f a world in which Messrs.
Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and
millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a
certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of
emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an
impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how
hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as
the fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtile
brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests
against the entire race-tradition of retributive justice?--I refer to
Tolstoi with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his
substitution of oblivion for repentance (in his novel of Dr.
Heidenhain's Process), to M. Guyau with his radical condemnation of the
punitive ideal. All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as
much beyond what can be ciphered out from the 'laws of association' as
the delicacies of sentiment possible between a pair of young lovers go
beyond such precepts of the 'etiquette to be observed during
engagement' as are printed in manuals of social form.

No! Purely inward forces are certainly at work here. All the higher,
more penetrating ideals are {189} revolutionary. They present
themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in
that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the
environment and the lessons it has so far taught as must learn to bend.

This is all I can say of the psychological question now. In the last
chapter of a recent work[2] I have sought to prove in a general way the
existence, in our thought, of relations which do not merely repeat the
couplings of experience. Our ideals have certainly many sources. They
are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained,
and pains to be escaped. And for having so constantly perceived this
psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whether
or not such applause must be extended to that school's other
characteristics will appear as we take up the following questions.

The next one in order is the metaphysical question, of what we mean by
the words 'obligation,' 'good,' and 'ill.'

II.

First of all, it appears that such words can have no application or
relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists. Imagine