Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/387

THE PROBLEM OF CONDUCT. 373 for. But this is not that to which Mr. Taylor's argument directs us. It is a double-barrelled attack on the whole idealist position of an underlying unity of the social and individual will. On the one hand this unity is attacked from the point of view of empiricism : there is no trace of it in the form of feeling or judgment which lies at the root of ethics ; on the other hand it is attacked from the point of view of the absolute philosophy as essentially incapable of realisation. I have not considered it necessary to prove that these two points of view are not at any rate prima facie the same or reconcilable with one another. I have tried to show that the first indicates a certain failure on the part of the author to appro- priate the results of the earlier idealist movement of our own time, while the mode of argument based upon the second equally fails to interpret the later. The aim of the earlier movement was not to pledge idealist ethics to a timeless self, but merely to the reality of moral distinctions. Later developments instead of invalidating this reality start from it as a datum, going on to investigate at what point it must itself become transformed into a form of conscious- ness which just because it is morality is also something more.