Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/369

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355
REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
[Vol. XIII.

the analogous error, which Kant regarded as the cardinal point of his system and which has received immensely wide acceptance—the erroneous view that to be 'true' or 'real' is equivalent to being thought in a particular way. In this discussion the main points to which I desire to direct attention are these: (a) That Volition and Feeling are not analogous to Cognition in the manner assumed; since in so far as these words denote an attitude of the mind towards an object, they are themselves merely instances of Cognition: they differ only in repect of the kind of object of which they take cognisance, and in respect of the other mental accompaniments of such cognitions: (b) That universally the object of a cognition must be distinguished from the cognition of which it is the object; and hence that in no case can the question whether the object is true be identical with the question how it is cognised or whether it is cognised at all: it follows that even if the proposition 'This is good' were always the object of certain kinds of will or feeling, the truth of that proposition could in no case be established by proving that it was their object ; far less can that proposition itself be identical with the proposition that its subject is the object of a volition or a feeling" (pp. 139-141).

Chapter V deals with the "Ethics in Relation to Conduct." "The main points in this chapter, to which I desire to direct attention, may be summarised as follows: (1) I first pointed out how the subject-matter with which it deals, namely ethical judgments on conduct, involves a question, utterly different in kind from the two previously discussed, namely: (a) What is the nature of the predicate peculiar to Ethics? and (b) What kinds of things themselves possess this predidate? Practical Ethics asks, not, 'What ought to be?' but 'What ought we to do?'; it asks what actions are duties, what actions are right, and what wrong: and all these questions can only be answered by showing the relation of the actions in question, as causes or necessary conditions, to what is good in itself. The enquiries in Practical Ethics thus fall entirely under the third division of ethical questions—questions which ask, 'What is good as a means?' which is equivalent to 'What is a means to good—what is cause or necessary condition of things good in themselves?' But (2) it asks this question, almost exclusively, with regard to actions which it is possible for most men to perform, if only they will them; and with regard to these, it does not ask merely, which among them will have some good or bad result, but which, among all the actions possible to volition at any moment, will produce the best total result. To assert that an action is a duty, is to assert that it is such a possible action, which will always, in