that it directs us in regard to alternative courses of conduct conceived as equally possible.
The consciousness of obligation is so intimately conjoined with the perception of rectitude that the older intellectual moralists tended to identify them. They made the recognition of rightness the essence of obligation. But at the present day few, if any, would assert that the consciousness of goodness is the very same thing as the consciousness of obligation. The inseparable association of the two is all that would be maintained: we cannot discern the right without bowing to its authority. It has, indeed, been claimed that, as our consciousness of moral distinctions is a cognition, our consciousness of obligation is cognition likewise. But it seems more correct to say that, though we know the right, we feel its authority. The feeling is what we call the sense of obligation. Though dependent upon an intellectual act—the recognition of rightness—it seems in its own nature to be a purely emotional experience. So much is clear; whether anything further can be made out regarding this unique feeling, is next to be considered.
In answering this question, care must be taken to eliminate all other problems. Especially must it be borne in mind that the origin of categorical imperatives, of authoritative moral law, in the history of humanity is one thing, and that the emergence in each individual of a feeling of obligation to obey those objective behests is quite another thing. In this respect we may compare morality with language. The individual feels himself under obligation to observe the existing rules of orthography, orthoepy, and syntax; but to account for this feeling would not be to account for the grammatical rules themselves. We must have a theory of language as well as a theory of the individual speaker's attitude towards language. The case is the same with morality. Every son of man who comes into the world finds morality, like language, there before him and over him. This objective morality consists of rules which make unconditionally imperative demands upon him. But he too, in time, shows a sense of obligation to respond to these objective requirements. Here there are two
