Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/46

" IDIOPSYCHOLOGICAL ETHICS." 33 such variations are to a considerable extent due to differ- ences in the objects contemplated ; but I hold that they cannot entirely or even mainly be referred to this cause : that when we have made full allowance for this, an im- portant element of difference still remains which it appears to me unwarrantable to attribute to " unfaithfulness," or " wilful drooping of the inward eye " in one or other of the differing individuals. Among reflective persons, who belong to the same age of history and are members of the same civilised society, the amount of difference that is disclosed by a comparison of moral opinions bears usually a small propor- tion to the amount of agreement ; but it is probably rare that some material difference is not discernible, whenever two such persons compare frankly and fully the results of the spontaneous, unreflective play of their moral sentiments. And if we survey the views of the whole aggregate of persons who devote serious thought to moral questions at any given time, we cannot but see that systematic ethical reflection, while it tends to group individuals together into so-called schools, and so to intensify the consciousness of a common morality among members of the same group, has so far tended to develop profounder differences between one group and another. As an illustration of the irreducible differences of which I am speaking, I may note a point of some importance on which I find myself in disagreement with Dr. Martineau. In stating wfr ' he calls the " fundamental ethical fact of which we have to find the interpretation " (p. 18), he affirms that " wherever disapprobation falls, we are impelled to award disgrace and such external ill as may mark our antipathy, with the consciousness that we are not only entitled but con- strained to this infliction". Now I find that the sense of being " constrained to award external ill " to a fellow-man of whose conduct I disapprove, not in order to prevent worse mischief to him or to others, but merely to " mark my antipathy," is entirely absent from my moral consciousness ; and, what is more, I feel an instinctive moral aversion to the impulse thus characterised which goes decidedly beyond my reflective and deliberate disapprobation of it. But I do not therefore affirm that Dr. Martineau has wrongly analysed his own moral consciousness ; still less do I suggest that it has been cor- rupted through unfaithfulness. I should rather say that his sentiment appears to me to belong to that earlier stage in the development of morality in which legal punishment is regarded as essentially retributive, instead of preventive. Nor do I affirm that the common sense even of civilised mankind 3