savage the moral is no 
 doubt to a great extent the customary, 
 and yet for many savages it is probable 
 that the words "right" and "custom- 
 ary" do not mean exactly the same 
 thing. Let us suppose that we could put 
 a savage, not of the very lowest type, 
 but whose morality was still in the cus- 
 tomary stage, through a little catechism 
 of this kind. " You are a member of a 
 
 scious beings, the statement is probably true. One must 
 remark in this connection that " confusion of catego- 
 ries " of which I have spoken below. 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 clan which has a Hare for its totem, and 
 therefore you are exogamous, and must 
 not marry a woman of the same clan." 
 " Quite so," he would reply. " But if 
 you were a member of the Rabbit-clan, 
 in another tribe, you would be endoga- 
 mous, and it would then be wrong for 
 you to marry outside your clan." "Yes, 
 I suppose so." " Then it is right for each 
 man to follow the custoins of his own 
 tribe ? " " It seems so," would probably 
 be his answer. And there would be, I 
 think, in this notion, " it is right," some- 
 thing more than the notion, "it is cus- 
 tomary," or the admission that a man 
 would feel an emotional discomfort if he 
 breaks the rule, or that his conduct would 
 excite in those about him an emotional 
 discomfort which might provoke them 
 into scalping him. There would be some- 
 89 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 thing more, though as yet the reasons 
 or causes which induce him to invest 
 particular kinds of conduct with the no- 
 tion of Tightness might be almost en- 
 tirely those of the kind commonly rec- 
 ognized in anthropological explanations 
 of morality: and though this savage's 
 obscure notion of " oughtness " may 
 be something very different from the 
 distinct consciousness of duty as it 
 manifested itself in a Socrates or a 
 Kant. 
 
 I might illustrate this purely hypo- 
 thetical dialogue by an actual one 
 which I take from Professor Wester- 
 marck : " The rule of custom is con- 
 ceived of as a moral rule, which decides 
 what is right and wrong. . . . Mr. How- 
 itt once said to a young Australian na- 
 tive with whom he was speaking about 
 90 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 the food prohibited during initiation, 
 * But if you were hungry and caught a 
 female opossum, you might eat it if the 
 old men were not there.' The youth re- 
 pHed, ' I could not do that: it would not 
 be right'; and he could give no other 
 reason than that it would be wrong to 
 disregard the customs of his people." ' 
 That savage was clearly in the state of 
 mind in which the details of his moral 
 code were fixed by custom: but it is 
 equally clear that the idea of right and 
 wrong found a place in his thoughts, 
 and that it was an idea which could not 
 possibly be explained by any of the in- 
 stinctive tendencies enumerated by an- 
 thropologists. The imitative instinct is 
 the one which might most plausibly be 
 
 ' Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 
 vol. I, p. iiS. 
 
 91 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 invoked: but it will be observed that 
 the young savage does not say merely 
 "it would be against the custom of the 
 tribe." I don't know anything about this 
 Australian language, but it appears to 
 have got a word for " right," and, even 
 if the savage said to himself, "the cus- 
 tomary is right," that shows that he 
 drew some distinction between the two 
 notions. He meant something more than 
 " the customary is customary." I do not 
 gather that missionaries find it impossi- 
 ble to translate the terms " right " and 
 " wrong " into very primitive languages, 
 nor do I find it anywhere stated that the 
 terms used really mean only "custom- 
 ary." People do not invent words for 
 notions which do not exist even in their 
 own minds J and, if there is no such a 
 thing as rightness, how comes the no- 
 92 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 tion to have got into that young Austra- 
 lian's mind? No doubt the idea is there 
 in a very germinal form. The story 
 might even suggest that the young sav- 
 age was led by Mr. Howitt's question 
 for the first time to realize that his moral 
 conceptions implied something more 
 than fear of what the old man would 
 say or think or do. Had it not been very 
 indistinct and chaotic, he could not have 
 supposed (as he possibly did suppose) 
 that to eat the female opossum during 
 initiation would be a crime on a level 
 with the killing of a fellow tribesman. 
 But the notion was distinctly there 
 which, when fully developed, would 
 first diminish the sense of guilt at the 
 eating of the female opossum during ini- 
 tiation, and ultimately abolish the whole 
 system of initiation and all the ideas 
 
 93 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 connected with it. Professor Hobhouse, 
 who is a philosopher as well as an an- 
 thropologist, acutely remarks that one 
 of the mental infirmities to which the 
 mind of primitive man is most liable is 
 confusion of categories. He is referring 
 to purely intellectual categories, but 
 what he says is equally true of the sav- 
 age's moral ideas. " One conception 
 melts readily into another," he tells us, 
 "just as in primitive fancy a sorcerer 
 turns into a dragon, a mouse, a stone, 
 and a butterfly without the smallest dif- 
 ficulty. Hence similarity is treated as if 
 it were physical identity. The physical 
 individuality of things is not observed. 
 The fact that a thing was mine makes 
 it appear as though there were some- 
 thing of me in it, so that by burning it 
 you make me smart. The borders or 
 
 94 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 limits of things are not marked out, but 
 their influence and their capacit}' to be 
 influenced extends, as it were, in a misty 
 halo over everything connected with 
 them in any fashion. If the attributes of 
 things are made too solid and material 
 in primitive thought, things themselves 
 are too fluid and undefined, passing into 
 each other by loose and easy identifica- 
 tions which prevent all clear and crisp 
 distinctions of thought. In a word, prim- 
 itive thought has not yet evolved those 
 distinctions of substance and attribute, 
 quality and relation, cause and eflfect, 
 identity and difference, which are the 
 common property of civilized thought. 
 These categories which among us every 
 child soon comes to distinguish in prac- 
 tice are for primitive thought interwoven 
 in wild confusion, and this confusion is 
 
 95 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 the intellectual basis of animism and of 
 magic." ' 
 
 For minds in this stage of develop- 
 ment it is not to be supposed that the 
 notion of " right " exists in a perfectly 
 clear and distinct form. There may be 
 much confusion between the customary 
 and the right. But still we cannot say 
 that the savage mind is altogether with- 
 out the notion of right any more than 
 we can say, without qualification, that 
 it has no notion whatever of substance 
 or of attribute, or of the relation be- 
 tween cause and effect. There is no 
 greater difficulty in supposing a purely 
 emotional and customary morality to 
 have passed into a rational and more or 
 less reflective morality than in suppos- 
 ing (what is undoubtedly a fact) that 
 
 ' Morals in Evolution, vol, II, pp. 20-2I. 
 96 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 minds which had no notion of the dis- 
 tinction between substance and attri- 
 bute passed by slow stages into minds 
 which had a hazy notion of it, and from 
 that stage into one in which the distinc- 
 tion was apprehended as sharply and 
 clearly as it is to-day in the mind of a 
 philosopher like Professor Hobhouse. ; 
 The moral ideas of savages are full 
 of similar confusions. Sin, for instance, 
 is often treated as a kind of physical 
 disease or a sort of imponderable fluid, 
 capable of being transferred from one 
 person to another or from a human be- 
 ing to an animal, and of being removed 
 by physical processes of purification 
 and the like. But beneath all this con- 
 fusion there is to be detected the germs 
 of a notion which the emotionalistic 
 ethic is quite incapable of explaining. 
 97 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 The very materialism of primitive moral 
 ideas is a sufficient proof of their objec- 
 tivity. It is not only in very primitive 
 times that people have a tendency to 
 imagine that whatever is real is mate- 
 rial and occupies space. In a recent 
 controversy a very eminent professor 
 of theology in England showed that he 
 regarded mind as something which oc- 
 cupies space quite as much as matter. 
 
 (3) At a very early stage in the de- 
 velopment of morality we begin to dis- 
 cover not merely a hazy notion of right 
 and wrong in general, but particular 
 moral ideas which cannot be explained 
 by any of the emotions which figure in 
 naturalistic ethics. This appears most 
 distinctly in the primitive notion of jus- 
 tice. Justice has been called the most 
 intellectual of the virtues. Doubtless 
 98 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 the savage has no notion that he ought 
 to treat every other human being as an 
 end in himself or to treat him in the 
 way in which he could rationally will 
 that he should be treated himself in 
 similar circumstances, or the like. He 
 would think it monstrous to treat a 
 member of another clan as of equal 
 value with his fellow clansman or a 
 chief in the same way as a common 
 man. But still, if the chief proposed to 
 tax A twice as much as B, — both be- 
 ing members of his own tribe, of the 
 same rank, wealth, and so on, — even 
 a very low savage would probably see 
 and condemn the injustice; and he 
 would do so none the less if the favored 
 person were his private friend and the 
 other man a stranger or even, perhaps, a 
 private enemy. I do not think this con- 
 
 99 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 demnation could be accounted for 
 merely by the fusion of a blind acquisi- 
 tive instinct with the instinct of kind, 
 or by any other species of emotional 
 alchemy. I believe that we can trace in 
 such a judgement the operation in an 
 obscure way of just the same ultimate 
 principle which underlies the most ab- 
 stract judgements aboutrightand wrong 
 to be found in the pages of Kant or of 
 Sidgwick, though the man who made 
 it would be quite incapable of working 
 it out and eliciting from it all the con- 
 sequences which it carries with it for 
 those philosophers. All travelers testify 
 to the strength of the sense of justice 
 in savages. Here I may appeal to the 
 admission of Professor Westermarck 
 himself: "Various data prove that the 
 lower races have some feeling of justice, 
 loo 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 the flower of all moral feelings. And 
 the supposition that remorse is unknown 
 among them is not only unfounded, but 
 contradicted by facts. Indeed, genuine 
 remorse is so hidden an emotion even 
 among ourselves that it cannot be ex- 
 pected to be very conspicuous among 
 savages. As we have seen, it requires 
 a certain power of abstraction, as well 
 as great impartiality of feeling, and must 
 therefore be sought for at the highest 
 reaches of the moral consciousness 
 rather than at its lowest degrees." ' 
 
 I will quote another passage from 
 Professor Hobhouse: — "Justice as we 
 understand it — the rendering to each 
 man his due as judged by an impartial 
 authority — is not distinctly conceived 
 
 ' Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 
 vol. I, p. 124. 
 
 lOI 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 as a social duty in primitive ethics, and 
 that is what, morally speaking, differ- 
 entiates the primitive ethical conscious- 
 ness from the ethical consciousness at 
 a higher stage of development. Yet 
 primitive ethics works upon rules in 
 which a certain measure of justice is 
 embodied. Thus, in the first place, cus- 
 tom prescribes certain rules of retalia- 
 tion which are recognized as right and 
 proper and have the approval of the 
 neighbors and clansmen. The simplest 
 and earliest of these rules is the famous 
 Lex talionis. ' An eye for an eye and a 
 tooth for a tooth ' comes to us from the 
 chapter of Exodus, but far earlier than 
 Exodus in its first formulation. We find 
 it, like many other primitive rules of 
 law, in the recently discovered Code of 
 King Hammurabi, which is earlier than 
 1 02 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 the Book of the Covenant, perhaps by 
 thirteen hundred years, and we find it 
 at the present day among people socio- 
 logically at an earlier stage of develop- 
 ment than the Babylonians of the third 
 millennium before Christ. ... In some 
 cases the idea of exact retaliation is 
 carried out with the utmost literalness 
 — a grotesque literalness sometimes, as 
 when a man who has killed another by 
 falling on him from a tree is put to death 
 by exactly the same method — a rela- 
 tion of the deceased solemnly mount- 
 ing the tree, and, much one would say 
 at his own risk, descending upon the 
 offender." ' 
 
 Crude as such applications of it may 
 be, the root of the highest morality is 
 really involved in this " impartiality of 
 
 ' Morals in Evolution, vol. I, pp. 84-85. 
 103 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 feeling," the existence of which is ad- 
 mitted by Professor Westermarck. To 
 feel impartially about conduct means 
 in effect to look at it rationally or ob- 
 jectively. Emotion is essentially par- 
 tial, personal, subjective. It is only so 
 far as he is a rational being that any 
 one is capable of impartially judging 
 between the claims of one man and 
 those of another — whether that other 
 be himself or a third person. That the 
 savage is to some extent, though it may 
 be to a very limited extent, capable of 
 adopting that attitude — at least as be- 
 tween fellow tribesmen — is not denied 
 by the naturalistic moralists. " The 
 predicate of a moral judgement always 
 involves a notion of disinterestedness," 
 says Professor Westermarck. "... If 
 I pronounce an act done to a friend or 
 104 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 to an enemy to be either good or bad, 
 that implies that I assume it to be so 
 independently of the fact that a person 
 to whom the act is done is my friend or 
 my enemy." ' And again, still more 
 emphatically he declares that " a moral 
 motive has a certain flavor of general- 
 
 ity." 
 
