Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/638

gation is actually generated (though it is, of course, brought into play) by the operation of assignable causes. In this interpretation of the passage, I am confirmed by a passage which occurs much later in the work, when the 'feeling of obligation' is made the object of metaphysical reflection. The feeling of oughtness, Professor Ladd there says, "cannot be explained as a resultant solely of the working of social influences upon the mind of the individual. On the contrary, it is itself a basic and ultimate fact with which every attempt to account for the origin of social organizations among men must always reckon. Social organization among men presupposes the feeling of moral obligation" (p. 614). Now it seems to me that, in this whole view of the consciousness of obligation, Professor Ladd is tending to argue fallaciously from the position that the feeling (or notion) of obligation is ethically unique and ultimate to the quite distinct position that it must also be psychologically original and inexplicable. Whereas we may grant his ethical premises without at all admitting the psychological conclusion he would have us draw from them. For instance, we may admit that the 'feeling of obligation' is unique, and, for that matter, every kind of feeling is unique in so far as it has a nature of its own at all; fear and anger are quite as unique as the feeling of obligation. Further, the consciousness of obligation is distinct from any feelings of pleasure and pain, and indeed does not even derive its (ethical) force from these feelings, except for a hedonist. Further, 'ought' is for ethics an ultimate notion; if a man will not allow that one course of action may be more reasonable than an- other, and therefore have a greater claim upon him as a rational being, ethics can do nothing with that man. Wherefore, of course, ethics must refuse to recognize such a man as a moral agent, i.e., as a man in the ethical sense, at all. And, consequently, it may be said quite correctly, and in fact tautologically, that for ethics man must be regarded as moral from the very beginning—the beginning, not, of course, of man, but of moral man or of morality. But all these admissions do not go the least way to prove that man had not an existence for biology or for non-ethical psychology before he had any existence which ethics can recognize; nor yet to prove, that in the individual the 'feeling of obligation' is in any way innate or instinctive, by which would be meant, I suppose, that it corresponded to some inherited psycho-physical disposition and was immediately aroused by the presentation or apprehension of an appropriate object. Nor are there any ethical motives for denying that the consciousness of obligation is generated in the individual by a process of education,