A REVERSAL OF PERSPECTIVE IN ETHICAL THEORY[1]
I.
THE dependence of a religion or an ethical movement upon what is called its 'human appeal' is a common-place among historians and other observers of affairs. The fact has, however, not had due recognition in the building of ethical theories. It is true that the varied interests of men to which such an appeal may be made may often be too abstractly conceived. It becomes fatally easy, in this way, to mistake the physiological priority of certain human interests for an unbending authority and power which they are supposed to have in the molding of men's conduct and institutions. But errors like these cannot justify a rationalistic recoil to the opposite extreme. For the truest teaching in the world must be ineffectual if the unregenerate who stand in need of it are not somehow moved, in their very sluggishness and perversity, to turn and lay hold upon it. Moreover, the actual acceptance of any new teaching may impose sacrifices and surrenders upon the individual which are in themselves unwelcome; and, again, in proportion to the degree of generality with which a new rule or formula may be stated, there is a call for intellectual effort in the use of it. Clearly, then, a man's resolve to put off his old life and put on a new must be a matter of motives and 'sufficient reasons,' and these considerations must suffice, not merely to confirm the change when it is viewed in retrospect, but first of all to make the change seem worth while to one who has the venture yet to make.
For a man or an organized society of men, a sense of needing new guidance comes, let us say, of blunders in self-seeking and of the loneliness and remorse that follow upon injury done to others. For the more self-observant it may come also of a certain impatient indignation at their own vacillation in the complexities of
- ↑ Read in part at the meeting of the Western Philosophical Association in Madison, Wis., April 16-17, 1920.
