problems behind us, we are also making way for others ahead. Thus, there is always bound to be some discrepancy between intention and result, and this is the condition of progress. This inadequacy of motive or intention is not only the condition, but may also be called the method of conscious advancement. Effectual intention, that is, a complete adjustment, may be expressed in terms of habit; and ineffectual intention, in terms of desire or effort. It is, then, the transformation of the inefficient into the efficient, or the strenuous into the habitual, which constitutes moral action. If there were no failures of intention, there would soon cease to be any successes. An act is good when it is adequate to the situation, but it is adequate only when it embodies and expresses a man's whole intention when it reforms and unites all his previous inadequate attempts.
Finally, the psychological discussion turns to the distinction between 'pro-ethical' and truly ethical sanctions. The proethical sanctions are designated as fear of "the seen ruler, of the unseen ruler, and of public opinion" "Only after political, religious, and social restraints have produced a stable community, can there be sufficient experience of the pains, positive and negative, sensational and emotional, which crimes of aggression cause, as to generate that moral aversion to them constituted by consciousness of their intrinsically evil results." Also: "The restraints properly distinguished as moral, are unlike these restraints out of which they evolve ... in this they refer not to the extrinsic effects of actions but to their intrinsic effects."[1] Fear of authority, of coercion, and of public opinion are, then, according to Spencer, motives which have reference to the merely extrinsic results of acts, they represent an external control. The truly ethical sanctions, as implied in the above quotations and in Spencer's whole hedonistic standpoint, are the pleasure and pain which result 'intrinsically' or 'naturally' from an act. Applying our criticism to this viewpoint, we should say that intrinsic and extrinsic are relative, not absolute terms that there is no given result of an act which is more intrinsic than another. Respect for public opinion is just as internal as any motive can be
- ↑ Principles of Ethics, Pt. I, ch. 7, §45.
