a moral faculty, and pronounced one thing right, and an other wrong. This view is quite inadmissible; at variance with facts, and the well-known laws of the human mind. The moral faculty is one of the earliest to develop itself. It appears in childhood, manifesting itself, not as an acquired and secondary principle, the result of a complicated process of associated and transferred emotion, requiring time for its gradual formation and growth, but rather as an original instinctive principle of nature. Adam Smith, in his " Theory of Moral Sentiments," has proposed a view which falls properly under the general theory of association, and may be regarded as a modification. of it. He attributes our moral perceptions to the feeling of sympathy. To adopt the feelings of another is to approve them. If those feelings are such as would naturally be awakened in us by the same objects, we approve them as morally proper. Sympathy with the gratitude of one who has received a favor, leads us to regard the benefaction as meritorious. Sympathy with the resentment of an injured man, leads us to regard the injurer as worthy of punishment, and so the sense of demerit originates; sympathy with the feelings of others respecting our own conduct gives rise to self-approval and sense of duty. Rules of morality are merely a summary of these sentiments. Whatever credit may be due to this ingenious writer, for calling attention to a principle which had not been sufficiently taken into account by preceding philosophers, we cannot but regard it as an insufficient explanation of the present case. In the first place, we are not conscious of the element of sympathy in the decisions and perceptions of the moral faculty. We look at a given action as right or wrong, and approve of it, or condemn it on that ground, because it is right or wrong, not because we sympathize with the feelings awakened by the act in the minds of others. If the process now supposed intervened between our knowledge of the act, and our judgment of its morality, we should know it and recognize it as a distinct element. Furthermore, sympathy, like other emotions, has one imperative character, and, even if it might be supposed to suggest to the mind some idea of moral distinctions, cannot of itself furnish a foundation for those feelings of obligation which accompany and characterize the decisions of the moral faculty. But more than this, the view now taken makes the standard of right and wrong variable, and dependent on the feelings of men. We must know how others think and feel, how the thing affects them, before we can know whether a given act is right or wrong, to be performed or avoided. And then, furthermore, our feelings must agree with theirs; there must be sympathy and harmony of views and feelings, else the result will not follow. If anything prevents us from knowing what are the feelings of others with respect to a given course of conduct, or if for any reason we fail to sympathize with those feelings, we can have no conscience in the matter. As those feelings vary, so will our moral perceptions vary. We have no fixed standard. There is no place left for right, as such, and absolutely. If no sympathy, then no duty, no right, no morality. We have, as yet, found no satisfactory explanation of the origin of our moral ideas and perceptions. They seem not to be the result of education and imitation, nor yet of legal enactment. They seem to be natural, rather than artificial and acquired. Yet we cannot trace them to the action of the sensitive part of our nature. They are not the product of a special sense, nor yet of the combined and associated action of certain natural emotions, much less of any one emotion, as sympathy. And yet they are a part of our nature. Place man where you will, surround him with what influences you will, you still find in him, to some extent at least, indications of a moral nature; a nature modified indeed by circumstances, but never wholly obliterated. Evidently we must refer the ideas in question, then, to the intellectual, since they do not belong to the sensitive, part of our nature. 5. Are they then the product and operation of the faculty of judgment? But the judgment does not originate ideas. It compares, distributes, estimates, decides to what class and category a thing belongs, but creates nothing. I have in mind the idea of a triangle, a circle, etc. So soon as certain figures are presented to the eye, I refer them at once, by an act of judgment, to the class to which they be long. I affirm that to be a triangle, this, a circle, etc.; the judgment does this. But judgment does not furnish my mind with the primary idea of a circle, etc. It deals with this idea already in the mind. So in our judgment of the beauty and deformity of objects. The perception that a landscape or painting is beautiful, is, in one sense, an act of judgment; but it is an act which presupposes the idea of the beautiful already in the mind that so judges. So also of moral distinctions. Whence comes the idea of right and wrong which lies at the foundation of every particular judgment as to the moral character of actions? This is the question before us, still unanswered; and to this there remains but one reply. 