when it is applied to the superiority of the general good over what is just mine, seems to me to get its ethical significance only as it calls up the judgment of triviality; and the trivial differs from the less precisely in the emotional feeling of dislike which accompanies it. Of the feeling, one not unimportant ingredient is in a special sense intellectual,—the dislike which a reasonable being has of falling below the standard of impartiality and intellectual fairness, as he would do were he to exalt the claims of one unit over the—in the eyes of reason—equal claims of others.[1]
If, therefore, I am asked to pronounce on the relative place of intellect and feeling in the ethical judgment, I should attempt to answer somewhat as follows: There is of course no ethical judgment without the exercise of the intellect; and our more complex and matured ones are shot through with intellectual elements. What I shall consider good in the concrete depends on my whole experience of life; my possibilities of appreciation, both positive and negative, represent a progressive refinement of taste which could not go on apart from more and more subtle intellectual distinctions also. Nevertheless, after I have made all these distinctions, there is something still which must not be left outside the picture; and that is the way in which the thing appeals to my feeling. Without this, the 'value' quality in the 'good' and the 'ought,' which distinguishes them from a mere judgment of fact or truth, would not be accounted for. And this emotional element goes back, apparently, not to intellect, but to our given constitution with its emotional possibilities; even the 'intellectual' elements which I have just noticed are in terms,
- ↑ I might add that this same condemnation of the petty may explain also why many forms which this very judgment itself takes are condemned. Why is it that the man who is over-ready to despise as petty other interests and standards than his own, to condemn poetry, say, because it is not science, or the man of quiet tastes because he is not strenuous and eager to mix in 'big' affairs, or the student or artist because he isn't enthusiastic over uplift, makes upon us the unsatisfactory impression that he does? For the reason, I think, that his own judgment shows narrowness and provincialism; the more our insight and our interests broaden, the more we are able to recognize the significance of things for which we may have ourselves no special bent, and the more we see how unintelligent therefore is the common disposition to think that no one understands how to live except ourselves.
