GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

OBJECTIVE INTUITIONISM 177
in question. No such elaborate chain of reasoning is, it is
argued, involved; all that has happened is that die moral
sense of the peasant and the maid have instinctively and
immediately reacted with judgments of disapprobation
to behaviour which an act of insight has revealed as wrong.
Similarly! the child who reproves the action of another
child in pulling the wings off flics, has not necessarily at
his disposal a stock of maxims of the "kindness is better
than cruelty" type, with which to back his reproof; he
intuitively feels that it is wrong to make living things
needlessly suffer. Some I am in this argument still
following popular' usage push this fine of thought even
further, and claim for the uninStructed moral senses of
country people, or of the very young, a degree ofimmediate
insight which has, they say, been lost by those who have
become bemused by the sophistications of the intellect,
or obscured in those who have succumbed to the artifi-
cialities of civilized life. The moral sense, it is often said,
comes to us from a supernatural source; it is only to be
expected, therefore, that it should function with the greatest
freedom and directness in the young, and in those who
have not allowed themselves to be corrupted by the
sophistries of this world. These latter reflections belong,
it is true, rather to the realm of moralizing than to that
of popular morals; nor, intuitionists would admit, can the
same degree of authority be claimed for them as for the
of con-
popular tradition which testifies to the authority
science. This tradition which affirms that there is a moral
sense, that it is unique, that its deliverances are absolute, and
that they are our sole guide to morality, prescribing to us
what things are right and what wrong, does, it is urged,
represent centuries of popular thinking about morals; it
constitutes, in fact, a distillation of the common moral
experience of mankind. It is not, in any event, to be
lightly dismissed, and the doctrine which treats the
existence and Authority of the moral sense as the keystone
of the structure of ethics the doctrine, namely,
of Objective-Intuitionism has, in spite of the various