Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/232

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. I.

just as a dog volitionizes. The subject takes possession of the personality, and uses it for its natural desires" (pp. 320, 321).

Professor Laurie's scheme of the virtues is based upon the several kinds of feeling or attuency which have to be moralized. Two main divisions are recognized, the egoistic and the altruistic. The former is called "appetition," and the corresponding virtue (or group of virtues) is temperance or self-control. Each desire naturally seeks its own satisfaction; it must be brought under the law of the life of an organism of desires. Altruistic impulse, or sympathy, which the author finds to be as "natural" as the egoistic, stands equally in need of moralization, organization, or subjection to the law of reason. When thus treated, it yields the virtues of justice, negative and positive, and benevolence. Negative justice is defined as "the freedom of each person to realize himself in so far as this is compatible with the freedom of every other member of the same society" (p. 161). "In so far as our fellow-men are unable to realize themselves, owing to obstacles for which not they, but we, are, directly or indirectly, responsible, our activity in their interest is ... positive, as distinguished from negative, justice" (p. 183). "But when our good- will extends to the. helping of others to help themselves, by sharing or removing burdens self-caused, or not due directly or indirectly to us or others with whom we are associated (and whose responsibilities, therefore, we share), the motive is one of benevolence" (p. 184). These virtues tend to pass into one another, as the emotion of humanity finds in them an ever fuller expression; "the force of the human emotion is, in many, perhaps most natures, so strong, that the boundary line between strict negative justice and benevolence is always being obliterated" (p. 182).

The discussion of the State is one of the most valuable parts of the book. The author insists upon an ethical conception of the State, as the great mechanism for the realization of personality. He combats the extreme view of it as the "social organism." "It is a mistake to regard the State or the social organism as the supreme end — as that for which the individual exists, the State realizing itself through him. . . . The State, at best, is the work of men's feeble hands, working with unsteady purpose; the person, with all his claims, is the work of God" (p. 69). But if "a State collectivism ... in which the unqualified conception of an 'organism' logically lands us, is profoundly immoral" (p. 220), the theory of individualism is no less at fault. "The question, in truth, has not been for ages a question of individualism, but a question of personality" (p. 219). The acceptance of an ethical conception of the State means the abandonment of the laissez-faire principle, and the inclusion within the political sphere of positive, as well as negative, justice. Even the "ideal life" falls within the scope of the State's action; "the promotion