Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/492

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
476
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. I.

which leads to the idea that such actions ought to be done. Hence the idea of duty appears. Spencer claims that making pleasure the end of action does not signify that such pleasure must be directly sought. Moral actions, however, do produce happiness in the agent. Duty, which grows out of the feeling of coercion, will in time give way to the consciousness of the pleasurableness of right conduct. The author's own view is that the primitive man had the tendency to perform acts, not only for his own advantage, but for that of others. Reflection on the results of such acts transformed the habit into a duty. Duties are of two sorts, — negative, the respecting of the rights of others, and positive, the performing of beneficent acts; the former may originate in external sanctions, but the latter have only internal sanctions, and these are developed by civilization and moral culture. The general consensus of approval of right acts is what renders the principles on which they rest objective and universal and transforms them into moral laws. This is the pure, or a priori, element in morality; it is the result not of the experience of the individual but of that of many generations. The end of moral action is not, as Kant taught, the will alone, nor, as Aristotle believed, happiness alone, but the union of both in the intellectual and moral improvement of society. Morality seeks to realize the ideal which we ourselves have formed; and in obeying the moral law we are following the principles of our own reason.

Filosofia della Storia. La Gente vecchia e la Gente nuova nella formagione e nel progresso del pensiero e della vita sociale. P. L. Cecchi. R. I. d. Fil., VII, 1, pp. 149-194.

Both in the history of individual peoples and in that of civilization at large we find every new outgrowth of thought and activity to be the result of the emergence of some new social order. The dynamic principle on which advance in culture depends is found in new men, who, free from the cramping influence of the old schools, throw themselves, fresh and untrammelled, into the work to be done. The traditions which had become to the men of the old ways of thinking ends in themselves are to the new men of value only as means. In the history of Greece we find each city bringing in turn some new element to enrich the Greek ideal. In Rome progress was always owing to new self-made men. Christianity grew up as a new society formed out of elements despised by both Jew and Gentile. The struggle of old with new and the triumph of the latter are shown in mediæval history and especially in the rise of Florence to greatness and influence. In England successive conquering races mixed with the conquered, the old order is not superseded but modified by the new. The national tendency is exhib-