Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE ROOTS OF ETHICS If before they had comen to the popular and received notions of virtue and vice, pleasure and pain, and the rest, they had stayed a little longer upon the enquiry concerning the roots of good and evil, and the strings of those roots, they had given, in my opinion, a great light to that which followed.?Francis Bacon. It is not altogether an easy task to say with precision at what atage in the evolution of psychical life the modes of feeling and action which we call moral make their first appearance in a rudimentary form. In our attempt to find an appropriate starting-point for our review of the phenomena of the ethical life, we are unavoidably exposed to the risk of choosing our point of departure either too high or too low in the scale of psychical development. If our speculative interest lies chiefly in the description and analysis of the ethical facts as they present themselves in their fullest development in the conscious and systematic morality of civilised persons and races, we shall naturally be tempted to find the essential characteristics of morality in the possession of a sense of responsibility, a feeling of reverence for the moral law, or a concept of common good. If, on the other hand, what impresses us most strongly is the evidence afforded by comparative physiology and psychology for the continuousness of all bodily and mental life, we shall probably incline to simplify our notion of the requisites of moral action so as to embrace under that term as far as possible not only human but animal behaviour. It should be clear, however, that both these courses are open to serious objection. If we demand, for instance, with Green, as high a standard of intelligence as is implied in the possession of a concept of common good before we ...
Synopsis
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