6. The ideas in question are intuitive; suggestions or perceptions of reason. The view now proposed may be thus stated: It is the office of reason to discern the right and the wrong, as well as the true and the false, the beautiful and the reverse. Regarded subjectively, as conceptions of the human mind, right and wrong, as well as beauty and its opposite, truth and its opposite, are simple ideas, incapable of analysis or definition; intuitions of reason. Regarded as objective, right and wrong are realities, qualities absolute, and inherent in the nature of things, not fictitious, not the play of human fancy or human feeling, not relative merely to the human mind, but independent, essential, universal, absolute. As such, reason recognizes their existence. Judgment decides that such and such actions do possess the one or the other of these qualities; are right or wrong actions. There follows the sense of obligation to do or not to do, and the consciousness of merit or demerit as we comply, or fail to comply, with the same. In view of these perceptions emotions arise, but only as based upon them. The emo tions do not, as the sentimental school affirm, originate the idea, the perception; but the idea, the perception, give rise to the emotion. We are so constituted as to feel certain emotions in view of the moral quality of actions, but the idea and perception of that moral quality must precede, and it is the office of reason to produce this. There are certain simple ideas which must be regarded as first truths, or first principles, of the human understanding, essential to its operations, ideas universal, absolute, necessary. Such are the ideas of personal existence and identity of time and space, as conditions of material existence; of number, cause, and mathematical relation. Into this class fall the ideas of the true, the beautiful, the right, and their opposites. The fundamental maxims of reasoning and morals, find here their place. These are in a sense intuitive perceptions; not strictly innate, yet connate; the foundation for them being laid in our nature and constitution. So soon as the mind reaches a certain stage of development they present themselves. Circumstances may promote or retard their appearance. They depend on opportunity to furnish the occasion of their springing up, yet they are nevertheless the natural, spontaneous development of the human soul, as really a part of our nature, as are any of our instinctive impulses, or our mental attributes. They are a part of that native intelligence with which we are endowed by the author of our being. These intuitions of ours, are not themselves the foundation of right and wrong; they do not make one thing right and another wrong; but they are simply the reason why we so regard them. Such we believe to be the true account of the origin of our moral peceptions. We have directed our attention, thus far, to the first of the several elements that constitute the moral faculty, viz. the perception of the right and wrong in actions. We proceed, now, to discuss the second of these elements or mental pro cesses. II. The perception of obligation. No sooner do we apprehend a given act as right or wrong, than we recognize, also, a certain obligation resting on us with respect to that act, either to do, or to avoid, the same. It is a conviction of the mind, inseparable from the perception of the right. Given: a clear perception of the one, and one cannot escape the other. The question arises here, what is the ground of this OUGHT, what constitutes it; what is that, in any given action, that imposes on me the obligation to do, or not to do, the same? I ought to do this, and that. Why ought? Whatever answer we may give to this question, we must come back ultimately to the simple position, we ought, because it is right; the rightness of a given course constitutes the obligation, on our part, to adhere to the same. Given the one; given, also, the other. The question, then, What constitutes obligation? resolves itself into this: What constitutes right? This is a question of no little moment. It has received, at different times and from different writers, widely different answers; and these various answers constitute so many different theories of morals. They lead us over an interesting and important field of inquiry, involving one of the deepest and most difficult problems in the whole range of philosophy. This is altogether a distinct question from the one already discussed, though often confounded with it by ethical writers. The question is not, now: Whence our ideas of right? but, What makes right, what is right itself? It is quite possible that what is, to me, the source of the idea of right, may not be the foundation of right itself. I derive my idea of time from the succession of events, my idea of space from extension; but succession does not constitute time, nor extension space; on the contrary, time is necessary to succession, and space to extension. The latter presuppose the former, and could not be without them. So with respect to moral distinctions I may, or may not, be indebted for the idea of right, as it exists in my mind, to that which is the foundation of right itself. : The principal theories of morals, or grounds of obligation, proposed by different writers, may be reduced, perhaps, to |
