Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/179

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No. 2.]
REASON AND FEELING IN ETHICS.
167

individuals clearly differ at the start, and which cannot be changed, fundamentally, by thinking about them. Of course a rational treatment of our natural dispositions may modify them largely. But that there is a limit to this, the facts of experience seem to show plainly. And, in the second place, the only test of whether we have got the right answer is not strictly an intellectual test, or an appeal to the truth of intellectual or relational judgments, but a feeling test,—the sense of satisfaction which tells us that our action really meets our personal demands. This is not a calculus of pleasures, or any sort of construction through analysis, but a unitary state of being in which the different factors of our lives may experimentally be reduced to a harmony such as no speculative activity of thought can hope, in the practical realm, to achieve.

A. K. Rogers.

Yale University.