 It may be well to quote the whole 
 passage : — " Finally, a moral emotion 
 has a certain flavour of generality. We 
 have previously noticed that a moral 
 judgment very frequently implies some 
 vague assumption that it must be shared 
 by everybody who possesses both a 
 sufficient knowledge of the case and a 
 'sufficiently developed 'moral conscious- 
 ness. We have seen, however, that this 
 
 ■ Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, vol. I, 
 pp. 102-04. 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 assumption is illusory. It cannot, con- 
 sequently, be regarded as a conditio 
 sine qua non for a moral judgment, un- 
 less, indeed, it be maintained that such 
 a judgment, owing to its very nature, is 
 necessarily a chimera — an opinion 
 which, to my mind, would be simply 
 absurd. But, though moral judgments 
 cannot lay claim to universality or 'ob- 
 jectivity,' it does not follow that they 
 are merely individual estimates. Even 
 he who fully sees their limitations must 
 admit that, when he pronounces an act 
 to be good or bad, he gives expression to 
 something more than a personal opin- 
 ion, that his judgement has reference, 
 not only to his own feelings, but to the 
 feelings of others as well. And this is 
 true even though he be aware that his 
 own conviction is not shared by those 
 1 06 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 around him, nor by anybody else. He 
 then feels that it -would be shared if 
 other people knew the act and all its 
 attendant circumstances as well as he 
 does himself, and if, at the same time, 
 their emotions were as refined as are 
 his own. This feeling gives to his ap- 
 proval or indignation a touch of gener- 
 ality, which belongs to public approval 
 and public indignation, but which is 
 never found in any merely individual 
 emotion of gratitude or revenge." ' 
 
 Wherever we see this tendency to 
 look at conduct from an impartial, an 
 impersonal, a universal standpoint, we 
 see the operation of Reason in ethics. 
 Professor Hobhouse, whose apprecia- 
 tion of the real nature of morality, 
 
 ' Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, vol. I, 
 pp. 104-05. 
 
 107 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 whether in savage or civiHzed man, is 
 to my mind immeasurably superior to 
 any that one can find in the merely an- 
 thropological or psychological moral- 
 ists, has constantly throughout his work 
 shown how largely the advances of mo- 
 rality have been due to the growth of 
 this effort after impartiality in ethical 
 judgement. To aim at impartiality is to 
 aim at objectivity. An ethical judge- 
 ment claims objectivity just so far as it 
 pretends to impartiality: it is entitled 
 to make this claim just so far as it suc- 
 ceeds in achieving it. An impartial 
 judgement means a judgement based 
 upon some rational consideration which 
 must appeal to every rational being just 
 so far as he is rational. 
 
 (4) What I have said about impar- 
 tiality naturally leads us to the idea of 
 108 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 consistency. One of the ways in which 
 the conviction that moral judgements 
 are objective betrays itself is in the re- 
 quirement that our moral judgements 
 should be consistent with each other. 
 At a tolerably early stage in the devel- 
 opment of morals this demand is un- 
 doubtedly made to some extent. It is 
 assumed that, if I condemn a certain 
 act to-day, I ought to condemn a pre- 
 cisely similar act to-morrow; or again 
 (at a slightly more advanced stage), 
 that, if I condemn the stealing of money, 
 I ought to condemn the stealing of cat- 
 tle, or the stealing of books, and so on. 
 Moral progress has consisted very 
 largely in the gradual rationalizing of 
 the inconsistencies involved in merely 
 customary or merely emotional moral- 
 ity. The conviction that slavery was 
 109 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 wrong was brought about not only by 
 the growth of humanity, but also by a 
 demand for intellectual consistency. It 
 was felt to be unreasonable to approve 
 of treating the black man as a mere 
 means to an end when such conduct 
 was condemned toward a white man, 
 unless some relevant difference could 
 be pointed out between the two cases. 
 Defenders of slavery for a time at- 
 tempted to point out such differences, 
 but it was gradually seen that the dif- 
 ferences were either non-existent or 
 irrelevant. An American court has 
 even, as is well known, been driven by 
 the desire to escape this logical diffi- 
 culty into actually deciding that the 
 term " man " does not include " negro." 
 It is obvious that there can be no need 
 for such consistency of moral judgement 
 no 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 about a mere matter of emotion. In that 
 case, the fact that a white man actually 
 sympathized with other white men 
 more than with black men would have 
 been a final reply to the demand of the 
 Abolitionist. On the emotionalist hy- 
 pothesis, it would be unreasonable to 
 demand even that my judgement should 
 be the same for two days together. 
 Emotional moods vary : and if either an 
 individual or a community were angry 
 with a certain piece of conduct to-day 
 and not angry with precisely similar 
 conduct to-morrow, nobody would have 
 any right to reproach them with incon- 
 sistency. We do actually tend to be in- 
 consistent in our judgements, but there 
 is something in us which condemns that 
 inconsistency, and that something can 
 only be the rational element of our na- 
 il i 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 ture. This demand for consistency was 
 not altogether absent from primitive sys- 
 tems either of law or of morality; and 
 it has grown with the general growth 
 in the power of abstract thinking. 
 
 I have spoken of a gradual transition 
 from einotional to rational morality. 
 But it must not be supposed that mo- 
 rality can ever become purely rational. 
 No action can be done which does not 
 satisfy some desire: that has hardly 
 been seriously denied by ethical Ra- 
 tionalists, though pages and pages have 
 been written by their opponents to es- 
 tablish this obvious fact. And the ques- 
 tion how much any given individual 
 does actually comply with the require- 
 ments of the moral law depends quite 
 as much upon the relative strength of his 
 various desires as upon the clearness 
 
 112 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 and correctness of his intellectual judg- 
 ments. The question at issue between 
 Rationalists and Emotionalists is not 
 what impels me to do a virtuous act, 
 but how I know it to be virtuous. And 
 even when- we ask why this or that 
 person thinks this or that act right, the 
 answer will be very often that he is de- 
 termined to think so partly by custom, 
 partly by emotion: ' but even in these 
 cases the intellectual notion of right and 
 wrong is present, and may strengthen 
 whatever other motives might other- 
 wise impel him to choose one course 
 of action rather than another. There is 
 such a thing as (to use Sidgwick's ex- 
 pression) the desire to do what is right 
 
 ' I might add, "partly by deference to authority," 
 but authority, so far as it can be distinguished from 
 custom, always implies the judgement of some other 
 mind in the background. 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 and reasonable as such. But the extent 
 to which this motive actually operates 
 in the life of even the best men has been 
 enormously exaggerated by most Ra- 
 tionalists. Nor is it even morally desir- 
 able that this motive should be the 
 dominant one. Indeed, we may even 
 say it ought not to be the sole motive 
 of any single moral action. For in our 
 most deliberately rational moments we 
 do not deny all value to all the things 
 which we naturally and spontaneously 
 desire — to our own happiness, to other 
 people's happiness, to knowledge, to 
 the contemplation of beaut3^ On the 
 contrary, we cannot regard anything as 
 good which is not capable of being de- 
 sired. Every rational aCt ought, there- 
 fore, to be directed toward the realiza- 
 tion of some good other than the good 
 114 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 will, however true it may be that the 
 good will possesses a higher value than 
 anything else in the world. Reason, and 
 the desire to obey Reason, actually op- 
 erate not so much by substituting them- 
 selves for other desires or motives as 
 by selecting among the desires those 
 which have most value — suppressing 
 this one, subordinating that one, com- 
 paring one desired end with another, 
 turning the confused and alternating 
 chaos of natural desires into an or- 
 dered hierarchy, combining them into 
 a settled plan or ideal of life, building 
 up out of the numerous ends which we 
 desire a single end which we pursue for 
 ourselves and for others as the end of 
 htiman life. 
 
