The causes of this phenomenon, therefore, are easily understood.
[43.] But there is another point which appears enigmatical. How does it happen that the prevailing public opinion respecting law and morality is itself, in so many respects, obviously right? If a thinker like Kant was unable to discover the sources from which ethical knowledge flows, how can we believe that the common folk succeeded in drawing therefrom? And if this were not the case, how were they able, while ignorant of the premises, still to reach the conclusions? Here the phenomenon cannot possibly be explained from the fact that the right view was long before established.
This difficulty also resolves itself in a very simple manner when we reflect that much in our store of knowledge exists, and contributes towards the attainment of new knowledge, without the knowledge of the process itself being clearly present to consciousness.
It must not be supposed that in saying this I am an adherent of the wonderful philosophy of the unconscious. I am speaking here only of undeniable and well known truths. Thus it has often been observed that for thousands of years men have drawn right conclusions without bringing the procedure and the principles which form the condition of the formal validity of the inference into clear consciousness by means of reflection. Indeed when Plato first took the step of reflecting upon it, he was led to set up an entirely false theory which assumed that every inference was a process of reminiscence.[55] What was perceived and experienced on earth recalled to the memory knowledge acquired in a pre-mundane existence. Nowadays this error has disappeared. Still, false theories concerning the fundamental principles of syllogism are continually emerging, as, for example, when Albert Lange,[56] finds them in space-perceptions and in synthetic propositions à priori, or Alexander Bain[57] in the experience that the moods Barbara, Celarent, etc., have up to the present time been found to be valid in every case: mere crude errors which overlook the immediate intuitions forming the conditions of right conclusions, but which do not prevent Plato, Lange, and Bain from arguing in general exactly like other people. In spite of their false conception of the true fundamental principles, these still continue to operate in their reasoning.
But why do I go so far for examples? Let the experiment be made with the first “plain man” who has just drawn a right conclusion, and demand of him that he give you the premises of his conclusion. This he will usually be unable to do and may perhaps make entirely false statements about it. On requiring the same man to define a notion with which he is familiar, he will make the most glaring mistakes and so show once again that he is not able rightly to describe his own thinking.
[44.] Meantime, however dark the road to ethical knowledge might appear, both to the “plain man” and to the philosopher, we must still expect, since the process is a complicated one and many combined principles operate therein, that the traces of the operation of each separate principle will be evident in history, and this fact, even more than agreement in respect of the final results, is a confirmation of the right theory.
This also, if only the time permitted, in what fulness would I not be able to lay before you! Who is there, for example, who would not, as we have done, regard joy as something evidently good in itself, if only it were not joy in what is bad. Nor has there been any lack of writers on ethics who have asserted that pleasure and the good were strictly identical conceptions.[58] Opposed to these were others who bore witness to the inner worth of insight and such will be supported by all unprejudiced minds. Many philosophers have wished to exalt knowledge above all else as the highest good.[59] They recognized, however, at the same time, a certain inner worth in each act of virtue, while others have carried this view so far as to recognize only in virtuous action the highest good.[60]
On the one hand, therefore, we have had sufficient confirmatory tests in support of our view.
Next with regard to the principles of choice, how often do we not see the principle of summation applied as, for example, when it is said that the measure of the happiness of life as a whole and not that of the passing moment is to be considered.[61] And, again, passing beyond the limits of the self, when, for example, Aristotle says, that the happiness of a nation seems to be a higher end than that of an individual happiness,[62] and that in the same way in a work of art, or in an organism and similarly in the case of the family, the part always exists for the sake of the whole; everything is here subordinate to the “common” (“εἰς τὀ κοινόν”).[63] Even in the case of the whole creation he makes the same principle hold good. “In what,” he asks,[64] “regarding all created things consists the good, and the best, which is its final aim”? Is it immanent or transcendent? And he answers: “Both,” setting forth as the transcendent aim the divine first cause, likeness to which everything strives after, while the immanent aim is the world-order as a whole. The like testimony to the principle of summation might be taken from the lips of the Stoics.[65] It reappears in every attempt to construct a theodicy from Plato down to Leibnitz and even later.[66]
In the precepts of our popular religion, again, the operation of this principle is also distinctly visible. When it ordains us to love our neighbour as ourselves, what else is taught but that, in the right choice, equality (be it our own or that of others) shall fall with equal weight into the balance, from which follows the subordination of the single individual to the good of the collective whole; just as the ethical ideal of Christianity—the Saviour—offers himself as a sacrifice for the salvation of the world.