..jij—judsfeji! The Library of Genetic Science and Philosophy Vol. I Bij^ak - _i — S.Jl 'C :&: U5 A sshU =Mwiiti*-i 131/ k ©Btttell laiwtsitg f itaaig BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF Denrg W. Sage 1891 'A^. J./.r^- 4^^ 6896-1 315 volume was taken. To renew this book copy the call No. and give to ' the librarian. HOME USE RULES. AM Books subject to Recall. Books not used for instriJbtion or researeh are returnable within 4 weeks. Volumes of periodi- cals and of pamphlets are held in the library as much as possible. For special purposes they are given out for a limited time. Borrowers should ' - ; not use their library privileges for the bene- fit of other persons. Books not needed during recess periods should be retiirned to the library, or arrange- ments made for their return during borrow- er's absence,if wanted. Books needed by more than one person are held on the reserve list. ? Books of special value and gift books, when the giver wishes it, are not allowed to circulate. Readers are asked to report all cases of ■" ■' books marked or muti- lated. Do not deface books by marks and writing. Cornell University Library BJ1311 .025 Moral life: a study In genetic ettilcs b 3 1924 029 203 457 olin A Cornell University 9 Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029203457 Psychological Review Publications LIBRARY OF GENETIC SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. VOL. I THE MORAL LIFE A STUDY IN GENETIC ETHICS BY ARTHUR ERNEST DAVIES, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy in the Ohio State Uniiiersity REVIEW PUBLISHING CO. BALTIMORE 1909 T A.t^li bS PRESS OF WILLIAMS Jc W1KLIN8 COMPANY BALTIMORE, MD. LI B RART OF GENETIC SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORS' PREFACE. The Editors of the Psychological Review have long felt regret that they were not able to accept manuscripts which ran too long for the Monograph Series. They have instituted this ' Library,' therefore — ^with the restriction indicated in the title. The new 'genetic' movement, long represented by the Editor who signs this preface, is gathering momentum as the genetic method becomes more clearly defined, and its applications are worked out in science and philosophy. We hope the series may exert some influence toward its further extension; and to that end we invite contributions devoted to evolutionary and developn mental topics, both scientific and philosophical. June, 1909. J. Mark Baldwin. TO MY MOTHER FROM WHOM I LEARNED THE PRACTICE OP THE MORAL LIFE THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED PREFACE. "The moralist, like the savant," writes M. Duprat, "must at the beginning of his investigations be ignorant of the point at which he will emerge." In the spirit of the statement, I can best describe this book as an 'inquiry.' It embodies an attempt to determine, in the light of recent advances in psychological knowledge, what are some of the more important and fundamental characteristics of the moral life. It is not, however, a contribution to the phe- nomenology of ethics. Important additions have been made, in the past few years, to the literature of this subject, notably in the works of Westermarck, Hobhouse, and Wundt, and there seems now to be no danger that carefully collected and patiently sifted data vriU remain a desideratum of ethical science. It is, therefore, not my intention, even if I could claim the qualifications, to add to the number of books which deal with the morality of peoples at differ- ent levels of culture ; but it has been my aim constantly to bear in mind what is to be learned in this field, and it is hoped that nothing has been set down in the following pages that cannot find confirma- tion in the labors of the experts in this line of research. The relation of my work to sociology requires brief explanation. If we consider the tendencies among modem writers on sociology and ethics, sociology seems to be engaging itself more and more with ethical considerations, and ethics with equal diligence is cultivating social and sociological material. Thus a mutual rapprochement of sociology and ethics seems to be a sign of the times, and, in some quarters, the denial is already heard that the two can much longer remain separate and independent branches of PREFACE knowledge. If, further, we emphasize the dependence of ethics upon psychological method, a dependence which throughout its history has never been wanting, an additional motive is found for remarking upon the unstable character of the science of ethics, and the conclusion is sometimes drawn, as for example by Simmel, that nothing can prevent the dissolution of ethics as an independent science, and the handing over of its distinctive material and prob- lems to sociology and psychology. In view of such facts as these, facts which point to the reconstructions which are taking place in sociology, psychology, and ethics, it is not surprising if the ethicist finds it necessary to define somewhat carefully his own particular problem, and to state the distinctions which mark it off from other related studies. This statement will explain the form which the discussion of the latter part of chapter II takes in this book — a discussion which is concerned with the differentia of ethics. And if any further explanation of my method in dealing with sociological questions is required, I can only say that I have felt it necessary to examine in some detail the concepts of a social sort which are presupposed in ethical science, and have had to refer at various points to the sociological treatment of these concepts in a critical way, because our knowledge of social facts is constantly under- going enlargement, and because sociology must be understood to have reserved to the future its own systematic consideration of the implications of social phenomena. I have referred to ethnology and sociology because in important respects they are, just now, the two most conspicuous sources from which, in varying degrees, assistance may be had for the carrying on of ethical inquiries. However, a broad and well-considered view of the moral life can be gained only when we refuse to be confined within the limits of these two disciplines. Some remarks on this question will be found in the earlier chapters : here all that is neces- PREFACE IX sary is to point out that the subject of this essay is not covered by either of these related sciences. Like each of them, genetic ethics is a determination of fact; and unlike both, the facts which it elucidates relate to the principles through which the moral life gets its organization, and by which it attains its development. I am not advancing a philosophy of morality: the humbler task has been attempted of dealing with the texture, or inner structure, of the moral life; and this, not as a theory, but as a fact which may be verified by the use of the appropriate methods. The methods are psychological. And if there is anything characteristic in the result, it is this : that the mental and the moral are seen to be inter-related and inseparable factors in the organization and growth of human societies, that moral soundness is based in mental development, and that mental integrity is impossible apart from moral growth. The doctrine is not new; in some respects it is as old as Greek thought. But the grounds on which the view is here seen to rest are modem. They have been made possible by the development of more accurate methods in psychology, and the speciahzation of problems in this field. The influence of these advances in psychology may be seen nowhere better, perhaps, than in the large place I have given to the discussion of the moral motive, a subject which is dismissed with a few paragraphs in most treatises, and, with the exception of Wundt's work on ethics, does not rise to the dignity of a chapter. The topics selected for discussion have been chosen on a definite plan. It is true that much that may be considered ethical finds no place in these pages. If any one should be disappointed on this ac- count, I can only say that I cannot share with him that view of ethics which makes of it a single and well-defined field of inquiry which every writer is obliged to cover. It is, in my judgment, no more possible for ethics to be compassed by a single writer and from a single point of view, than it is possible to do the same, for example. X PREFACE in respect to chemistry or psychology. The breaking up of the subject-matter of ethics, and the specialization of method place a limitation on every ethical writer, and he must choose as his prob- lem what seems at the time most in need of systematic investiga- tion. His major problem will determine the particular topics of study. In brief, then, and as concerns the present work, I have omitted whatever does not bear directly upon a better understand- ing of the moral ideal — a conception which, I hold, is fundamental to every moral situation, and without which no rationalization of the moral life would seem to be possible. Tn writing this book I have entertained the hope that I might be meeting the need not only of that increasing number who, amid the shifting standards of the time, are trying to find guidance as to present duty through a more intimate acquaintance with the prin- ciples of the moral Ufe; but I have also tried to provide a book which, in the ground it covers and the method it adopts, might prove of service to those who, in our colleges and universities, are giving instruction in the subject of ethics. It does not, however, make unnecessary, on the part of the student, an acquaintance with the great historic writers in the field of ethics. That it can be used as a means of opening up the literature admits, I think, of no doubt. And if, as I hope, it gives to the historic theories an interpretation which saves them from the category of fruitless efforts, because it shows their relation to man's progressive mastery of the materials and the instruments of effective living, it will have succeeded in embodying, what seems to the writer, an essential quality of an ethical text-book. It is a pleasure to acknowledge my more special and personal obligations. My first indebtedness here as elsewhere is to my teachers. Professors George Trumbull Ladd and George M. Duncan, of Yale University. The editors of The Journal of PREFACE XI Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Mdhods courteously put at my disposal for this book material contributed to the magazine at various dates during the past few years. My colleague, Profes- sor F. A. McKenzie read the second chapter, and favored me with written comments; and Mr. Louis Wallis helped me to some of the references in the same chapter. In the field of genetic science > with all the world I, am under obligation to Professor J. Mark Baldwin, and even where I have not been able to follow him, his published works, especially Thought and Things, the latest and most finished product of his scholarship, have been constantly held in mind. I am indebted to him also for reading the manu- script, and for discussing with me some of the more important details of the position to which my studies have led. I cannot adequately express the debt of gratitude I have incurred to my colleague, Professor David R. Major, for advice at every stage through which the book has passed, and for the continuous interest he has taken in it up to the time of its passing into the hands of the reader. He has given ungrudgingly of his time; and his appreciative criticism of my work has enabled me to avoid many irrelevancies, and to give my views a more adequate state- ment than otherwise would have been possible. I have also to thank my colleague. Professor F. P. Graves, for assistance in carrying the book through the press. A. E. D. March 7, 1909. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Chapter I The Nature and Method of Genetic Ethics i Chapter II Social and Ethical Phenomena 18 Chapter III The Moral Ideal 40 Chapter IV The Moral Self 63 Chapter V Motive : The Beginnings of Morality 88 Chapter VI Motive and the Moral Judgment 106 Chapter VII Motive in Relation to the Personal and the Individual 120 Chapter VIII Moral Freedom 154 CHAPTER I. THE NATURE AND METHOD OF GENETIC ETHICS. What we are to understand by Genetic Ethics can be stated at the outset only in a tentative way, and even then agreement upon a number of debatable questions will have to be assumed. A glance, however, at the title of this essay will make it sufficiently clear that we propose to apply a particular method — the genetic — to a particular subject matter — ethics. But while it may be gen- erally agreed what these two terms mean when taken separately, it is not obvious what limitations are involved when they are brought together in a single term. It win further our search for a working definition of ethics, if we glance at other ways in which the same subject has been con- ceived. Thus, there are two well defined tendencies in the history of ethics which should be remarked. The first is the metaphys- ical, and the second, the epistemological. For the former, the problem centers in the content of the moral judgment. From this point of view, ethics is a science of what is good or bad, etc. It is, in part, concerned with the classification of the various ideal forms of conduct to which actual conduct must conform if it is to receive moral approbation. Its ultimate aim is to formulate an inclusive Ideal which, if it find concrete realization in the conduct of men, imparts to conduct its moral quality. From the epistemological standpoint, the question is not directly, what is good or bad, etc., but, why people call anything good or bad, etc. The point of chief interest here is whether we can validate moral judgments when they are made. Are these judgments, it asks, anything more than prejudices decked out in rational form to give them currency, or are they universal and necessary, and therefore capable of being passed by anyone anywhere? Ethics, so conceived, is 2 THE MORAL LITE. concerned not with the content of the moral judgment, but with its nature, extent, and validity. Psychological ethics, so-called, is closely allied with each of the tendencies just mentioned. The question that is central in this view of the subject relates to the will, especially to what is called its freedom. The feelings also are incidentally included in its discussions of motives, and their relations to the will are carefully determined. We may indicate the connection of psychological ethics with the metaphysical standpoint by saying that its answer to the question. What has ethical value ? is, That which is freely done. Its connection with the other standpoint is seen when it affirms the sovereign choice of the willing subject as the founda- tion of all moral judgments. The chief contribution of this type of ethical theory is its emphasis on character in contrast to con- duct, on the inward spring as opposed to the outward forms of moral behavior. The genetic method of considering ethics is determined, as these others are, by the point of view from which we intend to look at the subject. We must, therefore, state what that point of view is, and what is the question for the determination of which this method is particularly useful. Now, it is necessary to remark that the question of genesis is needlessly obscure if we fail to draw a distinction which is obvious enough when stated, but which is in danger of being overlooked when not pointed out. We may use the term genesis in either of two meanings, but cannot properly mean both at the same time. Thus we may wish to ascertain the genesis of any fact or set of facts in either an absolute or a relative sense. For example, we may speculate about the origin (genesis) of the world. When we do so we are trying to find some statement which shall tell us about the absolute beginning of the finite universe. It is in reply to this question that the creative hypothesis is proposed, and in the same category must be placed, among others, the chemical theory. In one respect, however, the former is the more satisfactory and illustrates more completely this meaning of the term we are con- sidering; for while the latter has to presuppose the existence of physico-chemical elements and the operation of chemical laws, THE NATITRE AND METHOD OF GENETIC ETHICS. 3 facts of the same order as the universe it is trying to account for, the former, presupposing nothing finite, makes its appeal to an infinite, divine Intelligence who is not limited by or to the mate- rial through which the universe has its existence.' Another, and more immediately practical, meaning of the term genesis is found in the quest for the constant conditions under which, in the empir- ical world, specified results are known to occur. The history of the inductive sciences provides us with our best illustrations. Starting with the complex facts of ordinary experience, by appropriate methods of analysis, constant simplification of that experience takes place until, if the aim of the process is reached, only the essential factors remain. But because life is always complex and the aim of science is simplification, the search for origins has made necessary the development of experimental methods of research. Experimental research, therefore, whether in the physical or in the anthropological sciences, may be considered as an effort on the part of man to overcome the complexity of direct experience in his endeavor to arrive at the simplest, most elementary case of the general type of experience under consideration. If, therefore, we caU the search for an absolute beginning a logical affair, this for a relative beginning which does not take us out of the temporal series, may be called chronological since it finds its cases in earlier and more elementary stages of development. Our use of the term genetic is connected with the latter of the two meanings just explained. Whether there is an absolute worth attaching to moral judgments, or whether there is anything absolutely good, we do not directly inquire. These questions are legitimate enough in their proper place, but they do not constitute, as we understand it, the genetic problem. The fact with which genetic ethics starts is the fact that all organized societies, primi- tive or civilized, recognize certain things as moral, and require of the individual that he submit his conduct to the judgment of his fellows. In other words, it starts with morality as an already ' For the sense in which the Church has held that the world was created out of nothing, the reader may refer to St. Anselm's Mono- logium, Chapter VIII f. 4 THE MORAL LIFE. established fact of life and object of thought. There is, as we conceive it, no material for ethics, genetic or other, except in an already morally organized community. We may say, with this m mind, that genetic ethics attempts to trace the means by which the moral community gets for itself a more complete expression and realization of its own moral possibiUties. Or, with a slightly different emphasis, the purpose is to state the conditions which make conduct possible. Or, again, we wish to know what are the factors which constitute a moral situation moral. It will help to clear the subject from unnecessary ambiguity if we consider further at this point the relation that genetic ethics sustains to other forms and methods of ethics. We said above that it is usual to consider ethics from either a metaphysical, or an epistemological standpoint. We revert to these main types of ethical theory to remark that, like science, in order to get under way and carry out their objects, it is necessary for them to have something to work on. Grist of some sort is necessary here as elsewhere if we are to have anything more than a churn- ing of the wind. Speculation, whether it be philosophical or scientific, is always speculation about something, and what we speculate about, in science and philosophy, is experience. We may, therefore, say that experience of some sort lies back of ethics from whatever standpoint it may be regarded. Life is the source of all our doing and thinking. We must not forget, however, that metaphysics and epistemol- ogy are very highly differentiated forms of speculation. What the ethical problems are from these standpoints we have suggested on a previous page (pp. 1,2). Here we point out that these problems could not be formulated, much less solved, unless there were recognized moral facts and judgments as facts of the empirical order. What sense, for instance, would there be in an attempt to show that goodness is a quaUty of the World Ground, if no one called anything good ? And would it not be the height of folly to undertake to vaHdate a class of judgments of which not a single specimen could be found? It is, therefore, customary for ethics to take both these classes of facts and judgments for granted. They are the presuppositions which ethics, as usually considered, makes; in them it finds the material which it construes for the particular object it has in view. However, before the common judgments and estimates of conduct as they lie in the common consciousness are available for rational treatment at the hands THE NATURE AND METHOD OF GENETIC ETHICS. 5 of philosophical ethics, it is found necessary to subject them to closer scrutiny and careful analysis. While this is no part of philosophical ethics, it is a necessary propaedeutic thereto; and hence we find it usual to include whatever must be done in the way of fitting the material for further consideration under the general title 'prolegomena to ethics.' By the prolegomena to ethics, conse- quently, is meant all that is necessary to be done in shaping the material and instruments of ethics so as to fit them to the special- ized problems which are suggested by the points of view of philo- sophical ethics. In its relation to the philosophical treatment of ethics, the genetic inquiry carries one fairly into the field of pre- suppositions. The statement and solution of philosophical ques- tions is no part of genetic ethics, and our independence of them is a gain in so far as it leaves us free to see what the facts are with which philosophical ethics deals. Perhaps this is the best contri- bution one can make, in this connection, to a deeper insight into the moral life. We have been engaged, in a general way, with the definition of the field of genetic ethics in its relation to philosophical ethics. Now within recent years the effort has been made to treat morality in a scientific, and even naturalistic, way. The material that is brought into requisition when this interest is uppermost is that which the older and more traditional view has considered as belonging to its prolegomena. There is, thus, no necessary antag- onism, but only a mutual division of labors in the field of ethics, as in other departments of knowledge, when the scientific and philosophical interests are properly related. We may ungrudg- ingly recognize, what is the fact, that, as the result of the applica- tion of scientific methods and aims to the subject matter of ethics, a vast amount of material has been gathered, and classifications made which have served, through the study of the natural history of the moral life, to throw considerable light upon the structure of morality itself.' In this statement we are only recognizing what evolutionary ethics has accomplished, and what assistance it has rendered in elucidating those practical problems which, from Socrates downward, have engaged the consideration of thoughtful • A recent contribution from this point of view is Westermarck's The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas. 6 THE MORAL LITE. men. We may even go further and say that in so far as it has brought about a keener appreciation of the historical treatment of ethical questions, and has served to emphasize the social structure of moral behavior, evolutionary ethics has performed an invaluable service. The success which has attended its more ambitious aims, for example, to render a complete and final account of moral phenomena, must be judged by the results it has attained. Our own opinion is that it has not superseded, and in the nature of the case cannot supersede, the philosophical interpretation of the same material; for science, in the sense of the term implied in its use in this connection, is not a substitute for, but an important, and we may, say necessary, introduction to philosophy in respect to the entire group of interests around which the life of the race gathers. In another respect, also, we consider that evolutionary or his- torical ethics falls short of completeness. It is one thing to describe the several ways in which the moral Ufe, under varying conditions of climate and culture, has been organized; it is another to ascer- tain the constant factors which constitute the moral situation wherever and whenever found. In the former, we do not get beyond the general, concrete particulars of the group; in the other, we are concerned with the abstract generalizations to which an analysis of the particulars leads. Now, when we speak of analysis there are several things to be borne in mind. It may be held that evolutionary ethics uses analysis, and, because it is science, aims to generalize its conclusions. This is true; but because of the histor- ical motives which have given rise to this type of ethical inquiry, its analysis and generalizations are limited by the material with which it deals. This material, we have said, it finds in the concrete moral situations with which history makes us acquainted. Evolu- tionary ethics, consequently, may give us light for future guidance as it is able to summarize the experience of the race in the form of moral maxims, prohibitory and commendatory; but it cannot shed any ray backward beyond the limits of the most primitive social organization, and, so far as evolutionary ethics is concerned, we are still in the dark as to the dynamic processes through which THE NATURE AND METHOD OF GENETIC ETHICS. 7 the moral institution, as such, comes into existence, and the means by which the moral judgment becomes a factor in the pro- gressive improvement of the race. This double task is the proper enterprise, as we conceive it, of genetic ethics. The way in which we have stated the problem of genetic ethics in distinction from that of evolutionary ethics makes it obvious that we are committed to a psychological treatment of the ethical problem. The relation between these two methods of studying the moral life may perhaps be made clearer if we remark that, in our judgment, evolutionary and genetic ethics together constitute what may be described as scientific ethics. They differ in the material they use and the direction in which they move. Evolu- tionary, or historical, ethics takes the common moral judgments as they are expressed in the moral institutions of the race as its start- ing point, and undertakes to show that there has been a moral development. For the proof of development it relies upon its ability to show that there has been an increasing complexity in the structure of the several institutions it studies, and that ethical judgments tend to be applied to new aspects and departments of organized endeavor. It also undertakes to point out the stages of this developmental process, and to summarize the law, or laws, of the process as a whole. Genetic ethics is under obligation to the considerations emphasized by evolutionary ethics in so far as it takes its point of departure from the organization of the common moral consciousness, and posits, without question, the social char- acter of all moral phenomena. But what it seeks to do is not to trace out a process of development, but to ascertain what are the elements of any situation which constitute it moral, and what are the func- tions which the several factors serve in bringing about this result. In other words, genetic ethics is a study in the anatomy and physiology, not in the natural history, of the moral consciousness of the race. We said, just now, that in a genetic study of the ethical question psychological interests are predominant. We also said, that psy- chological ethics, so-called, was most intimately connected with philosophical ethics. Further consideration of these relations is necessary. If it is borne in mind that psychological ethics took its form, and carried on its work before the attempted enfranchise- ment, in our own days, of psychology in the sisterhood of the sciences, the reason is obvious for connecting it with the philo- sophical interests which are emphasized in epistemology and meta- 8 THE MORAL LIFE. physics. Psychology then was a rational psychology, or as we should say, a philosophy of mind. And surely moral phenomena are facts of mind, and may be considered according to the methods of rational psychology. But if we forget that in the meantime, without ceasing to be rational, psychology no longer values its philosophical character, only confusion can arise through the employment of a term which has lost so much of its original meaning. When, therefore, the psychological features of the genetic study of ethics are emphasized, we are to be understood as using the term in its modern connotation. To speak, then, of psychological ethics, if by this is meant anything more than the psychology of ethics, when the modern usage of these terms is followed, is to convict ourselves of a contradictio in adjecto. It is not, we think, going too far to say that in so far as the ethical interests are concerned we have no psychology, and in so far as the psychological interest is predominant we do not reach any ethical conclusion. If, for example, we may mark off the field of ethics as dealing with the practical values of facts, it is only perversity to retort that this also is a fact and, therefore, that psychology has its legitimate function in the construction of ethical doctrine. There is a psychology of values because and when we cease to valuate, and are concerned with the process in which valuation takes place. Psychology may make us better acquainted with the facts of the moral life, but is not able to pass a single judgment of value. As one writer has put it, "Ethics is not a question of origin, but of content; not of causation, but of meaning."* The question of origin, when consciously formulated, is the genetic problem with which this essay is concerned. To complete this survey of the relations in which our subject stands to other methods and ways of approaching the moral phe- nomena, we must say a word or two as to the possibility of bringing our facts under a theory of organic evolution. The term genetic, whether defining a method or a standpoint, has reference to two fields of investigation. It received its first clear definition and successful application in the work of Darwin in his study of plant and animal life. From there it was taken up by the psychologists in their study of individual and social consciousness. The simil- arity of the method, however, should not blind us to the limitations 'J. Seth: Ethical Principles, third edition, p. 30, note i. THE NATURE AND METHOD OF GENETIC ETHICS. 9 that are placed upon its working by reason' of the differences in the material which the biologist and psychologist respectively studies. It is this felt, and explicitly declared, difference between organic and mental phenomena that has led to a change in the form of the genetic method when it gets concrete application to these two distinct, though related, fields. Thus, where we are con- cerned, as in the biological series, to trace the life history of an organ- ism to its most primitive type, or a single organ to its elementary parts, we are said to be using the bio-genetic method. When, on the other hand, we are engaged in analyzing a complex social structure into its several factors, and seek to verify the analysis by reference to earlier stages of its growth, we are using the psycho-genetic method. This distinction, recognized by biologists and psychol- ogists alike, we adopt; it is a distinction which refers, primarily, to distinctive fields of inquiry, and this difference in the material requires a modification of the one genetic method which is common to both.' We meet at this point a difiSculty which arises from the fact that the fields of investigation which, with respect to method have been marked off as distinct, overlap. Thus man, who is distin- guished by reason of his psychic abilities, is at the same time an organic being, and, therefore, may be studied by the biogenetic method; and the animals, if not the plants, although organic, are at the same time conscious, and hence are subject to a psychogenetic study. There are differences, of course, between the psychic capacity of man and the animals, but it is a difference in degree, not in kind. Consciousness qua consciousness, wherever found, is the same. Now with respect to the problem of genetic ethics this certainly raises the question whether we are to search for the roots of moral phenomena in the animal series, and, if so, in what sense this may be done. Before our answer can appear, it is necessary to refer again to the limits of the two branches of scientific ethics as they were indicated above. We said that evolutionary and ' For a good statement of the relation between 'biological' and 'orthogenic evolution,' the reader may refer to the concluding chapter of L. T. Hobhouse's Mind in Evolution. 