 This is the ideal task of Reason. And 
 Reason does something of this work in 
 
 "5 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 the inner life probably of most adults in 
 modern civilized countries. But we must 
 undoubtedly recognize the fact that we 
 have in a modern community, living 
 side by side, individuals who are at very 
 different stages both of intellectual and 
 of moral development. The morality of 
 many is almost wholly customary: the 
 morality of many others is mainly emo- 
 tional. Even when the sense of duty is 
 fully and strongly developed, most men 
 are very largely dependent upon custom 
 and authority on the one hand, and 
 upon emotion on the other, for the de- 
 termination of the particular acts which 
 shall be accounted moral. We may 
 have a morality of a very high order 
 in which (nevertheless) there is little 
 direct and conscious reflection upon 
 the details of duty. The moral value of 
 ii6 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 a motive is not dependent upon the 
 abstractness or self-consciousness with 
 which the desire to act rationally oper- 
 ates. A motive may be pronounced by 
 Reason to possess the highest value, 
 although the individual agent may not 
 himself have consciously thought much 
 about being rational. Reason, for in- 
 stance, recognizes that the enthusiasm 
 of humanity is the highest of motives 
 and may therefore acknowledge the 
 sainthood of a St. Francis of Assisi, al- 
 though St. Francis personally was prob- 
 ably more influenced by his emotions 
 than by his reason. It was probably by 
 a vague consciousness that the love of 
 mankind, and of the ideal Man Jesus 
 Christ, is a higher motive than self- 
 love that the practical Reason con- 
 trolled the life of St. Francis: and in 
 117 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 that sense of something intrinsically 
 higher there was operative the same 
 sense of duty which, in a more abstract 
 and intellectual form, dominated the life 
 of a Socrates or a Kant. Doubtless there 
 were defects in his morality, which a 
 more reflective and rational ideal might 
 have avoided. On the other hand, neither 
 Reason nor the desire to act rationally 
 can be satisfactory substitutes for emo- 
 tion. The practical morality of a man 
 like Kant was as defective on one side 
 as that of St. Francis was on another. 
 A more rational morality would, per- 
 haps, have induced St. Francis to recog- 
 nize that he had no right to give away 
 his father's property to the poor; that 
 cleanliness is not necessarily inconsist- 
 ent with godliness; and that it is better 
 to take care of one's health and live to 
 ii8 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 the age of seventy than to neglect it 
 and die at forty-five. A more emotional 
 morality might have led Kant to visit 
 his crazy sister as well as to support 
 her pecuniarily out of respect for the 
 Categorical Imperative. And even in 
 Kant himself it is easy to see that, with 
 all his parade of Rationalism, he was 
 mainly dependent upon custom and tra- 
 dition for his views as to what detailed 
 kinds of conduct were moral or immoral. 
 Moreover, it must be remembered 
 that the Reason which operates in the 
 moral life of mankind is not always that 
 of the individual moral agent himself. 
 Very often it is the diffused Reason of 
 the community which expresses itself 
 in his ethical judgements. But there is 
 one sense in which all higher morality 
 — thoughnot necessarily that of the very 
 119 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 young child or that of the very primi- 
 tive savage — is essentially rational. 
 We can always detect in it that concept 
 of the right or the good (no matter what 
 the detailed acts or ends to which it is 
 applied) which cannot be resolved into 
 any kind of emotion, or fusion of emo- 
 tions, which cannot be derived from ex- 
 perience, which is not a mere vox nihili 
 standing for nothing but confusion and 
 delusion in the mind of him who thinks 
 that he knows what it means, but an ul- 
 timate, unanalysable notion or category 
 of human thought — as much so as the 
 notion of quantity or of quality, of caus- 
 ality or of substance. 
 
 That the notion of an intrinsic right 
 and wrong — an intrinsically higher and 
 lower conduct or character really dom- 
 inates the ideas of those who in their 
 
 I20 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 speculative moments most strenuously 
 deny their validity — could be abun- 
 dantly illustrated from their own writ- 
 ings. Professer Westermarck, though 
 he is generous to the savage and perhaps 
 underrates the difference between his 
 morality and ours, never exhibits the 
 slightest real doubt that his own ideal 
 of life, when it is different from that of 
 the savage, is the higher of the two, 
 though his system entirely fails to sup- 
 ply any intelligible meaning for such an 
 assertion. 
 
 I will give a few illustrations of this 
 fact. In one place he is speaking of sav- 
 age ideas of chastity. The tendency, he 
 tells us, is to treat acts of unchastity 
 only as wrongs done to the parents or 
 family of the girl, and he continues: 
 " Now to anybody who duly reflects 
 
 121 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 upon the matter it is clear that the se- 
 ducer does a wrong to the woman also; 
 but I find no indication that this idea 
 occurs at all to the savage mind."' Pro- 
 fessor Westermarck clearly thinks that 
 the savage is wrong, and that his own 
 attitude toward the matter is the truer 
 or higher attitude; and yet it requires 
 some reflection and intellectual activity 
 — and not merely emotion — to reach 
 that attitude. If it were merely a differ- 
 ence of emotion, what right has he to 
 assume that, because the savage's emo- 
 tions are different from his own, they 
 are therefore " lower " ? It may be that, 
 if the savage were to reflect, emotions 
 of approbation might be excited which 
 otherwise would not be excited; but, 
 
 ' Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, vol. ii, 
 P- 437- 
 
 122 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 then, why should he assume that it is a 
 duty to reflect, or that the emotions of 
 the reflective are higher or truer than 
 those of the unreflective? In one place 
 he actually talks about emotions depend- 
 ing upon cognition as "higher emo- 
 tions." ' He speaks again of traditional 
 notions being accepted by the majority 
 of people without further reflection; and 
 declares that "by tracing them to their 
 source it will be found that not a few 
 of these notions have their origin in sen- 
 timental likings and antipathies,to which 
 a scrutinising and enlightened judge 
 can attach little importance." ' But, ac- 
 cording to Professor Westermarck, all 
 moral distinctions are based simply 
 upon sentimental likings and antipa- 
 
 ' Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, vol. II) 
 p. 744. 2 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 3. 
 
 123 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 thies. If so, what has enlightenment or 
 unenlightenment to do with the matter ? 
 Obviously the Professor here betrays the 
 fact that he thinks there are some emo- 
 tions which it is reasonable to feel and 
 others which it is unreasonable to feel, 
 or, at all events, unreasonable to act 
 upon; the "importance" of which he 
 speaks implies precisely that notion of 
 objective validity or value the existence 
 of which he disputes. Again, at the end 
 of his chapter on " the emotional origin 
 of moral judgements," he exclaims, 
 "Could it be brought home to people 
 that there is no absolute standard in mo- 
 rality, they would perhaps be somewhat 
 more tolerant in their judgements and 
 more apt to listen to the voice of reason." ' 
 
 ' Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, vol. I, 
 p. 20. 
 
 124 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 "The voice of reason," forsooth, when 
 the whole chapter is a diatribe against 
 the notion that Reason has anything to 
 say about conduct! Reason might no 
 doubt on his premises explode the no- 
 tion of an absolute standard, and the 
 Reason which did so would of course not 
 be the moral Reason. But the Professor 
 clearly means to imply that to be intol- 
 erant when one's judgements have noob- 
 jective validity would be unreasonable. 
 Why so, if I actually do feel intolerant 
 toward those whose sentimental likings 
 and dislikings happen to differ from 
 mine ? I could hardly imagine a clearer 
 betrayal of the fact that in Professor 
 Westermarck's mind, as in other peo- 
 ple's, some sorts of conduct are looked 
 upon not merely as provocative of dis- 
 approbation in certain persons, but as 
 
 125 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 the object of judgements which are in- 
 tellectually valid. The very denial that 
 some acts conventionally immoral are 
 rationally condemned carries with it the 
 implication that other acts may be ra- 
 tionally condemned and pronounced im- 
 moral. 
 
 Let me add that, although it is easy 
 to see that high-minded philosophers of 
 the emotional school are really affected 
 by the concept of which they deny the 
 validity, I am far from suggesting that 
 their denial of validity to such concep- 
 tions has no practical consequences. On 
 the contrary, I believe that to deny the 
 validity of the idea of duty has a strong 
 tendency to impair its practical influ- 
 ence on the individual's life. And there- 
 fore I hold it to be a matter of great 
 practical as well as intellectual import- 
 126 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 ance that the emotional theory of mo- 
 rality should be rejected. A morality 
 which describes itself, as it does in the 
 title of a celebrated book of M. Guyau, 
 as "Une morale sans obligation ni sanc- 
 tion," is very likely indeed to prove in 
 actual life a morality which is not par- 
 ticularly exalted in theory, and which is 
 usually disobeyed in practice. 
 
 NOTE ON DR. McDOUGALL'S 
 TREATMENT OF RATIONALISTIC ETHICS 
 
 In ' ' An Introduction to Social Psychology " 
 (the sixth edition of which has just appeared) 
 Mr. McDougall does me the honor to criticise 
 me as a representative of rationalistic Ethics. 
 I should like to make a few remarks on his 
 treatment of the subject. 
 
 (i) He begins his note by saying (p. 229), 
 " This hypothesis [that our moral ideas are the 
 work of Reason] is still maintained by some 
 modern writers of repute," as though the posi- 
 
 127 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 tion were unusual and obsolete. It would prob- 
 ably be useless to mention as authorities by whom 
 that view is maintained, such w^riters as Green,' 
 the two Cairds, Edouard von Hartmann, Renou- 
 vier, or Henry Sidgwick, for these writers, being 
 dead, would presumably be treated as belonging 
 to the hopelessly benighted past of moral phil- 
 osophy as unquestionably as Plato or Kant or 
 Hegel. But, lest some younger reader of Mr. 
 McDougall's book should suppose that the view 
 is one with which he need not trouble himself, I 
 may perhaps point to the fact that it is shared by 
 the most eminent living representatives of English 
 and American philosophy, and in fact by a con- 
 siderable majority of the official teachers of 
 philosophy in England, including those of Mr. 
 McDougall's own university — men like Mr. 
 Bradley, Professor Bosanquet, Professor Royce, 
 Professor A. E. Taylor, Sir Henry Jones, Pro- 
 fessor Pringle-Pattison, Professor James Seth, 
 Lord Haldane, Professor Mackenzie, Professor 
 Muirhead, Dr. McTaggart, Professor J. A. 
 Smith, Mr. Prichard, Mr. Clement Webb, the 
 
 ' I am surprised to find that Mr. McDougall appeals 
 to Green in support of his views. 
 
 128 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 Hon. Bertrand Russell, and Mr. G. E. Moore. I 
 am prevented from adding other well-known 
 names which probably ought to be included by 
 the fact that they have not written upon ethics, 
 though from the general trend of their philosoph- 
 ical opinions they might be presumed to hold 
 the view in question. Nor can the doctrine be ac- 
 counted for by the fact that professors of phil- 
 osophy are not always equally well acquainted 
 with the most recent developments of psychol- 
 ogy. Professor Miinsterberg, Professor L. T. 
 Hobhouse, Prof. James Ward, and Prof. Stout 
 believe in the rational or intellectual nature, and 
 consequently the objective validity, of our moral 
 judgements as strongly as any of the writers who 
 are mainly known as metaphysicians. I submit 
 that in view of such a list of names Mr. Mc- 
 Dougall, though, of course, entitied to dissent, 
 is not justified in assuming the somewhat con- 
 temptuous tone which he adopts in speaking of 
 my views. 
 
