Professor Paulsen, a more recent critic of Kant, comes to a similar conclusion.[229] He thinks that Kant should have modified his formula in some such way as follows:—“The laws of morality are rules which might serve for a natural legislation for human life; in other words, rules that, when they guided conduct according to natural law, would result in the preservation and supreme development of human life.”
From whatever side we examine the problem of morality, we come to submit conduct to the laws of human nature. Sutherland, a modern author who discusses morality by the scientific method, defines morality as “conduct guided by rational sympathy.” Such sympathy would not subordinate the chief good of others to an advantage less important but more immediate. Thus a mother may sympathise with her child when it has to take some unpleasant medicine; but if her sympathy be rational she will not let it interfere with the health of the child.
In the foregoing case, sympathy has to be controlled by medical knowledge. In moral conduct generally, reason must be the determining factor, whatever be the inspiring motive of the conduct, whether it come from sympathy or from the sense of duty. And thus morality in the last resort must be based on scientific knowledge.
III
INDIVIDUALISM
Individual morality—History of two brothers brought up in same circumstances, but whose conduct was quite different—Late development of the sense of life—Evolution of sympathy—The sphere of egoism in moral conduct—Christian morality—Morality of Herbert Spencer—Danger of exalted altruism
Although moral conduct refers specially to the relations between men, there exists a morality of the individual. As this latter is simpler, I shall consider it first in my investigation of rational morality.
When a man, seeking his individual happiness, gives way to his inclinations without restraint, he often comes to behave in a way that is generally regarded as immoral. Following his inclination, he may become idle and drunken. Idleness may depend on some irregularity of the brain, and may thus be as natural as is the wish to take drink in the case of a man to whom alcohol brings a feeling of well-being and gaiety. Why is it that idleness and alcoholism are immoral? Is it because they prevent the living of life in its completest and widest sense, according to the theory of Herbert Spencer? But it is precisely in this way that the adherents of the theory justify all kinds of excess without which fullness and width of life seem to them impossible.