10 THE MORAL LIPE. genetic ethics comprise the field of scientific ethics. The same distinction is also sometimes indicated by the terms historical and biological ethics. The latter pair of terms, however, cannot be accepted because 'biological ethics' begs a whole series of ques- tions which need discussion before the possibility of a 'biological' ethics can be admitted. But whatever the terms by which we divide the field, the distinction to be pointed out is clear enough. Evolutionary ethics, strictly so called, works within the field of historical ethics considered as a study of the forms which the moral life of the race has assumed at various stages of its develop- ment. Historical ethics is engaged with what may be called 'insti- tutional morality. The tests of morality of which it takes cogniz- ance, like its facts, are historically determined. And if we were to ask how it ascertains whether any given facts fall under the moral denomination, the answer would take some such shape as this : From this point of view, any social organization which seeks to control the behavior of its individual members in the interests of the group is regarded as moral. This criterion is the result of racial experience, and in turn, becomes the means of determining the social value of all new cases, and it also indicates the limits of inquiry. Hence historical ethics is a study of the group as a group, or of the individual socially determined, and beyond this it is not possible for it to go. Now in so far as its problem within this field is that of development, it may be said to employ the genetic method. This, of course, must be so if genesis means development. But if genesis means also origin, then historical and genetic ethics are by no means identical. The problem of development is common to both because both aim to be scientific, but historical ethics, because it is historical, cannot go beyond the simplest forms of moral organization and in its argument for development is confined to the comparative method. That is to say it may compare one form with another of any selected moral institution, and show that there has been a gradual increase in complexity of structure. But what it cannot do, without changing its character, is to answer the question of origin. Now when scientific ethics raises this question it becomes THE NATURE AND METHOD OF GENETIC ETHICS. II distinctively genetic; that is to say, it foregoes the comparative method. For here our question is, What are the factors of the moral situation and their functional bearings? The problem here is to go behind the simplest moral situation, and to disentangle its inner parts and processes. In other words, while historical ethics considers the simplest moral situation as a unit, genetic ethics regards it as a complex to be analyzed. Now in this process of analysis it may happen that the factors which we finally reach are common to men and animals, and that the determination of their function must be referred to the more primitive examples in the animal kingdom. For example, Baldwin holds that "the origin of the moral sense by this method shows it to be an imita- tive function."^ Now whether this is so or not, imitation is a psychic fact which is not confined to man. Where then, if we are to trace out the roots from which spring the moral life of man, are we to go if not to the more primitive types of conscious life? We do not say that the animals exhibit moral consciousness; we should hesitate to make this claim for the child for the first few months or years of its existence;^ but if the human moral conscious- ness is capable of analysis into elements which are not moral, we must trace these elements as far back as we can without respect to the distinction between man and brute. Because our task is psychological, man and brute have no meaning except as indicat- ing a higher and lower order of conscious existence. In this sense the distinction is on a level with adult and infant. Two questions are involved, directly or indirectly, in the state- ments of this paragraph: the question of method and the question of data. On the question of data we have already remarked that ethics is a study of moral phenomena. Ethics, like any other science, assumes the existence of the facts it selects for study. But it is, from a genetic standpoint, an important consideration how wide is the distribution of the phenomena involved. Is morality confined to the human species, or do we find it also, in rudimentary ^Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. SS. first edition. ^ According to writers on child psychology, moral phenomena are observable at the end of the second and toward the beginning of the third year. THE MORAL LIFE. forms but in its essential features, among species of the animal kingdom?^ The answer to this question is important for our inquiries, because upon its answer will depend whether we are to take our position within either the one or the other of these biological divisions. Now it may be pointed out that the claim is never unequivocally made for the existence of morality in the animal kingdom; it is, on the most favorable interpretation, some rudimentary suggestions of morality which the gregarious life of animals seems to imply. This being the case, the recognition of morality outside the human race is based upon and made pos- sible by the certainty of the fact of the moral life in the human species. The presumption of morality among animals rests upon our right to interpret animal behavior analogically. But even if the analogy is sound and will bear the strain put upon it, it is only after an analysis of human morality has been made that the ques- tion is at all possible. Whether morality is anything more than gregariousness, or gregariousness is anything more than herding, are impossible of answer until, upon the basis of indisputable moral facts, we have arrived at some statement as to what the moral life implies. It seems, therefore, best to leave the question of animal morality in the place indicated by the present condition of our knowledge. The only sphere where, at the outset, it is safe to assume morality is among the members of the human race. The other question to which reference was made is that of method. Here we are in a different position. For one thing, comparative psychology has made a great deal more progress than has comparative ethics. In some fields of mental activity we have as much assurance that certain processes are common to men and animals as we have that they are common to adults and children. The comparative study of mental facts is helpful for the reason that the more simple and elementary forms in which they appear in the animal throw instructive light upon their place and function in man. In this way it is possible some- times to interpret complex conscious situations to which otherwise we might for a long time remain without the clue. It seems to us, therefore, legitimate to make use of the results of comparative psychology in our understanding of the psychological processes which underlie the moral facts. 1 The reader may refer to an interesting discussion of this subject in Schurman's Ethical Import of Darwinism, Chapter I; see also C. Lloyd MoTgnn's Animal Behaviour, pp. 270-282. THE NATURE AND METHOD OF GENETIC ETHICS. 13 In the foregoing our effort has been to exclude from genetic ethics as much as seemed properly to belong to other methods and points of view in their study of the same general problem, and in this way to delimit the area of our inquiries according to some definite plan. We may bring this chapter to an end with a state- ment of what the genetic method requires when it gets application to the problems suggested by the moral life. It is, we think, sufficiently clear that the first requirement of the genetic method is that a careful and painstaking analysis be made of the concrete social situations which give rise to the main types of moral judgment. The same demand, from another point of view, may be expressed by saying that we must read these moral judgments back into the social life in which they are capable of receiving concrete significance. These statements emphasize two points which it is important to distinguish. In the first, the social situation is given in its concrete definiteness, and the judgment assumes a form which is quite general and therefore capable of indefinite application and expansion. In the second, the judgment has a fixed form, but the social milieu which is to give it its content needs to be constructed by the imagination on the basis of experi- ence. The former case defines what it is that evokes moral esti- mation; it denotes the subject of the moral judgment. The latter case indicates the method by which we get meaning for the predicate of the same moral judgment. We may illustrate this distinction by any moral judgment whatsoever. If, for example, we take the formula 'This is good' as typical of all moral judgments, and we are challenged as to its content and meaning, where must we look for the subject of the judgment except in some definite situation which is capable of accurate description, or for the predicate except in those results and relations which have become embodied in the situation and through which the situation has and maintains its present character? What the results and relations are which any situation involves can, of course, be ascertained only as we apply the method of analysis to the various cases which come up from time to time for consideration. And, also, as the cases are distinct the results and relations vary; but this is only to 14 THE MORAL LIPE. say that the practical reason recognizes a variety of 'goods' any one of which, when it can be predicated of a subject, entitles that subject to moral approbation. But what we wish to emphasize here is that neither what the subject is, nor what the predicate of a moral judgment means, is possible of genetic consideration unless we define each as the result of an analysis of the concrete situation in which both subject and predicate are essential and interrelated parts. Let it, therefore, be admitted that the genetic problem implies an examination of particular cases of acknowledged moral significance as necessary to the work it undertakes or is required to do. It should be pointed out in this connection that there are limita- tions within which this task is either practicable or possible. For instance, if it is understood to express the demand for a classifi- cation of the various types of moral behavior, this would be to do over again the work which, as we have said, has been admir- ably pursued by writers on evolutionary ethics, and, there- fore, to obliterate the distinction between the two fields which has already been indicated. The point of view from which the statement is made is that of the moral judgment; and what we call attention to is that the moral judgment functions within definite concrete situations for the purpose of defining their moral quality. To see how this is so requires not that we should come to our problems with some previously formulated and somewhat abstract doctrine of judgment, but that we should analyze the situation which con- cerns us with a view to showing the conditions of the process of moralization which is actually going on. We may say, tautolog- ically if you please, that the moral judgment is a function of the moral situation, and it is only as we understand the latter that the former has any meaning. But, secondly, the genetic problem and method have been con- fined, in current literature, to the question of development.^ By development is usually meant the growth in structure and function of typical psychic processes at different levels of individual con- scious existence. Development is contrasted with evolution which ' E. g. by Baldwin. THE NATURE AND METHOD OF GENETIC ETHICS. 1 5 is interested in the same problem from the standpoint of the race." In either case, however, growth is the characteristic note struck, and each is genetic because attention is directed to the movement from lower to higher stages of selected groups of data which are brought under consideration. Whether this is the best designation of the general field which is here marked out we do not care, and it is not important for us to consider. But even though we have as clear an appreciation of the need for an undertaking of this character as have those whose work has contributed so much to its elucidation, there seems to be a demand in the field of ethical inquiry, for a more restricted investigation which, although restricted, does not lose its character as genetic science. We should, therefore, say that, although the question of development is not far away in the following studies, it is subordinate to the endeavor to ascertain the instrumental character of the factors which con- stitute the social milieu through which the moral judgment and feelings are mediated. Before the question of development, that is to say, comes the question of maintenance, and it is chiefly with this that we are concerned, not only as coming first in time, but as being prior in order of importance. The moral judgments and feeUngs are not only psychological facts; they are, at the same time, facts which are shot through and through with concrete social meaning and significance. Likewise, the social community is not only a self -propagating body; it is, before this and by reason of it, a seK-maintaining organization, and it is more with the conditions of its maintenance than of its propagation that we are to deal. But it should not be forgotten that maintenance is no less a function than is development; nor can there be any development which is subversive of the principles which control maintenance. And it may be fairly asked whether development is anything more than the result of the application of the principles of main- tenance to larger areas of Ufe, and to more and more diversified data of the same general character as that in regard to which the 1 This distinction is made in Baldwin's Development and Evolu- tion, and yet the title of an earlier work is Mental Development in the Child and the Race. 1 6 THE MORAL LIFE. principles of maintenance have been determined. Hence, while we do not underestimate the importance of that aspect of the genetic problem and method which ahready have received strong emphasis and wide recognition, we affirm that the prior question has not received sufficiently careful consideration.' It is to this neglected feature of the genetic problem, in so far as it relates to ethics, that attention is to be directed throughout. We have, that is to say, not only to ascertain what are the data, but to point out what are the functional relations which obtain among the data of our moral situations by reason of which they maintain their character as moral situations. In his book on Mind in Evolution, Hobhouse recognizes the distinction of the text between the genesis and the development of mental life. Concerning the genetic inquiry as it is defined by this contrast, he remarks that he is not "concerned with what is called (as I think, confusedly and inappropriately called) the ulti- mate nature of the mind. So far as its origin is concerned, we shall take it as a factor in organic evolution, and shall content ourselves with pointing out certain more primitive factors of which it is the natural development. In regard to its nature, we shall be principally occupied, not with what Mind is felt to be by its pos- sessor, but rather with its operations as apparent to an onlooker" (p. 5). As to the other question, he remarks that the evolution of mind is a term which he uses "not in the sense of its origin, but in the sense of that unrolling of its full nature which is what evolu- tion most strictly means. If mind is the highest thing, orthogenic evolution^ (by which Hobhouse means 'the growth of mind') ^ Baldwin informs the writer that the objective anthropological point of view and method suggested in the text, and to which reference is made throughout, has been recognized by him in his studies of religion, and that he has marked off a stage in the genetic method as 'anthropogenetic' to distinguish 'human progress from anterior (animal) progress' in addition to the former distinctions of 'biogenetic' and 'psycho-genetic' See his Dictionary of Phil- osophy, Vol. II, 1902, p. 459, art. 'Religion'. ^ The selection of the term 'Orthogenetic Evolution' for mental development is unfortunate in view of the fact that Eimer {On Orthogenesis) had already preempted the term 'orthogenesis' to indicate a theory of evolution which depends to a large extent on THE NATURE AND METHOD OF GENETIC ETHICS. 1 7 must consist of the unfoldment of all that there 'is of latent possi- bility of Mind, the awakening of the powers, the development of its scope" (p. 5). In this statement the genetic is clearly distin- guished from the developmental and evolutional problems, prob- lems which Baldwin crowds together under the one term genetic. The result of this crowding is that interest comes to center more and more on one side of the contrasted set of questions, and Bald- win ends with limiting genetic science to the investigation of growth processes. It may be said that, in this particular, Dewey's Studies in Logical Theory is a necessary corrective to the view of Baldwin, a correction, however, which is no less one-sided than is the view which it supplements.' We may bring these remarks on the problem and method of genetic ethics to a close with the following most general statement of the task which lies before us. We propose, in what follows, to study the concrete moral situation with a view to show what the factors are which constitute it moral and what are the forces which operate to maintain and develop it. In other words, we are to study the structural and functional relations of moral consciousness. physiological causation. The two views, however, approach one another in laying emphasis on the fact that evolution is not an accidental but a definite or directed process the conditions of which it is the business of science to point out. ' Since this was written, Baldwin has thought himself beyond the generalizations of his earlier works, and in his Thought and Things may be found much food for reflection for all who are interested in genetic problems. As examples of the 'crowding' to which the text refers, the reader may consider Baldwin's treatment of Habit and Accommodation, the Theory of Pleasure-Pain, Atten- tion, etc., in Mental Development. Psychological motives appear more clearly in Social and Ethical Interpretations and indicate the line of advance which is made in this book over the earlier volume. CHAPTER II. SOCIAL AND ETHICAL PHENOMENA. Growth of interest in social and sociological questions is a fact of contemporary life. In politics this is seen in the modifications, among the leading world powers, of a military conception of the state, and the readjustment of political organization to fit it to the economic conditions of the present day. In commerce, we are witnessing the passing of the extreme individualism which for two hundred years has kept the many poor, and we are trying to find some way by which the profits of labor may be more widely and equitably distributed. In society, the relations of the classes is acknowledged to be unsatisfactory, and some method is yet to be devised by which mutual sympathy and understanding vnll be possible between the various crafts and professions. In science there is proceeding a rapid adaptation of the conclusions of learned inquiry to the convenience and comfort of living, and along with the extension of the boundaries of scientific endeavor into anthropological and ethnological problems we are coming to entertain a less mechanical conception of what a science should be. In philosophy, the old formal idealism is already dead, new methods and aims are coming to take the place of the old, and it is not unreasonable to expect that in the present generation we shall see philosophy restored to its rightful place as an interpre- tation of life. All these movements, and others of similar character, emphasize the humanitarian spirit by which we in our day are being moved; and this spirit, while it has directly stimulated inter- est in social and sociological relations, has reacted upon those conceptions which have commonly been held as to the nature, scope and warranty of morality. It would be possible, in view of this broader humanitarian i8 SOCIAL AND ETHICAL PHENOMENA. 1 9 demand, to show that the reconstructed notion of ethics which it implies, emphasizes anew the more original and satisfactory view of the subject which received expression, in its first systematic form, in the ethics of Aristotle. But what we are more interested in, at the present, is that this relation between ethical and social phenomena, however clearly it may have been seen by Aristotle, is today a more complex affair by as much as the modern state, in its domestic and foreign relations, is more complex than the Greek City-state which practically had no foreign relations, and limited its citizenship to as many as the town {-KdXis) could con- veniently afford protection to in time of threatened invasion. We have to do not only with more intricate, and with a larger number of relationships. Our social unit itself is vague and shifting. This is due, no doubt, to the broadening of our social sympathies in various directions. This shifting of the boundaries of the social structure is a constant menace to the ethical foundations of our modem social life. If, therefore, we are to define and maintain .the rights of ethics as distinct from, though related to sociology, and if we are to ascertain what the ethical functions are which society implies, what we need is not so much a natural history of the social process, nor, indeed, an account of the several types of social organization, as a genetic determination of the social concept itself. The root idea lying at the foundation of the term society and its various derivatives — social, sociability, etc. — is that of associa- tion. Wherever individuals are associated together so that certain conditions and results may be indicated as the predicates of this united life and action, we may fairly be said to be dealing with a society.' In this broad sense of the word, it makes no difference whether we have in mind the common life of wasps and bees, of ants, or of men, for in each case we find certain conditions existing and certain results being brought about which are directly depend- • Cf. Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations, fourth edition, p. 486. "The determination of phenomena as social is only possi- ble under the two-fold requirement as to matter and functional method." 20 THE MORAL LITE. ent upon the fact of association. All that need be implied by association in this connection is a certain 'togetherness' as char- acterizing and constituting the group we have in mind. Thus, for example, the union of a group may be determined by geographical considerations. We are familiar with this fact in what is known as the distribution of species under the selective operation of con- ditioning environments. Within indefinite boundaries we find cer- tain kinds of flora and fauna, and beyond, certain other kinds. Association, even in this broad use of the term, is defined by cer- tain conditions which are determinant of the life history of the individual and of the group to which the individual belongs. We may expect to find that the character of the conditions changes from species to species, and from lower to higher forms of organic existence. But aside from the question of what the conditions are which association, in any given case, implies, we shall find it true of all groups which are entitled to be called social, that these conditions may be pointed out, and in pointing them out we have taken the first step in establishing the social character of the relations which are determined by them. But the conditions must determine, or be accompanied by, cer- tain results. That is to say, consequences must foUow from the conditions which association involves if we are dealing with a social group. It might be found, however, that the 'togetherness' of association took such a form that it is impossible to trace out con- sequences which are directly dependent upon the conditions involved in that fact. We have to recognize, that is, the possibility of conditions existing which are not operative in the life history of the individual or of the group, and yet that these conditions are deter- mined by the association which is the root idea of the social concept. Thus we may say of any individual or group of individuals who, in view of the political duties that citizenship defines, refrain from the performance of those duties while retaining their political status (the 'togetherness'), that they are potentially, though not actually, political (social), or, as regards the whole round of their social duties, that they are only incompletely social. But even this much can be said only if we admit that there is no radical separation SOCIAL AND ETHICAL PHENOMENA. 21 in fact between rights and duties, and that function may supervene upon a redistribution of forces within the social organism as a whole. Hence, it seems to follow that the fully developed social concept requires not only that association be defined as a set of conditions, but that consequences should be determined by these conditions for the group in its relations to the individual, and vice versa. It is an interesting phenomenon of the literature of sociology that the concept ' society' is taken with so little seriousness. In a descriptive way, without pretense to scientific accuracy, we may be allowed to say that sociology is, in some sort, a study of society. We presume that this conception of the subject plays a more or less important r61e, consciously or unconsciously, in parts of the subject's development, if not over its whole range, with every writer on sociology. It was, therefore, thought possible to get wisdom from those who cultivate this field, and that our labors would be lightened at this point by acknowledged borrowing, and that we should be excused the presumption of stating for a sister science what its proper business is. But so far from getting the satisfaction we looked for, sociologists almost seem to vie with one another in taking 'society' as a joke. Giddings,' it is true, defined society as "a rationally developing group of conscious beings, in which converse passes into definite relationships that, in course of time, are wrought into a complex and enduring organi- zation." But one can hardly blame the sociologist for not remain- ing with a statement in which there are so many unanalyzed concepts, and which in its total impression is so ambiguous. The following from Ward is not so much a definition of what society is as of a point of view for its consideration. "In general," he writes, "it may be said that society as a whole, including all its structures and institutions, constitutes a mechanism.'" Coming to works that fall within the present century, we find the tone is changed and the way is opened for that vague generality which, to so great an extent, characterizes the products of the sociologist's labors. "Society is, of course," says Ross, "a kind of fiction. There is nothing to it, after all, but people affecting one another in various ways."^ It is not merely due to the development of ^Principles of Sociology (1896), p. 5. 'Outlines of Sociology (1899), p. 170. Cf. Spencer's 'Society is an organism.' ^Social Control (1901), p. 293. 22 THE MORAL LITE. this as a personal attitude, but as expressing a general agreement that in the same writer's Foundations of Sociology, which appeared four years later, no attempt is made to state what the term 'society' connotes. Stuckenberg, consequently, may be regarded as express- ing a fact when he writes that "society is as yet only a word whose rich content is to be discovered.'" But not much hope is held out from the side of sociology for a better understanding if Small represents the current sociological opinion. "We have lost confi- dence," he says, "in the utility of the word 'society,' that has given sociologists so much trouble. The term has such persistent structural — i. e., statical — associations that it starts us with false presumptions."^ In its place he substitutes Ross' 'people affecting one another in various ways' or, as he prefers to say, 'the process of human association,' and remarks that "this shifting of attention . is not a mere verbal change. It marks real progress in discovery" (p. 184). With the details of the sociologist's busi- ness we have nothing to do. This interesting exhibit is made as a justification of the way in which the problem of this chapter has been handled so far as it relates to sociological concepts. We need some clear distinction as to sociological and ethical data, and this at the most is what is attempted in the present connection. We may now look at this analysis of the social concept more closely, to ascertain if possible what it implies. It will be under- stood, of course, that the study of particular forms of social organi- zation — the family, the guild, etc. — present concrete problems, and need to be studied with reference to the conditions and results which are peculiar to each. We have to leave this work to the sociologist. Our interest is in the group concept itself, and when this interest is satisfied certain characteristics come to light which, in varying ways, find their illustration in the societies of primitive and civilized life. It will help to make our definition of society more tangible if we inquire, in the first place, what are the elements which association of the social type involves. 'Togetherness' may be admitted to be as characteristic of a piece of mechanism, for example, a watch, as it is of what we call society. It may even be maintained that the watch ^Sociology (1903), Vol. I, p. i. '' General Sociology (1905), p. 183. SOCIAL AND ETHICAL PHENOMENA. 23 exhibits the relationship and involves the functions which have been said to belong to a society in a more striking fashion than some societies do. We have in mechanical instruments and inven- tions admirable examples of the adjustment of parts in a common medium for effecting specified results. And yet, by common con- sent, the term social has been limited to the associations of organic beings. Between the finest example of mechanical skill as exhib- ited in the most complex and most sensitive piece of machinery and the most loosely organized of social groups there is not merely a difference of degree but one of kind. Wherein does this difference consist ? As we have seen, it is not a matter of structure ; may it not then be a matter of the elements of which the struc- ture is composed? Assuming that this is true, and making our statement as generic as possible, it may be said that the organiza- tion of social groups takes place through the incorporation of units aU of which have characteristics that are common, and each of which, within the limits determined by the common qualities, are capable of doing the same things. This statement, however, requires to be safeguarded in two particulars. We do not mean to predicate identity of parts, nor do we assert a similarity of function for the parts. As to the first point, the underlying conditions of association are ultimately biological; and as to the second, they are the varia- tions within the biological series which make possible those differ- entiations of functions which everywhere accompany social organi- zation. There is, that is to say, a natural unity which characterizes the association which is capable of serving social ends, and these ends themselves, in the first instance, are conditioned by the bio- logical reference which has already been made. It is not so with a piece of machinery which secures the diversity through which it works out the determined result in the individual parts, a diver- sity which limits each part to the doing of a single thing. In con- sequence of this fundamental difference, social laws can never get application to the world of invention, nor can mechanical laws illuminate or regulate the world of society. An interesting illustration of the position maintained in the text may be found in a letter addressed to Baron Kaneko Kentaro by 24 THE MORAX LIFE. the late Herbert Spencer under date of August 26, 1892, and which appeared in the London Times of January 18, 1904. The question relates to the intermarriage of foreigners and Japanese. Mr. Spencer writes: It is not at root a question of social philosophy. It is at root a question of biology. There is abundant proof, aUke furnished by the intermarriages of human races and by the interbreeding of animals, that when the varieties mingled diverge beyond a certain slight degree the result is inevitably a bad one in the long run. I have myself been in the habit of looking at the evidence bearing on this matter for many years past, and my conviction is based on numerous facts derived from numerous sources. This convic- tion I have within the last half-hour verified, for I happen to be staying in the country with a gentleman who is well known and has had much experience respecting the interbreeding of cattle; and he has just, on inquiry, fully confirmed my belief that when, say of the different varieties of sheep, there is an interbreeding of those which are widely unlike, the result, especially in the second generation, is a bad one — there arise an incalculable mixture of traits, and what may be called a chaotic constitution. And the same thing happens among human beings — the Eurasians in India, the half-breeds in America, show this. The philosophical basis of this experience appears to be that any one variety of creature in course of many generations acquires a certain constitutional adap- tation to its particular form of Ufe, and every other variety similarly acquires its own special adaptation. The consequence is that, if you mix the constitutions of two widely divergent varieties which have severally become adapted to widely divergent modes of life, you get a constitution which is adapted to the mode of life of neither — a constitution which will not work properly, because it is not fitted for any set of conditions whatever. This organic similarity of the individuals of a social group, in the second place, exercises its influence on the group itself. From one point of view, the group may be said to determine, and, from another, to be determined by the individual particulars without which it cannot be conceived. This is only to say that the shifting characteristics of the component parts is correlated with the abiding character of the whole. In logical terms, this means that the group is a true universal, and not merely a formula of the common SOCIAL AND ETHICAL PHENOMENA. 