 (2) Mr. McDougall goes on to say that I re- 
 gard the moral consciousness " in the same way 
 as Kantians regard our faculties of perceiving 
 spatial and temporal relations, namely, as one 
 
 129 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 which, though it may be developed and refined 
 by use, is given a priori as a primary faculty 
 of intuition, one not evolved from more elemen- 
 tary forms of judgment"; and continues, "he 
 makes no attempt to justify this assumption, on 
 w^hich he hangs so great a weight of conse- 
 quences." I do not quite recognize the first sen- 
 tence as a correct account of my position, as it 
 suggests that I do not think that the moral con- 
 sciousness has been gradually evolved, but I will 
 not dwell upon this. What I wish to object to is 
 the statement that I have made no attempt to jus- 
 tify my position. The fact is I find it difficult to 
 say what part of my " Theory of Good and 
 Evil " is not an attempt to argue in defense of 
 this position. The chapter on " Rationalistic 
 Utilitarianism " (vol. i, pp. 44-76) states Sidg- 
 wick's position, and argues in defense of it so 
 far as it involves the existence and validity of 
 a priori or immediate ethical judgements. The 
 chapter on ' ' The Categorical Imperative " (vol. 
 I, pp. 102-37) is an attempt to defend the 
 rationalistic position of Kant, while rejecting 
 some of the consequences which Kant deduced 
 from that position. The chapter on " Reason 
 
 130 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 and Feeling" (vol. i, pp. 139-77) ^^ entirely 
 devoted to an argument in favor of the belief 
 that our moral judgements are rational and to 
 a refutation of the rival theory that they are 
 feelings or emotions. Book 11, chapter in, on 
 "Self-Realization and Self-Sacrifice" (11, pp. 
 61-103) ) defends the validity of our moral judge- 
 ments against writers who, while not denying 
 the intellectual character, or even in a sense the 
 objective validity, of the conception of Good, 
 deny the absolute or cosmic validity of our hu- 
 man moral judgements in detail. In book in, 
 chapter I ("Metaphysic and Morality," vol. 11, 
 pp. 189-246), is contained inter alia a reply 
 to the objections made to the rationalistic posi- 
 tion so far as they are based on metaphysic. 
 Chapter IV (pp. 356-413) is a reply to Prof essor 
 Herbert Spencer's attempt to supply a purely evo- 
 lutionary explanation of our moral judgements, 
 this being the best-known of the attempts to ex- 
 pound something like Mr. McDougall's own po- 
 sition before the appearance of Professor Wes- 
 termarck's book and his own. My arguments 
 may not appeal to Mr. McDougall, but they are 
 certainly there. However weak an opponent's 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 arguments may seem to his critic, it is scarcely 
 a legitimate controversial device to deny their 
 existence. From the nature of the case, the ar- 
 guments consist very largely in the refutation of 
 rival and inconsistent theories. If Mr. McDou- 
 gall thinks my references too vague, I will espe- 
 cially direct his attention to the following pas- 
 sages : vol. I, pp. 90-91, 102-06, 140-49, 164- 
 68; vol. II, pp. 189-95, 229, 356-75, 391-93. 
 
 (3) Mr. McDougall goes on to remark: 
 " Curiously enough, while the Kantian view of 
 our faculties of spatial and temporal judgement 
 is held to imply that such judgements have no 
 objective value, space and time being purely 
 subjective. Dr. Rashdall finds in the assured 
 a priori character of moral judgements and the 
 moral consciousness his one source of confidence 
 in the objectivity of such judgements." I venture 
 to point out that this criticism implies a total 
 misconception of the whole Kantian philosophy. 
 It seems to imply that Kant denied objective 
 validity to all a priori judgements. Now Kant 
 distinctly held that all the categories possess ob- 
 jective validity : they are valid even as regards 
 things-in- themselves. But we have no experi- 
 
 132 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 ence which goes beyond phenomena : conse- 
 quently we do not know how to apply categories 
 to noumena. The category of causality, for in- 
 stance, is perfectly valid even as regards nou- 
 mena ; but the only experience to which we can 
 apply it is an experience which comes to us un- 
 der the forms of space and time. Consequently 
 for us a cause must be an event antecedent in 
 time to its effect, and therefore we can only 
 know phenomenal causes. But Kant never de- 
 nied that the category of causality was valid even 
 in the world of noumena. I need not add that it 
 was just because he supposed ( however strangely) 
 that our moral judgements do not relate to any- 
 thing temporal, that he held that the limitations 
 of the speculative Reason do not affect the ab- 
 solute objective validity of the judgements given 
 by the practical Reason : and this objective va- 
 lidity of the judgements of practical Reason con- 
 stituted a validation even of the speculative 
 " ideas " which can be shown to be postulates of 
 the practical Reason. 
 
 (4) In the only passage in which Mr. McDou- 
 gall attempts any serious reply to the position of 
 which he regards me as the representative, he 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 writes, "When authors tell us that 'reason' is 
 the principle of moral action, it is necessary to 
 point out that the function of reason is merely 
 to deduce new propositions from propositions 
 already accepted." (L. c, pp. 378-9O 
 
 Mr. McDougall appears to expect us to accept, 
 on the strength of his mere ipse dixit ^ a propo- 
 sition which would be contradicted not only by 
 all modern idealists, but by all logicians and 
 metaphysicians who have learned anything at all 
 from Kant. By Reason, of course, those who 
 believe that our moral judgements are the work 
 of Reason do not mean merely the faculty of 
 drawing inferences, but the faculty of appre- 
 hending a priori or immediately those axio- 
 matic truths upon which in the last resort all 
 knowledge depends." They hold that our moral 
 judgements are due to a distinguishable activity of 
 the same rational Self or Mind or Soul (Mr. 
 McDougall at least will not object to my use of 
 
 ' Kant and others would refer such judgements to 
 "the Understanding," but lam not, and wasnotin my 
 book, dealing with the question of the distinction be- 
 tween one intellectual faculty and another. The ques- 
 tion is whether moral judgements are the work of the 
 Intellect. 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 the last term) to which is due our judgement that 
 two and two make four and that " two straight 
 lines cannot enclose a space." This position may 
 be false, but it cannot be disposed of by a 
 mere denial. Further controversy on the subject 
 would, however, be unprofitable until Mr. Mc- 
 Dougall tells how he supposes our knowledge 
 of such principles is obtained. For the position 
 that such judgements are seen to be true immedi- 
 ately by the Reason or intellect a much longer 
 list of authorities might be quoted than that given 
 above for the rationalistic character of our moral 
 judgements. In fact, apart from the Pragtnatists, 
 few logicians of the present day would deny it. 
 (5) Mr. McDougall appears to include me 
 among those who believe in a moral " faculty 
 w^hich seems to be conceived as having been im- 
 planted in the human mind by a special act of 
 the Creator, rather than as being the product of 
 the slow processes of evolution " (p. 378). Ihave 
 over and over again in the course of my book 
 ("The Theory of Good and Evil," Oxford, 1907) 
 asserted that the moral faculty is the result of slow 
 development just in whatever sense all our other 
 intellectual faculties or (if that phrase is objected 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 to) capacities are the result of evolution. I will 
 quote only one of these statements : " In the pres- 
 ent state of ethical thought it will be perhaps 
 unnecessary further to labor the point that our 
 moral ideas are gradually developed in exactly 
 the same sense, and in exactly the same way, as 
 any other capacities of the human soul, and that 
 this forms no more reason for doubting their va- 
 lidity than in the parallel case of the multiplica- 
 tion table " (1. c, vol. ii, p. 357)- He then tries 
 to dispose of this position by saying, " All these 
 doctrines are open to two very serious objec- 
 tions : ( I ) that they are incompatible with the 
 principle of the continuity of evolution ; (2) that 
 they are forms of the ' faculty doctrine ' whose 
 fallacies has been so often exposed" (p. 378). 
 It is difficult to meet such a vague and dogmatic 
 attack until we know a little more what Mr. 
 McDougall supposes to be involved in these two 
 principles — " continuity of evolution," denial of 
 the " faculty doctrine." As to the first I should 
 not deny the continuity of evolution if by that is 
 meant that the human mind has reached its pres- 
 ent stage by a slow process of development, just 
 as the individual child who is rational only po- 
 
 136 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 tentially or f rafter spent grows into a fully de- 
 veloped rational man by slow stages. If, how- 
 ever, the formula means that there is nothing in 
 the higher stages of mental development which 
 was not present in the lower, that for instance 
 the idea of logical connexion present in the 
 mind of an adult human being is exactly the same 
 as anything which was present in the mind of a 
 toad, I can only say that such a view is opposed 
 to the general view of psychologists — including 
 (I imagine) that of Mr. McDougall himself. 
 Intellectual evolution certainly involves the ap- 
 pearance of a constant succession of new mental 
 events which have not appeared before, and (in 
 its higher stages) of concepts which are not 
 present at all in the lower stages. If it is ad- 
 mitted that ideas which were once non-existent 
 in the mind of an animal come in time to be 
 present in their posterity — if that involves no 
 denial of the " continuity of evolution," neither 
 do I deny it when I say the same thing of the 
 idea of ' ' duty " or of " good." There is a " spe- 
 cial act of the Creator " in the one case as much 
 or as little as in the other. Exactly the same 
 principle holds of the "faculty doctrine." By a 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 faculty I mean (as I have explained in my book) 
 nothing but a " capacity." It can hardly be de- 
 nied that, if we do give moral judgements, we 
 have a capacity for giving them. To hold that 
 men or animals wrho once did not and could not 
 give such judgements have come to be capable 
 of giving them no more involves " the faculty 
 doctrine" (in any sense in which most modern 
 psychologists reject it) than to hold that mon- 
 keys have no capacity for apprehending the dif- 
 ferential calculus, but that men have such a ca- 
 pacity involves a like error. Perhaps we might 
 reach a clearer issue and avoid the prejudice which 
 any allusion to ' ' Reason " or " moral faculties " 
 excites in some minds by stating my position in 
 the form that moral judgements are a kind of 
 thinking, not a kind of emotion or feeling or 
 desire, however closely they may be connected 
 with all three. 
 
 (6) The only passage in which Mr. McDou- 
 gall has come to close quarters with any position 
 which I have really maintained is in his attack 
 (p. 379) on my view that a desire to do the right 
 action ' ' may be created by the Reason which 
 recognizes the rightness." In reply he says : ' ' To 
 
 138 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 create desire is a task beyond its [Reason's] 
 competence ; it can only direct pre-existing tend- 
 encies toward their appropriate objects." Yet 
 even here we are presented with dogma rather 
 than with argument. Of course it is in a sense 
 true that there must be a " pre-existing tendency" 
 toward an appropriate object before a man can 
 desire to do right, just as there must be a "pre- 
 existing tendency " toward the desire to solve 
 mathematical problems (whether in the race or 
 in the individual) or these problems will not be 
 solved ; but until the Reason or (as perhaps Mr. 
 McDougall would prefer to say) the Intellect 
 possesses the idea (say) of an isosceles triangle, 
 it will feel no desire to solve the problem of the 
 equality or inequality of the angles at the base of 
 such a triangle. If the desire to know whether 
 those angles are equal or unequal springs up 
 subsequently to, and in consequence of, the in- 
 tellect's apprehension of the idea of an isosceles 
 triangle and of the problem about the equality 
 of its angles, would there be any harm in saying 
 that the Reason creates the desire to solve the 
 problem ? Of course Reason would not create a 
 desire in a mind that was all Reason and nothing 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 else, that had not desires or at least a capacity 
 for acquiring such desires. I only assert that the 
 desire to do right is created by the intellect in 
 the sense that the desire to solve a problem is 
 created by the intellect when it apprehends the 
 nature of the problem. The desire to do right 
 presupposes the idea of right just as the desire 
 to solve the problem presupposes an intellectual 
 apprehension of the problem. What is denied 
 is simply that any other desire need be present 
 except the desire to do right. I do not deny that 
 in the majority of cases the desire to do right is 
 not the sole motive which prompts to the doing 
 of the right action when it is actually done. 
 Against the view which is here set forth Mr. 
 McDougall brings no arguments at all. 
 
 In conclusion, I should like to say that I have 
 a great respect for Mr. McDougall's psycholog- 
 ical work, but his whole treatment of this ques- 
 tion of Reason and Feeling in ethics shows that 
 he fails to understand the position really taken 
 up by ethical Rationalists. His mind is so 
 obsessed by the prejudice that any form of that 
 doctrine implies some philosophical bogy of 
 "special creation" or an "implanted faculty" 
 
 140 
 
THE MORALITY OF SAVAGES 
 
 or a " deus ex machina," or the like, that he is 
 really incapable of stating the position fairly — 
 still less of arguing against it in a way that can 
 bring any conviction to the people who know, 
 or think they know, what it means. 
 
