516 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
In this case, as in others, society does not fabricate the instru- ment of control, but turns to account something already at hand. The beginning of moral philosophy is the honest interpretation of genuine experience. Over and over again choice spirits have given us the record of their inward struggles and their ethical salvation. In the Psalms and the Prophets, in the neo-Platonists and the stoics, and all down through the Christian centuries, we detect the note of moral crisis and triumph. But these stood as sequestered fountains of inspiration to which the few repaired. They were undisturbed until the break-down of other engines of regulation compelled society to cast about for fresh stimulus. Then the phenomena of the ethical consciousness were anxiously explored, analyzed, and interpreted by many thinkers ; and these interpretations came to be organized into an imposing moral philosophy, which, to paraphrase a famous saying about the papacy, might be termed "the ghost of theology sitting crowned upon the grave thereof."
As the English theology of the early eighteenth century was simply the reflection of British constitutionalism, so this moral philosophy is modern legalism translated into consciousness. The " moral law " is the inner counterpart of that " law " which at the close of the later Middle Ages began to draw to itself the authority of the absolute monarch, and finally became supreme. That this abstraction is a figment there is scarcely need to show Psychology has turned its object-glass on the phenomena of 11 oughtness " and " moral responsibility," and bids fair to fur- nish ere long a genetic account of them. 1 A sacred or ethical psychology will prove no more immune than sacred cosmology from the biting acid of scientific criticism. The keen inquisitive spirit of the age bids fair to disintegrate all dogmas, however serviceable they may be, which cannot meet the modern tests.
The system just described remained no mere theory among theories but, when caught up by a society looking for a new discipline, becomes a full-blown creed and confession of faith. The pulpit is propped with it. Political thinkers anchor to it.
1 See BALDWIN'S Mental Development: Social Interpretations for a brilliant example.