25 qualities of its subsumed particulars. This statement is important in view of the two main theories which, in varying forms, have been held as to the nature of society. The first tends to look upon society as a sum of its parts. This is the theory of collectivism. The second regards society as an organism which, after the analogy of the individual, gives birth to its own members, and limits their functions according to its own particular needs. This is the bio- logical theory. The view we have stated acknowledges the individuality which is the strong point of the former theory, and recognizes the functional relations of the latter. The biological theory is inadequate because it overlooks the undetermined pos- sibilities of the individual; the theory of collectivism is deficient because it does not recognize the organic character of association, and makes it entirely conventional (Social Contract). In our view, 'social group' is understood as an organic concept, and hence the relations between it and the component individuals may be stated in one of several ways. From the standpoint of the group, there is emphasized cooperation in the performance of a common, complex task; from the standpoint of the individuals, specialization of function is necessary for the maintenance and development of the higher ends of living. But whether we state the relation in terms of the outward activities or of the inner motives, means, or functions, in either case is emphasized the reciprocal demands that are emphasized in every truly social relation. That form of philosophical individualism which we find in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding when trans- planted to the Continent worked out, in social theory, in Rous- seau's statements of the Social Contract, a work which had its progenitor in Hobbe's Leviathan. The common purpose of these, as of all other works on social philosophy, was to give an account of the grounds on which constituted authority reposes. It was not, as popular references to the theory would seem to imply, to undermine constituted authority. Historically, this impres- sion is due to the appeal of the French Revolutionists to the indi- vidualistic theory of which we are now speaking. We have perhaps a better illustration of its legitimate consequences in the American Republic whose Constitution is indebted in some important par- ticulars to the individuaUsm of the group of men whose names 26 THE MORAL LIFE. have been mentioned. Individualism, as we admit, is not a suffi- cient account of the origin and nature of society, but provision must be made, in any theory which professes to be adequate, for the truth which the Social Contract, historically, serves to illustrate. Nor shall we be disposed to underestimate its importance when we remember that it is the principle of that Protestantism, — a principle which for many generations had been nurtured in the common soil of Roman Catholicism, which freed the mind and conscience of the world from the tyranny of authority, although not from authority, and made modern science, art, literature, philosophy, and social order possible. It is, therefore, not too extravagant a demand that is made when in the interests of con- servatism the principle of individuation is, as due to this demand, recognized as one of the fundamental factors of a properly consti- tuted society.' What was termed above the biological theory is much older than the theory of collectivism. It received its first systematic statement in the Republic of Plato, and has been the ideal of most writers whose efforts in social philosophy are regarded as Utopian. It errs, not so much in what it says, as in what it denies. But its positive contribution to the conception of society is only suggestive, and has to be reinterpreted in view of all the facts which an analytic study of society clearly emphasizes. Thus we may say that while the theory of collectivism starts with a false equality among individuals, the biological theory gives a false ground for the subordination of individuals, and in the end comes to a wrong estimate of that subordination itself. This is always the danger of a theory, whether of physical, social, or religious facts, which relies upon the principle of analogy. For example, it does not follow that because the individual man has a head which is the seat of reason, a breast which is the seat of the noble passion, and an abdomen which is the seat of the coarser appetites, as Plato held, that therefore these same distinctions will be found in the state in the three classes respectively of philosophers or the ruling class, warriors or the militant class, and merchants, artisans, agriculturalists and slaves, or the servant class. It does not follow because each man in each of the social classes is subject to all of the distinctions which are distributed throughout the state. Logically stated, the fallacy underlying the theory is that what is taken collectively in the one case is taken distributively in ' The ethical implications of this principle are treated below in Chapter IV on The Moral Self. SOCIAL AND ETHICAL PHENOMENA. 27 the Other. In other words, analogical reasoning is valid only on the supposition that there is a homologous relation between the two structures which are implicated, taken as a whole. But what- ever the defects of this theory may be, it does serve to emphasize as an essential aspect of society the fact that there are functional relations which must be taken account of, and it is with this as a clue that we are enabled to overcome the one-sidedness of the theory of collectivism. Third, all social phenomena are phenomena of consciousness. It is this fact that is overlooked in every attempt to give a mechan- ical or biological account of the origin and development of society. Of the fact of consciousness there is no dispute, but of its distribu- tion there is difference of opinion. But with this we are not at present concerned. We are merely interested to point out that social phenomena fall within the field broadly marked out as conscious. The speculative question of the (absolute) origin of consciousness lies outside the boundaries of a scientific inquiry. And the question of how far back among the pre-human ancestors of man we are able successfully to apply the tests of conscious exist- ence is a matter to be experimentally decided. The only point we have in mind just now is that, however wide or narrow the limits of consciousness may prove to be, we are not justified in using terms which imply consciousness to describe groups of organic existences which have not been considered specifically with reference to their conscious endowment, as seems to be done when the term 'colony' is used to describe a group of cells making up a tissue or an organ. We have no special interest in denying consciousness to the cell, if only it is not a gratuitous assumption but a demon- strated fact. But so long as it is only an assumption and not an ascertained fact, we are obliged, by the requirements of a strictly logical method, to deny that social and organic phenomena may be equated. The organic world is much wider than the social world, in our present knowledge, and, 'consciousness' is limited in its application to the higher forms of organic existence. But the more important point is whether social facts are conscious facts. While social phenomena are organic, as we have seen, not all organic phenomena are social, because some organic phenomena 28 THE MORAL LITE. are not conscious. Now our question is whether the same, or a different, relation exists between social and conscious phenomena. It is enough to say that phenomena of consciousness are present wherever we find that complexity and interrelationship of parts which the term association implies. There is, moreover, the exist- ence of certain conditions which become effective in producing definite results. Consciousness La its several forms makes a difference in the life history of those individuals and groups within which it is effective.^ Things happen as a result which would not happen but for its operation. And all our social facts, because they are facts of consciousness, are facts of a different order from what they would be in the absence of this special quality. This is the reason why Lloyd Morgan differentiates between organic and mental evolution, and uses the term 'conscious control' to indi- cate the method of the latter in contrast to 'struggle for existence ' which is the method of the former." The presence of consciousness is that which distinguishes mental from organic phenomena, and as coming under the former class our social group must be studied by the methods that are appropriate to psycho-genetic problems. We have seen that no characterization of the social situation would be adequate which did not take account of the fact of con- sciousness. This is even more true, or more obviously true, of those situations which are called moral. No one, for instance, would think of applying ethical tests and standards to a situation from which the element of consciousness was entirely missing, and no one would think of requiring the f uU measure of moral quality in those relations in which defect or deficiency of conscious factors was detected.' In respect to the implication of consciousness, therefore, the moral and the social concept seem to agree. But no 1 This statement is not to be interpreted in a mystical sense. We mean to lay emphasis upon the instrumental character of con- sciousness. In the absence of criteria there is no ground on which we may predicate consciousness as a fact. Consciousness must do something to be recognized. " Habit and Instinct, pp. 273, 274. ' As, for example, with the idiot or the insane. SOCIAL AND ETHICAL PHENOMENA. 29 sooner do we reach this assuring position thah we begin to be aware that the agreement is more seeming than real. This may be illustrated by reference to the tendencies which are working themselves out in the field of modern sociology. Herbert Spencer's aim was to bring social phenomena under the general evolutionary theory which had been developed in connection with the study of organic life. The fact that this theory was formulated as a means of explaining cosmic processes was not without its influence upon the direction which these studies took. It is now generally admitted that Spencer's sociology is the place where the Synthetic Philosophy fails to support the theory of development which was supposed, by its author, to be the golden thread which united the several parts of his work. It is also generally admitted that the failure is due to the fact that he relied upon a biologically devel- oped apparatus criticus to maintain the identity of social and biological phenomena. As we now see, all that he did was to show the possibility of describing in terms of one science the facts of another.' But in doing this, as the sociologists are coming to admit, he overlooked some important differences between organic and social phenomena, differences which are connected with the place and play of consciousness in organized societies. It would not be accurate to describe the effect of this recognition as a reac- tion against the earlier sociological movement, but it has resulted, within the field of sociology, in a modified interpretation of the biological formula in its application to social data. Instead of considering evolution as an ontological fact, it is now thought of as a methodological device, to be used, indeed, in tracing out the historic growth of societies, but, at the same time, to be adapted to the material in such ways as furthered the ends for which, in the first place, it was adopted. This adaptation has come about as the result of the larger place that is now admitted consciousness occupies in social phenomena. But while there has been an attempt, on the part of sociologists, ' Another example of this is found in Drummond's early work on Natural Law in the Spiritual World. 30 THE MORAL LIFE. to decipher the psychic factors of the social order, ^ it has not been forgotten that they are concrete social situations, of which con- sciousness is only a fractional part, with which sociology properly deals. Commerce, politics, amusement, morality, art, religion, — all these it is claimed are social phenomena, and, therefore, however they are related to other sciences, it is to sociology that we must go for our full account. Every science which deals with man and his activities presupposes, it is said, a sociology, because the task of this science is to make out "the different groupings of persons, and of detecting their interrelations, in such a way that the content of the whole life-process will appear, both in kind and in propor- tion, in the interrelations of their activities."^ But when these claims are understood, when sociology undertakes to be a science of the whole content of the anthropological data available at any time, a demand is rightly made in the name of ethics for a more accurate and historic delimitation of their respective areas. For it may be pointed out that, from the time of Aristotle, ethics has been engaged in the study of all the concrete relationships into which, with the development of civilization, human beings have come. Here then is a direct issue resulting from the agreement between sociology and ethics that the phenomena of both are facts of consciousness. Sociology having been nearly absorbed by biology, appropriates material from all available sources to escape from submission, by starvation, to any other science.^ It is not necessary that we should do more than suggest that this unsatisfactory relation of ethics to sociology is the outcome of mistaking a distinction of method for a real difference of fact. This is seen in the statement that Small gives of the general thesis which he is concerned to defend in The Significance of Sociology for Ethics. "Ethics," he writes, "must consist of empty forms until Sociology can indicate the substance to which the forms ' Lester Ward's Psychic Factors of Civilization is an illustration in point. ° A. W. Small, Significance of Sociology for Ethics, p. 21. ^ This is seen nowhere better than in the monograph by Small referred to in the previous note. SOCIAL AND ETHICAL PHENOMENA. 3 1 apply.'" In this conception, ethics is an abstract science which may have methodological value, but which can never provide for itself concrete verification. This may impose on the unwary, but it is as fallacious in logic as it is false in fact. Logically, the contrast, if it is pertinent, must be based upon a single principle of division, and the contradictory of 'formal' is not 'substance,' or even 'con- tent,' but 'not formal,' and this may include anything in the uni- verse with the single exception of the 'formal.' But though we may straighten out the logical entanglements which mar the coherency of this view, it will not help the cause overmuch. We may claim that since Kant the separation between form and con- tent, a separation which lies at the root of the Kantian Antinomies, is not a fruitful one. There is no more certain way of paralyzing human thinking than to divide it against itself. And this Kant himself saw, although he did not successfully guard against it. For to adapt, without essentially changing the meaning, one of Kant's dicta, we may say that ' 'forms without contents are empty, and contents without forms are bUnd." You can have, conse- quently, neither an ethics nor a sociology on such a principle of division as this. The formal and the material enter into the con- struction of all sciences, and the two in question are no exception. Let it therefore be admitted that ethics has its material and that sociology has its forms, and the problem then reduces to an attempt to indicate the tests by which the phenomena of the one science are to be distinguished from those of the other. The view of the relation of ethics and sociology criticised in the text assumes that the one subject matter is common to both sciences. The question then arises as to the distribution between the sciences of this common subject. And the argument seems to be that since ethics is a study of its forms, then, no forms being left unaccounted for, sociology must be a science of the substances to which the forms apply. We do not dispute the assumption on which this view relies as will be seen below, but we do doubt the consequences which are deduced from it. For, on such a supposi- tion, the possibility of ethics is not made more reasonable and it ' Op. cit., p. 9. 32 THE MORAL LITE. opens up the question why there should be any such thing as ethics at all. Accordingly we find the author who is taken as representing this view, after carefully differentiating the psycholog- ical, the ethical, and the sociological problems, absorbing them all under the single head of sociology. The "sociological problem," he writes, "is, first, the psychological problem as it is presented, not by the phenomena of the psycho-physical process in the indi- vidual, but as it is encountered in the process of the same mechan- ism when individuals are in contact with each other. The socio- logical problem is, second, the positive or concrete side of the ethical problem, namely, the determination of actual values as distinguished from the logic of the categories of valuation. Or once more, the sociological problem is to express objectively situa- tions between persons, and the interchange of influence between person and person in the situations, and then to determine the positive or negative effects of those reactions upon some relation- ship of the situation taken as a norm.'" "In this way," Small goes on immediately to say, "we divide the sociological from the psychological problem, which is to express what occurs within the individuals as such, and from the ethical problem, which is to indicate the place of these activities abstractly considered in a system of logically related facts." But so far from 'dividing' the one from the other, what we have is a wholesale appropriation of territory belonging to these related sciences, upon a misinterpre- tation of the tenure by which they are held. The case is 'argued,' but it must be thrown out of court, because the major premises on which it relies — the definitions of the other sciences — while perti- nent ad hoc, do not get verification by the testimony of the experts — the psychologists and the ethicists — within their respective fields. When it is said, as was said above, that ethics has a material as well as a formal side, it is obvious that we are claiming for the subject-matter of ethics a concrete, historical status. It is material, in other words, of a social character. But does not this statement claim the entire social field for ethics ? In one sense this is true. It is a fact, whether we can trace the historic growth of societies or not, that ethics finds its data where sociology finds its, and there are no social phenomena which do not belong equally to these two sciences. The facts with which these sciences deal are coetaneous. In the point of view from which we are now considering the prob- ' Small, op. cit., p. lo. SOCIAL AND ETHICAL PHENOMENA. 33 lem, therefore, the social and the ethical spheres 'coiacide. And if we try to find the differentia of ethics by a study of the outward conditions and results of association, we shall find it not only a difficult but an impossible task; and, further, we shall be obliged to confess that the utmost we have accomplished is to denote the marks of a social group. It is because historical interests pre- dominate in sociology that it has an easy task in resolving all the cases which are claimed by ethics as her own into social phenomena. For sociology has to do with the matter-of-fact relationships which constitute our anthropological groups. This is true whether we define sociology as a study of society or of interests, for in both is emphasized the social structure of the units of sociological science. And when, from this standpoint, the material is studied with a view to the discovery of the relations that obtain either within the groups or as binding groups together, we have no means whatever of distinguishing between those facts which have and those which have no moral quality. Murder and a deed of heroic self-sacrifice are both, from this point of view, social facts; but no one supposes them to be on the same level ethically. Another line of remark may be indicated. Ethics has a long history. This history is instructive because it is a record not only of theory but of cases. The concrete interests in connection with which the science of ethics has developed have made it, on the practical side, very largely casuistical. Practical ethics is casuistry; it is the effort to determine social action along moral lines, to bring social behavior into connection with, so that it may be the social realization of, moral principles. But when, from this point of view, we ask what the moral principles are according to which social action is to be determined, we are met with the statement that "a sort of Moral Tact is the source of such practice of casuis- try as can rightly commend itself to the seeker after the Virtuous Life."' Casuistry, that is to say, is more an art than a science, and is not, in the nature of the case, quaUfied to lay bare the ' Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, p. 420. The reader is referred to the entire chapter for a discussion of the sources and sphere of Casuistry as well as of the conflict of duties. 34 THE MORAL LITE. grounds of moral judgment. And if we turn to the history of ethics as a history of theories, we shall find that the views of the moral life which have been held by different schools is so con- nected with particular types of metaphysical systems that its tests of what constitutes morality are throughout contingent. But while we can not, on either of these counts, provide ourselves with a differentia of moral in contrast with social action, we may, in view of the historical development of the moral life and of moral theory, arrive at a general statement of some importance, and which may open the way to what we are in search of. This state- ment is : Ethics has concerned itself with ethical principles as prin- ciples of social organization, and has paid attention to the theoretical construction of the science under ideas of the end toward which conduct should he directed. We may now emphasize two characteristic developments within the field of the history of ethics which throw light upon the problem before us. In the first, ethics appears as a theory of the end.' Now when we ask how the end or ends of the moral Uf e are to be ascertained, we are referred to the moral life in its concrete par- ticularity. A study of group phenomena if it is carried over a sufficiently long period of time, and takes account of a sufficiently wide diversity of fact and conditions will make possible the formu- lation of a generalization which, pro hac vice, may be considered as the law of the evolutionary process of the phenomena in question. This law when it has been studied may then serve as an ideal, as a principle of organization for experience along the indicated line. This is what is done in other lines of scientific research, and there can be no objection, a priori, to ethics attempting the same thing. But we should bear in mind that whatever practical purposes this may serve, the inductive process, ethically, can get started only by presupposing the moral tests which, ex hypothesi, the method was invoked as a means of discovering. ' For a statement of this point of view cf. Muirhead, The Ele- ments of Ethics, pp. 89-169. SOCIAL AND ETHICAL PHENOMENA. 35 The other line of development is this. Instead* of seeking the test of what is morally worthy in the ends toward which action is to be directed, some, especially the British moralists, have inter- ested themselves in the facts of moral behavior itself. Here, of course, belong the whole of psychological ethics, so called. Now the facts of ethics, according to these writers, are subjective. They belong characteristically to the active, Hving, moral subject. Hence ethics becomes a study of the individual with a view to his moral endowment. From this point of view, it expresses itself in the form of theories of conscience, of the will, of motive, etc. In contrast with the former line of development, which concerns itseK with theories of the ends of moral behavior, ethics, psycho- logically considered, eventuates in some theory of the means of moral behavior. And when so stated, it is obvious that the means, no better than the end, provides us with the tests or differenti complex of interests which society is organized to maintain pre- vents an imitative action terminating at the same point where suggestive actions terminate, and implicates the individual in that social redistribution which every moral act brings about. The imitative individual, therefore, actually finds himself in a different relation to the social world as the result of his own conduct. What, then, is the character of this changed relation ? From the side of the group, it is, of course, a judgment; in this way society under- takes to express its estimate of the conduct of its members. But from the side of the subject of conduct, whatever else it may also dimly be, it is most clearly and consciously a new kind of feeling. This may be shown in two ways. In the first place, the individ- ual's previous experience of f eeHng has been connected vdth changes in his own organism; feeling is present as the support of just those motor changes which the organism is capable of sustaining. The feeHng-motor connection is organic. It is, fundamentally, the instrument and the material of conscious life. What, therefore, could make a stronger claim than just those actions which our own pleasures maintain? These connections are no doubt retained, but their scope is transcended. The limits may be indicated if we follow out what may be called the curve of feeling. When any wave of feeHng has run its course there is a settling down again into what, most accurately, is described as a state of satisfaction {satis facere) . This is a point of equilibrium between feeling and action in the conative-affective individual. To move from it requires a disturbance of the feeling-motor relation, for example in the form of desire. Now, when society undertakes to express itself morally in the individual for the purpose of impressing its judgment, it must travel the same path it took in the first instance toward getting those things done which, at the stage we are now considering, have become the subject of approval or disapproval. This we saw was the highway of the feelings. But why in this case do we say it is a new kind of feeling when in the earlier instance it was not so. Because, briefly no outlet is provided by the old path for the feeling-motor consciousness. The new feeling attaches to , MOTIVE AND THE MORAL JUDGMENT. 1 15 the completed task, and modifies the natural satisfaction into which we relapse when a normal conscious process has run its course. Thus, if the judgment is one of approbation, there is a heightening of the feeUng-motor tension which gets expanded retrospectively, and the situation or event to which the judgment refers gets selectively chosen for future repetition. If, on the other hand, the judgment is reversed, the feeling-motor tension is depressed, and the situation or event to which the judgment refers loses its support in the individual's consciousness, and is, so far, inhibited. Moral feeling is thus a modification in the way of reinforcement and abatement of the natural satisfaction, so that the conduct to which it attaches comes to be selectively chosen for survival or elimination. This brings us to the second point. What has been implied is that feeling needs a point of attachment if it is to become perma- nent. FeeUngs are not wandering spectres of the mental Hte. In view of this, we have to ask with what the new feeling comes to be connected so that it may bear its part in the future development of the individual. One possibility has been excluded. It can neither attach itself to an old motor reaction, nor is there any new motor outlet with which it may become assimilated. Consequently, this feeling is not, Uke the old, the immediate antecedent of motor adjustment. How, then, can it be made permanent? The answer may be put generally by saying that the moral feehng of the indi- vidual must become a function of whatever it is in the society by which it was induced. This, we said, was the moral judgment. Now, as we saw, the moral judgment uses as its norm the moral ideal which it interprets and apphes to concrete social situations. What , therefore, society does in its approbation and disapprobation is to state whether or not the ideal which is embodied in the moral judgment has received adequate recognition in individual behavior. It consequently follows, since the new feehng is the counterpart of the moral judgment, that if it is to receive sufficient support, it must be possible to develop in the individual the consciousness of the idea which, explicitly presupposed in the moral judgment, exists in the individual, as feeling, in only a vague and shifting Il6 THE MORAL LITE. way. The feeling, that is, cannot attach to any akeady estab- lished form of behavior because it exists, as feeling, as the sense of the idea which, through the moral judgment, became operative in the individual consciousness. Moral feeUngs doubtless are important in relation to moral behavior, but their relation to con- duct is not that of the immediate sort illustrated in the pleasure- pain reaction. They function in the individual mediately through the ideal to which they are permanently attached in the moral life. It is this mediate connection with practical life through the ideal which differentiates them in the feeling Ufe of man. Let us turn, now, to the function of the moral feelings in their relation to the moral judgment. For our purpose, it is enough to distinguish pleasure and pain from the ethical feelings. What we shall see is that these, while functionally distinct, are not indepen- dent of, but are related, through development, to each other. Two things have been made clear: first that feeling is the way in which an object on which action terminates comes to be defined in the unreflective stage of mental development; second, that this object gets reinstatement, or becomes again the goal of a creative impulse, when its absence arouses feelings which originally gave it its psy- chic support. Hence what is known as desire. Desire is the sensed absence of a once experienced object which has become suffused with the feelings formerly connected with that object, together with the adjustment of the motor apparatus in a way appropriate to carrying out the movements through which, in the first instance, the object was given. In desire, then, as we know it at this level of development, we have the reinstatement of an object of sense vsdthout the mediation of a memory image; it is the center of a feeling-motor function through which a process of verification may be carried out. ' We have here not only an interest- ' I have called this form of revival a sense-image, and have defined it as ' 'the sensed presence of objects in our environment which have not for the purpose of the present behavior been perceived" — Jour, of Phil., Psy. and Sci. Meth. Vol. IV, p. 355, note 20. With this may be compared Baldwin, Thought and Things, Vol. i, p. 150 and note 2. MOTIVE AND THE MORAL JUDGMENT. 