 Perhaps the best way of disabusing Mr. Mc- 
 Dougall's mind of the prepossession that my 
 views on this matter are inspired by some anti- 
 quated theological dogma will be to point out 
 that they are shared by such completely anti-theo- 
 logical moralists as Mr. Bertrand Russell and 
 Mr. G. E. Moore. 
 
Ill 
 
 VALUE OR SATISFACTION? 
 
 In my previous lectures I have tried 
 to show you that there is such a thing 
 as a judgement of value — a distinct in- 
 tellectual act by which we pronounce 
 something good or bad. This implies 
 that we have a distinct concept of good 
 or value — as distinct, as incapable of 
 being defined or of being analysed away 
 into anything else, as the idea of cause 
 or the idea of quantity. In the present 
 lecture I shall endeavor to examine a 
 little further the nature of this concept; 
 and I trust that in doing so I shall be 
 able to go farther than I have hitherto 
 done in the direction of admitting ele- 
 142 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 ments of truth in the opposite or emo- 
 tional view of ethics, and may hope to 
 render the rationalistic position a little 
 more intelligible and more acceptable 
 to those who may have been more or 
 less disposed to acquiesce in the emo- 
 tional theory. 
 
 No writer has done so much to em- 
 phasize the ultimate, unanalysable, sui 
 generis character of the value-judge- 
 ment as Mr. G. E. Moore, of Trinity 
 College, Cambridge. " If I am asked, 
 ' What is good ? ' " he says, " my an- 
 swer is that good is good, and that is 
 the end of the matter. Or if I am asked, 
 ' How is good to be defined ? ' my an- 
 swer is that it cannot be defined, and 
 that is all I have to say about it. But 
 disappointing as these answers may 
 appear, they are of the very last im- 
 H3 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 portance. For readers who are famil- 
 iar with philosophic terminology, I can 
 express their importance by saying that 
 they amount to this : That proposi- 
 tions about the good are all of them 
 synthetic and never analytic ; and that 
 is plainly no trivial matter. And the 
 same thing may be expressed more pop- 
 ularly, by saying that if I am right, then 
 nobody can foist upon me such an axiom 
 as that ' Pleasure is the only good,' or 
 that ' The good is the desired,' on the 
 pretence that this is 'the very meaning 
 of the word. ' " " 
 
 Mr. Moore does not, of course, deny 
 that you can set forth in detail the things 
 that are good. What he means is that 
 if you say, for instance, " Pleasure is 
 good," you mean something more than 
 
 ' Princifia Etkica, pp. 6, 7. 
 144 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 that pleasure is pleasant, and that that 
 something is not expressible in any lan- 
 guage which does not contain the word 
 "good" or some synonym of it. That 
 would equally be the case even if you 
 were right in saying, " All pleasure is 
 good and nothing but pleasure is good." 
 The only way of escaping this admis- 
 sion is to say that good is simply a word 
 without meaning. And in view of the 
 fact that all languages provide a word 
 for the idea, and that such propositions 
 as the above are constantly enunciated 
 as if they had a meaning and were not 
 mere identical propositions, this is a 
 view that I find it difficult to accept. 
 For a full statement and defence of the 
 position that the term " good " is inde- 
 finable, and for a full exposure of the 
 fallacies implied in denying it, I must 
 
 H5 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 refer you to Mr. Moore's brilliant and 
 extremely important work. I should like 
 to quote more of it, but time will not 
 allow. 
 
 I fully and heartily accept Mr. 
 Moore's position. At the same time I 
 feel that there is something more to be 
 said. The moral judgement is not a mere 
 emotion, but it is impossible to deny 
 that it is very closely connected with the 
 emotional side of our nature, and it is of 
 great importance to determine as clearly 
 as possible the nature of that connex- 
 ion. It is only in that way that we can 
 hope to make the rationalistic position 
 satisfactory, or even intelligible, to 
 minds which are inclined to the emo- 
 tionalist view. Now, in the first place, 
 most Rationalists will readily admit that 
 146 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 an ethical judgement is normally (at 
 least when it relates to some important 
 practical issue actually arising in our 
 own experience) accompanied by a cer- 
 tain amount of emotion — all the more 
 so in proportion as the judgement calls 
 for and actually inspires action on our 
 own part in the face of some serious 
 temptation or conflicting desire.' We 
 need not for the present purpose ask 
 whether there is any one specific moral 
 emotion, or whether (as I should myself 
 be inclined to say) the emotional ac- 
 companiments of our ethical judgements 
 vary with difTerent individuals and dif- 
 erent kinds of right- and wrong-doing. 
 It is enough to say that emotion of one 
 
 ' These qualifications are sometimes ignored. An 
 abstract ethical judgement that theft is wrong or that 
 A. B. convicted at the police court last Thursday, did 
 wrong frequently involves no emotion at all. 
 
 147 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 kind or another — I do not say neces- 
 sarily but normally — accompanies the 
 giving of moral judgements in actual 
 concrete cases. 
 
 This will be generally admitted, and 
 it helps to explain the strong tendency 
 to confuse approbation and disapproba- 
 tion with emotion. But it will not go 
 far towards satisfying the demands of 
 those who feel attracted to the emotion- 
 alist position. We shall go a step nearer 
 to admitting an element of truth in this 
 theory when we insist that in some cases 
 the judgement is and ought to be actu- 
 ally aflfected by the emotions — emo- 
 tions excited by the contemplation of 
 certain kinds of conduct. I must remind 
 you once more of the all-important fact 
 that the thing which we pronounce to 
 be good or to possess value is always 
 148 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 some kind of conscious experience.' 
 And conscious experience always has 
 a feeling side to it. In the case of the 
 most commonplace moral judgements 
 the ground on which they rest is sim- 
 ply the pleasure or pain which is caused 
 by the act approved or condemned. Any 
 one of the more elementary moral rules 
 — the rules which forbid various forms 
 of injury to others — are sufficiently 
 explained and justified by the judge- 
 ment that pain is bad. I do not think 
 that the pleasure-pain side of a con- 
 scious experience is the only element 
 which we take into consideration in 
 
 ' Mr. Moore suggests that some low degree of value 
 may be possessed by unconscious things apart alto- 
 gether from the effect produced upon consciousness. 
 This is a position which I cannot understand, and I 
 believe Mr. Moore has since modified his view upon 
 this point. 
 
 149 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 pronouncing on its value. That is the 
 mistake of hedonism. But it is certainly 
 one of the elements on which its value 
 depends, and in the case of such ele- 
 mentary rules as we are considering, 
 it is the only one that need be taken 
 account of. In other cases the ground 
 of our judgement is adequately explained 
 by saying that we judge one pleasure 
 to be intrinsically higher than another. 
 And among the pleasures which we 
 pronounce to have a value much higher 
 than the value which they possess when 
 considered merely as so much pleasure 
 are various emotional experiences. We 
 judge the pleasures of family affection 
 to be more valuable than the pleasures 
 of eating and drinking, and on that 
 ground (among others) should condemn 
 the adoption of infanticide as a means 
 150 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 of reducing a population which threat- 
 ened to outgrow the food-supply. Emo- 
 tion of certain kinds is one of the things 
 which possess value. But further I think 
 we may even say that in some cases the 
 emotional repugnance which an act in- 
 spires is the sole ground for our condem- 
 nation of it. Thus we in a quasi-instinc- 
 tive way condemn cannibalism and 
 uncleanliness, though in some cases ' no 
 further evil follows from them beyond 
 the cultivation of one kind of emotional 
 disposition and the repression of an- 
 other. Possibly the condemnation of 
 some forms of sexual immorality or in- 
 decency may be brought within this 
 category. You will observe that even 
 
 ' In the case of cannibalism I am assuming that 
 the man is not killed solely for the purpose of being 
 eaten. 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 in these cases the judgement that the 
 emotions which are excited by the con- 
 duct possess a certain value, and should 
 be cultivated, is something quite dis- 
 tinguishable from the emotion itself. 
 Many kinds of cowd^uct ■prima facie ^yj- 
 cite a closely analogous repulsion — the 
 practice of dissection, the dirty work 
 connected with many trades or with 
 scientific research, and the like. But 
 here, when once the purpose of the pro- 
 ceeding is understood, it is recognized 
 that the squeamishness which rebels 
 against them is merely physical, and 
 should be lived down. In the case of can- 
 nibalism or useless uncleanliness, on the 
 other hand, we judge that the emotional 
 disgust which the conduct excites is one 
 which ought to be encouraged, that to 
 lose this dislike (as we should do by 
 152 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 practising or tolerating the conduct) 
 would be to lose something valuable, 
 and, on the other hand, that the emo- 
 tions gratified and cultivated by the 
 opposite kind of conduct possess an in- 
 trinsic value. 
 
 By this time it is probable that an 
 emotionalist opponent will be thinking 
 that we have very nearly come round 
 to the admission that after all the so- 
 called judgement of value is only a kind 
 of satisfaction which accompanies cer- 
 tain kinds of experience. If he is not a 
 hedonist, he may readily allow that the 
 satisfactoriness of an experience to a ra- 
 tional being does not depend upon its 
 mere pleasurableness. We are so con- 
 stituted, it may be suggested, as to find 
 very often more satisfaction in occupa- 
 tions which involve much toil or even 
 
 153 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 pain than in those which bring with 
 them a succession of unalloyed pleas- 
 ures. Even sport has been defined as 
 the overcoming of difficulties simply for 
 the sake of overcoming them, and sport 
 frequently involves an element of dan- 
 ger or of pain. Unselfish people get 
 more satisfaction from giving pleasure 
 to others in laborious and disagreeable 
 ways than from enjoying it themselves. 
 To men of heroic mould the extremest 
 self-sacrifice in the pursuit of an ideal 
 seems, in and for itself, a more satisfac- 
 tory experience than the enjoyment of 
 some terrestrial or celestial paradise, 
 though it is a very hazardous assump- 
 tion to suppose that they get more 
 pleasure from it. And yet in all these 
 cases the meaning of the good, it may 
 be contended, is at bottom simply that 
 154 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 which satisfies desire. We have de- 
 sires for many things besides pleasure, 
 and therefore the good is by no means 
 identical with the pleasant. There may 
 be many different kinds of satisfaction, 
 or at least, we are satisfied with many 
 different kinds of things. But still the 
 meaning of the judgement "This ex- 
 perience is good," is after all, it may be 
 contended, only "This satisfies some- 
 body or other." 
 
