they ought to desire, and how they ought to act, but it is a necessary preliminary to this determination. This is obvious. But there has been also an illegitimate intrusion of Psychology into the sphere of Ethics, caused by the specific ethical doctrine held by some thinkers as to the grounds of moral distinctions. In the writings of the eighteenth-century moralists, this confusion between the two sciences is very common. The inquiry into the nature and origin of the moral faculty often occupies the largest part of their ethical treatises. This purely psychological inquiry was actually called "the Theory of Morals," as Reid tells us,1 while he adds, with his usual common sense, that "it has little connection with the knowledge of our duty." "It is," he says, "a very important part of the philosophy of the human mind (i.e., Psychology), and ought to be considered as such, but not as any part of morals." The intuitionalists of the period believed that their doctrine somehow depended on certain psychological views as to the faculty which was held to immediately apprehend the moral quality of actions or the truth of moral judgments. The hedonists attacked their psychology as the most easy way of upsetting their ethical conclusions. Nowadays the whole discussion is felt to be unsatisfactory. The validity of a judgment cannot be settled by an inquiry into its origin, although a knowledge of the origin may help us in determining the amount of credence we may provisionally give to it. 1 Works, ed. Hamilton, p. 642, b. To assign the elements which can be detected in a complex state of consciousness and to trace the development of the psychosis through lower forms is not the only thing to be done. A living being is something more than a mechanical mixture of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and so forth; a scientific concept or a moral emotion is something more than the elements into which the psychologist analyses it. There is room for another analysis which shall estimate the objective meaning and import of the psychosis as it exists here and now. § 2. The Moral Faculty. Psychologists have analysed mind into intellect, emotion, and will. These are all concerned in morality; not only in the production of moral action, but also in the perception of moral truth. For we must remember that the faculties are abstractions. The intellect does not think, nor the emotions feel. The whole man thinks and feels and acts; and in all moral apprehension there are elements of intellect, emotion, and conation. Of course any judgment or perception must in the main be an intellectual state; that is, the intellectual elements will be the most specialized and important. But the concrete state of mind, the psychosis, is a living whole. "Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers, Vain labour! Deep and broad, where none may see, MATTHEW ARNOLD. We have already alluded to the intrusion of discussions on the nature of the moral faculty which characterizes eighteenth-century moral philosophy in It is interesting to see how this intrusion England. came to take place. As long as Ethics was looked upon as the art of conduct, as a rationalizing of life, there was no need to suppose any special capacity for apprehending moral facts, because moral facts were not in kind different from other facts. When the jural view of Ethics began to obtain, owing to the influence of Roman law, and the influence of the Jewish scriptures, which formed a part of the Christian text-book of morality, an attempt was made to find out what laws were binding on all men quá men. Sir H. Maine has shown how the prætorian judges, stimulated by the Stoic philosophy, gave origin to the ideal of a jus naturale, which, as it were, lay behind the particular and specific laws of individual states. In the same way, the Christian theologians were influenced in their turn by the new ideal; they assumed the existence of a code of natural morality, binding on all men and implicitly contained in the customs and positive laws of all races of men. They distinguished this from the Jewish code, and from the ecclesiastical code binding on Christians, as P well as from the code of state law. What was felt to be obligatory by all was part of the original moral deposit. The conscience was the test or criterion of the natural code. What the conscience forbade was forbidden by God universally for all men. Thus the nature of conscience or moral faculty became a supremely interesting point. It was clearly something very special-something different from the rest of human nature, since its deliverances were practically revelations of the will of God. It was not dependent on the accidents of education; but was clearly innate, given to every man by God as a light to conduct. This innateness was denied by Locke; who, however, undoubtedly misunderstood the doctrine he attacked. Broadly speaking, the Schoolmen and the Platonists, e.g. More and Cudworth, taught not that there existed ready-made moral ideas in the minds of children and savages; but that there existed at birth a moral faculty which was capable of development. That they attached too little importance to the need of education and experience may be true, but they did not as a rule deny it. §3. Moral Sense. The term 66 sense of right and wrong" was used by Shaftesbury to indicate the "reflecting faculty" which in rational beings takes notice of their various impulses and approves or disapproves them according as they are good or bad. Shaftesbury was no psychologist ; and he does not make clear whether this 66 sense was mainly of the nature of thought or of the nature of emotion; whether it was like Locke's internal sense, i.e., introspective consciousness, or whether it was simply a form of emotion, the cause of which lay not in external objects but in the affections (or impulses) themselves. Probably he thought of it as at once. perceptive and emotional. The moral sense doctrine was developed by Hutcheson and other writers. There was in the middle of the eighteenth century a growing tendency to lay stress on emotion. In England it is found in the writings of the novelists, Richardson, Sterne, and Mackenzie, as well as in the formal treatises of the moral-sense school. On the continent it is especially associated with the name of Rousseau. Connected with it was the general tendency of psychologists, lasting till the middle of the present century, to analyse all intellectual acts into subjective associations of feelings. Judgment itself was looked on as a mere association of impressions, immediate or remembered. Hence the most prominent and tangible factor in the complex state we call moral approbation became the emotion which accompanies the perception; just as the perception of the beautiful was resolved into feeling. Neither Hutcheson nor Hume denies that there is an element of judgment or perception in the apprehension of moral quality. But they both assert that the distinctive and peculiar feature of this apprehension was the presence of a special kind of emotion, akin to that |