117 ing, but an important stage in mental and ethical development. We face one of those facts which while firmly rooted in the past indicates the way of progress. The control of the conative process is in this case exercised by the sense-image. The sense-image is the first form in which reproduction as a psychic fact takes place. What earlier, and as leading out into this, occurs is the reinstate- ment of the conditions which make a presentation of the same object possible. That is to say, we get the same thing again because the feeling-motor process gets its fulfillment in the series of changes which leads to that thing. The object, here, is the terminus in quo. It is for this reason that we can not agree with Baldwin that the "recognition of sense objects as such without the medium of memory images" is a function of recognition which belongs in "the sphere of 'primary attention' in the sense mode."' It is, doubtless, a safe presumption that "a low organism having crude sense objects only, has along with them feelings of famil- iarity." But the 'feeling of familiarity,' in this case, does not serve, however vaguely, as a guide to the object, but is attendant upon the objects presented, and is conditioned by that fact.^ The sense-image, on the contrary, is conceived by us as serving to arouse, and to give direction to the feeling-motor process itself. It cannot be placed earUer than the phase we have marked oS by the term suggestion. It, at any rate, uses mechanized forms of behavior for the purpose of carrying out a series of activities which is differently initiated from those whose forms it calls into use. Instead, therefore, of being a terminus in quo, the sense-image is a terminus ad quem. It should, however, be remarked that beyond this very general function, it is a matter of inquiry what its termini are, and how far it has the means of securing them. As regards ' See reference in last note. ^ Of course, if that is all that Baldwin means, we do not dispute the position; we are, indeed, in agreement with him. Nevertheless, we must hold that he has missed an opportunity to run down the pre-logical roots of memory and imagination to their simpler form in the sense-image. This is what we do in the text so far as it is consistent with our present interests, which are ethical and not logical. Il8 THE MORAL LIFE. the latter point, our opinion is that it is very much of a hit-and- miss affair, because its reliance must be upon existing modes of reaction of that simpler sort which when once started run an estab- lished course. And yet, because there is no clear recognition of what it is that the sense-image introduces, it is quite possible for modes of reaction to be started which fail to realize its intention. The importance of this, psycho-genetically, is that the hard-and- fast connection which is maintained in suggestion between inner process and outer object is broken up. This is a condition of progress. It sets free certain processes for other ends than those which were originally conserved by them, and it tends perma- nently to fix certain ends by deepening and strengthening the con- nection between them and the processes in which they are secured. We may say, with some truth, that the sense-image plays a part, at its level of development, analogous to that of both memory and imagination; to that of the former because it reinstates a previously experienced object, to that of the latter because it makes new kinds of experience possible. When these functions become special- ized, as they are in memory and imagination, there is presented a condition which renders permanently possible the deepening and the development in scope and character of the feeling-motor con- sciousness.' Imagination takes the lead because it makes possible ' It may be well to point out that the sense-image is bound up with the practical attitude of the organism in which it appears. It is an instrument of better adjustment to environment. How far it serves outside of biological and economic relations it would be difficult to say. Perhaps the statement may be hazarded that it is its failure to meet, or to meet adequately, the demands of social organization that has led to the splitting off of its two functions in the specialized activities of memory and imagination. The dis- tinction involved here, of course, is that between those experiences, or those objects of experience, which 'stay put,' and those which do not. And if it is objected that this distinction is not coincident with that of natural and social, it must be remembered that for primitive man — and perchance civilized man is in this respect primi- tive — all incalculable forces are social whether they fall under what we call nature or mind. In this distinction between mem- ory and imagination, we have the basis for the distinction between MOTIVE AND THE MORAL JUDGMENT II9 the presentation of a new complex situation as the center around which the feeling-motor processes may get a new organization. This is not true of memory. Memory secures, as permanent gain to the organism, the results of past experience. It does not lead out to new types of experience. But because of its limitations, it is an important factor in moral development. It is, as we hope may become clear in ihe next chapter, the instrument which the moral judgment uses to secure those kinds and types of reaction in the individual which are in harmony with the tradition of the group. science and what is not science, only it has to be remarked that were it not for what is not science — were it not for imagination — science itself would be a short-lived affair. For ethics, the devel- opment here indicated is important because it marks the difference between what 'was and therefore may be again' and 'what was and therefore ought to be now.' The difference in the conclusion is due to the growth in feeling which accompanies mental develop- ment. CHAPTER VII. MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. A functional interpretation of memory and imagination gives the point of view for considering certain characteristic features of the moral life. The importance of this interpretation lies in the fact that it forces for ethics the distinction between the personal and the individual, and presents as the unsolved problem of our own day the relations between them. The Hmits of our discussion are fairly clear. What we propose is to use the differentiation of memory and imagination on the mental side as corresponding to the differentiation of the personal and the individual on the moral side, and to consider how these play back and forth on each other by means of the moral judgment, to give definiteness and enrichment to the moral motive in the permanence and effectiveness of which the moral life not only secures a stable organization for racial experi- ence, but guarantees to unborn generations the liberties of the future. In the first place, however, we must restate our terms, and then we shall better be able to consider the character of the motive by which each of these is mediated. The personal and the individual were presented above as social concepts. They express, we said, the relations of the members of the group to the group as a whole. The difference between them is, in part, a difference of the relations which each implies. In the personal there are ex- pressed those relations which are determined by the organic struc- ture of the society, and which are fundamental to its being and remaining what it is. The personal, consequently, signifies those qualities of individual conduct and character which make social cooperation possible. This means that the person is interpreted through the group. This meaning has been wrought into the MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 121 popular wisdom literature of all races, as, for example when it is said that 'evil communications corrupt good manners,' and 'we are judged by the company we keep.' The truth of this view lies in the fact that the behavior in question was learned in the first place by imitative appropriation of the social example. In the individual, on the other hand, another set of relations is expressed. They are those which are, or appear to be, in contravention of the conventional requirements which social tradition embodies. Not to consider extreme cases, we may say, quite generally, that they are, and always are felt to be, a disturbing factor of good order. The reason for this is that the control in the situation is not, as it was in the personal, social, but individual. Society, we saw, exerts itself to maintain its own traditional life. Here we see the individual exerting himself to introduce relations within the society of which he is a member which, from the social standpoint, involve a modification of inherited beliefs and practices. We may make a statement of this same contrast from the point of view of the problem of this chapter. Motive, we have defined in a general way as a complex feeling-motor experience which is centered in the consciousness of an end which has, or is intended to have, social consequences. The ends toward which motive points may and do vary with the different situations in which the moral judgment operates, but, as we saw in an earlier chapter the consequences may be reduced to definite types. Morality, we said, aimed at the maintenance and development of social life Now, it is interesting to note, and it is at the same time a confir- mation of the position taken, that the concepts which are the points of departure for discussion in this chapter refer to these two objects of moral effort. In the personal we have summed up those facts and relations which tend toward social maintenance. The individual subserves the interests of social development. Hence the problem which awaits our consideration is how these objects are secured in the motives which they are the means of estab- lishing. The concept ' individual ' has received no more adequate consid- eration than, as we remarked above (p. 21), has the concept 'society,' 122 THE MORAL LIFE. at the hands of modern sociology. The attitude of the sociologist, in both instances, is similar. Quite frankly Small affirms: "The con- cept 'individual' is one of our convenient concessions to our intellect- ual incapacity. In view of our mental limitations, it is doubtless a necessary device, but there is nothing in the world of reality to correspond with the notion which the term 'individual'is made to connote in (all the individualistic philosophies.'" If we may take this confession as typical, one begins to wonder whether sociology has any legitimate business in the world, and whether it is not a sort of freebooter among the sciences taking what and where it can. But, seriously, if 'society' is only individuals affecting one another in various ways, as we saw above, and if, as we now learn, the 'individuals' are nothing real, sociology, certainly, can not be accused of lack of modesty in claiming to be the foundation of all our sciences of human nature. Perhaps we waste words; for so long as the sociologist does not put forth an appreciable effort to state what his terms do mean, and contents himself with denying that they mean what someone else says they mean, he is an 'Ephraim joined to idols' whom vnsdom counsels to 'leave alone.' It is, therefore, much nearer the point to find the modern philosopher — Small seems to have stopped his reading of the philosophers with the eighteenth century — falling back upon the reality of the concrete individual, as determined by anthropology and social psychology, in his protest against the reality of the so-called 'social self.' For ethnology and psychology, the 'social self,' as Ladd affirms, "is but a figure of speech, fitly enough designed, it may be, to remind us that the individual man could never be, or develop into, a true personality were it not for the constant and most potent influence of other personal beings.''* This author, however, does not draw the precise dis- tinction connoted by the 'personal' and the 'individual,' and which we have essayed to point out. It may, therefore, help to make the line of distinction clearer if we throw into more stiff and exclusive statement what these terms specify. In regard to the personal, we should have to hold that it expresses, or is the way in which are expressed, the organic connections which the race maintains between its various divisions and members. Were there no such thing as a continuity of life in time there would be no such thing as sympathy uniting life in space. The solidarity of the race in its ' Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, Vol. IV. p. 128. '^Philosophy of Conduct, p. 195. MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 1 23 psycho-physiological character forms the basis* of what in the race divisions forms the material of those concrete developments in which one individual reproduces the life of his kind. This statement relieves our position from the onus which rests upon those who hold, as a friendly critic does, that the person "is a person when as yet the community has not touched him. He already has in him those elements which fit him to become a member of the community. They exist in embryo, to be sure, but they are there; and because they are there the child reacts on the influences from without, both material and social, as a person and not as a mere animal." We do not know what a 'mere animal' in this connection is, unless it denotes the individual member of the species determined as to racial characteristics by his psycho-physiological ancestry. But then the 'mere animal' must be equated with our 'person,' for we do not know anything whatever about any existence which 'as yet the community has not touched.' It is, indeed, the touch of the common life which gives life to the members of the race, tribe, family, so that in ascending series through family, tribe, and race it is true that 'Uke father, like son.' This may be asserted of mental as of physical and physiological characteristics. The beginning of the one is no more mysterious than the beginning of the other because we know nothing of the beginning of either. The (abso- lute) origin of matter is as far from being clear to us as is the origin of spirit because both lie in the unknown, where there are no measuring lines. The only existence we know is the psycho- physiological member of the race, and the 'mere animal' of bio- logical science is as mythical a being as the 'pure spirit' of a theologising psychology. In the world of mysteries a newly spawned unicellular animal is as fearful and wonderful a thing as the birth of a human soul. Each is what its ancestry has determined, or else we do not know what it is. And when we have said this we have expressed the fundamental fact which, working out to very diverse results in each case, is the clue to the meaning of personaUty. The individual also has its organic basis. "Every man is born to develop a pecuUar organic structure of impulse and emotion, more of this and less of that, through the whole range of feelings. Such a structure varies inexhaustively from man to man, as faces and finger-prints do, and constitutes his character (the dominant tendencies of his reaction) ; so far as this can be distinguished, on the one hand, from behavior, which is determined partly by experience; and, on the other hand, from temperament, which 124 THE MORAL LIFE. depends upon Ccenaesthesis."* This statement is true in so far as it lays emphasis upon the connection between personality and individuality. Of these concepts, this author writes: "A man's personality is inseparable from the family and its possessions and traditions; and hitherto it has been inseparable from the Tribe or State. There, on the other hand, grows up a consciousness of the relation of self to others, according to rules implying respon- sibility and defining the individual; on the other hand, suggestion, imitation, education, emulation and specialized industry and rank modify his individuality and disguise his character by codes of behavior. And further, since society is the greater part of every man's environment, it operates selectively, eliminating those who fail to 'behave,' and thus determining possible types of character itself."^ What shall we say of the relation indicated between the personal and the individual? If 'every man is bom to develop a peculiar organic structure of impulse and emotion,' it is obvious that the modifying and eliminating forces of the environ- ment, social and material, which get expression in the latter part of the quotation, have been too strongly stated. We do not deny the influence of environment in the moral life; it is true that the funding of racial experience in the 'social tissue,' as Stephen indicates, may have been brought about under the operation of a law of selection. But the way in which this in- heritance comes to be appropriated is the same as that which makes possible the appropriation of the objects of the 'objective mind,' or nature. As Read says, " Kinaesthesis accompanies all the special sensations, and becomes the connective tissue of the objective mind or nature."^ But also, as we have indicated, this may be affirmed to be the method of naturalization in the social order. Here, too, the social order as a fixed quantity operates as a stimulus to the process in which it comes to be known; and yet it must be added that what society is or appears to be must be stated, from the individual standpoint, in terms of the conative-affective qualities which condition practical adjust- ments. With the development of the life of thought, that is, when conduct is brought under the remote and contingent, the way for greater variation is opened up, and departure from mechani- zation of life becomes a possibility. Here is the basis of indi- viduality. Something may be granted to the way in which the ' Read, The Metaphysics of Nature, p. 251. 'Ibid,, pp. 252, 253. Italics mine. 'Ibid., p. 251. MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 1 25 elements are mixed in a given individual, for we' must admit that what distinguishes one member of the race from another is wrought out through what is common to all. But unless we over- look the fact that Ufe is not a deposit but a process, the emphasis must not be placed either upon inheritance or upon environment, but upon the way in which what is inherited is utilized in definite situations to bring about useful variations. Thus, ultimately, individuality is organically connected with the modifiability of inherited structure ; and the determination of ' possible types of character,' which Read alludes to as the function of the environ- ment, is as much dependent upon variation in reaction as it is upon conformity to type. The individual and environment grow together; but the higher we go in the scale of being the greater relative independence does the individual attain, that is, the larger the control which he exercises over the conditions under which his career is run. We may now consider the development of motive under the influence of what we term the personal. This will take us back to the conclusion of the last chapter for our starting-point. It was there pointed out that memory is a conservative element in mental life, and, as we shall have occasion to emphasize, it is the instrument of the moral judgment in preserving to the indi- vidual his racial inheritance. For what we mean by law, tradi- tion, or custom is the fact that society has its method of storing experience so as to make it available for future guidance. It should be remarked, however, that social memory, like imagination, abstracts from the concreteness of its practical original which is then preserved in a somewhat schematic form. Hence its depend- ence on the moral judgment for its social efiiciency. In this point of view, the moral judgment may be said to consist in the deter- mination of conduct with respect to the requirements which social experience embodies. In relation to motive, the problem is to ascer- tain how social can become individual experience. This much may be said, in a general way, that as the moral judgment implies and works through the social memory, it requires in the members of society a similar mental development — the ability to store and to profit by experience. Now memory as an individual characteristic 126 THE MORAL LIFE. is a matter of images and ideas.' "A memory image may be described objectively as a mental image which resembles closely a former image, a real thing, or event. Subjectively regarded, memory images .... are accompanied by the feeling of familiarity, or mood of at-homeness, as Titchener describes it, and also by the belief that the image relates to a real object, event, or situation, and still further by the consciousness that the object, event, or situation is not at the moment present to sense."^ The importance of this definition is that it recognizes the wide scope which memory may take as to its content, and at the same time indicates the inner characteristics of the experience itself. Moral- ity, in this connection, is concerned with the recall of social 'situa- tions,' and it is the feeling-motor aspect of its memory-image which makes it dynamic in maintaining these situations. Hence, we may say, that through a common content of memory — the social situation — the judgment becomes functional in the individual through the feelings which it is capable of arousing. We may now take a step farther and ask what are the compli- cations in the feeling-motor consciousness which take place when the memory image serves as the medium of bringing the individual into relation vdth the social group. Let us take the typical case where the reproduction of past experience serves as the guide to action in a presented situation. Here we are called upon to do something which, from the standpoint of the individual, is intended to afford a definite satisfaction. The control, in this instance, is exercised by the content of the memory-image through which conduct is tied down to reproducing a remembered sequence. Through the image we get back to life — to its social contacts and moral effort.^ It is the starting-point of a process of verification ' Ideas are not important at this stage, because, here the practical demands are those which get their fulfillment in conformity, and memory is usually adequate for the socializing of individual behavior. They are, however, a more fruitful medium of individuality, and lead out to all the wide diversity which that term connotes. ' Major, First Steps in Mental Growth, p. 202. ' Professor Baldwin writes me a propos of the article 'Imagina- tion and Thought in Human Knowledge' {Journal of Phil., Psy. MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 1 2 7 which, if successful, reacts upon the image itself to give it definite characteristics. Because of its functional relations, the memory image drops what is irrelevant in the original experience when it comes to be applied in a problematical situation, and in becoming schematic its sphere of application is enlarged to include many situations which, though not identical, are sufficiently alike to be interpreted in a similar way. The importance of this fact in the development of motive is that the pleasure-pain connected with the kinaesthetic character of the original experience loses its point of attachment in the motor series, and is modified by the distinctive feelings which belong to the image-motor series which are now dynamic. This same truth may be expressed by saying that while in perception the affective element is in direct relation to the motor possibilities of the presented situation, it is not so in memory. In memory, because we have the advantage of the completed experi- ence, the affective consequences react upon the affective accom- paniments of the original conative process to make the motive more complex, a complexity which becomes emphasized and deepened with every new application and use of the memory-image. Memory is important morally because, in practice, it affords the opportunity of connecting the pleasure-pain factors of direct perceptual experi- ence with those emotional results which accompany praise or blame which are the forms in which the moral judgment takes account of what we do. There is, therefore, in memory, as a moral instru- ment, already a transformation and modification of the elements and Sci. Meth., Vol. IV, p. 64 sf), that the place of what I call 'imagination' — in which term were included both reproductive and productive imagination — is 'one of the main problems' of his Genetic Logic {Thought and Things, Vol. I), and that "the theories of 'Image objects,' 'Semblance' and 'Schematism,' in that book. Chapters V, VI, VIII, give imagination the mediating place." The doctrine of the article is unchanged here, and I am glad to refer the reader to Baldwin's treatment for its logical implications. The reading should be continued to Vol. II, where the matter is carried on to the sphere of truth. The same subject has been considered by Baldwin in an article on 'Knowledge and Imagination,' in The Psychological Review for May 1908, pp. i8if. 128 THE MORAL LIFE. of the original experience to the extent that no repetition of previous behavior can take place in actual life which does not bring upon it a moral valuation. To do the same thing twice needs justifying. The reason is that the motive in the two instances is not the same. Moral motive is not possible until the pleasure-pain experience has been absorbed into the emotional response which comes from regard for the social consequences of our several acts. Regard for consequences would not be possible, and the distinctive character of moral motive would be absent, were it not for that mental development in memory which ties us to the past in order that we may know more surely how to tread the unknown way of the future. Not only in moral theory, but in practical life, Hedonism has played a conspicuous part. By Hedonism we mean any view of morality which holds that men behave in the concrete situa- tions of their life in the way they do for the sake of the pleasure which the behavior affords. According to this, I am writing, and the reader is reading these pages because the psycho-physical activity which is, respectively, ours is in each case pleasurable. When it ceases to give pleasure, I throw down the pen, as you do the book, and that is the end of the matter. The widespread acquiescence in this account lays a heavy burden of responsibility not only on those who hold the view, but also on those who would discredit it. The same reason, however, weighs with both — the statement of the theory is so perfectly obvious and easily under- stood. With the practical man, this is a necessity. If he is to have any theory of conduct, as he must have, it has to be one which bears its meaning on its face, and is capable of immediate application to the affairs of life. A man is practical, in the common meaning of language, when, so far as he is concerned, no delay is allowed between desire and its satisfaction. There are, of course, questions which arise, and which for the time, prevent the accomplishment of plans; but, unless we go beyond the sphere of practice, they are, and can be, only those which are concerned with the means and not the end of his activity. The business world is an obvious example. No one disputes that here we have an organization for the purpose of making money; its justification lies in the success with which it attains this end. Here is preeminently the place and the sphere of the practical man. Let it be suggested that commercial enterprise is only MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 1 29 indirectly related to wealth, but has for its direct object the enlarge- ment of life, and you have turned the world of the practical man upside-down. The problems with which he deals do not sug- gest, even remotely, the possibility of subordinating financial success; they present themselves, rather, as requiring a more adequate development of the means of a secure and rapid accumu- lation of wealth. We offer this as a statement of fact. Our point is quite distinct from the question whether the facts and relations of the business world, as such, are capable of an ethical valuation. With regard to this we should certainly consider it so. This, we take it, is the opinion of all those also who, whether they be morahsts or statesmen, think there is a better way of doing business than by keeping an eye on the till. In this relation. President Roosevelt is the leading statesman of our modern American life, because in him we have a strong will illuminated and guided by clear moral vision. There is, for instance, no 'politics,' but good business and moral sense in this: "The rich man who with hard arrogance decHnes to consider the rights and needs of those who are less well off, and the poor man who excites and indulges in envy and hatred of those who are better off, are ahke alien to the spirit of our national life. Each of them should learn to appreciate the baseness and degradation of his point of view, as evil in the one case as in the other. There exists no more sordid and unlovely type of social development than plu- tocracy, for there is a peculiar unwholesomeness in a social and governmental ideal where wealth by and of itself is held up as the greatest good."* It is because, as a matter of fact, wealth is held up as the greatest good in the business world that the prac- tical man lives a short-circuited hfe. He lives mostly through his spinal cord, and the cerebrum does not exist to set new aims, but to meet the complexity of situations which the spinal cord is not able to overcome. Now, if we speak to a man whose con- tacts with his environment are of this immediate sort of moral theory, we must give him a short-circuited theory — he can under- stand no other. Now, this is what Hedonism is. It belongs to and finds meaning in the inchoate stage of moral life, the stage of the non-moral, of the moral by courtesy, and because there the conditions are developing which later become of service in the transmuting of values in which, as we have seen, morality, to so large an extent, consists. The reason which commends this theory to the practical man ' Provincetown (Mass.) Speech, August 20, 1907. 