 Such is substantially the view of 
 Ethics adopted by the late Professor 
 William James, and I suppose by most 
 Pragmatists. And a strong tendency to- 
 wards this point of view is frequently 
 discoverable in writers who are other- 
 wise Rationalists of the very straitest 
 sort. Professor Bosanquet, for instance, 
 has expressly identified the good with 
 
IS CONSaENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 satisfactory experience, though he would 
 no doubt be less willing than less ra- 
 tionalistic writers to explain the " satis- 
 factory " as simply that which satisfies 
 any and every sort of desire. But at 
 present I will confine myself to William 
 James, who has at least the merit of 
 being perfectly clear and explicit. This 
 doctrine that the good is the satisfac- 
 tory is not exactly the same as that 
 of the writers whom we examined last 
 time but it is sufficiently like it to 
 justify its consideration in these lec- 
 tures. It may be described as another 
 form of the emotional view, and is 
 equally opposed to the rationalistic 
 position for which I am contending. 
 And the best way of meeting it will 
 be to show you how impossible the 
 writers who hold it find it to avoid in- 
 156 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 troducing into their notion of satisfaction 
 an element which really admits that 
 intellectual concept of the good which 
 they profess to deny. 
 
 William James definitely lays it down 
 that " the essence of good is simply to 
 satisfy demand^ ' Anything and every- 
 thing which satisfies any sort of demand 
 of anybody is good. But a very little re- 
 flection shows that not all demands can 
 be satisfied. One man's demands can 
 often only be satisfied at the expense 
 of the non-satisfaction of another's; the 
 demands of one part of my nature or 
 one moment of my existence can only 
 be satisfied by leaving unsatisfied an- 
 other side of my nature or other mo- 
 ments of my conscious life. And Wil- 
 liam James admits that the philosopher 
 
 ' The Will to Believe, p. 201. 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 — and therefore presumably the ordi- 
 nary man in proportion as he is influ- 
 enced by the philosopher's desire to be 
 rational and consistent — feels a demand 
 for some principle by which he can de- 
 termine which of these conflicting de- 
 sires shall be satisfied, and which shall 
 not. And James attempts to provide 
 him with such a criterion : — 
 
 " Since everything which is de- 
 manded is by that fact a good, must not 
 the guiding principle for ethical philoso- 
 phy (since all demands conjointly can- 
 not be satisfied in this poor world) be 
 simply to satisfy at all times as many 
 demands as we can? That act must be 
 best, accordingly, which makes for the 
 best whole, in the sense of awakening 
 the least sum of dissatisfactions. In the 
 casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals 
 158 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 must be written highest which prevail 
 at the least cost, or by whose realization 
 the least possible number of other ideals 
 are destroyed. Since victory and defeat 
 there must be, the victory to be philo- 
 sophically prayed for is that of the more 
 inclusive side — of the side which even 
 in the hour of triumph will to some 
 degree do justice to the ideals in which 
 the vanquished party's interests lie." ' 
 
 Now it seems to me that William 
 James here betrays in an almost naive 
 manner the fact that, even though he 
 may think that everything which is de- 
 sired is good, he does not mean by 
 "good" simply the fact that it is de- 
 sired. He recognizes that the philoso- 
 pher has an " ideal of objectivity " (that 
 is his own expression) in matters of 
 
 ' The Will to Believe., p. 205. 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 conduct. He assumes, indeed, that he 
 will exhibit this concern for objectiv- 
 ity by simply treating one desire as 
 equally entitled to satisfaction with 
 every other, irrespective of what de- 
 sire it is. The goodness of an experi- 
 ence is to be measured by the extent to 
 which it satisfies desire. We may doubt 
 whether that is exactly the verdict 
 which the philosopher, or the thought- 
 ful good man who attempts to act upon 
 this ideal of objectivity, will actually 
 pronounce ; but let us assume for the 
 moment that he will accept Professor 
 James's interpretation of objectivity, and 
 let us see what this implies. It implies 
 that he thinks some desires ought not 
 to be gratified because they are incon- 
 sistent with the satisfaction of other 
 desires. The philosopher, then, — and 
 1 60 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 I presume I may add every other ra- 
 tional man in proportion as he is rational, 
 — demands intellectual impartiality in 
 conduct. And, in proportion as he lives 
 up to his own ideal, he is prepared to 
 doom to non-satisfaction some of his 
 own desires for the sake of this ideal. 
 From what part of his nature, then, 
 does this demand for impartiality arise ? 
 Surely it can only be from his intellect. 
 Mere desire qua desire cares nothing 
 for impartiality, ^ua appetitive being, 
 I shall only satisfy desires in propor- 
 tion as I feel them, and it constantly 
 happens that I do in fact desire things 
 which I can only attain at the cost of a 
 quite incommensurate dissatisfaction on 
 the part of many other persons; and 
 even if you allow for the play of altru- 
 istic impulses, I am much more inter- 
 i6i 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 ested in one individual or small group 
 of individuals than in thousands of 
 others who are known to me merely as 
 human beings enumerated in the census. 
 It is only my Reason which objects to 
 such partiality. There is no desire in me 
 which forbids me to gratify this spon- 
 taneous preference for myself, my fam- 
 ily, or my friends except the desire to be 
 rational. And the fact that I have a de- 
 sire to be rational implies that I already 
 have the notion that impartial conduct 
 really and intrinsically is more rational 
 than partial conduct — the conduct 
 which satisfies thousands of human be- 
 ings rather than the conduct which satis- 
 fies one or a few. That seems to me 
 practically to admit the existence of 
 some such self-evident rational judge- 
 ments as these — " More satisfaction 
 162 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 is always better than less satisfaction," no 
 matter whose satisfaction it is, or "One 
 man's satisfaction is as valuable as the 
 like satisfaction of another." Emotion- 
 ally this is certainly not what we feel. 
 As subjects of mere natural spontaneous 
 emotion, one man's or one woman's 
 satisfaction may be more to us than 
 that of a thousand others. And yet there 
 is something in the intellect which pro- 
 tests against acquiescence in the view 
 that thousands should be sacrificed to 
 one. Once more, in analysing the moral 
 consciousness of Professor James as in 
 analysing that of the savage, we dis- 
 cover in the sense of justice the ele- 
 ment of morality which most peremp- 
 torily refuses to be explained away into 
 mere desire or mere emotion. 
 
 No doubt Professor James mightplead 
 163 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 that I shall not in practice be influ- 
 enced by this judgement except in so 
 far as it satisfies some demand of my 
 own. That is quite true ; but the de- 
 mand is simply the demand of my 
 rational nature, not of any other part of 
 me. Thus it is practically admitted by 
 Professor James that, even though every- 
 thing be good in proportion as it is de- 
 sired or demanded, the word "good" 
 does not mean merely the fact that it 
 is demanded. If by "demanded" you 
 mean merely that which I personally 
 happen to want, then I should not ac- 
 knowledge that that which satisfies the 
 demands of thousands is better than 
 that which satisfies the demands of one. 
 If you say, " That which any one de- 
 mands is good, and that is all that is 
 meant by calling it good," then, so long 
 164 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 as you stick to your definition of good, 
 I might intellectually recognize that 
 what thousands demand is good, but 
 that would constitute no motive for my 
 choosing this course which others de- 
 mand. Others demand it (you tell me) : 
 I recognize the fact; and that (you say) 
 is all you mean by calling it good. But 
 /do not demand it: why should I care 
 about the demands of others ? If in point 
 of fact I do recognize that other peo- 
 ple's desiring it constitutes a reason why 
 I should promote the satisfaction of the 
 demand, that implies that to recognize 
 a thing to be good is more than to recog- 
 nize that it is desired. It implies in 
 fact that it is something which presents 
 itself to my rational nature as that which 
 ought to be desired, whether in point 
 of fact I do desire it or not. Thus the 
 165 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 inexpugnable idea of "oughtness" re- 
 veals itself beneath all the phrases which 
 have been carefully constructed to con- 
 ceal it. That interest in an abstract, ob- 
 jective, greatest quantum of satisfaction 
 which James admits that some men at 
 least possess,implies the existence of that 
 objectivity in the notion of good which 
 the emotional theory, as is admitted by 
 more consistent theorists, entirely un- 
 dermines. That is so even if we assume 
 with William James that the fact of a 
 thing being desired stamps it as fro 
 tanto good. But I do not think it will 
 be difficult to show that the actual moral 
 consciousness does not always recognize 
 that the mere fact that a thing is desired 
 implies that it is good, or at all events 
 that the measure in which it is actually 
 desired is the measure of its goodness. 
 1 66 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 The best way of doing this will be to 
 point out how different is the actual 
 behaviour of men whom we are agreed 
 in calling good to that which would 
 naturally and logically result from the 
 identification of the good with the actu- 
 ally desired. In the first place, the good 
 man does not really make his conduct 
 towards others turn upon the satisfac- 
 toriness to the individual of that indivi- 
 dual's own personal experiences. When 
 he judges that an experience of another 
 man is bad, — say, for instance, the ex- 
 perience of getting drunk, which is em- 
 inently satisfactory to some people, — 
 he will try to prevent that other person 
 having that experience, without calcu- 
 lating how far the experience of so- 
 briety will actually be satisfactory to 
 the drunkard. You will suggest, per- 
 167 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 haps, that what he says to himself is, 
 " I object to your satisfying yourself 
 by getting drunk, because such satis- 
 faction dissatisfies me." That explana- 
 tion of the good man's desire to prevent 
 another getting drunk (not in his pres- 
 ence but in a way which can inflict no 
 physical or emotional discomfort upon 
 him) involves the same fallacy — the 
 same hysteron-proteron, as it has been 
 called, — as the ordinary doctrine of the 
 old hedonistic psychology, the doc- 
 trine that what is desired is always the 
 agent's own pleasure. No doubt if I al- 
 ready desire that another man should be 
 sober, it will be satisfactory to me to pre- 
 vent his getting drunk, but not other- 
 wise : therefore you can't account for my 
 interest in the matter by saying that I 
 stop his getting drunk because it causes 
 1 68 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 me dissatisfaction. The dissatisfaction 
 implies a condemnation which is not 
 based on the dissatisfaction. Or do you 
 admit that there is a disinterested desire 
 of the other man's satisfactions ? But if 
 all I meant by "good" were actual satis- 
 faction, I should surely accept the other 
 man's verdict as to what is satisfactory 
 to him and what is not. What can be 
 more arbitrary, if what I aim at is an- 
 other's satisfaction, than to insist on his 
 satisfying himself with what satisfies 
 me? It is plain that, so far as the good 
 man's notion of good can be identified 
 with satisfactoriness, it is what is satis- 
 factory to an ideal self, not to any par- 
 ticular actual self that he identifies with 
 the good. And that implies an objec- 
 tive standard of good which cannot be 
 got out of mere emotion, or out of any 
 169 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 mere feeling of satisfactoriness, unless 
 by satisfactory you mean satisfactory to 
 this idealizing part of the man — in 
 other words to that moral conscious- 
 ness which is part of his nature as a ra- 
 tional being. 
 
