2. CHRISTINA NORTH. By E. M. Archer. Part VI., Macmillan's Magazine, 3. WIT AND HUMOUR, POETRY. British Quarterly Review, Pall Mall Gazette,. 510 450 | LAST WORDS OF A DYING FIRE-WORSHIPPER, 450 SHORT ARTICLES. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers. the LIVING AGE will be punctually for. warded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year. nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club THE LIVING AGE with another periodical. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY. useful thing which can even yet be put into the hand of a student. But it is equally From The Contemporary Review. THE RADICAL QUESTION IN ETHICS. TWENTY years ago, the controversy be-true that this split in the ethical camp is a tween the two great speculative schools of ethics in this country was quite as confused as it is at present, though perhaps not so loud. When then studying it for the first time, at the University of Edinburgh, it occurred to us that there was a distinction lying very near the roots of the science, which both parties habitually ignored, but which, if recognized, might do much towards reconciling them. The discussion, which has smouldered so long, has during the last three years been fanned again into a gentle conflagration; but neither now nor formerly does the exact distinction of which we speak appear to have occurred to speculators on the subject. And the two great parties still remain unreconciled. Under somewhat new names they hold their old positions, and neither is willing to surrender so much as must be conceded before any solid result is attained between them. It is therefore a suitable enough time to state a distinction, which, if true, would drive a wedge into the very core of the question. permanent and, in one sense, a necessary one. It is, in fact, no other than that larger division which has run through the whole of philosophy in all ages, and which ranges thinkers on opposite sides now as it did before the days of Socrates. It is well understood that, under the names of Idealist and Intellectualist and Intuitionalist and many another designation, on the one hand, and of Empiricist and Sensationalist and Materialist and similar titles, on the other, the abstract thinkers of each generation inevitably divide and separate, and mass themselves together, age after age, with a wonderful persistency. In ethics, at all events, especially in modern times and on British soil, this has been the great distinction; and each new inquirer into what we may provisionally call conscience or the moral faculty finds his place according as he derives it from sense and experience on the one hand, or traces it to a special innate or original capacity on the other. There have been subdivisions, of course, in each of the two schools. NotaWe have spoken of two schools of ethics. bly among the Intuitionalists there has It is hardly necessary to say that there is been a difference as to whether the moral such a thing as speculative ethics, or moral faculty, which they all claim as original and philosophy, distinct from mere morals or native to man, is more of the nature of morality; that it is one thing to teach dog- reason or of feeling; some of them thinkmatically that such and such things are ing that moral approbation, though in itright, another to inquire what we mean by self a unique and separate phenomenon, is saying they are right, or how we come to analogous to a judgment of the intellect, know that they are so. Moral philosophy, while others find in it a greater resemethical science, the theory of moral senti-blance to an emotion of the heart. Either ments, have been generally treated. we may be held, provided the moral judgment shall at least treat them in this paper belonging to the region of inquiry, of speculation, and of analysis. We have not to deal with any system of moral precepts, but with that which underlies it- the inquiry how we may get at such a system, and whether, when found, it can have for us any value and authority. Now there is no doubt that ethics, taking it in this sense, has always, and especially in our country, been divided into two hostile schools, and the map of speculation which Sir James Mackintosh has drawn on this principle of division, is on the whole historically correct, and is probably the most as in the one case, and the moral sentiment in the other, are not resolved into the elements of sensible experience. So, too, on the opposite side. We shall find that the theories by which the moral faculty is explained away or analyzed into other constituents of our nature, are many. Hobbes is not as Adam Smith, and Adam Smith is not as John Stuart Mill. But in this subject of ethics they are all grouped together, because they profess to show in various ways how conscience is a product of man's common experience derived through the external senses. Now, before referring further to the the man ories, let us ascertain the object, or, if you | us what is right. It is represented by a prefer it, the subject, with which they proposition, or affirmation, or judgment, all deal. There is no dispute as to this. It is, putting it in the roughest way, the conscience or moral faculty of that part of our nature, or that function of our nature (for it may not be a separate part) which deals with such ideas as those of right and duty, and with the whole ethical relations which are connected therewith. With some such rough popular description all inquirers find it necessary to start, and they do not find practically that their conclusions are thereby prejudged. It is the next step that is the important one. We all deal with the moral faculty, or moral region of man's nature. But what is it that on looking into it, we find there? We find two things at the least. which is always a connection of two ideas. The one term of the proposition is an action, or class of actions, or at least some human relation, which is about to be judged of; the other term is the moral predicate (or idea, already spoken of), such as right, or wrong, or dutiful, which we affirm with regard to it. And when we have said that conscience, as popularly and indeed universally understood, involves not only moral ideas but moral judgments, we have said everything as to its extent which, for the purposes of this paper, is necessary. Thus we shall not meddle with the question whether the judgment, as we have called it, is a sudden flash of the moral sense, or a calm deduction of the reason; whether it arises intuitively within us on witnessing individual actions, or whether it abides with us permanently in the form of general moral criteria, which we simply apply from time to time to particular cases that come before us. All that is an