Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/419

E. WESTEEMAECK, Origin and Development of Moral Ideas. 405 that I being an average reviewer must aim at impartiality. This I take to be the import of the passage above quoted, where he says : " We approve and we disapprove because we cannot do other- wise ". Now this is certainly not plain fact as revealed to one and all of us by introspective analysis. Ethics has somehow shaken off its essential subjectivism, or else has gone outside itself for its principle of explanation. The choice lay between an appeal to the experience of the moral subject, and frank recourse to the natural- istic hypothesis. Dr. Westermarck seems to hold to subjectivism just so long as to make nonsense of our ethical experience. Then, in order to make sense of it again, a deterministic naturalism has to be given a more or less free hand. (c) Such a deterministic tendency manifests itself, to my mind, in the interesting discussion that immediately follows on the nature of the moral emotions. These are held to form a species within a wider class termed the " retributive emotions". Thus moral approval is a form of " retributive kindly emotion," whilst moral disapproval is one kind of resentment. What, then, is resentment or revenge in general ? Dr. Steinmetz in his Ent- ivicklung der Strafe maintains that revenge, inasmuch as its prime function is to restore one's injured " self -feeling," is originally " undirected " save^er accidens until experience begets a utilitarian- ism which perceives in the punishment of the author of the wrong a means of preventing its occurrence. Dr. Westermarck opposes o this doctrine the notion of a revenge that is per se " directed," .at is, essentially involves an aggressive attitude of mind towards an assumed cause of pain. Now I am here not so much concerned with his conclusion as with his method of establishing it. More suo he makes biology his starting-ground, but in a short time has passed over into psychology, as if the change of standpoint involved were next to none. " Eesentment, like protective reflex action, out of what it has gradually developed, is a means of pro- tection for the animal. Its intrinsic object is to remove a cause of pain, or, what is the same, a cause of danger. . . . The need for protection thus lies at the foundation of resentment in all its forms." Note here the ambiguity of " object," " cause," and " need ". Surely the animal does not say to itself, " This causes my pain ; I need protection ; with this object, then, I let loose my wrath ". It is the biologist who says this for the animal. But the question before us is precisely when, how, and why man, or some ancestor of man, first came to say this to and for himself. Simply to assume, as Dr. Westermarck seems to do, that with the growth of intelligence what was before implicit became explicit is to make intelligence a mere fly on the wheel. Not but that a few examples are offered of revenge on the part of animals where conscious direction is claimed. But will these bear close inspec- tion? I cannot help smiling over Palgrave's camel which " bode its time," and finally " looked deliberately round in every direction, to assure itself that no one was within sight " before it brained the 27