 You may suggest that, since we all par- 
 take in one human nature, the man who 
 finds, say, the pleasure of sin ultimately 
 unsatisfactory, has a right to assume 
 that in the long run it will be found to 
 be so to others. Certainly that is so if Rea- 
 son has got anything to do with the esti- 
 mate of what is satisfactory, for Reason 
 is objective in its deliverances: I may 
 therefore assume that the other man's 
 rational nature will condemn what my 
 rational nature condemns, when once it 
 is roused into activity: just as I assume 
 that when I see a geometrical proposi- 
 170 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 tion to be demonstrated, another man 
 who does not see it, could still be got 
 to see it with sufficient explanation on 
 my part and sufficient attention on his. 
 But if by " satisfaction " you mean 
 simply what satisfies the man as he is, 
 it is a ridiculous assumption to suppose 
 that what will satisfy me will satisfy 
 another. Reason is the same in all 
 men: tastes proverbially differ. The 
 identification of the good with the sat- 
 isfactory reduces diversities of moral 
 judgement to differences of taste quite as 
 much as the theory of the " moral sense " 
 school. Upon this view it would be as 
 absurd that we should try to force our 
 own ideas about the satisfactoriness of 
 moral conduct upon others as it would 
 be for a musical man to insist upon 
 others sitting through a long sonata 
 171 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 which would produce in them the 
 highly dissatisfying experience of bore- 
 dom,' You cannot account for the fact 
 that the man who condemns occasional 
 drunkenness, no matter how little fur- 
 ther harm may result from it, feels him- 
 self bound to endeavour to prevent 
 other people indulging in this (to them) 
 satisfactory experience, except by the 
 conviction in his mind that there is an 
 absolute standard of what is satisfactory. 
 And this cannot be unless the part of 
 one's nature which feels the satisfactori- 
 ness belongs to the intellect, and not 
 the sensations or the emotions. Doubt- 
 
 ' No doubt it may be contended that the sesthetic 
 judgement, too, is objective : but this is not recog- 
 nized by those against whom I am arguing, and after 
 all the objectivity of the aesthetic judgement, "This 
 is beautiful," does not make it a duty for all to en- 
 deavour to enjoy it. 
 
 172 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 less the intellectual judgement that an 
 experience is satisfactory to the value- 
 judging intellect is very closely con- 
 nected with the sensational and emo- 
 tional experiences which are judged 
 valuable, but the judgement is not the 
 same thing as those experiences them- 
 selves. To speak of the value-judge- 
 ment as a feeling of satisfactoriness 
 misrepresents its true nature except in 
 that popular sense of the word "feel- 
 ing" in which it is used for any ob- 
 scure and unanalysed kind of thinking: 
 it is a thought satisfactoriness rather 
 than a felt satisfactoriness, even when 
 that which is pronounced satisfactory is 
 most clearly and obviously some feeling 
 or emotion. 
 
 The judgement of value is, then, very 
 closely connected (though not identical) 
 
 173 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 with satisfactoriness of experience — 
 in two ways. In the first place that 
 which is pronounced good is always 
 an experience which can satisfy. It is 
 always the satisfaction of some desire 
 that is pronounced satisfactory, — the 
 desire of some consciousness, not neces- 
 sarily that of the person who judges, 
 but of some consciousness or other, — 
 something which actually satisfies some 
 part of the nature of some one. We 
 may even go so far as to say that 
 ■prima facie the satisfaction of all de- 
 sire as such will commend itself to our 
 value-judging consciousness as good. 
 If in some cases we do in fact condemn 
 what satisfies another, it is always be- 
 cause it involves the non-satisfaction of 
 some other and higher part of his nature. 
 That which I judge good for him will 
 174 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 always be something which might sat- 
 isfy some part of his nature. Even if 
 the higher desire is not actually felt, it 
 is always some desire which he might 
 feel. I condemn the satisfaction of an 
 impulse toward cruelty — even apart 
 from the claims of the being at whose 
 expense this desire would have to be 
 gratified — because it involves the non- 
 satisfaction of the humaner impulses 
 which the man feels or (as a human 
 being) might feel. I should think it 
 senseless to condemn a similar impulse 
 in a beast of prey : in the beast the sat- 
 isfaction of such an impulse presents 
 itself to me (in Bishop Butler's words) 
 as "agreable to his nature as a whole." 
 And there is a second way in which the 
 idea of value is very closely connected 
 with satisfaction. When I judge some 
 
 175 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 end to be good, and therefore the con- 
 duct which will produce it to be right, 
 I always do so because the end satisfies 
 a part of my own nature. 
 
 So far we may admit an element of 
 truth in the " satisfaction " theory. The 
 point at which we shall differ discloses 
 itself when we go on to ask, What is the 
 part of my nature which finds its satis- 
 faction in the attainment of an objec- 
 tive end — which finds its satisfaction in 
 the preference for myself of the higher 
 desire to the lower, or in the satisfac- 
 tion of many men's desire in preference 
 to the satisfaction of one ? I have already 
 given reasons for holding that, in the 
 case of an act done from a sense of duty, 
 this part of my nature belongs to the 
 intellectual part : but I will try to make 
 the point still clearer. That " higher 
 176 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 self " or " self as a whole," of which James 
 so often talks as being dissatisfied with 
 the natural self — dissatisfied with what 
 satisfies many other desires or sides of 
 our nature — is, I contend, simply that 
 in me which does other kinds of think- 
 ing and which, as a part of that thinking, 
 appraises the various desires and im- 
 pulses of myself and other men by refer- 
 ence to a certain ideal of human life and 
 conduct as a whole. And this appraise- 
 ment is no mere expression of any 
 mere liking or disliking, but, as much 
 as any kind of judgement, a piece of in- 
 sight into the true nature of things, a 
 judgement which (in so far as it is 
 true) must be recognized by every 
 other mind which possesses this in- 
 sight. It would be possible to quote 
 phrase after phrase from James which 
 177 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 really recognizes that this is so. It will 
 be enough to mention the constant use 
 of the terms "higher" and "lower" — 
 that admission of an objective standard 
 in our moral judgement which the most 
 emotionalistic of Emotionalists can never 
 prevail upon himself altogether to aban- 
 don. 
 
 The intellectual character of these 
 value-judgements comes out most clearly 
 in the procedure which a man adopts 
 in comparing the satisfactions of differ- 
 ent individuals other than himself. One 
 man desires something — some pleas- 
 ure, let us say — which would give 
 him some satisfaction, but which will 
 cause non-satisfaction of a similar de- 
 sire on the part of three other men. 
 Suppose that in a besieged town, when 
 the provisions are limited, one man 
 178 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 wants to have a full meal at the cost of 
 two other men having no meal at all. 
 Such an arrangement would produce a 
 certain dissatisfaction in most minds; 
 and to avoid that dissatisfaction most of 
 us, if in supreme command in that town, 
 would order the rations to be distributed 
 equally. Of course we might be actuated 
 in so doing by many other considerations 
 besides the desire of dealing fairly be- 
 tween the individuals — by the desire, 
 for instance, that the town should hold 
 out as long as possible. But even if such 
 considerations were absent, it would of- 
 fend us that such conduct should be 
 permitted. Yet the satisfaction which 
 the commander tries to promote in him- 
 self would be simply the satisfaction 
 of a rational demand : and that is only 
 another way of admitting that Reason 
 179 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 does prescribe the conduct in question. 
 I defy any Emotionalist to point out any 
 impulse, desire, primitive instinct, emo- 
 tion, sentiment or whatever you call it 
 which runs counter to the unequal dis- 
 tribution except the desire to be ra- 
 tional ; and this desire we could not feel 
 unless our reason did judge that there is 
 something irrational about treating one 
 man's desires or pleasures or satisfac- 
 tions as more important than those of 
 three other (in all relevant ways) sim- 
 ilar persons.' We have already seen 
 that it is in dealing with the virtue of 
 justice that the anthropological moral- 
 
 ' It might be said that the divider might be influ- 
 enced by benevolent feelings tovifards all the persons 
 vifhile he had no reason for preferring one to another : 
 but, hovfever strong his personal affection for one or 
 personal dislike for the other, there would be still the 
 same rational revolt against inequality. 
 
 i8o 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 ists come nearest to admitting that an 
 intellectual concept does influence con- 
 duct even in the case of the savage. It is 
 in comparing the relative claims of 
 different individuals that the rational 
 character of our moral judgements is 
 most obvious. 
 
 It is only another application of the 
 same principle of justice which com- 
 pels me to be impartial in dealing with 
 the different moments of the same man's 
 conscious life or experience. That so far 
 as the experience is of equal value, one 
 moment of it is as valuable as any other, 
 and a larger amount more valuable than 
 a smaller is a deduction which will be 
 admitted by all except those who are 
 prepared paradoxically to contend that 
 the element of quantity does not enter 
 at all into our judgement as to the value 
 i8i 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 of experience.' And this implies the 
 self-evident axiom that the more good 
 is always greater than the less good. 
 Thus the sentiment of justice in its 
 broadest sense is found to involve these 
 two axioms upon which the whole sys- 
 tem of such a rationalistic morality as 
 Professor Sidgwick's is built up — the 
 axiom of rational benevolence which 
 pronounces that the greatest good is al- 
 ways to be preferred to the lesser, and 
 the axiom of equity which pronounces 
 that one man's good ought always to be 
 treated as of equal importance with the 
 like good of another. 
 
 It is in reference to these two funda- 
 mental axioms — the axiom of equity 
 
 ' This has been maintained by some of those who 
 polemize against the idea of a calculus of goods. I 
 have dealt with this matter in my Theory of Good 
 and Evil, vol. II, chaps, x and ii. 
 
 182 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 and the axiom of rational benevolence ' 
 — that the rational, objective character 
 of our moral judgements can be ren- 
 dered most evident. It would be con- 
 sistent with the rationalistic view of 
 ethics to suppose that it was only in 
 these quantitative comparisons of good 
 that any rational, and therefore objec- 
 tively valid, element enters into the 
 moral consciousness, the content of the 
 good being in all cases ascertained by 
 a mere appeal to experienced pleasant- 
 ness or satisfaction. This is a possible 
 view; but it is one which I do not hold, 
 for the simple reason that I do not ac- 
 
 ' Sidgivick adds a third — the axiom of prudence 
 which asserts that (where one's own good only is in 
 question) one ought to prefer one's own greater good 
 to one's own smaller good; but this is merely a par- 
 ticular case of the axiom which declares that the 
 greater good is always to be preferred to the less. 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 tually judge all kinds, whether of pleas- 
 ure or of satisfaction, to be intrinsically 
 of equal value or to differ only in quan- 
 tity. I regard — and I find that others 
 regard — one kind of satisfaction as hav- 
 ing a higher quality than another; and I 
 claim objective validity for this prefer- 
 ence. If the superiority can claim this 
 validity, the judgement which asserts it 
 must be a judgement of Reason. I ad- 
 mit that the rational character of these 
 qualitative judgements is much more dif- 
 ficult to establish than those which re- 
 late merely to the just quantitative 
 distribution of satisfactions. It is more 
 difficult in the case of such qualita- 
 tive judgements as " The pleasure of 
 Art is higher than the pleasure of 
 eating" to dispose satisfactorily of the 
 suggestion that in pronouncing one 
 184 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 pleasure or other experience intrin- 
 sically better than another, I mean 
 merely that I personally find in it more 
 emotional satisfaction of one kind or 
 another than in what I call the lower 
 pleasures or experiences. However, I 
 must try what I can do to show that 
 this is not the case. 
 