130 THE MORAL LITE. is the reason the moral theorist has for rejecting it. Much has been written, and written well, upon Hedonism as a theory of the moral life. But the best things that have been written, and this is true of the Hedonists themselves, are the things which have contradicted it. Thus when Mill admitted the distinction between higher and lower pleasures he introduced into Hedonism the entering wedge which, if forced, would divide it against itself. We refer to Mill because, in this concession, he seems to have had warrant of the facts of life when brought under moral review. When the Hedonist, as theorist, does what, as practical man, he could not do — when, that is, he takes the look before and after — bUnd immediacy no longer appears as a characteristic of the best types of moral existence. But if the facts change, so does the theory; and when the pleasures, for example, of the intellect are placed over against the pleasures of sense, we have not merely a question of more or less, but a difference in the kind of life which morality connotes.' To connect this distinction with our exposition, those pleasures which act as motives to future conduct are higher when they are connected with the conse- quences which follow in a social way the completion of the indi- vidual act. They are not only more complex, but because they are more complex they initiate the means which lead to their fulfillment. The forms of behavior to which they lead are moral because, as we said in the beginning and in many ways have repeated throughout this essay, they are mediated by those forms of feeling which are capable of the widest socialization. Brought to this test, Hedonism is discredited. Feeling which terminates in the individual, and is not the medium of wider social conse- quences, is not the motive which has brought, however imper- ' This statement should be taken in connection with what was said above concerning the relation of the elementary pleasure-pains to the moral motive. We do not find that, in themselves, the so- called lower pleasures are contradictory of the best life, any more than, in themselves, the higher pleasures are promotive of it. What we have to recognize is that a new direction and use is made of the feeling-motor consciousness when we pass from the biological to the ethical life. Indeed, it is the silence of ethics upon the place of the organic instincts in the scheme of existence, or its wholly negative and ascetic treatment of them, that gives occasion to that duality of motive which figures in and discredits our modern Ufe, and which, in making goodness to appear as a gloss, justifies, in reality, their unregulated satisfaction. MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 13 1 fectly, the future under the control of the present*, and made of the present the seed plot of human destiny.' We shape ourselves the joy or fear, Of which the coming life is made, And fill our future's atmosphere With sunshine or with shade. The simplest and most elementary type of moral motive is that through which the common interests, the fundamental and organic needs, of communal life are met. This is the motive which pro- motes those qualities of conduct and of character which most nearly bind the members of society together, and unite them in an inclusive purpose. All that we have said concerning the develop- ment and applications of motive in this and the preceding chapter centers in this purpose. Whether we consider the first budding forth of the moral life in children or childlike races, or whether we view it from the more advanced stage where memory makes a more indirect method of control possible, the object which the motive in these cases supports is that which is summed up in the ' Business life is not the only sphere of human activity which is carried on without consideration of its moral implications. Culture also has its dangers; and an education divorced from the service of man is only a refined form of selfishness, and may become the instrument of oppression more terrible than any of the clumsy devices known to despotism. It killed the body, an unmoralized culture kills the soul. The following from Ruskin may serve as an illustration: "I have bought for my own exclusive gratification the cottage in which I am writing, near the lake- beach on which I used to play when I was seven years old. Were I a public-spirited scientific person or a benevolently pious one, I should doubtless instead be surveying the geographical relations of the mountains of the moon, or translating the Athanasian creed into Tartar-Chinese. But I hate the very name of the public, and labor under no oppressive anxiety either for the advancement of science or the salvation of mankind. I, therefore, prefer amus- ing myself with the lake-pebbles, of which I know nothing but that they are pretty, and conversing with people whom I can under- stand without pains, and who, so far from needing to be converted, seem to me on the whole better than myself." — From Harris, God Creator and Lord of All, Vol. II, p. 431, note i. 132 THE MORAL LIFE. term 'personal.' We have looked at the facts, hitherto, from the side, and according to the advantages of society, and, very properly, it has seemed that, in relation to the moral life, society appears as an organization for the objective control of the individual, to direct his steps, and to give him exercise in the things which make for the larger Ufe. There is, however, in the later stages of this disciphne a moment when social demands appear less as tasks that cannot be avoided without pain, and more as opportunities which contain the promise of fulfilling personal needs. The reason for this is bound up in our exposition, and it appears, in a general statement, as a particular apphcation of the truth that the subject and his environment grow up together and can not be taken apart. The law of morality, consequently, is not, in the sense in which some ethical schools have held, a heteronomy, and it appears so at any time only because it remains steady and insistent, while there are many other competing outlets for the active energies of the unregulated and imperfectly integrated life of immaturity. Free- dom from restraint, however, is as much dependent, especially in the elementary stages, upon the inhibition of competing activities as upon the consent which the moral law receives. For, doubtless, the more and better training one gets in obedience to the com- mands of the moral law, the less chance remains to other incom- patible modes of action to get stamped in and to become estab- lished habits of hfe. Practice, I say, my friend, doth long endure And at the last is even very nature.' The fact to which we wish to call attention is this: that the ends defined by society as objects of the individual's moral effort are the reality which, in the individual, the moral feelings point to, and in which they receive their satisfaction. The meaning of this is that the motive has become, at least in part, inde- pendent of the social sanctions which, hitherto, have secured moral behavior. With the development of memory, we become ' Evenus, quoted by Aristotle, Ethics, Book VII, Chapter 9. MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. . 133 relatively independent of the suggestion of our immediate en- vironments for the determination of our courses of conduct, and we find in experience — which in ethical terms signifies character — the clue to the behavior which these concrete situations demand. When, however, as an incident of mental and moral growth, we are thus thrown upon our resources it should be remembered that the experience upon which we are thrown, and from which we have to select the key for the unlocking of the future, is not some private, fortuitous experience, but, defini- tively, those forms of behavior which have been learned from society as the things which it demands of us if we look for moral approbation. Hence it is obvious that with the shifting of the emphasis from social control to moral initiative, the presumption is in favor of the right thing getting done — the thing the individual does will be an approved form of moral conduct. If, therefore, we inquire, from the standpoint of the subject of conduct, why that gets done which the individual does, we can only say that that is the thing the individual wants to do. The occasion provides an outlet for action, and the action can be, when memory serves as a bridge, no other than that which already implies, through the motive by which it is supported, the approval of the moral judg- ment. For, as we said, the moral motive is the moral judgment functioning in the individual to secure those types of behavior which best interpret and embody the moral ideal. The remarkable statement of Kant's in the Metaphysic of Morals that incUnation destroys the moral quality of the resulting action seems to deserve brief notice The subject of discussion in which he states his position is the content, or the field of opera- tion, of the 'Good-will.' What is the character of those actions which are done from good-will, and how wide a field do such actions cover? Kant brings to the consideration of this question his conception of duty as the requirement embodied in the moral law. Thus, he says, only those acts are moral which are done from a sense of duty, that is, because the moral law requires them. But this does not cover all human actions. There are, besides, those acts which are inconsistent with duty, and those which, although what duty requires, are done because one takes 134 THE MORAL LIFE. pleasure in them. The former are easily disposed of; although, as we may pause to remark, not quite consistently with any theory which undertakes to apply moral predicates to them. But it becomes a nice question whether, because and when inclination and duty, as in particular cases they sometimes do, coincide, we are to refuse, as Kant apparently does, to recognize these as fall- ing under a moral denomination. Thilly makes a curious obser- vation when he says that the question is wholly 'dependent upon one's standpoint.' We do not think this is so; for whatever our standpoint the facts should be correctly stated, even if they need to be supplemented by facts gathered from other standpoints. What, therefore, is the fact which Kant had in mind when he ruled out this class of actions from the field of morality ? No one, for instance, can suppose that he would have approved the selec- tion of examples in Schiller's famous parody of his doctrine, in which the poet by means of these examples reduces the position to absurdity. The parody, in English, runs as follows: The friends whom I love I gladly would serve, but to this incli- nation incites me; And so I am forced from virtue to swerve since my act, through affection, delights me. The friends whom thou lovest thou must first seek to scorn, for to no other way can I guide thee; 'Tis alone with disgust thou canst rightly perform the acts to which duty would lead thee. But why not? Because — to meet a paradoxical situation para- doxically — these are not the things we do because we like to do them. The examples mentioned very often and most characteris- tically involve hardship and difficulty. They cannot be, therefore, the bearers of the motive from which they receive their moral support. And, in this, we are confirmed by Kant's own state- ments. For while he recognizes the feeling of respect for the law as the motive of all moral actions, he is careful to say that respect is an effect of the law and not its cause. This was, from the historic standpoint, a direct thrust at the hedonism of his times, in combating which he was led into an extreme and unguarded statement. What his statement amounts to, then, is that that feeling — which he calls inclination — which finds its satisfaction in the actions which it immediately occasions is not to be confused with the moral motive which is an organization of the feeling ^Introduction to Ethics, p. 107. MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 13S life around the ends which the moral law holds up as the objects of a moral will. It will be seen that this interpretation of Kant brings him nearer to the position for which we have argued. But the two views are not identical. For there still remains the hiatus between feeling and action, and conduct is recognized to be moral only when it is enforced behavior. The fact is Kant's psychology is all at sea in this connection. The distinction which he draws between the two kinds of will (Wille and WiUkiihr) has its counterpart in the distinction of 'inclina- tion' and 'respect,' and in neither case has he made provision for the lower to be taken up into the higher, with the result that the moral life is a thing apart in disjunctive relation with the common stream of the individual's life. We may say, with Paul- sen, that 'such a human being, doing his duty solely for duty's sake, is the most wooden mannikin ever constructed by a system- builder."' Nevertheless, in its positive features, the doctrine of Kant is a close approximation to the facts, but because of what it excludes it fails to provide for some of the characteristics of the moral life. For, after all, the good man, as Aristotle pointed out,^ is the man who likes to do good things. Inclination and duty must find their reconciliation somewhere in the moral life. In our doctrine of motive this reconciling process is shown to be going on all the time, and thus the moral life is shown to be growing constantly richer because it is infolding within itself as secondary ends the objects which, on Kant's view, are constantly distracting the moral will from its proper moral ends. Turning now to the consideration of the individual, we meet with an important transitional stage where, within the field of application of the memory-image, the way is being prepared for the distinctive uses of image and idea which are characteristic of imagination. We have spoken of the part that memory plays in determining conduct in a problematical situation. It was pointed out that we need not go beyond the means offered in memory for the control of those situations which, although differing from any past experience, were sufficiently like them to be assimilated to one or other of the types which had become fixed through repetition. Our position in regard to such cases was that the field of the per- ' A System of Ethics, translated by F. Thilly, p. 351. 2 Ethics, Book I, Chapter X. 136 THE MORAL LITE. sonal is determined by the range of the applicability of the memory image as a principle for the guidance of conduct. It can, therefore, be readily understood that the determination of the ethical charac- teristics of the individual will depend upon where, in the develop- ment of mental and moral life, memory no longer serves as a guide to practice without undergoing modification to meet the greater complexity which the new situation implies. Now, it needs only to be pointed out that memory is serviceable in so far as it retains the essential characteristics of the original experience, and connects these with the moral judgments which either approve or condemn. There are a number of recurring situations — such, for example, that, in current expression, go by the term 'manners' — which become very completely formalized, and which when once their requirements have been learned may be left to the mechanism of memory for their reinstatement. We learn to observe the social amenities in much the same way in which we learn to speak our mother tongue. They are, indeed, the idiom of our social class. Elementary morality is of this type. But appearances are proverbi- ally deceptive, and one of the first lessons that has to be learned is that differences may sometimes be overlooked because of more inclusive likeness. In this way the memory-image becomes more definitely formalized. Hence the practical expertness which is frequently shown in assimilating diverse situations to the image-type by those who have given hardly a thought to the problems which vex the soul of the moral philosopher. The fact seems to be that memory reacts upon perception, and the essentials of experience which are summed up in the image provide the clue to the behavior which the situation requires. It can be seen, however, that this is a safe procedure only within limits. When social conditions are more complex, and the relations more involved, differences become more emphatic and common likeness serves only to make them more problematical. Take, for example, the stock question whether one should, under all circumstances, speak the truth. Not many of us would hesitate as to the answer we would give. But few of us would as readily express the same judgment if we were asked whether the physician attending one of our own loved ones should MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 137 tell his patient that the sickness was mortal when the probability is that the news would either be fatal or hasten the demise. The point to be attended to is that they are the differences in the cases which accentuate the limitations of the function of memory in cases of casuistry. But evei before this stage of development is reached, it is possible that memory has proved a limited instrument of the moral life. For one may find out very early that while other things remain the same the time element itself may make all the difference. So the child who asks whether she may have some candy, will receive a scolding if the permission is taken to extend beyond the occasion to which it originally referred. Such a case is instructive because, as any one who has to do with children may verify, the child will most likely resent the correction with the justifying remark — 'You said I could.' And if, as sometimes happens, the emphasis is put on 'said,' the child is standing up for her own moral standards, and pointing you out as the one who has broken 'the law.' But if it is told her that the case of candy is not one that can safely be left to her to decide, this will mean that there are some circumstances which her standards do not take account of, and which, therefore, must lead her wrong. And when any exception is made, the limits of memory have been already reached, and some new way of dealing with the excepted cases is in demand. We may look at the development of imagination in its practical use in another way. Careful observers have remarked upon the importance of social contact if the child is to make mental and moral progress. The more social groups to which the child can get adjusted, the more diversified vidll be his acquired reactions. It is instructive, and not infrequently amusing, to observe the different modes of behavior of the same child under the changing social conditions into which he comes in the course of a day. All this is significant for the future of the child because it is in his imitative reactions that he not only gets his social introductions, but finds the material which, preserved in memory, serves as the guide to future behavior. Practically, therefore, memory may be viewed as being concerned with the conscious application of imitative mate- 138 THE MORAL LIFE. rial. Now the limits of this growth era are reached when mistakes begin to appear, and we are sent back, like children at school, with our examples marked 'wrong.' A typical case of this arises when the standards of one social relation are used to solve the problems which arise in another social relation to which, because of the neglect of important differences, they are not pertinent. There is no escape from this. As much as possible must be assimi- lated to a single type. In this sense, memory illustrates the law of parsimony in mental hfe. But when memory is extended into areas where, because the conditions have become more complex, it proves ineffective, the necessity of imagination is emphasized if social readjustment is to take place. Hence, whatever else it may be, imagination, from the practical standpoint, is a mental device for dealing with situations which, because they depart from a fixed type, are no longer capable of control by memory through which what is permanent in common situations gets reenforcement. While it does not belong to an ethical inquiry to consider in detail the genetic history of memory and imagination, except so far as it may throw light upon the grovirth, in scope and complexity, of the moral life, it is pertinent to call attention to the traditional psychological view which was developed under influences which regarded facts of all kinds as definite quan- tities to be analyzed with a view to their adequate descrip- tion. This, in psychology, led to the differentiation of memory and imagination both in respect of their relations to perception and in respect of the complexity of their organization. This view laid stress upon the following considerations: (a) memory and imagination both presuppose perception; (b) imagination differs from memory in being less representative of its perceptual origin; and this (c) is somehow connected wdth the greater degree of vivacity of the memory-image. These positions are substantially correct. But, notwithstanding the show of thoroughness which the traditional view has always carried, it only afiords a deter- mination of the representative consciousness in a single dimension. Thus (b) and (c) above are accurately corollaries from the temporal relations in which perception, memory, and imagination are said to stand to one another in mental life. Thus Hume taking percep- tion — or the 'impression of sense' — as the original fact of experi- ence, is able to distinguish imagination from memory as the copy of MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 139 a copy, and, consistently enough, accords to memory, which is the copy of the original, a more definite constitution. But if the difference between perception, memory, and imagination is, wholly or in part, a matter of which is original and which is copy, it is obvious, inferentially, that the copy of a copy can be neither as representative nor as vivid as the copy. But whatever hmitations the doctrine may be subject to, the common view is, as we said, substantially correct. We find, for example, in Hume's exposition the locus dassicus of the position which has been advanced above that memory and imagination afford the means for the developing consciousness, mental and moral, to retain its vital connections with the concrete environments in which truth and righteousness come to their first expression. We also find here the germ of the view that, in characteristic ways, memory and imagination make possible the growth of human knowledge and morality, and function in the interest of the greater diversity of their form and scope. There is one point which we should note, namely, the detachableness from its concrete original of the image in imagination. This, according to Hume, is due to the fact that imagination retains in more schematic outline than memory the concrete inter-relations of the parts of the primary perception. In our view this is to put the cart before the horse. Imagination, as we have seen, differs from memory not in its structure, but in the use to which the image is put. Hence, as we have impHed, the memory image, when it is used as a means for overcoming a situation which refuses to be assimilated to a common type, is, so far, an imagination-image. It is doubtless true that the sche- matization of the image proceeds with the number of differences which it mediates, but this is the result, not the cause, of its separa- tion from the perceptual or imitative origin to which it refers. It is for this reason that we find the beginning of imagination in memory; not because, structurally, imagination differs from mem- ory; but because, functionally, memory lends itself, within limits, to the kind of service which imagination carries out in a freer way and over larger areas of conscious experience. The instru- ment is shaped to existing needs, and gets perfected through the demands which are made upon it in the compUcating situations of social intercourse. The development of imagination has been traced with reference to those cases in which memory breaks down because it is no longer able to cope with existing situations in a morally satisfactory way. Two instances were mentioned: first, when the individual is begin- I40 THE MORAL LIFE. ning to appropriate new aspects of community life, and finds his old experience failing him as a guide to what ought to be done; second, when contrasted social relations are beginning to overlay one another, and the attempt is made to assimilate the one to the other. Each of these in its own way marks the limits of the memory function in the moral situation, and by emphasizing differences opens the way for a new step in mental and moral growth. Men- tally, as we have seen, differences are controlled by imagination. The greater the number and complexity of significant differences, the more emphatic and characteristic are the variations of con- duct. In this way conduct not only becomes enriched, but finds in change the condition of its own permanence. Since this state- ment is true of both the cases above, they remain transitional in the sense that imagination is not freed from its contextual dependence, but functions within the limits of the memory- scheme. It becomes a question, however, how much diversity can be admitted without going beyond established custom. Per- haps the least that can be said is that what has the sanction of tradition may be done in new ways, and the most, that new behavior will be permitted which can be assimilated by the old formulas. The morality of the average person will, we think, be found to lie within these bounds. We may sum up the case in the statement that because memory and imagination are cooperant factors in the solution of moral problems, individuality is seen to further the interests of the personal and to set them on firmer foundations. By preventing stagnation it contributes to moral permanence. In face of the facts which lead to the view just stated, what changes, if any, take place in the character of the motive which underlies this stage of moral growth ? The most obvious incident here is that an element of uncertainty is introduced, and we are not so sure as we were that desire will meet with its fulfillment. There is something analogous to this in all transitional eras. We noticed something similar when we were considering the progress from the inchoate to the definitely moral period of growth. It is worth while to emphasize that this uncertainty is not an accident, but an MOTI\'E IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. I4I essential element of progress. It provides the condition of that deep- ening and strengthening of the feeling-motor consciousness which comes through the introduction into it of new elements. And this is what we noticed here. The outward, practical consolidation of the new \vith the old — the possibility of this is exactly the question involved at this stage — can become an established social fact only when the existing motive is capable of such modification that it can appropriate the feeling-motor consciousness which is the psychological raison d'etre of the separate, independent existence of the unassimilated item of conduct. We have an inkling of this when we say, for example, that no social, just as no legal, demand can be enforced which does not receive the moral support of the community. For what does this mean? Does it not mean that the motive underlying the demand must be assimilated to the existing motive forces so that, as a new moral force, it shall secure to this demand its place in the social order? Unless it means this, it is not obvious that anything is meant. But, meaning this, what do we find as the positive feature of this hesitancy and uncertainty which the limitations of memory seem so well to introduce ? It is not merely or only the arrest of an accustomed reaction, any more than the functioning of imagination here implies the abeyance of memory. As, on the mental side, we have two memory-images thrown into partial opposition, so, on the moral, two motive-reac- tions are inhibiting each other, and preventing either's fulfillment. This conflict of factors, both mental and moral, gives a moment of pause which is significant of readjustment, and from it we emerge with new strength, fuller powers, a broader outlook, and a richer experience. In all this our center is not changed, but there is greater freedom from the restraint of custom, and the mechanism which is the characteristic of the moral life at the lower level, is displaced by a more consciously directive purpose. The termina- tion of conduct is still within the conventional, but the conventional is fulfilled con amore by reason of the greater flexibility of the motive which is secured by moral growth. We are ready now to make a further advance. We have con- sidered those cases where differences are not so radical that they 142 THE MORAL LIFE. cannot be controlled on behalf of the common interests which cen- ter in the personal. This subordination of differences to the uni- form type for which the group stands is capable of quite wide extension, but unless a somewhat free attitude is maintained toward the unfamiliar and the untried, an accentuation of con- trasts will be precipitated, and the new will be thrown into oppo- sition, with the result that it gains a consciousness of itself which up to now was entirely lacking. This may be brought about in either of two ways which, probably, mark stages in the development of the individual. First, whatever renders society inhospitable toward the new — whether it be an extreme conservatism which ties to the past, or whether it be a more positive opposition toward change — will, when carried to a certain length, precipitate a crisis which can be overcome only by expelling the intractable element which society refuses or has failed to assimilate. In general, what we refer to as the unprogressiveness of oriental civilization is due to the close inter-relationship of the various orders of society, under a common ancestor who is not merely a world-ruler, but a race- divinity.' In such a society the progressive factor which we identify with individual initiative is not possible, or if possible, it appears with the odds tremendously against it, which in most instances means that it is strangled at its birth. Of such civiHzations may be said, what we say of one of our own number when we wish to • Since we shall maintain later on that imagination gets its own unique forms of organization, and functions through the indi- vidual to secure moral conformity, it may avoid misunderstanding to point out that it makes all the difference where one's social ideal is found. Our criticism of oriental civilization is not that it is well organized, but that because it gets its inspiration in an ideal which does not admit of indefinite growth, it is bound to an inflex- ible type of existence which must end in deterioration, stagnation, and death. Popularly expressed, the difference is whether the moral ideal is a summary of the past, or whether it is an antici- pation of the future. The same contrast marks oriental and occi- dental religion. Buddhism, for example, is a device for negating the effects of historic life in the interests of an unrealized good; Christianity presents an unrealized good working in time for the redemption of the historic life of the individual and of the race. MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 143 pass criticism on extreme stupidity, that they have no imagination. Old Japan affords an example of this type of social organization. In summing up his chapter which deals with this subject Lafcadio Hearn remarks: "Personality (individuality in our terminology) is wholly suppressed by coercion; and the coercion is chiefly from within, not from without — the life of every individual being so ordered by the will of the rest as to render free action, free speaking, or free thinking, out of the question. This means something incomparably harsher than the socialistic tyranny of early Greek society : it means religious communism doubled with a military des- potism of the most terrible kind. The individual did not legally exist, — except for punishment."