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Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge
Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy
These lectures were given to a summer meeting of clergy, held atCambridge in the month of July last. Some passages have been added asthey were written out for the press, and the crudities of the spokenword have, I hope, been pruned away; but, in other respects, theoriginal plan of the lectures has been retained. They are nowpublished in the hope that they may prove of interest to those whoheard them, and to others who may desire an account, in short compassand in popular form, of some leading features of the ethical thoughtof the present day.
It is inevitable for such an account to be controversial: otherwise itcould not give a true picture of contemporary opinion. Intellectualand social causes have conspired to accentuate traditional differencesin ethics, and to make the questions in dispute penetrate to the veryheart of morality. It has been my aim to trace the new influenceswhich are at work, and to estimate the value of the ethical doctrinesto which they have seemed to lead. The estimate has taken the form ofa criticism, but the criticism is in the interests of construction.
CAMBRIDGE, 7th March, 1904.
A survey of ethical thought, especially English ethical thought,during the last century would have to lay stress upon onecharacteristic feature. It was limited in range,—limited, one maysay, by its regard for the importance of the facts with which ithad to deal. The thought of the period was certainly not withoutcontroversy; it was indeed controversial almost to a fault. Butthe controversies of the time centred almost exclusively round twoquestions: the question of the origin of moral ideas, and the questionof the criterion of moral value. These questions were of coursetraditional in the schools of philosophy; and for more than a centuryEnglish moralists were mainly occupied with inherited topics ofdebate. They gave precision to the questions under discussion; andtheir controversies defined the traditional opposition of ethicalopinion, and separated moralists into two hostile schools known asUtilitarian and Intuitionist.
As regards the former question—that of the origin of moral ideas—theUtilitarian School held that they could be traced to experience; andby 'experience' they meant in the last resort sense-perceptionsand the feelings of pleasure and of pain which accompany or followsense-perception. All the facts of our moral consciousness,therefore,—the knowledge of right and wrong, the judgments ofconscience, the recognition of duty and responsibility, the feelingsof reverence, remorse, and moral indignation,—all these could betraced, they thought, to an origin in experience, to an origin whichin the last resort was sensuous, that is, due to the perceptions ofthe senses and the feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany orfollow them.
With regard to the criterion or standard of m