 Now it is admitted by writers of Pro- 
 fessor James's school that we are as a 
 matter of fact more satisfied by one ex- 
 perience than another, though this ex- 
 perience is not necessarily a greater 
 pleasure. What is it, then, that finds it 
 more satisfactory ? Is it not clear that 
 in preferring an intellectual satisfaction 
 to a sensual pleasure, I am influenced 
 by a certain ideal as to the relative im- 
 portance of different parts of my nature 
 — an ideal which appeals to no other 
 
 185 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 instinct, emotion, or sentiment except 
 the desire to act in accordance with the 
 ideal? The impulse is one which could 
 not come to a mere animal. It might be 
 replied that the mere animal could not 
 feel the intellectual or aesthetic experi- 
 ence at all, and for that reason could 
 not appreciate its superiority: but the 
 mere experience is a different thing 
 from a consciousness of its superiority. 
 The notion of intrinsic superiority or 
 right to prevail — which is implied in 
 calling the experience " higher " — is 
 something more than an emotion ; it is an 
 intellectual concept. And therefore we 
 consider ourselves entitled to act upon 
 our judgement, even in conduct which 
 affects other people, whether or not they 
 actually feel the superiority of the 
 higher experience themselves; which 
 1 86 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 would be quite arbitrary if this sense 
 of superiority were a merely subjective 
 preference. We decline to cultivate 
 their taste for drunkenness, no matter 
 how much satisfaction they derive from 
 it. We consider it a duty sometimes to 
 create a supply of education or culture 
 or refined amusement where there is no 
 demand for it. For these reasons I do 
 not myself doubt that this sense of the 
 superiority or superior satisfactoriness 
 of one experience over another is really 
 a rational judgement, and that it is such 
 a judgement that implicitly underlies all 
 that talk about the higher self or the 
 deeper or more permanent satisfaction 
 which we find in writers who seek to 
 identify the good with the satisfactory. 
 All these fine phrases seem to be at 
 bottom simple aliases for the sui gene- 
 187 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 m judgement of value which they want 
 to get rid of. The term " satisfaction " 
 does but darken counsel. Either it 
 means at bottom merely pleasantness, 
 or it means a satisfactoriness of so 
 unique and distinct a kind that it had 
 better be expressed by a unique and 
 distinctive term. If satisfactory does 
 not mean pleasant, it is a mere synonym 
 for good or valuable, and the less am- 
 biguous term is the preferable one. The 
 truth at the bottom of the " satisfac- 
 tion" theory is that the good actually 
 does consist in experiences which are 
 satisfactory to some part of our nature; 
 but in calling them good we mean more 
 than that they are satisfactory; and the 
 rank and importance of different kinds 
 of satisfactoriness — kinds which ap- 
 peal to difFerent parts of our nature — is 
 1 88 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 determined by no sort of satisfaction 
 except the satisfaction of an ideal as to 
 what human nature and human life 
 ought to be. This notion of what ought 
 to be, if it is not a chimera, must be of 
 intellectual origin. 
 
 Writers like Professor James are very 
 fond of the term " ideal." They admit 
 that the satisfaction aimed at is an ideal 
 satisfaction or the satisfaction of an ideal 
 self. On their avowed premisses an ideal 
 ought to mean simply that which satis- 
 fies a desire — a desire for a particular 
 kind of life as a whole, as distinct from 
 the desire of some particular thing or 
 experience. The term may on their 
 premisses signify a demand different 
 from other demands, but it cannot on 
 that account alone be called superior. 
 And yet they constantly admit that they 
 189 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 themselves recognize it to be superior 
 — and that not in the sense merely that 
 this or that person demands it more. 
 Sometimes they forget themselves so 
 far as to call it an intrinsic superiority. 
 But what can " intrinsic " mean except 
 a superiority which is not created by 
 the precise strength of the demand in 
 this or that individual consciousness, 
 but a superiority which objectively be- 
 longs to these higher experiences — 
 which is recognized by our judgements, 
 not created by our desires or our whims ? 
 If it be only recognized that the satis- 
 factoriness which constitutes the mean- 
 ing of good is a satisfactoriness to a self 
 which has a peculiar capacity for judg- 
 ing or valuing ideals, and if the ideals be 
 treated as ideals which are capable of 
 being true or false, there would be no 
 190 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 harm in such language. Only it will 
 have no superiority over the old com- 
 monplace rationalistic doctrine that the 
 good is that which is pronounced such 
 by a particular and distinctive activity 
 of that same Reason or rational Self 
 from which all ultimate concepts or 
 categories of thought are derived. 
 
 Before I conclude, I should like 
 briefly to glance at one or two of the 
 consequences or corollaries of a recog- 
 nition of that rational objective charac- 
 ter which I have claimed for our ethical 
 judgements. The first and most im- 
 portant is one on which I have already 
 dwelt ; but in view of the ultimately 
 practical purpose of the West lectures, 
 you will excuse me, if I for a moment 
 191 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 insist upon it once again that it gives 
 us a ground for inferring that, if there is 
 such a thing as a world-purpose, that 
 purpose must be goodj and that, if that 
 purpose is the purpose of a self-con- 
 scious, rational Will, that Will must be 
 thought of as directed to the good, and 
 therefore as being itself good or right- 
 eous. There is no ground for any such 
 assumption except what is derived from 
 our own judgements of value recog- 
 nized as possessing objective validity. 
 The mere fact that the Universe seems 
 to be tending toward, even consciously 
 tending toward and striving after a 
 certain end, will not prove that end 
 to be good. If our moral judgements 
 are reduced to mere individual " de- 
 mands" — the demands of our sensi- 
 tive or emotional nature — there is no 
 192 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION ' 
 
 reason to assume that the Universe is 
 likely to fulfil our demands or to gratify 
 our desires and aspirations. Even if we 
 have arrived on other grounds at some- 
 thing like a personal conception of God, 
 it would be rash to assume that his 
 emotions or desires are like ours. Only 
 if we regard moral approbation as a 
 rational judgement about what ought 
 to be, have we a right to assume that 
 the Mind from which our minds are 
 derived will recognize their truth, and 
 act upon it. Thus and thus only have 
 we a ground for inferring that there is 
 being realized by the world's history an 
 end or good which Reason inust pro- 
 nounce to be the best that is possible. 
 And only upon this supposition have 
 we any rational ground for accepting 
 whatever postulates or consequences 
 193 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 seem to be implied in this view of the 
 Universe. The mere fact that some men 
 wish for Immortality would be a poor 
 ground for believing in it or even hoping 
 for it. The fact that it seems a necessary 
 postulate of our regarding the world as 
 one which a supremely rational Being 
 could will is a ground for assuming it 
 than which none could be stronger. To 
 put all this in more popular language, 
 the belief in the objectivity of our moral 
 judgements is a necessary premiss 
 for any valid argument for the belief 
 either in God, if by that be understood 
 a morally good or perfect Being, or in 
 Immortality. 
 
 The other consequence which I will 
 
 notice is the bearing of this belief in 
 
 ethical objectivity upon the problem of 
 
 moral education. There are many peo- 
 
 194 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 pie in England who would like to sub- 
 stitute systematic ethical instruction in 
 schools for the teaching of religion. 
 And in this country, I imagine, the 
 plan of giving such instruction in entire 
 disconnection from theology or religion 
 is much more frequently advocated and 
 adopted. I do not doubt that it is pos- 
 sible to teach both the idea of duty in 
 general and particular duties in detail 
 without explicit reference to theology; 
 and, where there are insuperable ob- 
 stacles to religious teaching in schools, 
 it may be very desirable that some- 
 thing of the kind should be attempted, 
 though I strongly believe that moral 
 ideas can be taught much better with a 
 religious background and in a religious 
 setting than without them. But I should 
 be more inclined to favour purely eth- 
 19s 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 ical teaching in schools if I were quite 
 sure as to what sort of morality it is 
 that is to be taught. It is a mere de- 
 lusion to suppose that, while men differ 
 about theology, there are no differences 
 of opinion about morality. On the con- 
 trary, I believe that there are difTerences 
 of ethical opinion which already divide 
 men, and will probably divide them 
 still more sharply in the future, even 
 more fundamentally than any purely 
 theological difference: and the great- 
 est of such differences is the difference 
 between those who do and those who 
 do not believe in the objective validity 
 of the idea of duty. Some of those who 
 clamour for the teaching of morality in 
 schools clearly do not believe in moral- 
 ity at all in the sense in which the ethi- 
 cal Rationalist understands morality. 
 196 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 In a specimen ethical lesson put forth 
 as an illustration of the value and effi- 
 ciency of purely moral instruction there 
 occur this question and answer: "If 
 you resist a temptation to tell a lie, 
 what will you get by it for yourself? 
 Answer: "I shall get the respect of my 
 fellows." Such ethical teaching (apart 
 from the fact that the statement is by 
 no means always true) seems to me 
 a good deal more demoralizing than 
 the crudest form of the old-fashioned 
 heaven-and-hell theological morality. 
 Even when an excessive emphasis is 
 laid in religious teaching upon future 
 rewards and punishments rather ma- 
 terialistically understood, these rewards 
 and punishments are always supposed 
 to be inflicted by an intrinsically just 
 and righteous God : and therefore such 
 197 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 teaching does impress upon the chil- 
 dren's minds the idea of an eternal, 
 intrinsic, objective difference between 
 good and evil. It inculcates respect for 
 an absolute moral standard which is 
 independent of human fashion or ca- 
 price. In short, it implants and fosters 
 the idea of duty; whereas the teaching 
 which puts the desire for the respect of 
 one's fellows in the forefront of ethical 
 motives tends to make morality mean 
 "Always shout with the largest crowd," 
 to make a god of public opinion, to 
 make a heaven of mere popularity, and 
 to encourage the shrinking from un- 
 popularity as the worst of hells. From 
 such a standpoint Socrates and one 
 greater than Socrates were simply fool- 
 ish and immoral persons. And yet, if 
 the emotionalist theory of morals which 
 198 
 
VALUE OR SATISFACTION 
 
 I have been examining be well founded, 
 there is no really solid basis for any 
 other kind of ethical teaching. 
 
 The theories which I have been dis- 
 cussing are grave scientific theories 
 which must be discussed on scientific 
 grounds without any appeal to mere 
 conservative prejudice. I have tried to 
 suggest to you that they can be met in 
 as purely a scientific and dispassionate 
 way as that in which they are (at least 
 sometimes) defended. But the scientific 
 spirit does not require us to blind our- 
 selves to the practical consequences 
 which hang upon the solution of not a 
 few scientific problems. And assuredly 
 there is no scientific problem upon which 
 so much depends as upon the answer we 
 give to the question whether the dis- 
 tinction which we are accustomed to 
 199 
 
IS CONSCIENCE AN EMOTION 
 
 draw between right and wrong belongs 
 to the region of objective truth like the 
 laws of mathematics and of physical 
 science, or whether it is based upon 
 an actual emotional constitution of in- 
 dividual human beings, which may 
 once have possessed, and may possibly 
 still possess, a certain survival-value in 
 the evolution of the species to which 
 those individuals belong. The emo- 
 tionalist theory of ethics however little 
 intended to have that result by its sup- 
 porters, is fatal to the deepest spiritual 
 convictions and to the highest spiritual 
 aspirations of the human race. 
 
 THE END 
 
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