^ Individualistic modes of behavior, especially in the early stages of moral development, have always been considered dangerous because, as we are able to see, the intellectual means have not, as yet, been developed for the control of the situations in which they occur. But, as was pointed out, there are stages in the development of the individual which are hardly distinguishable from those more advanced stages in which the personal is the dominating factor. At first, divergencies must be brought under the restraining influences of established moral habit if they are not to work disastrously to all concerned; but this implies the modification of the original or parent social order which is possible only within limits. When, however, society has become immobile, or when the individual factors have undergone preternatural growth, parturition takes place through rupture, and because there is no social order into which the individual may be received, his importance, both by himself and by others, is in danger of being very much over-estimated. The atomic individual is always a fo'rced product, the respon- sibility for which lies with society. He is also a social nuisance and moral menace. There is hardly anything second in importance, for our American life, to a clear apprehension, by all the people, of the conditions which make him a possibility. That is a sane moral judgment which holds that the family, for instance, which does not grow with the growth of its several members, can hardly ^ Japan: AnAttempt at Interpretation, pp. 277, 278. Italics mine. 144 THE MORAL LIFE. be thought of as best fulfilling its social and moral responsibilities. And yet how many families innocently {sic) turn their adolescent boys and girls on to the streets, or permit their associating in mixed companies, because forsooth, to keep them at home would require some readjustment of the domestic economy. The 'gang,' for example, is a promiscuous association of boys who have been abandoned by their families, and the dancing hall is filled with girls whose parents think they have fulfilled all the law and the prophets when they have purchased a few flimsy dresses and tawdry trinkets. At the stage we are considering, there is no doubt that the problem of morality is the problem of the parent; and no reform could well be more wholesome than that which awoke us out of our good-natured indifierence, and presented the duties of parenthood as a high and noble calling which comes to its reward in the third generation. We may refer, in this connection, to some of the characteristics which belong to the adolescent period. There is here the break- ing up of old ties, the restiveness under restraint, the felt lack of appreciation from others, the abandonment to what is new as that which has the promise of Hfe, — all of which, we are told, occur as the detached experiences of maturing youth. The out- standing feature is the lack of continuity which, on the positive side, is marked by the budding forth and pursuit of many diverse interests. Whether it covers a short time, as in the individual; or extends over longer periods, as in the race; whether it comes with the rush of a new found energy, or appears with slower steps, the problem it presents in moral theory is not materially altered. Perhaps it would be safe to affirm that at the longest it is but an incident, and when it seems most deliberate there is at the heart of it an impatience to be born. It is the period of romanticism. New faiths are matured in a day, new ideals blossom as crocuses under a spring-time sun, great enterprises are conceived at the wave of its fairy wand. Moreover, nothing is impossible, except the established order of things; and nothing is wrong except the teachings of a hoary experience. And yet, we could not well spare this epoch; for if it raises no superstructure, it broadens foundations, and if its achievements are mostly destructive, it matures the powers by which, when the storm and stress have passed, worthy things may be accomplished. It is, very largely, a fruitless age; but, we are to remember that seed time belongs to youth, and if some tares are sown with the wheat, and the labor of harvest is thereby increased, the garnered crop remains. Only that there may be a happy harvest, the whole period needs to be wisely brought under social restraint. MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. I45 Second, not all differences can be handled in the way we have supposed, because there are normal limits to the growth of every society beyond which it can not go without losing its characteristic qualities. The problem is a broad one, and concerns the segrega- tion of social groups with their distinctive organization and life.' Whatever theory may be held of the facts, it cannot be doubted that the problem is forced by the grovidng complexity of the con- ditions of social intercourse, by every advance that is made toward a differentiation of interests, and by a specialization of the means for meeting human needs. So long as society is adequate to the demands which get expressed in its several members a certain amount of development is possible, and if we do not attain a very high order of civilization, we have laid the foundation for that future progress in which new types of character emerge. For if, as we have seen, the personal is grounded in what is common, the individual comes to its most perfect expression when, by organi- zation, separate groups of interests are brought into contrast by emphasizing different demands and by supplying distinct means for their gratification. We are likely to miss a great deal of the moral significance of this because, before we have attained the period of reflective self-consciousness, we have become adjusted, in a practical way, to the varying demands of our differing relations, and it appears, for this reason, to be the normal order of things. The fact, for the average adult, is that there exists no problem because his ability to satisfy the requirements of his several asso- ciations meets with Uttle or no interference from the perception of their mutual opposition. To such an extent do we live a seg- mented life that the fact that a man is a good father has very little appreciable influence on the fact that he is at the same time a good, bad, or indifferent business or professional man. It would not be difficult to find examples of the social lion who is the domestic bore. The ease with which such facts as these are acknowledged sug- gests that, as a matter of history, morality has taken the line of ' On this subject the reader may be referred to Wundt's Ethics, Part IV, "The Departments of the Moral Life. ' 146 THE MORAL LIFE. least resistance. By this we mean that since morality does not exist apart from practice, but in practice is wrought out and embodied, we cannot look among the facts of the moral life for anything corresponding to that unity and consistency which is the demand made by the theoretical understanding upon life. Prac- tice insists that differences be taken account of with the least hindrance to present interests, and morality, for the most part, is allied with the conservative forces of community life. But when differences become emphatic, that is, when new interests develop which are, or appear to be, incompatible with the old, they may be brought under control, and the danger which is always felt to belong to them may be reduced, by allowing them a distinct sphere of influence in which to operate as the nuclei of separate memory-systems in which their significance and value as different are to a large extent overcome. Now, this movement can take place only when the image, which at this stage is the instrument of moral organization, is, to use Baldwin's term, 'liftable.' Here the image has finally broken with its concrete perceptual original, and has gathered to itself a new meaning developed in the course of experience, which meaning it now definitely stands for. This is what takes place not only once and in one instance, but many times and in many instances in the history of the race. There may be, therefore, as many separate ideal-systems as there are separate organized interests. Nor need we be more concerned vnth the relations which these systems bear to one another, than, in practice, we are solicitous of bring- ing the various interests into harmonious agreement with one another. The fact seems to be that when the image has freed itself from perception and taken on a distinctive meaning, it has exhausted its negative features, and functions in society henceforth in very much the same way as a memory-image does; that is, to maintain the interests which are now centered in it. In general terms, all images, once they have become established, exist as means by which we get back the experiences, or get back to the experiences, in which they had their origin. It is not surprising therefore, that when the imagination-image is fixed as an inde- MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. I47 pendent item of the mental life it continues as an instrument for mediating the new experiences which cannot be assimilated by the old memory-systems, and giving to these a standing which, without it, they would be unable to secure. Thus while Kfe becomes greatly diversified, its chief characteristic is its externality; and while there may not be any consciousness of inner con- tradiction, the larger organization thus secured is in unstable equilibrium. In the light of this exposition we may gain some insight into the conditions which make possible what may be referred to as the moral inconsistencies, for example, of the leaders of our modern industry. A considerable amount of criticism has been indulged, and we have no desire to continue the whipping of a whipped dog. The facts come before us here as an ethical prob- lem, that is, for understanding. And when they are approached in this way, the problem which they present seems to be griev- ously misunderstood if due consideration is not given to the conditions out of which the facts arise. We have had a period of wonderful economic development along many lines, the changes incident to the readjustment to present needs have been many and far-reaching, and the confidence of the people in themselves was never stronger. New ideals in government, in commerce, in social, and even in moral and reUgious life have taken the imagi- nation captive. It may be said that in all this very little attention has been given to the bearing that what is done and sanctioned in one line may have upon what is done and sanctioned in another. In fact, the sanction of success has been industriously applied throughout, and we have been, as under any such sanction we must be, negligent or indifferent to what is going on outside the direct interests involved. Comparing results, it does not appear that we have failed more egregiously in business than we have in morahty to secure our moorings in the experience of the past, nor that we have accompUshed more in religion than in govern- ment, perhaps not as much, toward constructing a comprehensive ideal which shall secure for our national life a normal and steady progress. The fact is that the work of moral consolidation belongs to the future; but the thing to regret in the situation is that it is only here and there among the leaders of their fellows that one is found who even dreams that the task of the present is to formu- late a plan and to generate the motives of an inclusive righteous- ness; yet, even now, some things may be said. Socially, we mus 148 THE MORAL LIFE. get back to the sincerities of life; educationally, we must go forward toward a liberalizing culture; religiously, we must be unafraid of our freedom as the children of God. In each case there is a moral protest: socially, against the tyranny of fashion; educa- tionally, against the tyranny of success; religiously, against the tyranny of tradition. Unless, as Carlyle has taught us, we can utter our 'Everlasting No,' how can we utter our 'Everlasting Yea' ? We have now considered the 'individual' in the various relations which it sustains to the imagination as it develops to meet the needs of an increasingly complex social organization. We saw (a) that imagination is at first only a particular form of memory through which are preserved certain acquired variations from conventional behavior. Here were noticed two cases neither of which sets up an opposition to, but tends to the modification and growth of the established morality. The first referred to those instances where implied distinctions become explicit through the consequences which develop when essential differences are over- looked. In this way we learn that the moral order is more complex than our memory-system has made it to appear. The develop- ment of the memory-system, then, takes place to meet the dis- covered limitation, and it becomes adequately representative by incorporating the special differences on which the case depends. The other case is more complex, though similar. Social relations within the group overlap, and in the interests of simplification we try to assimilate the one to the other. This is a legitimate endeavor, as it looks toward better organization, and whenever it is possible without blotting out important distinctions, its success is a distinctive gain. An illustration may be given from the home. The characteristic feature of the home is that it is the center of a system of relations that in their nature involve the principle of identity-difference which is the principle of intellectual and moral growth. The fundamental relationships that are defined by the home are always correlatives. Hence, parent-child, brother- sister, sister-brother, uncle-nephew, aunt-niece, etc. Each of these pairs of terms may, of course, be read the other way ; each term of the relation implies the other. But the parent-child rela- MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 149 tion is determinative throughout. An identity of blood relationship underlies all the diflferences mediated by the home. Now these obvious facts condition not only what each member of the family may do, but also what it is possible for each one to think. Think- ing, that is to say, is determined for all members of the family by the particular relationship which for the time being is operative. But every other term is subordinately functional at the same time, and at any moment may become operative — ideally — in modifying the customary behavior in any given relation. This is seen even in so fundamental a relation as that between parent and child. This relation is interpreted aright only when it stands for authority on the one side and obedience on the other. The brother- sister relation, and every other relation based on more remote kinship, place their subjects more nearly on a footing of equality. The give-and-take in these cases is not nearly so well prescribed as in the parent-child relation. In the latter, restric- tions as to behavior are obvious, whatever their sanctions or methods of enforcement. We, thus, have two general groups within the one family life which play back and forth on one another in the consciousness of the child, and which, through the process of adjustment, secure the intellectual and moral development of their subject. The relative freedom of the one tends to limit the necessity of the other until, through the discipline of experience and the growth in intellectual discernment, the parent-child rela- tion, as we started with it, is changed into the best type of human companionship. But all this comes about through actual relation- ships operating in an ideal way to modify the permanent relation- ship on which the home is founded.' There is (b) another class of cases which, because the differences involved are of a more radical character, and cannot be brought under the forms of the estabhshed morality, requires a separate organization if we are to make moral progress. Here we considered, ^ It is hardly necessary to say that the influence works in the other direction as well. Thus, the parent-child relation in respect to the other relations prevents equality from degenerating into contempt by securing mutual respect. 150 THE MORAL LIFE. as an intermediate example, the phenomena of adolescent morality. We say intermediate, because there is much here that not only requires, but is capable of readjustment under the old forms; and if, for the time, we are thrown into confusion by the breaking up of fixed habits, and the introduction of new thoughts and impulses, the opportunity should be freely and generously made for the reorganization of the permanent gains of the past which, then, may become afresh the center to which we may anchor while meeting the other problems which do not seem amenable to this method of control. When this does not take place, the individual is thrown into an extreme and lonely opposition, and because there is no permanent social organization, — as there cannot be for any tran- sitional phenomena, — into which he may go, there arise certain fortuitous and temporary associations of which the 'gang' was taken as a type.' In this connection we saw that one of the chief problems of morality was so to conceive and organize the home that it may become the natural and normal field within which grow- ing boys and girls can live through this intermediate period to the benefit of all concerned. This leads to the other example. Beyond adolescence lies the differentiated interests and activities of adult life. From the stand-point of intellectual development this means that imagination undergoes a wide extension, and, in supplying the specialized images which are the support of these differences, provides the conditions for the organization of many social groups. How this takes place may be seen if we recall that in the home the relationships are all determined by the fact of correlativity. For this reason it is impossible, for example, for the child to occupy any other place, within the family group than that which is deter- mined for it by the coexistent parenthood of other members of the group. The child relation is not, of course, incompatible, in itself, with the parent relation, but to become consistent with it, it requires a new sphere for its legitimate exercise. The principle involved in this particular case is capable of indefinite expansion. The ' We may note in passing that when these accidental relations become fixed we have the organization of protest, and the psycho- logical conditions of crime are already operative. MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 151 farther we get from the original center in this 'multiplication of group on group, the more specialized do the relations which their members sustain to one another become. The interests of one group over against those of another become more and more exclu- sive. The fact, therefore, is as we now know it, that the same person is at once child, parent, brother, neighbor, etc. The importance of this fact is that these existent conditions, which because they are so familiar seldom arouse inquiry, implicitly raise the problems the solution of which determines the character and extent of one's human development. From the intellectual standpoint, the prob- lem is, how these various predicates can be made consistent within the unity of the same consciousness; from the moral point of view, it is how conduct in these several relations can be brought into the form of a reconstructive ideal, and thus serve as an implicit prin- ciple of social and ethical development. Let us look now at the motives underlying these several trans- formations. With respect to the first class of cases, it was shown that because the opposition falls within the one social system, — or, as we may say, refers to the same memory-system, — the feeling- motor consciousness with which this system is connected meets with only a temporary arrest, and that the resolution of the differ- ences takes place because it is found that the motives which give to each its distinctive support are capable of flowing together in a single stream to the permanent enrichment of life. Now when we turn to the other class, it does not seem necessary to dwell at any length on the motives which are characteristic of adolescence. It seems obvious that its motives are as changeable as its phenomena. They present some of the features of primitive morality with some of those of traditional morality. With the former they share its immediacy, — the directness with which it tends to get itself ful- filled; with the latter, they display an unreflecting obedience to what is required. We may say, therefore, that the adolescent motive is at once independent and servile. It is independent because and when it finds its sanction in the satisfactions which center in its own impulsive nature; it is servile because and when it unhesitatingly and even passionately follows the leader who. 152 THE MORAL LIFE. for the time, has got the upper hand. There is an incompatibility between these two attitudes — their counterpart is found among slave populations — just as and because there is an opposition between the motive which in either case is functional. An addi- tional complication comes in because it is never possible wholly to free the feeling-consciousness of this period from the control of the conative-affective processes through which connection with the home is maintained. This is the law of habit applied to motive, and because of its operation the broken and partial feeling proc- esses which underlie adolescent phenomena tend always toward organization along the accustomed lines. When the social condi- tions of the period are favorable, this is doubtless what takes place; as much of the active feeling Ufe as possible is assimilated to the old motive, and the old duties and relations are sustained and reinforced. The psychological conditions point in the same direc- tion. For, to speak accurately, early adolescence has no motive. But supervening as it does upon a period of moral training, there is, as the ground tone of all its restlessness, a feeling of unsatis- factoriness, a feeling which is generated through the failure of its impulsive activity to terminate in those objective sources from which, as we have seen, the sense of moral approval arises. In other words, the motives of pre-adolescent morality tend constantly to absorb the motives by which the new forms of conduct are mediated and to bring them under regulation. In the same way as before, the motives here in question present, so far, essentially the same problem; only the problem is more complex than it was because there is a residuum which remains, and which goes to form the special motives which are required by the differentiated interests of the next period. The chief feature of the motive up to this point is that the several conative-affective processes which have appeared are sufficiently congruous to constitute a fairly continuous and harmonious expe- rience. Whatever variations have been noticed have not been con- siderable enough to be considered as forming distinctive types. They all serve the same purpose, — the purpose of all motives — namely, to maintain and develop the organization in reference to MOTIVE IN RELATION TO THE PERSONAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 153 which the actions which they prompt take place. The limit of this is reached when the maturing youth is brought, through profound and significant physiological changes, into new relations with his old associations. Then variations in conduct occur, and new forms of feehng are developed which fall outside the former hmits, and which cannot be assimilated by any single organization. Hence, as we said, this last stage is characterized by a number of special- ized forms of activity more or less external to each other, and corresponding to these groups, conative-feeKngs exist whose only relation seems to be that they more or less effectively inhibit each other. Up to a certain point — that is, so long as the develop- ment of any system of moral interests is possible, — there is both an enrichment of moral ideas and an enlargement of the moral feelings. Beyond the point where development is pos- sible, — that is, when the original moral organization is required to incorporate material which is, or appears to be, incompatible with its present constitution, — there is not only a multiplication of systems which are external to one another, but also a grouping of corresponding motives which oppose each other. Here we have on a large scale, and with respect to many hnes of activity, what we have noticed on a small scale, and with respect to a single line. These spheres of interests are cultivated simultaneously, and the individual gains, in passing from the one to the other, an expert- ness and fiexibihty which would not be possible so long as his activities fell within a single group, and the feelings by which he was moved were of a single type. This, perhaps, is the only gain. From the standpoint of moral theory, no new principles emerge; and if we leave the discussion at this point, it is because here expe- rience begins to fail us. It is not difficult to see what the next stage must be, but until we can intellectually win our way from imagination to thought, the ethics of reason remains, where for the many it has always been, in the unacquired domain of the future. CHAPTER VIII. MORAL FREEDOM. In this essay we have been dealing, from a genetic standpoint, with some of the more important considerations bearing upon the nature and limits of the moral Hfe. The discussion has shown that the phenomena of morality — that is, the concrete moral behav- ior of men in organized societies — are phenomena of control which do not happen accidentally, and which are capable of being studied with a view to ascertaining the principles which are realized in them, and which, through them, come to more explicit and wide- spread application. In general, it has been shown that the standard of control which the moral life displays is best described by the term moral ideal, and provision was made for the diversity of the moral life when the facts of moral behavior were seen to work out, in their consequences, to the maintenance and development of the moral organization. It is, therefore, with the support that comes from the studies of this essay that we may point out that at every step we have been considering some aspect or other of the facts and relations which are grouped together under the moral ideal. The scope of our inquiry has included the following main lines. Some account, in the first place, was given of the moral ideal — in the chap- ter bearing that title — especially with a view to show its possibility, and the discussion was guided by the requirements of an answer to the question, How comes there to be a moral ideal? This pre- pared the way for a consideration of the moral ideal itself, not as an abstract, rationally conceived fact, but as it was able to take on concrete qualifications in the development of those moral rela- tions to the establishment of which, we said, it was chief contributor. The question which directed the research at this point was. Why there is an ideal ? and we saw that it was only from the differences 154 MORAL FREEDOM 1 55 which it makes in human society that light could be thrown upon this inquiry. The specific results were summed up in the terms personal and individual, and the chapter took its title — The Moral Self — from the fact that these two specifications had an interdependence which seemed to imply a common ground, not of a mechanical, but of an ideal sort. In the succeeding chapters on the moral motive, this conception was worked out in more detail, and we saw the moral ideal producing either one or the other of the two types of moral life — the personal or the individual — which were said, in the earlier chapter, to be the consequences of its functional presence in any social organization. The definite question throughout these chapters was, How the moral ideal works out the moral results which our previous analysis had shown to be the ends which, if it were present, would necessarily ensue. In all this, then, the moral ideal has been the subject of inquiry. And, as we bring these studies to the concluding chapter, it remains the central theme. For the problem of moral freedom is con- cerned with the question. Why any one does the things which are prescribed by the moral ideal.' Nowhere is it more necessary to come to terms with the historic formulations of an inquiry than in the discussion of this question. This is so not merely because 'freedom' has been largely and vari- ously considered, but because it presents the whole moral problem in a particularly condensed form. Hence the central position which it occupies in our ethical theories ; and it is the presupposi- ' It will serve to set the various stages of the argument in relation to their chief topic, and also to show the form of the genetic inquiry peculiar to each if we set down in a table what has been stated above, in extenso. Genetic Question. How comes there to be a Moral Ideal? Why is there a Moral Ideal ? How the Moral Ideal works out to moral results ? Why any one does what the Moral Ideal requires? Chapter Subject III Moral Ideal. IV Moral Self. V ■ VI • Moral Motive. VII VIII Moral Freedom. 156 THE MORAL LITE. tion of the practical efforts we put forth to bring some sort of systematic unity into our moral life. The consistency of our thinking upon, and the success of our living after the pattern of, an ideal seem to concentrate in a reasoned or assumed 'freedom' which furnishes the nerve of every ethical undertak- ing. This is a fact of which it is impossible to remain in ignorance so long as we keep in close contact with the historic records, or are discriminating observers of contemporary moral movements. No consideration of the phenomena of morality would be adequate which failed in due recognition of the importance, for these phenomena, of what is called 'freedom.' But neither the wide recognition of freedom, nor its importance for the moral life can excuse us from inquiring into the meaning of the term, or from seeking to know what are the facts which it more precisely denotes. And this need becomes the more imperative when we consider what are the varying changes in conception which the history of morality enables us to note. From this stand- point, the problem is concerned with the nature of moral behavior. Now it is obvious that behavior, whether of the moral sort or not,^ is an event which is connected, in an indefinite number of ways, with other events which give to it a contexture which contributes to, if it does not constitute, the significance which the behavior possesses. Behavior, that is, is a concrete event which implies connection with an environment, and which, apart from that envi- ronment, would not be precisely what, in that environment, it is. The problem of freedom, consequently, has necessarily taken the form of an inquiry into the relation between these two factors — behavior and environment — which are present in all moral action. This becomes obvious the moment we attempt to state the several views which are distinguished in the history of the subject. There is, first, what has been called physical freedom. This is an asser- tion of the individual's adequate, if not complete, control of the physical and physiological elements through which behavior gets ' For an interesting account of the 'wide range of meaning' which attaches to the word behavior, cf. C. Lloyd Morgan's Animal Behavior, Chapter I MORAL FREEDOM. 157 expression. Some such conception as this gives point, for example, to Kant's discussion of moral freedom, and is the subject of his discussion in the Third Antinomy.' The question is. How can man be morally free in a world of physical causation ? In another form the same relation and, therefore, the same difficulty is pre- sented by, what may be called, psychological freedom. By those who hold this view, freedom from psychical causation is asserted, as in the former view there was the denial of physical causation. What is affirmed is an arbitrary freedom of choice. This was a characteristic mediaeval doctrine of which Duns Scotus and Wilham of Occam may be taken as representatives. It is the so-called liberty of indifference; and what we are indifferent to are the motives which an ex post facto examination of the behavior may bring to light. No one is an outspoken advocate of this kind of freedom at the present time, for no one denies the presence of motives as the condition of choice; and yet it is not uncommon, even now, to find it asserted that the will is free to choose between present motives, and that in every decision of the vsdll it is not the motive which is chosen, but the free choice of the motive which is the antecedent of moral behavior. This seems, however, only a rather shamed-faced way of saying that motives have nothing at all to do with the matter. Hence the advocates of what has been called moral freedom maintain that "the freedom of the will is in the fact that the person is enlightened by reason and susceptible to rational motives, and thus is self-determining, both as self- directing and self -exerting. ' ' ^ This conception of freedom is said to foUowfrom the definition of the will as "the power of a person to determine the ends to which he will direct his energies and the exer- cise of his powers."^ Freedom, then, is the ability to do those things which are in harmony vidth the moral nature; or, the power to conform conduct to the requirements of present character. Finally, there is real freedom. This should not be confused with moral freedom, but is so related to it that it is the outcome of a course ^Critique of Pure Reason, Max Miiller's translation, pp. 36!-36g. ^ Harris, God, Creator and Lord of All, Vol. II, p. 54. 3 Ibid. 158 THE MORAL LIFE. of moral living. It is characterized by a perfect harmony of the will with the demands of the moral ideal. These views fall into two distinct groups. For convenience they may be distinguished by the terms negative and positive freedom. Under negative freedom are included physical and psychological freedom, and the common character which this type of theory has consists in the denial that the conditions under which human activity takes place are determinative of moral be- havior. It is an assertion of freedom from. By positive freedom is understood the recognition that the will is under direction and control in carrying out those courses of action which re- ceive moral valuation. Here belong the other views mentioned above. This is characteristically a freedom to. Now, it is an interesting observation that this classification of theories marks the point of disagreement between the two main parties to the free-will controversy — the necessarians and the hbertarians. Necessarianism — or, following Mill, determinism — is a challenge of the facts on which negative freedom reUes for maintaining its position. Libertarianism — or, as is sometimes said, indeter- minism — is a flank movement to turn the assault of the direct attack, and to cover the movements of the advanced wing [in their retreat from an untenable situation. When, therefore, we come to a statement of what freedom is, as the result of these movements and counter-movements, we find that the essential contention of necessarianism is granted, and a more precise regard is had for the conditions which are essential to the occur- rence of moral behavior. Thus the freedom of the moral life is no longer thought to consist in the fact that it is beyond all law or regulation, only it is held that the source of control is to be found in the moral subject himself. Or, to use the generally accepted terminology of the schools, 'self-determination' is of the essence of moral freedom.' ' This is a conclusion in which both libertarians and necessa- rians seem to agree. Thus, from one side we have this statement: " To be free means that one is determined by nothing but himself." Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics, p. 94. From a determinist writer we take this: "The idea of liberty therefore should be reconciled with the idea of determinism; but then, it may be that of a deter- mination by oneself opposed to that of a determination by a power outside oneself, of an internal opposed to an external causality. MORAL FREEDOM. 