Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/418

404 CBITICAL NOTICES : and we disapprove because we cannot do otherwise. Can we help feeling pain when the fire burns us ? Can we help sympathising with our friends ? " Finally, though I cannot help judging in my way, other men cannot help thinking it positively wrong of me not to judge in their way. " Although we hold it to be wrong of a person to act against his conscience, we may at the same time blame him for having such a conscience as he has." Now with a great deal of this I find myself in sympathy. Nevertheless, I am disposed to criticise (a) the justification or proof Dr. Westermarck offers of his thesis ; (b) the conclusion he would draw therefrom sfc to the function and method of an ethics ; (c) its relation to his actual procedure. (a) Dr. Westermarck entitles his first chapter ' The Emotional Origin of Moral Judgments '. Further, he adduces what are clearly considerations of origin to account for the appearance of objectivity attaching to such judgments. Society is at the back of them ; whence the uniformity and, again, the authority they tend to display. On the other hand, we read: "To name an act good or bad ultimately implies that it is apt to give rise to an emotion of approval or disapproval in hitn who pronounces the judgment ". But what is the relation of ultimate implication to origin ? At all events they cannot be crudely identified. Nor can I suppose that Dr. Westermarck intends to do this. Whilst some of his argu- ments refer to history, others appear to rest on analysis. But if one man's analysis of his moral judgments yields him objectivity, and there be no flaw in the actual logic of the analysis, how is Dr. Westermarck, on his own principles, going to upset him simply by analysing his own moral experience and finding there only the echo of the voice of society or what not ? I do not see how a sub- jectivism can profess to reach "ultimate implications" at all. That way lies absolutism. Nor again can it afford to disregard the analysis of personal experience and construct an evolutionary history of man ab extra. That way lies a would-be objective naturalism. A subjectivism, it seems to me, must abandon all claim to be dogmatic in matters of general theory, and content itself with setting probability against probability to the end of time. (6) Moral principles, says Dr. Westermarck, are inaccessible to demonstration because, owing to their very nature, they can never be true. " If the word ' Ethics,' then, is to be used as the name for a science, the object of that science can only be to study the moral consciousness as a fact." Well, all depends on what we mean by "fact". Now it is a fact that at this present moment I am anxious to criticise Dr. Westermarck fairly. But is it the purpose of Ethics merely to register such interesting bits of biography, or at most to generalise therefrom the average moral disposition of the twentieth century reviewer? In this case Ethics would stop short at description. But I suspect Dr. Westermarck of wishing to extend its function to explanation. He would show, if he could,