Воок І. CH. II. PART IV. $ 37. The Moral Sense. immediately valid, and there is no appeal from its perception. Much needless confusion has arisen from the fact that it perceives all objects alike, and perceives them at one time as right, at another as wrong, the judgment varying with every change of circumstance, knowledge, feeling, or stage of development, so that what a man at one time condemns, at another time he approves, and what one generation or one nation finds the highest virtue another judges as the lowest depravity. The appeal is not from the moral sense to another sense or another rule, but from the moral sense to itself; the moral sense alone reverses or confirms its own decisions. The confusion is between the nature of the moral sense and its history, between its general character as a moral sense and the particular characters which it assumes from time to time, all agreeing in the same general characteristic. The validity of its judgment from time to time is supreme; what it says now is the criterion of goodness and the law of conduct for the Subject who perceives and acts. This validity is not impaired by its progressiveness; at all stages of development, and whatever may be the other content of the object or act perceived as right or as wrong, the validity of the perception is the same, being immediate. All content is indifferent to it; if the content were particular, the validity would be transient with the content. 4. Now in what does this validity consist, or whence is it derived? It is a repetition of the perception of justice. Whatever whole or concrete object is perceived to contain a just, equal, or congruous, arrangement of moments or of parts, that object is perceived as morally right, and its opposite as morally wrong. Validity is derived solely from the formal element in consciousness; and the perception of the right, or moral goodness, in any object, the emotional aspect of which framework is the moral sense, is a judgment passed upon the total object in virtue of the congruity which it contains or includes. The moral sense thus takes into account the two elements formal and material; its objects consist of both; and in this respect it differs from the emotion of justice which is indifferent to the material element, the emotion, in which the congruity is displayed. This gives the difference of character between justice and the moral sense, although the validity of the latter is derived solely from, or is a repetition of, the former. There is a perception of quality of emotion, and quality of pleasure and pain of enjoyment, in the doubly reflective emotion of the moral sense; it is not merely a judgment of right and wrong, but a qualitative emotion as well. It is a love of right, an emotional feeling towards it, or rather towards the objects which contain it, when they are pleasureable in their own quality. The material emotional element in objects perceived as morally good is some kind of pleasure of enjoyment, in objects perceived as morally bad some kind of pain of the same class. The additional emotional element in the moral sense, over and above that contained in justice, is due to this pleasure and this pain of its objects. Pleasures which are just are the objects of the emotion of moral goodness, excluding pleasures which are unjust; and pains which are unjust are objects of the emotion of moral badness, excluding pains which are just. The pleasure of moral goodness is double, consisting of a pleasure of enjoyment and a pleasure of admiration. The justice of emotions is in this BOOK I. CH. II. PART IV. $37. The Moral Sense. Book I. PART IV. § 37. The Moral Sense. respect the negative condition, the condition sine qua non, of the emotion of moral sense being felt towards any object or arising in any framework. This double character of the emotion of moral sense has enabled writers to be misled either into attributing its validity to the qualitative element, the pleasure of enjoyment, or into cutting down its nature to its formal character alone. Both characters are proper to it, in inseparable union. It is the whole man, the focus to which all his feelings converge, and in which they are fused; every feeling and every object in the whole empirical ego stands in some relation to it, and undergoes its judgment as means or as end, as intermediate means or ultimate end. It is the union of emotion arising from form and emotion arising from matter. 5. Let us dwell for a little upon the operation of this emotion of moral sense. Its form is justice or injustice, its matter the other emotions. But in operation, as set in motion by desire or by the passion of morality, as the will to be more and more good and right, it must follow some certain course of development and progress. All pleasureable emotions will be desired; its aim will be to include all that are pleasureable, and to exclude all that are painful. Its accompanying condition, under which alone they can be so included or excluded, is justice, the harmony or congruity of the Subject's mind with the minds of other persons, together with the applications and deductions from this principle, as will appear farther on. The formal element in consciousness, which was shown in "Time and Space" to be the ground of all logical pursuit of truth, or truth of reasoning, is here also, as the source of justice, the ground of all practical pursuit of truth, or of all volition, all action, for the attainment of good moral purposes, and, as included in them, of all purposes whatever that are good. All pleasures will be candidates for admission into the kingdom of morality; those only will be admitted which are in accordance with justice. How profound and true then appears the insight of Plato, who laid the corner stone of his Republic, and of the inner Republic of each individual, in the conception of justice. If the moral sense in each of its particular acts or perceptions is the moment which admits each thought and each feeling into citizenship in the True Ego of morality, the complete assemblage and cooperation of those that are admitted and abide is the realisation of perfect justice; if the moral sense in each particular act is the modern counterpart of the bare conception of a réλos, or end of action, the completed harmony of these acts in their entirety must be the counterpart of the completion of the reλos, that is to say, of εvdaspovía, the Summum Bonum, Happiness. 6. Now the moral sense when it looks forward in time, to the next moment or act, judging what act, thought, or feeling, shall be admitted through itself into the True Ego, looks to a réλos, or end, near or remote; the looking forward in time is looking to an end. In this respect it is the same as the ancient mode, and its standard or ultimate end is happiness, in the future. But when it looks backward in time, and judges its past acts, thoughts, or feelings, then two modes of the moral sense arise, which have been brought into prominence chiefly in modern times; the two modes are those of selfapproval and self-condemnation, which are appro Book I. CH. II. PART IV. $37. The Moral Sense. Book I. CH. II. PART IV. § 37. The Moral Sense. § 38. History and priately named from their emotional element Good Conscience and Remorse. There is no appeal, the judgment passed upon self by the moral sense is final. The acts, thoughts, or feelings, so judged, are what they are felt to be, morally good or morally bad. If the former, they must be persevered in and enforced; if the latter, they must be repented of and forsaken. The whole man is judged of by whether he does or does not so persevere and so repent; and, if he does so, then acts of perseverance and repentance, being continuations of his life forwards in time, take place and entrance, through the gate of the moral sense, among the acts, thoughts, and feelings, which together constitute the completed End of Happiness. The present act of perseverance or repentance looks both ways, backwards and forwards; and at every present moment the moral sense is the Janus of a new life. § 38. 1. The analysis here given of the moral method of the sense applies to it at every stage of its development, both in the individual and in the race. But at every Moral Sense. stage it will have a different content, will combine with different emotions, commanding, forbidding, and otherwise arranging them. Let us take a brief view of this its historical course, and of the method which it has pursued up to that stage of development which is the one reached at the present day in modern Europe. In the first place comes the question, How does the moral sense command or forbid an emotion or an action? The moral sense in that branch of it which approves, that is, the emotion of moral right, commands any action or feeling with which it combines either inseparably and inevitably, which is Kant's Categorical Imperative, or separably, that is, |