unessential and subordinate matter. The judgment, this action is right, may in one man be accompanied by a perfect whirlwind of moral emotion, while another, who perceives and affirms it equally, may be perfectly unmoved in doing so. In both men the In the first place we find certain ideas, commonly called moral ideas, and represented in language by a class of words devoted to ethical purposes. Such words, for example, are right, wrong, duty, desert, responsibility, obligation, approbation. We do not here inquire in the least what the relation between these several ideas is; whether they are all cognate but independent conceptions, or whether some of them are not mere modifications of the others. Nor do we at this point enter into the question which meets us after-moral idea or conception of right is preswards, whether these ideas or any of them, peculiarly ethical as they look at first sight, may not be resolved into non-moral constituents, and be shown to be products of our ordinary experience. All we say, in the meantime, is, that the words and ideas are there, and that, as Sir James Mackintosh puts it, "it would be as reasonable to deny that space and greenness are significant words, as to affirm that ought, right, duty, virtue, are sounds without meaning." ent; and in both, also, there is the judgment formed by connecting this idea with a particular action. And, without in the least denying the ethical interest of the emotion accompanying the idea and the judgment, or suggesting that it too may not come properly within the sphere of the moral philosopher, we shall probably be allowed to hold that the nucleus and centre of the problem consists in the moral idea or conception which is common to both men, and in the moral judgment by which that idea is applied. But in the second place, no one, so far as we know, has represented conscience Now we have said that ethical writers as consisting merely in the possession of generally have regarded the moral faculty these abstract ideas. It consists rather as not a bare group of moral ideas, but in the application of these abstract ide as also as a judging faculty. But this is to human conduct. Conscience, or the hardly putting it correctly. It is as the moral faculty, has always been held to judging faculty that they have all looked be a judging faculty. It not merely at it. For the judgments, as we have gives us the abstract idea of right, it tells seen, include the moral ideas, which in Now, what is suggested is, that in so taking conscience as a whole as a faculty of nothing less than judgment—it is taken too indiscriminately; and that looking at it in this way in the rough, has been the cause of the ill-success which most reading men are willing to acknowl speculation in Britain. Without anticipating the exact statement, we may say that most men feel that the school of Hobbes and Hume and Bentham and Mill, while it has done a very great deal in unfolding the influences which account for conscience, and are said to create it as a standard, have yet always encountered a hard nucleus which defied their analysis a moral residuum which can in no way be made non-moral. And on the other hand, the party of Kant and Butler, and the high moralist generally, while they have victoriously repelled the attempts of their adversaries to analyze away all that is peculiarly moral, have been by no means so successful in their counter-endeavour to show that conscience as a standard — the faculty of moral judgment as a whole deed are merely one term or limb of the proposition, and perhaps would not exist in consciousness at all, except as called forth by the sudden moral judgment or affirmation. Conscience, then, according to the general definition hitherto, is a standard of moral judgment within the man, or at the least is a faculty of moral judg-edge has attended both schools of ethical ment within him; and the great question fought between the ethical schools is as to the origin and constitution of the judging faculty. On the one hand, there is the great school of innate idea or intuitionalism; who all assert with various voices that this standard or faculty of moral judginent is given us by God; that it is, or furnishes, a true criterion of moral facts, and that, being a special and peculiar faculty given man for this purpose, it cannot be explained or analyzed more than any of his other ultimate faculties can be. Some of them make this innate, or connate, or intuitive faculty to be of the nature of reason, like Cudworth; others, like Hutcheson, will have it to be rather a feeling or emotion, or sense; but they all assert that it is an ultimate endowment, and that its judgments, whether general or particular, whether calm applications of its own moral criterion, or flashes of sudden intuition, are equally unimpeachable. And so the opposite school, prolonged through centuries, has dealt also with conscience as a faculty of judgment. But its teachers have pointed out, like Hobbes, that the moral judg-couraging sense of fighting a losing battle. ments are explained by the law of the But if both parties are unsuccessful in country where the man happens to reside, claiming conscience as a whole, if there is or by the power of education, or by the something in our moral standard or facinfluence of example, or, (like Adam Smith) ulty of moral judgment which is to all apby the effect of sympathy, or, with Ben-pearance ultimate and incapable of analytham, by utility. As the former school insisted on the judging faculty, as a whole, being intuitive and God-given, so this will have no part of it to be other than factitious, analyzable, and explainable into influences outside morals altogether. On both sides conscience has been taken as a complexus of judgments, or at least as a judging faculty-in one word, as a standard. On the one hand, this standard is held to be an ultimate moral fact, and, on the other, it has been explained away into something that is not moral at all. - possesses this quality for which they contend. What part of our moral judgments is intuitive or innate they have found it impossible to say; and as the opposite party have certainly proved an enormous number of them to be merely factitious, and even shown whence they are derived; the intuitionalists have the dis sis, amid a great deal which has been or may be resolved, the field is open for any suggestion for splitting up the faculty which as a whole has been found so unmanageable. Let us try. certain We spoke provisionally of conscience as at least containing two things moral ideas, and certain judgments in which these moral ideas are applied to human actions or persons. What if it should turn out that the ultimate and unanalyzable thing in conscience is simply |