wonderful clockwork
whose mainspring had been removed, or a steam-engine whose
fires had been drawn.[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _Social Psychology_, p. 44.]

Reflection is last rather than first; it is provoked and sustained
by instinctive desires, and is the means whereby they
may be fulfilled.

TYPES OF MORAL THEORY. Reflection upon morals produces
certain characteristic types of moral theory. These may be
classified, although, because of the complexity of factors
involved in any moral theory, cross-division is inevitable. But
in the long history of human reflection upon a reasonable way
of life, certain divisions stand out clearly. The first great
contrast that may be mentioned is that existing between Absolutism
and Relativism, the contrast, namely, between theories
of morals that regard right and wrong as absolute and
_a priori_, unconditioned by time, place, and circumstance; and
theories of morals that judge the rightness and wrongness of
acts in terms of their consequences, in the happiness or welfare
of human beings, however that be conceived. These two
points of view represent radically different temperaments and
differ radically in their fruits. The contrast will stand out
more clearly after a brief discussion of each.

ABSOLUTISM. Absolutistic moralities are distinguished by
their maintenance of the fundamental moral idea of Duty,
Duty consisting in an obligation to conform to the Right.
Implied in this obligation of absolute conformity is the
conception that the Right is unalterable, universally binding, and
imperative. Good and evil are not discoverable in experience,
but are standards to which human beings must in experience
conform. The right is not simply the desirable--frequently
it is, from the standpoint of impulses and emotion,
the undesirable; but it is a universal, an _a priori_ standard to
which human beings must in experience conform. Morals
are "eternal and immutable" principles, absolutely irrefutable
and indefeasible in experience. We shall, in approaching
the problem from the standpoint of moral knowledge, see
that most absolutist moral philosophers have also supposed
that these eternal principles of right action are intuitively
perceived. What concerns us in this connection, however, is the
nature of this absolutistic conception, and its bearings on the
governance of human conduct.

According to the absolutist, the "goodness" of an act is
not at all affected by its immediate con