159 In view of the divergent uses to which the term'freedom has lent itself, we may not take too lightly the particular affirmations and denials of the historical theories. Especially do we need to be on our guard against those prejudices, of a scientific and philosophical sort, which, because they act insidiously, deflect the truth. For exaftiple, that easy acquiescence with which we allow ourselves to be shut up vsdthin a mechanical system of interacting forces in the name of science should be discouraged, as if the history of science were not a history of man's emancipation from and control of, the forces which made the life of our ancestors miserable and poor. Equally to be deprecated is that philosophic pride which, springing from an ignorance of man's place in the universe, permits us to go about denying all barriers and limitations, as if the history of philosophy were not the history of the chastening of man's spirit in the process of learning his kinship with all that really is. Neither position is ethically fruitful. For the fact to which our moral expe- rience testifies is neither that the cosmos, as a system of forces operating under the principle of physical causation, is hostile to the occurrence of moral behavior, nor that the moral life is some secret and esoteric existence which somehow circumvents the obvious facts and relations of the material world. To acknowledge facts of the former kind does not make the assertion of moral freedom unintelligible, nor are we to suppose that the nat- ural laws become suspended with the affirmation of self-determi- nation.' The more virile ethical conception is that the moral life implies the natural, and without its support would be incapa- ble of concrete expression. The contrary supposition is the form The idea of a free man is that of an agent who is really an agent instead of being simply an intermediary for the transmission of movements." Duprat, Morals: The Psycho-Sociological Basis of Ethics, pp. 87, 88. This agreement as to the terms in which the concept of freedom should be stated does not mean that there are, therefore, no differences between libertarian and neces- sarian; it indicates rather the point of starting for the development of differences which become explicit with the attempt to deter- mine the function and scope of moral freedom. ^ Dnprat, Morals: The Psycho-Sociological Bases of Ethics, p. 24. l6o THE MORAL LIFE. in which dogmatic rationalism issues, in the moral realm, in an essentially vicious dualism. But we have seen how little 'reason' — as a faculty of innate practical principles — has to do with the moral life. The truth rather is that what 'reason' — in this use of the term — has divorced, we find inextricably joined together in all stages through which the moral hfe develops. It cannot, therefore, be a question whether freedom stands opposed to necessity — as thought to matter; but the quite different inquiry of the relation of freedom to necessity throughout the course of moral development. The immediately available connection for the discussion of free- dom may be found in the general view which we have taken of the moral motive. From this point of view moral freedom may be defined as the ability to act in conformity vnth the moral motive. Now there is no dispute as to the fact that men conform their con- duct to the requirements of accepted standards, or that these stand- ards operate as a measure of the Hfe which is possible under them. Indeed, so persistent is this feature of moral behavior that, what- ever view one may hold as to the origin of the ideal, no behavior is regarded as moral which does not embody a principle which is capable of indefinite application. So far Kant was right in his insistence that the moral will is implicitly legislative. But, as we have pointed out, the principle of morality is concretely embodied in social institutions through which it is not only preserved, but secures control of individuals in their progress toward the larger Hfe. Considerable space has been devoted to showing how the common content of ideas and feeUngs which the moral ideal im- pHes is made available and effective in the moral motive. Now it is the same complex of facts, only from a different side, which determines the problem before us. For freedom lays emphasis upon the dispositions which this common content begets in the form of habits of thought and action. We have already pointed out the importance for this result of inhibition — the starving out of antagonistic modes of action which endanger those selected activities which have been built into our existing moral organiza- tions. Inhibition, thus, must be considered as a psycho-sociolog- ical phenomenon. That is to say, it expresses from the individual MORAL FREEDOM. l6l side the process of selective activity through which society main- tains its peculiar or characteristic type. From the individual and the social points of view, it is negative; and yet it forms an impor- tant part of that ideal control which the doctrine of the moral motive has shown to be essential to the moralization of life. So- cially, it is the negative expression of the law of the whole: it is a safeguard to the inherited and acquired tradition of the group. Individually, it is a constant bar to the dissipation of energy, a negative lesson in the importance of invested capital. Taken together these two sides secure a simplification of the conditions of the moral life. The importance of this lies in the fact that the moral life presents a real difficulty on account of its great complexity. How can anyone enter, and fulfill the requirements of, the moral Ufe ? How can any one who as yet has no ideal live according to the ideal? No one can, of course, unless there is in the moral com- munity already a clear consciousness of what is essential to its own existence, and an intelligent apprehension of the methods of its own development. And this cannot be unless the fortuitous has been distinguished from the permanent, and unless it is seen that the instruments of advance are forged anew in each generation. The important consideration, therefore, in the early stage is not so much to get the positive thing done as to prevent the hostile, or useless thing from becoming habitual. Through the actions which society makes possible to the individual, dispositions must be encouraged which, because they draft all the available energy, tend to issue in forms of conduct that are in accord with the moral ideal. The importance of distinguishing what is permanent and what is relative in social organizations has other than moral significance. The transient, even if it is the fortuitous, is not useless because, possibly, it may have no direct ethical value. Social organizations, no doubt, become overburdened in the course of their history with an accumulation of unessentials; and this presents a serious moral menace when it is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain what the fundamental requirements are. It should be remarked, however, that the danger to morality does not he in the fact that some things in the social order are morally indifferent; but when 102 THE MORAL LIFE. indifferent things assume the same gravity as essentials the foun- dations of the moral order are threatened, and disintegration of the moral life is near at hand. This condition is found when social forms — organizations, laws, customs, etc. — in which the moral ideal has come to concrete expression are assimilated so closely with the ideal which they embody that they are enforced with all the sanctions which originally belonged to the ideal itself. Morality then, passes over into and becomes identified with traditionalism. For example: a large part of the moral inefiBciency of the Christian Church in all its branches, Greek, Catholic, and Prot- estant, is directly due to its inability to distinguish, like its Master, between the letter and the spirit, an inabiUty which issues from a fundamental unbelief in the truth, of which the entire hfe of Jesus is an illustration, that it is the Spirit which giveth life. The fact to which attention is directed is that the incidental has its legitimate place in social organization, but that much of what is incidental has only an indirect reference to the moral order. Here, for example, is the place and the material of 'society,' pop- ularly so-called. Society, it is true, finds its negative limitations in the boundaries of the moral life, but it does not exist, as mor- ality does, for maintaining and perpetuating the responsibilities of corporate action. It presents, rather, the opportunity for escape from the obligations of the moral life. Negatively stated, society may permit whatever is not prohibited by the current morality of the group. We may, therefore, look upon 'society' as the free and easy association of members of the community on the basis of what, from the moral standpoint, is unessential. Here, we are relieved from the necessity of taking ourselves and one another seriously. From the connection of moral freedom and moral motive, it follows that we cannot approach the question of freedom with any hope of enlightenment if we separate the will from the conditions which make willing possible, or take the individual as the willing subject in isolation from the complex circumstances which make the moral life possible. There is an added reason for this in the fact that, psychologically, there is no will and no individual isolated from a group of assignable conditions. If, therefore, we are to speak of the will at all,' or are to identify freedom with the possi- ' " 'Freedom of the will' is, I think, a term which would better be abandoned by Ethics. Moral Freedom for the human Self — MORAL FREEDOM. 163 bility of moral choice,' the willing and the choosing are more social than individual, and the character which they display is a common possession rather than a private virtue. Indeed, as we have seen reason to believe, the individual is a particular differ- entiation of the social group which displays, in unique ways, all the characteristic qualities of feeling and will and thought which belong to the parent organization. Wundt doubtless states the truth when he says: "We know man only as a social being, gov- erned at once by an individual will and by the will of the whole; and there is no evidence to show that the latter had its origin in the former. On the contrary, the relative independence of the indi- vidual will is the result of a later evolution. As the child becomes conscious of its own will by a gradual process, and slowly develops its own personality out of an environment which at first it scarcely distinguishes from itself, so in the state of nature it is the common feeling, thought andwill that dominate."^ This truth has important what is it in fact, and essentially, in spite of its many degrees of intensity, so to say, and its different forms of manifestation ? This is the primary ethical question." — Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, p. 1-44. ' By moral choice we mean the choice of that on account of which we put forth effort. The following from the 'Gorgias,' 467, may serve as an illustration, and, at the same time, as an indication of the Platonic position: Socrates: Do men appear to you to will that which they do, or do they will that further object for the sake of which they do that which they do; — for example, when they take medicine at the bidding of a physician, do they will the drinking of the medicine, or the health for the sake of which they drink? Polus: Clearly the health. Socrates: And when men go on a voyage .... they will to have the wealth for the sake of which they go on a voyage. Polus: Certainly. Socrates: And is it not universally true? If a man does something for the sake of something else, he wills not that which he does, but that for the sake of which he does it. ^The Principles of Morality, pp. 26, 27. Italics ours. 1 64 THE MOEAl LIFE. ethical application. For if we speak of freedom as an attribute of the moral life, and if we identify freedom with the fact of moral choice, these terms are quite misleading when taken independently of their social meaning. It is, consequently, no unimportant part of the truth to affirm that freedom is an attribute of the moral community which chooses, and determines, and lays the plan of the future for every one of its members. From the standpoint of the community, we can readily see why the individual seems to play so inconspicuous a part in determining the ends of moral action. That does not seem to be, and perhaps it is not except under special conditions, his appropriate mission. The fact which is most easily verified by an appeal to fife is that for the greater part of his time he is 'under orders.' He is engaged in doing the things which the moral organization which takes account of his actions makes imperative. He behaves in characteristic ways because he must. This is to say that the causa- tion of morality is to be found not in the individual agent — or not in him by virtue of what differentiates him from the community — but in the psycho-sociological forces which, having their seat in the moral community, operate in the individual to effect results which, alone, he could not so much as dream of. On the other hand, the moral aims of society could find no means of expression apart from the moral individual. But, as we have seen, it is the business of society to fashion the instruments by which it may make effective its morally conceived aims. And if we insist upon opposing the individual to society, we are forced to admit that it is only by doing moral things that the individual becomes moral. There is some justification for this presentation of the problem in the fact that everyday observation presents an indefinite number of instances of non-moral individuals who, under the restraints of custom, are constantly doing those things with which the well- being of society is identified. The reason for this is that psycho- physically, the individual is himself a psycho-genetically developed instrument which, if it is to operate at all, must operate under the conditions, and for the ends which determined its genesis and development. On this view, morality is the immanent idea of the MORAL FREEDOM. 1 65 individual; it is the principle under which he has'been fashioned, and which, through all the growth of moral life, gets wider and more complete exemplification. Therefore we may look upon the individual as a joint cause with the moral community in its reali- zation of the moral ideal. The causation of the moral life that is, is never a vis a tergo; it is a conjoint operation of the essential elements of the situation which is awaiting determination. Hence, it is pertinent to remark that to find the explanation of moral behavior in the strongest motive, whatever view one may take of the 'strong- est,' does not meet the demands of the problem of freedom. The strongest motive never determines the resulting behavior, because morality implies a complex of motives which sum up all that is pertinent to the issue. But when the individual is reckoned among the causes of moral action, it should not be forgotten that the indi- vidual needs that determination and direction which society affords if what he does is to issue in the freedom of a moral organization. The conclusion, therefore, at which we arrive, is that there is no warrant in a study of the moral facts for predicating freedom as the positive and exclusive attribute of the individual agent. This is true equally of primitive and advanced peoples. The child of Western civilization is, in this regard, on a level with the child of savage origin. Here, then, there is little, except perhaps in the emphasis which is given to the contributing factors, to distinguish the problem of freedom from the problem of motive. Indeed, so intimately connected at bottom are they that Green held that the question of freedom is the question of the origin of motives.' It is perhaps not so much a difference in doctrine, as a difference due to our method of approach to the moral problem, that we prefer to state the relation in converse order. It would then appear that the question of motive is the question of the origin of freedom. We should not say, as would Green, that the individual acts under motives — that is, under the idea of personal good — because he is free; but the empirical fact seems to be that he becomes free as the result of acting under motives. Freedom, consequently, is condi- ' Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 100. 1 66 THE MORAL LITE. tioned upon the formation of habits of cooperative activity. How little of indeterminism there is in moral freedom, from this point of view, is obvious; for the fact, which the study of moral motive has prepared the recognition, is that habits are mechanized forms of reaction to permanent and constantly recurring situations. If, however, we recall the later developments of moral motive as point- ing the way toward a larger and more spontaneous freedom, the truth is, to adopt the words of another, "that moral freedom must be considered as a matter admitting of degrees, and as itself capable of development. In a word, human beings are not bom free morally; neither do all men possess at any time, nor does any individual taan possess at all times, equal degrees of moral freedom. The rather has such freedom to be spoken of as an acquisition, dependent upon repeated exercise of so-caUed power of choice, under the principle of habit. Growth in moral freedom is the development of the self's capacity for making choices."^ We now turn to consider the question of moral freedom as an attribute of the moral individual. No success in this task com- mensurate with its importance or the demands of truth may be looked for, however, if we remain unmindful of the positions already secured. Let it, therefore, be said that we are not concerned to maintain a freedom of unregulated behavior; nor does there seem any reason why the sources of control should not be acknowledged to lie in that complex of psycho-sociological conditions which con- stitute the motive of human conduct. If the argument of this essay has led anywhere, it should place this conclusion beyond dispute. Hence we need only to add that, in carrying the discussion beyond the limits of the foregoing chapters, we are not changing foundations, nor do we doubt that the principles which have emerged in the course of this inquiry are adequate when the freest kind of freedom — freedom in its most complete development — is under consideration. What we mean to assert is that freedom cannot profitably be opposed to necessity in a disjunctive relation, nor can these terms be distinguished altogether in respect of the ' Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, p. 143. Cf. Paulsen, A System of Ethics, p. 469. MORAL FREEDOM, 167 kind of control which they respectively imply. As we have already indicated, freedom and necessity are terms which indicate a com- plex situation, and they depend upon the emphasis which parts of this complex receive in our approach to the moral experience which each of them implies. Thus the necessity of certain forms of conduct is beyond question. This is a matter of everyday experience. There is a moral coercion against which no amount of so-called 'freedom' is of any avail. The whole of society con- spires in the individual to make any other course impossible. Any case of social contagion will illustrate the principles which we now have in mind.' But we are not limited to such instances. The com- mon groundwork of every ethical organization is also of this nature. Whether, therefore, we consider the traditional morality of the group, or the re-arrangement of social forces which are induced by a new social consciousness of what the moral ideal implies, whether, that is, we have a case which falls under the principle of habit, or one which exemplifies the compelling power of a strong and widespread emotion, there is illustrated in the experience of the individual, in characteristic ways, what can be described only as a moral compulsion; and it would be as reasonable to speak of a person's ability to stop in mid-career down a steep incline, as to speak of the person's ability to arrest the momentum of the moral forces which are at the heart of these types of conduct. There are certain objections to this restatement of position, which, doubtless, will suggest themselves. For example, it may be said, vnith respect to the body of traditional morality, that because this is now accepted as common practice, it does not follow that it was always so. There is no intention to deny that we learn to do more perfectly, and even automatically, a large number of things; only, it will be held, this improvement in the facility of the doing argues a time when these things were arduously per- formed, and had to be consciously chosen. In this view, the ease with which a thing is done is a sign of its necessity, as the diffi- culty of a given action is an index of its 'free' performance. This connection between freedom and hardship appears constantly in '■ Cf. Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations, pp. 142-144, and the references which will be found there. l68 THE MORAL LIFE. ethical writers, and James has preached an admirable sermon on the importance of the little hardships which a man may freely undertake for their moral value.' This view has received its most characteristic expression in the definition of conduct as 'action in the line of the greatest resistance.' Now, whether this is so or not, we may say that if it is so, morality and inexperience are synchronous facts, and that, on this basis, the most efficient individual would prove to be the least moral among men. From this point of view, also, we should be justified in giving the chil- dren of our homes as hard a time as possible for their moral good. But further, we should be under obligation so to organize the social forces outside the home that, from manhood and woman- hood down to old age, one hardship is added to another until even dying cannot get itself accomplished without pain. Now, it its obvious that the only escape from the immoral consequences of such a view is to provide a way of escape from the moral life itself. And this is practically what the theory does. For when freedom is claimed as giving moral quality to acts of conduct in which the individual's choice is an ultimate determinant, freedom is referred to unregulated, as necessity is to regulated behavior. But since the latter has been won from, and, with the advancement of the individual in moral culture, is constantly encroaching upon the former, freedom becomes less and necessity more, not only in the extent of their domains, but in their significance for human advancement. Thus, instead of the progressive moralization of Ufe consisting in the attainment of a larger freedom, it consists in its progressive loss to such an extent that necessity on this view, is, always and necessarily, a lapsed freedom.^ Hence the more perfectly we learn to do those things which put us into coopera- tive relations with our fellows, that is, the more efficient we become, the less moral are we because, without forethought and without strain, habit has become with us a second nature. If, now, we seek to avoid the consequences of this view, another type of theory is brought to attention. This will agree that habit has, rightfully, a large place in moral development, and that it is important to get the fundamental moral requirements mechan- ized so completely that they are beyond revision. And it may be urged that to do this most economically requires that the indi- vidual start life without such freedom as the first view demands. ' Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 126. ^ Cf. the explanation of instinct as lapsed intelligence, e. g., by Wundt, Romanes, Lewes, etc. MORAL FREEDOM. 169 But, it will be argued, there are conditions under which habit provides no clue to appropriate behavior, and what is to be done must be left to the individual's decision. Now, this is a more plausible theory because it remains nearer the facts of experience, and seeks to provide for the complexity which the moral hfe dis- plays. But in this form it cannot be accepted because it does not tell us what freedom is, and leaves it without anchorage in the totality of the facts which constitute the moral Hfe. Freedom in this view, is an addendum to the normal human life, and mor- ality appears as a sporadic, not a permanent, requirement of human organization. In contrast to both these views, we are required, by our stand- point, to ascertain the essential characteristics of morality in all the forms which the moral life assumes, and if the earliest and most elementary forms are those which emphasize the necessity under which the individual is to conform his conduct to already fixed types, we must find here the key to our interpretation of whatever it is that goes by the name of freedom. There is no freedom, therefore, which is not the very heart of necessity, and no necessity which does not constitute the very being of freedom. The attempt has sometimes been made to determine the bound- aries of freedom and necessity by reference to the kind of control which each impHes. Thus by one writer "moral freedom" is identified with "such a kind and amounc of self-control as belongs, both in fact and in accordance with the demands of a sound ethical theory, to man's moral life and moral development."^ Necessity would then mean the determination of individual behavior under principles which have their origin outside that self which is essen- tial, both in fact and in theory, for the establishment of moral freedom. Necessity, from this standpoint, must be identified with social control. How much of truth there is in this way of stating the problem will appear as we proceed. Whether it accords with the most elementary moral facts of which we have knowledge may at once be questioned. Moreover, it involves a false separation between the self and the conditions under which the self develops; and in contrasting the one with the other we are led to suppose that the principle of moral organization is to be identified, in toto, ' Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, p. 133. lyo THE MORAL LITE. with the individual, and that the socius, if it enter into the account at all, does so merely as the foil — a sort of negative possibility — of the moral life. In view of the positions already taken, this separation of the individual from society and of society from the individual is a quite unwarranted abstraction. And if we are to remain in accord with our own foregoing conclusions, the contrast between freedom and necessity must be looked for, not in the separated halves of the moral life, but in all the stages through which, in their inseparable relationship, society and the individual make advancement in moral culture. For the fact which will receive increasing emphasis as we proceed is that self-control and social-control are two forms which ideal-control assumes in the historic development of the moral life. Now one and now the other, both in theory and in fact, takes the lead, but neither attains to a position which would warrant us in regarding it as an inde- pendent source of moral guidance. The conditions under which freedom becomes a pressing prob- lem, practically and theoretically, have been indicated in the chapters on motive. We saw that a development in motive is required whenever conventional morality fails to provide for all the awakening interests of the moral subject. Whenever we grow beyond our own moral past, or develop interests which are not possible of assimilation by the standard motive of our group, a moral situation is instituted which, through its tensional character, is characterized by the changes of emphasis among the factors of which the situation is composed. We saw how important it was for the motive to be capable of expansion and adaptation to changing conditions. Now the fact which freedom emphasizes is that the expansion and adaptation of the motive involves an essen- tially new and unique apprehension and conception of the moral Hfe. For however true it is that with the increase in number and complexity of our social relations the moral motive is under pres- sure to develop to the full its own internal meanings, the whole significance of the process is not exhausted until it is seen that in this process prominence is given to the hitherto unaccentuated con- ative factor which, from the time of its first recognition, grows more MORAL FREEDOM. 171 and more in importance until it becomes the dominant element in all future growth. Morality, that is to say, is no longer an affair in which the individual is learning to appropriate his moral inheritance through adapting himself to common modes of behavior, but it is becoming increasingly a matter of an enlarging and deepening con- sciousness of ability on the part of the individual to effect results in the social world which are of importance to himself and others. In other words, the moral motive is not merely developing further meaning; it is undergoing transformation of a very profound kind. In becoming centralized in the individual it passes beyond its own traditional past, and makes of the individual a unique moral force. Now it is the recognition of this fact that opens the way from the deadlock in which our study of the moral motive issued. The study of morality from the standpoint of its motive confines inquiry to ascertaining what are the principles of organization which have appeared in the development of the moral life. It is essentially a study of the moral life von unten. Hence we were left in the last chapter not so much with a picture, as a bird's-eye view, of the moral life. The morality of the modern man, we saw, is decidedly cosmopoUtan. The moral ideal is applied to many and diverse interests, and it settles down to a system of control, through which individuals are bound together, within each of these interests, by the ties of loyalty. All, therefore, that can be said from the standpoint of the moral subject is that he is conscious of loyalty to a number of laws which have their basis in as many ideas; it is farthest from his experience to have codified these laws, or to have grouped the ideas under a comprehensive and dominating ideal. But, as was pointed out, this is the next step that the moral facts imply; and it is to this end that moral freedom leads. We intimated just now that the most elementary form of moral freedom is the consciousness of ability to effect results which are of social consequence. This is prefigured in the general character of conscious life in which every experience pushes out beyond itself and passes into other, and related, experiences. It is, however, only prefigured. For, as we have shown, it is characteristic of the moral experience to find in the consequences of its own acts the 172 THE MORAL LIFE. principle of its own movement, and this is not possible until desire is brought under the control of socially approved ends. To state it in another way, desire must be rationalized if it is to develop into a moral will. But there is no moralization which does not imply control by the ideal of which ethics takes account. Hence the moral will, in this point of view, is desire directed toward those forms of behavior which, both as means and consequents, tend to realize the moral ideal in our concrete social relationships. Or, as Paulsen writes, "Will in the narrower sense, or rational will, is desire determined by purposes, principles, and ideals."' Now, there are two types of sjuch will which are dominated by the personal and individual types of social organization. In the first we have a rationalized will working under social control effectively realizing in many and diverse circumstances the full measure of good of which they are capable. Here desire — the primitive conative- affective consciousness — is, in Paulsen's phrase, 'determined by purposes, principles, and ideals.' Only, we have to remark, the 'purposes, principles, and ideals' are not, as such, imminent to the will through which they are carried into effect. From the stand- point of the individual, this means that he is acting under neces- sity. He is acting morally, of course, since what he does concretely realizes what the moral ideal requires; but he is not acting freely. Freedom belongs to the other, the social, end of the relation which is here implied. But since the individual cannot be taken apart from society, freedom and necessity are both essential to the moral relation; freedom no more constitutes an action moral than neces- sity takes it outside that category. The other case is yet to be determined. However for the sake of emphasis we may state it at this point. But no consideration of further cases is required to make clear the essential nature of moral freedom. Moral freedom consists in the ability to control the social situation in such a way that effective expression is given to the ideal under which the moral life is at the time proceeding. Now, the question with which we are principally concerned is the form which the ideal assumes in order to fulfill its proper function. ' A System of Ethics, p. 220. MORAL FREEDOM. I 73 The answer to this question is, of course, that it must be either a social convention or a thought. When it is the former, we have the first case referred to above: custom is controlling the indi- vidual in the interests of the established order; when it is the latter, we have the second case : the individual is controlling society and modifying custom for the sake of realizing an ideal which is thought as a larger common good. In the first case, whatever the motives may be for the individual's actions, he is acting neces- sarily; in the second case, because the motives make a direct reference to the ideal and are generated by it, he is acting freely. It may be well to point out in this connection that the difficulty of that aspect of the problem of freedom with which we are now dealing is not ethical at all; it is the difficulty of giving a psycho- genetic account of the process of thought. Now if we are ever to speak of the individual as free, it must be because and when the process through which moral results are achieved is determined by the presence in consciousness of an ideal which is antecedent to and independent of the conditions of its actualization. This we have indicated in the phrase 'conscious- ness of ability.' Consciousness of ability is the conative aspect of what, on the intellectual side, we may call projective imagination. Both are forms in which consciousness brings the future under the control of the present and makes them continuous. Without such continuity, the future would remain unknown and uncontrolled.^ That this is true of the natural world, the development of modem science is a sufficient ground for affirming. That it is true of the social world, it is the business of scientific ethics to maintain. For the moral life, like the physical universe, is one and continuous, and what we need as a basis of prediction in ethics is not an empirical knowledge of all existing cases, but of a crucial instance, that is, one in which the principle of development is clearly and adequately discerned. Now, what we have been arguing is that the principle of becoming in morality is the moral ideal; and this, as we have indicated, always shows itself in the moral agent as an ability to determine the consequences which will follow from 1 For the working out of the logical relations of knowledge and con- trol, Cf . Baldwin, Thought and Things, vol. ii, chapter xiii and xiv. 174 THE MORAL LIFE. his conduct. We cannot, therefore, confine morality to the time at which it takes place: it always and by its very nature passes over into the future to relieve it of that uncertainty and vagueness which acts as an opiate on moral endeavors. The future belongs to morality, not figuratively but literally, because it is the charac- teristic of all that is good to realize itself in the undetermined cir- cumstances of the future. This projection of the moral life comes to be the nucleus around which the transformation of society takes place. Now, the particular features of this movement come into view when we recall the fact that it is the nature of experience, and therefore of the moral experience, to leave traces, or to generate dispositions, which make possible the recurrence of the types of behavior required by moral organization. We have seen to what extent this is dependent upon the intellectual life. Suggestion, imitation, imagination have been mentioned as securing that coop- eration between the individual and his social environment out of which morality grows. There seems to be increasing clearness in ideational distinctness; and the greater the progress the more dependent does the moral motive appear to be upon intellectual apprehension of the termini of approved forms of conduct. Now advance beyond the stage at which imagination is the chief guide must wait until the volitional factors which are present in the earlier stages of moral growth connect with the imagination — a conjunc- tion which is psychically important in so far as it makes the development of imagination possible and renders it independent of the concrete image to which it is bound in all the earlier forms.' More than this, however, transpires. For if through its connection with conation, imagination loses its hold upon the concrete social copy, and comes to accentuate and make possible the expression of the conative-aSective impulses of the moral subject, it is also true that this reacts upon previously developed motives which then condition forms of activity which have all the essential fea- tures of moral freedom. The passage from necessity to freedom ' For the relation of the cognitive and voluntary processes, cf , Kulpe, Outlines of Psychology, pp. 443 f. MORAL FREEDOM. 175 is dependent, intellectually, upon the possibility of substituting ideas for images, — a possibility which is dependent upon the func- tion which conation comes to have in the moral experience of the individual. As it is through the prominence of the conative factors, at the level of imagination, that the image is transformed into the idea, so we may say that, at the same time and by the same means, a new organization of the feeling life takes place whereby it secures a larger field and a higher range. In some such way as this we may suppose that the end and the motives of conduct become con- joint factors in the moral Ufe of the individual and give rise to that consciousness of ability which, we said, is the equivalent of moral freedom. The individual, in other words, has outgrown, intellectually and morally, his historic inheritance, and become a factor in the intellectual and moral development of the race. We have spoken of the change in the character of the motive which accompanies the emergence in the individual of moral freedom. The facts at first glance are somewhat paradoxical, and yet they may be expressed, without too great a strain, by saying that with the removal of social compulsion, the more imperatively does the individual hold himself and others to the performance of those acts in which the moral ideal is realized. In other words, the consciousness of moral efficiency begets its appropriate motives. This is usually spoken of as the feeling of obligation. It is the constraint the morally free individual feels himself to be under to realize as best he can, the objects to which the motive points. This should be distinguished from the feeling of responsibility which is connected with the character of the means by which the ends of the moral life are sought to be realized. The feeling of obligation is the more general, and it attaches to all forms of moral freedom. It is usually expressed by the dictum: 'I ought, therefore I can.' In the light of the considerations we have been urging, it would appear to be equally true that 'I can, therefore I ought.' However, neither statement alone is adequate because no account is taken of the concrete particulars which determine the applicability of either. Ought I to do everything I can morally do ? If not, neither moral freedom, nor the feeling of obligation which goes along with it, can be the final solvent of the moral situation. What Paulhan expresses as a general psychological fact may be applied, mutatis mutandis, to this ethical problem, namely, that " Every idea .... every sen- 176 THE MORAL LIFE. timent; in brief, every psychic system tends to complete itself by volitions and motor phenomena; every system has its own will.'" That is, the moral idea tends to work itself out in practical forms of activity under guidance of the feeling of obligation. The feeling reinforces the idea, and the successful carrying out of the idea reacts upon the feeling. But whether what is done is the best thing to be done, whether this most adequately realizes the idea, neither moral freedom nor the feeling of obligation as such determines. What I must do if I am to do what I ought to do is a matter which can be decided only if I have regard for the conditions under which I am called upon to act. Thus, the feeling of obligation is as general as the end at which I aim, but the feeling of responsibility is as concrete as are the particular acts which are determined by the psycho-sociological conditions under which, in the given case, the end must find its realization. This distinction holds good throughout, even in those cases where we have to acknowledge a feeling of responsibility for the ends toward which subsequent effort is directed. There is in all such instances a direct or implied reference to alternative plans between which we are required to choose, so that if choice were not itself a kind of action, the basis of choice must be the relation of the possible courses as they further or hinder the moral ideals in process of fulfillment. That is to say, we feel responsible for the choice of ends in so far as they imply concrete behavior which harmonizes with types of conduct which have become established in the individual's moral experience. When, however, the deci- sion has been made, even though it be a mistaken one, we feel under obligation to carry it out. The development of the concept of individuality in the earlier chapters has shown this concept to be connected with the ideal elements in our social morality. Individuality, we saw, indicates the direction in which the moral community is to grow. To this may now be added that moral freedom working in the moral indi- vidual secures the release of the moral ideal from the limitations under which it must always remain so long as it is unable to get a formulation independent of its concrete embodiment in the moral community. In our study, the moral ideal has, no doubt, seemed to lag behind rather than to lead the way to moral achievement. ' L'ActiviU Mentale, p. 59 f. MORAL FREEDOM. 1 77 This is, in part, true, and it is true because, as was indicated in the earlier pages, the moral ideal has a fundamental relation to historic morality through which it acts as a conservative, as well as a developing, principle of the moral life. It is a fact to which attention has been called, and which comparative ethics in its own way emphasizes, that what the ideal of morality is may be ascer- tained by an appeal to its historic embodiment in the moral practice of the race. And that there is a progressive unfolding — a develop- ment — of the moral ideal may perhaps be affirmed as the result of such inquiries. It is, however, the unique feature of genetic ethics to be able to point out that, with the presence of the morally free individual, the moral ideal gets a formulation which is not confined to the limitations of historic morality, and that, through him, it is brought to bear upon social life in such a way that the pathway is broken to the largest moral good. To see how this is, we may recall that individuality has been shown to be a method of reorganizing experience. It expresses the right to rearrange the elements of a given situation in such a way that room is made for the incorporation of other, actual or possible, elements. From this standpoint, it is obvious that the question of moral freedom is the question of the further development of this type of experience. More particularly, the inquiry is forced upon us whether, when it is no longer a question of assimilating one moral group to another, we can go ahead of all existing groups and develop our moral ideal into a working principle for the further guidance of moral behavior. The answer to this question has been indicated in part. We said that moral freedom is conditioned by the presence of ideas, and the consequent freeing of the motives to conduct from social control. The morally free individual is unique in the sense that he Uves not in the past to which historic morality is confined and which is mediated through imagination, but in the future which he determines according to a consciously conceived plan, that is, through thought. Now, thought is always projective.' It defines a situation which is, actually or possibly, '"Mais inversement la Rationality est essentiellement sociale, non parce que la Raison imane de la soci^t^, mais beaucoup plut6t parce qu' elle y tend." — Belot, Etudes de Morale Positive, p. 181. 178 THE MORAL LIFE. common.' Where we are dealing, as in ethics, with relations, among individuals, this means that thought has for its object a social situation. In thought are expressed not only the position and influence which the members of the socius severally have; but thought reaches a formulation of the individual and personal rela- tions that is intended to bring them into the unity of a system which secures to each its proper field and which presents them as mutually supporting and conditioning factors of the largest freedom. Thought, that is to say, is synthetic, and it tends con- stantly to become a self-thought. The particular kind of unity which, in ethics, thought aims to reach is the unity of a self. Now, thought cannot attain this goal by a tour de force, but only as it gathers its material from the experience in which the unity of a self has been achieved. In other words, we do not first of all think self, and then become a self. Rather, it is by becoming a self that any one can state or reaUze what the term connotes. If this is true, it falls in line with all that we have said above that the self is a gradual evolution, and the steps we take toward it are marked by the successful harmonizing of the differences which arise in the practical situations of life. We have seen, for example, that mental faculty is developed as the situations in which we are called to act are more complex. The same is consequently true of thought: it is the product of experience, and the instrument for the regulation of experi- ence. Only in the case of thought we have to say that it defines a con- tent which holds the competing or opposed elements of which it is composed in subordination to the larger whole vnthin which, inten- tionally, each reaches its highest development and greatest security. Thought does not create nor does it destroy the differences with which it deals; it formulates a conception which is typical of the way in which all such differences in the future may be overcome. This, then, is what is meant by a self: it is a concept which thought constructs on the basis of experience, and it signifies, as it refers to the past or appUes to the future, that actual or possible harmony of the individual and personal relations which are present in all social organizations. I am a self only as what is individual to me has received adjustment to what is personal and common. MORAL FREEDOM. 1 79 The self never is, and never can be, anything but a social con- cept. It is obvious, therefore, that in the case of the moral self we are dealing with that form of reconcihation of the opposing social forces — the personal and the individual — which is made possible by the moral ideal. We may say that the moral ideal is an ideal of a moral self in so far as it secures prospectively the harmony of relations in which the well-being of society consists. From this standpoint we can see that when the moral ideal becomes, in Hume's phrase, a 'party' to our moral concerns, a shifting of the relations between the factors of the moral status takes place. It is doubtless true that the moral ideal can get introduced as a working ideal into our social concernments only as it is thought by the individual. But it is also true that it never is thought within the limits of the individual's private experience. To think the ideal in a final and complete way is to think beyond all actual experience. The ideal is, as Kant insists, a formulation, in advance of experience, of what it is best that experience shall realize. The ideal is a socius to which we must now become reconciled, and vrithin which we must now seek to realize our highest good. It is a society beyond any existing community, one that includes the principles of control for all individual and personal moral effort. By such a moral ideal the individual is freed from the tryanny of social convention, and society is freed from the misguidance of merely individual impulses. Groups of men, as well as individual men, find the highest Ufe when they five not in the favor of one another, but in that freedom from external restraint which is secured by the moral ideal. The moral ideal is the center and source of moral autonomy. Thus, to maintain under the changing circum- stances of finite existence such relations with the moral ideal as lead to the constant realization of the Hfe which the ideal itself embodies — that it is to be free. To be free is to be, at this time and in this place, a moral self. INDEX. Absolute, the, as the Status Quo, 57 Adolescence, character of, 144 Adolescent morality, jijo Agnosticism, of supernaturaHsm, 43 Analogy, principle of, in social theory, 26f. in ethics, 12 Anselm, on creation, 3 Antinomies, Kantian, 31 Arbitration, ethical interpretation of, 60 Aristotle, ethics of, 19, 30 on end as motive, 92f. onhappiness as supreme good, 109 Association, biological conditions of, 23 mechanical and organic, 23 a social concept. I9f., 22f. Baldwin, on anthropo genetic method, 16 on determination of phenomena as social, 19 on distinction between evolu- tion and development, 15 on genetic logic, 17 on genetic problem, 14 on imagination, 126 on the individual and society, 80 on knowledge and control, 173 on the range of imitation, 65 on the recognition of sense-ob- jects, 117 on sanctions, 90, 97 on social commonness, 68 on social contagion, 167 on social heredity, 52 Becoming, principle of, in ethics, 91, 95, 173 Behavior, and environment, loif. individualistic, 143 meaning of, 156 Belot, on the object of morality, 106, iii Bentham, on motive and intention, 92 Biology, and ethics, lo, 6if. relation of, to the family, 61 Bradley, on the a-moralityof the Absolute, 57 Buddhism, 142 Business, ethics of, 60, 70, I28f., I47f. Capital and labor, ethics of, 129 Casuistry, 33, 137 Categories, moral, and the moral judgment, 75 Catholicism, Roman, and modern culture, 26 Cause, freedom and necessity, 167, i69f., 172 Chesterton, on the family, 80 Chief, the, as an ideal, 59 Choice, moral, nature of, 163 Christianity, 142 Christian Church, moral inefficiency of, 162 City-State, Greek, 19 Civilization, oriental, 142 Collectivism, theory of, 25f., 97 Commerce, influence of social interest on, 18 and morality, 60, 70, I28f., I47f. Commonness, social, 67f. Conduct, action in line of greatest resist- ance, 168 Conscious control, struggle for existence and, 28 Consciousness and social facts, 27f., 3of. relation of, to moral facts, 28f . not coextensive with organic, 27 criterion of, 28 objective, 6^i., 84, 98f. functional view of, 99 Crank, the, ethics of, 93 Culture and morality, 131 Darwin, evolutionary method of, 8 Decalogue, Mosaic, as an ideal, 40 Decrees, Divine, doctrine of, in ethics, 44 Descartes, on the a-morality of the Abso- lute, 57 Desire, nature of, 116 as moral will, 172 Determinism, theory of, 85, 158 Development, conditioned by environment, 100 and genesis, 14!. 1 82 INDEX Development, meaning of, 14 mental and moral, 100, I45f. mental and the sense image, iiyf. and progress, 59f. social, 145 Dewey, on end as motive, 93 on logical theory, 17 Differences, mediated by imagination, I4if., I46f. mediated by memory I35f., I39f. socially controlled, 142 Drummond, on natural and supernatural laws, 29 Dualism, dogmatic, 44, 160 and the duality of experience, 102 supernaturalistic, 43f. Duns Scotus, on freedom, 157 Duprat, on freedom and determinism, 159 Duty and inclination, 133 Economics and ethics, 6if., 108 Education, and method of knowledge, 50 Eimer, on orthogenesis, 16 Epistemology, and psychology, 65 Ethics, Aristotle's conception of, 19, 30 and biology, 10, 6if. British, 35 comparative, lof. 12 data of, 4, I if., 6if., 91 differentia of, 3if., 33f, and economics, 6if. 108 epistemological, i, 4 evolutionary, 5f. 9f. 14 genetic, i,2f., 4f., 7f, lof., i^i, 17, 38,83,90 historical, lof., 32f., 37 and the humanitarian spirit, 6, i8f. limitations of practical, 31 limitations of theories of, 32 metaphysical, i. 4 and naturalism, 42f. natural and positive, 48 normative, 47 f. objective theories of, 35 philosophical, 5 and the predicative sciences, 6if. presuppositions of, 4, 37 prolegomena to, 5 psychological, 2, 7f . psychology of, 8 and psychology, 98 Ethics, its raison d'etre, 36, 62 science of, 5, 7 as science of the ought, 40 and social psychology, 56 and the social sciences, io8f. and sociology, 3of, 55f. subjective theories of, 35 Ethics, and supernaturalism, 12, 43f. as theory of the end, 34, 37 as theory of the means, 35, 38 and theory of evolution, 8f . Evolution, and development, I4f. meaning of, 5, 16 mental and organic, 28 and method, 9, 29 Family, the, and biology, 61 growth of, I43f. 150 as individual, 80 relations in, i48f. Fate, as an ideal, 41, 59 Feehng, of familiarity, 116 and imitation, iii f., Ii3f. and the moral ideal, 115 and motive, iii, ii3f. of obligation, i75f. pathic, 113 present state of psychology of, 1 1 1 of responsibility, i75f. and will in psychological ethics, 2 Freedom, and behavior, 156 and consciousness of abiHty, i7if, historical formulation of problem of, .55f. importance of, for moral Hfe, 170 and indeterminism, 157, 166 as individual type of experience, 177 and inhibition, i6of. moral, 157 and moral motive, i6of. and necessity, 1 59f ., 1 66, 1 69 f , 172 negative, 158 and philosophy, 159 physical I56f., 158 positive, 158 problem of, 156, 165 psychological, I57f. real, I57f. and science, 159 and self-determination, 158 INDEX 183 Freedom, socially interpreted, 163, i66f. theories of, i67f. in theory and practice, i55f- and thought, 173, 177 Function, biological meaningof , 94 mathematical meaning of, 95 Gang, the, nature of, 144, 150 Genesis, meanings of, zi. Genetic ethics, and epistomological ethics, 4f- and evolutionary ethics, 5f., 9f., 14 and historical ethics, lof. 32,37 and historical theories, 35, 38 and metaphysical ethics, 4f. nature of, I3f., 7, I5f. 17 and philosophical ethics, 5 problems of, i54f, 177 psychological, i, 2 and scientific ethics, 5, 7 Habit, law of, and freedom, 166 and motive, 152 Hardship, moral value of, 46 Harris, on moral freedom, 1 57 Hedonism, theory of, 7, 57f., 92, I27f. Heredity, social, 52 Hobbes, on social theory, 25 on statutory morahty, 58 Hobhouse, on biological and orthogenic evolution, 9, 16 on genesis and development, 16 on primitive morahty, 96 Humanitarian spirit, and social questions, 18 Hume, on memory and imagination, I38f. on moral principles, 70 on an ultimate moral end, 109 Huxley, on sanctions of morahty, 44 Ideal, the, an epistemological concept, 54 in ethics, 4of., 89 function of, 59f., 69f. and imagination, 53 and moral judgment, 57 and the moral situation, 56f . a movable idea, 68 and nature, 159 nature of, 54, 63f., 76f. Ideal, the origin of, 45f., 52f . and perception, 53 as principle of becoming, 91, 95 and social facts, 55f. \. theological and naturalistic theories of, 42f. Idiot, moral status of, 28 Illusion, as an ideal, 41 Imagination, and conation, 174 development of, I48f. functional interpretation of, 120 i35f-» i37f- genetic account of, I38f., I46f. importance of functional inter- pretation of, 120 Hmitations of, I46f. and memory, i35f., i48f. and -moral idea, 139 and perception, 53, loi projective, 173 relation to sense-image, Ii8f. and volition, 174 Imitation, and feeling 11 if. and memory, I37f. origin of, 102 and perception, loif, 112 and social control, I37f. and social values, 104 and suggestion, I03f . Imperative, unconditional, 107 Incidental, the, and society, i6if. Inclination, and duty, I33f. Indeterminism, theory of , 151, 158, 166 Individual, the, atomic, 98, 143 as cause, 1645. determined, i64f. freedom of, 173, I77f. a group differentiation, 86f., I76f. and motive, I52f. organic basis of, I23f. a particularizingsocialforce, 78,81,85, I4if.,i63,i76f. . and moral ideal, 78 and social growth, I45f., I77f. in social theory, 97f. social view of, i2of. and society, 79f., i64f. in sociology, i2if. IndividuaHsm, theory of, and Constitution of United States, 25 and French Revolution, 25 hmitations of, 97 INDEX Individualism, and Protestantism, 26 Individuality, and inherited structure, 125 and thought, 124 Indifference, liberty of, 157 Industry, and morality, 60, 70 I28f., I47f. and politics, 61 Inertia, law of, and social pressure, 103 Inheritance, social, 5if., I24f. Inhibition, nature of, 45, i6of. and moral life, I32f., i5of. Insane, moral status of, 28 Instincts, organic, in ethics, 130 Intention, and motive, 92 nature of, 36, 83 Intermarriage, a biological question, 24 Ladd, on ethics and sociology, 54, 108 on freedom as an acquisition, 166 on idealism and morals, 41 on moral categories, 75 on moral freedom, 162, 169 on moral judgment, 74 on moral tact, 33 on the social self, 122 Laissez-faire, ethics of, 60, 93 Laurie, on pathic feeling, 113 Law, statutory, and ethics, 107 nature of io6f. Libertarianism, theory of, 158 Locke, influence of, on Rousseau, 25 on innate ideas and principles, 96 James, on moral value of hardship, 168 on sense of reality, 66 Jesus, as an ideal, 40 on the letter and spirit, 162 on the transformation of values, 55 Judgment, moral, basis of, 57 characteristics of, io6f., logf. a function of moral situation, 75, 106 and the end of conduct, 72f. juridical, 73 legislative, 74 and the moral categories, 75 and the moral ideal, 7of, 106 and the moral situation, I3f. and motive, no, ii5f. unconditional, 107, I09f. Kant, on form and content, 31 on inclination and duty, I33f. on the moral ideal, 179 on moral judgment, 74 on unconditional imperative, 71 on will as legislative, 160 Kidd, on sanctions of morality, 145 Knowledge, and conduct, 65 method of, 46f., 5if. and reality 64 transcendence of, 65 and virtue, 63f. Kuipe, on cognitive and voluntary processes, '74 on moral judgment, 73 Labor and capital, ethics of, 60 Ladd, on belief in reality, 66 on casuistry, 33 Mackenzie, on animal morality, 73 on freedom and determination, on natural and positive ethics, 48 on normative ethics, 47 on postive and normative ethics, 51 Maintenance, problem of, I5f Major, on imagination, 53 on memory, 126 Majority, the, as an ideal, 59 Mansel, agnosticism of, 43 Mazzini, on the individual and society, 79 Memory, functional interpretation of, 120, I25f, i32f., i35f. genetic account of, 138 and imitation, i37f. limits of, I36f, 140 and motive, I26f., i4of. nature of, i25f. and perception, 136 and sense-image, ii8f. Method, anthropo genetic, 16 biogenetic, 9 genetic, 2, 13 of mental and organic evolution, 28 psycho gene tic, 9 of knowledge, 46f 5if. unity of, in knowledge, 46f . Mill, on utilitarianism, 55f, 130 on determinism, 158 Mind and nature, 99f. Monism, agnosticism of, 44 naturahstic and spiritualistic, 43 Moral choice, nature of, 163 Moral compulsion, natural, loof., 102 social, i66f. INDEX i8s Moral phenomena, and consciousness, 28f Moral will, types of, 172 Moral ideal, and categorical imperative, 7 if. as cause, 69f., yif. and epistemology, 63 in ethics, 4of. and freedom, 155 function of, 59f., 6i)i., i^^i. and intention 82 and moral judgment, yof. and motive, 91., 94f., ii6f. naturalistic view of, 42f. nature of., 63, 76f origin of, 45f.,52f., 154 as principle of becoming, 91 95' 173 a principle of comprehension, 82 quahties of, 77f. theological view of, 42f. Moral life, and animal behavior, 9f., iif., ■ 73f- and the ideal, 4of. and influence of environment on, 66, I oof., 124, i6of. and inhibition, 132, i5of. instrumental, 36 law of, io2f., 132 objectively grounded, loof. projective, 173 Moral self, as goal of moral life, 83 as individual and personal, 8if., lySf. nature of, 78 Moralists, British, their view of ethics, 35 MoraHty, adolescent, 150, I5if. animal and human, iif., 74 beginnings of, 96f., 100 causation of, i64f. child, II, 131 effect of humanism on, 18 and greatest resistance, 168 institutional, lof. and least resistance, I45f. and natural necessity, loof. sanctions of, 43f. statutory, 58f. Morgan, on organic and mental evolution, 28 on animal morality, I2f. on behavior, 156 Mosaic Decalogue, as an ideal, 40 Motive, and end, 72, 9of., 93f. and feeling, in, 11 3f. and freedom, i6of., 165., i7of. Motive, a function of the moral ideal, 89, 91, 94f. 116 in the historical theories, 92 and intention, 92 and the law of habit, 152 and memory, 126 and moral judgment, no, n6f. a new kind of feeling, 114 and method, 87, no and the personal and the individ- ual, 121 problem of, 88, in psychological development of, n4f, ii6f. and social pressure, io3f. the strongest, 92, 165 and the unconditional judgment, 1 10 Movable image, criticism of Hume's ac- count of, 139 function of, 146 Muirhead, on theories of the end, 34 Naturalism, and ethics, 42f, 44 Nature, and the ideal, 159 the imperative of, lOof. and mind, 99f, and morality, 102, 173 Necessarianism, theory of, 158 Necessity, and freedom, i66f. i69f. law of natural and moral world, 102 Nothing, creation out of, Anselm on, 3 Objective, consciousness, 65f., 84 how the ideal becomes, 69, 77 meanings of, 66f. Obhgation, feeling of, I75f. and responsibility 175 Occam, William of, on freedom, 157 Organic instincts in ethics, 130 Oriental civilization, character of, I42f. place of individual in, H3 Parent, the problem of, 144 in relation to the home, I48f. Parsimony, law of, in mental life, 138 Paulhan, on will, 176 Paulsen, on Kant's doctrine of duty, 135 on rational wiU. 172 1 86 INDEX Perception, and imagination, 53 and imitation, loof., 112 and memory, 136 Persons and things, 53f. Personal, the, a generalizing social force, 81, 84, 120 a group differentiation, 85 motive, I2$i., 151 organic basis of, iizi. Phenomena, social, and consciousness, lyf. and ethics, 32f. and organic, 22f., 27f. Philosophical, ethics, 5 individualism and social theory, 25 Philosophy, an interpretation of life, 18 social, aim of, 25 Plato, his idea of the good, 40 on moral choice, 163 his social theory, 26 Pleasure, higher and lower, 57f., 130 Politics, and ethics, 58 and industry, 6if. influence of social interests on, 18 nature of, 108 Protestantism, and individualism, 26 and Roman Catholicism, 26 Providence, as an ideal, 41 Psychological ethics, philosophical motives of 2, 7f. a theory of the means, 35 Psychology, comparative, 12 and epistemology, 65 individual and social, 66 Read, on the organic basis of individuaHty, 123 on the relation of environment to individuaHty, 124 Responsibility, feeling of, I75f. Revolution, the French, and the theory of individualism, 25 Roosevelt, on business and ethics, 129 Ross, definition of society, 2if. Rousseau, influence of Locke on, 25 on social contract, 25 Ruskin, and unmoralized culture, 131 Sanctions, doctrine of, in ethics, 43f, 90 Scepticism, Mansel's, 43 of monism, 44 Scepticism, Protagorean, 64 Schiller, parody of Kant's doctrine of duty, 134 Schurman, on animal moraHty, 12 Science, influence of social interest on, 18 instrumental character of, 52 normative, 47f. Sciences, predicative, and ethics, 6if. social, and ethics, io8f. Scientific ethics, problems of, 5, 7 Segregation of social groups, 145, i5of., 171 Self, moral, as goal of moral life, 83 as individual and personal, 8if., i78f. nature of, 78 Sense-image, function of, 117 and memory and imagination, 118 nature of, 116 Seth, on ethics as science, 8 on natural and normative ethics, 49 on normative ethics, 47f. on scientific method, 48, 50 Situation, moral, nature of, 38, 56, 91 and moral judgment, 75 social, functional, 52 and thought, 85 Small, on the individual, 122 definition of society, 22 on sociology and ethics, 3of., 32 Social, conditions and ethics, 18 conformity and feeling, 113 contract, 25 control, and imitation, i37f. conventions, 106 customs, conditional, 107 function, industry a, 61 group, nature of, 23 groups, limits to growth of, 145 segregation of, 145, 1 50 f ■, 171 heredity, 51 inheritance, 124 phenomena, nature of, 22f, 24f ., 27f . pressure, interpretation of, I03f. psychology, and ethics, 56 reformer, 78 situation, functional, 52 and thought, 85 theory, limits of, 97 and philosophical individual- ism, 25 tradition, 52 values and imitation, 104 Society, analysis of idea of, igf., 22f. INDEX 187 Society, biological theory of, 25f., 97 concept of, in sociology, 2if. and consciousness, 2,ji.y gof. gregarious origin of, 61 implies organic similarity, i^f. and the individual, j<)L an organic concept, 25 the permanent and the relative in, 1 6 if. theory of collectivism 25f., 97 Sociological questions, interest in, 18 Sociology, and ethics, 30, 55f., 6if. nature of, 21, 30, 32, 55, 62, 108, 122 Socrates, an ethicist, 5 on unconditional good, io9f . on virtue and knowledge, 63f. Sophists, scepticism of, 64 Sorley, on economics and ethics, 108 on the transformation of values, 55 Spencer, definition of life, 94 on evolutionary study of society, 29 on human and animal moraUty, 74 on intermarriage, 24 on organic basis of society, 21 Status Quo, the Absolute, as the, 57 Stuckenberg, definition of society, 22 Suggestion, and imitation, 103 nature of I03f. Supernaturalism, and ethics, 43f. Tact, moral, Ladd on, 33 sphere of, 107 Taylor, on the a-morality of the Absolute, 57 Thilly, on Kant's doctrine of duty, 134 Things and persons, 53f. Thought, and'^individuality, 124 psychogenesis of, I73f. and the social situation, 85, 124 Togetherness, mechanical and social, 22 Tradition, Mazzini on, 79 meaning of, 125 Traditionahsm, 162 Truth-speaking, limits of, i36f. United States, constitution of, and theory of individualism, 25 and Negro slavery, 55 Universe, origin of, meanings of, 2f. Urban, on valuation, 107 Unconditional, imperative, 107 judgment, 107, io9f.. Values, human, field of, 107 social, and imitation, 104 Virtue, and knowledge, 65 Ward, J., on spiritualistic monism, 43 Ward, L., definition of society, 21 on psychic factor in society, 30 Wealth, ethics of, I28f. Westermarck, character of his work, 5 on primitive morality, 56, 96 Will, and feeling in psychological ethics, 2 free, as an ideal, 40 a social function, 160, 164 types of moral, 172 Wundt, on end and motive, 93 on forms of moral motive, 97 on individual and social will, 163 The Psychological Review EDITED BY J. MARK BALDWIN AND HOWARD C. WARREN J. B. WATSON Princeton University Johns Hopkins University together with JAMES R. ANGELL, University of Chicago (for the Psychologi- cal Monographs), and C. M. BAKEWELL, Yale University (for the Philosophical Monographs). 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