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

OBJECTIVE INTUITIONISM 179
our notions of colour. We form the general idea of red,
he maintained, from seeing particular instance! of red
objects, and then abstracting from them their common
quality. Similarly, we form Our general notion of right
and wrong from perceiving particular situations which
exhibit ethical qualities, whether good or bad, and then
abstracting the ethical qualities from the particular cases
which happen to have exhibited them. And just as, in
the case of red, a particular faculty, namely, the faculty
of vision, sees what is red, so that, lacking the faculty,
we should be without the notion of red, so, in the case
of morals, a particular faculty, the faculty known as the
moral sense, discerns the moral qualities which the world
of men and things exhibits, so that, lacking that faculty,
we should be without moral conceptions. The faculty is
defined as "the moral sense of beauty in actions and
affections, by which we perceive virtue or vice in our*
selves or others". It is implied that actions and situations
are right or wrong in themselves, that persons and char-
acters are virtuous and vicious, and that the moral sense
tells us in regard to each particular one of them whether
it is right or wrong.
Thomas Clarke (1675-1729) took the same line, regard*
ing our judgments of right and wrong and the moral
obligation which they lay upon us to do the right and
refrain from the wrong, as arising from and being related
to essential differences in the nature of things. In developing
this notion of essential differences Clarke made use of
an analogy based on physics and mathematics. There is
in the physical world what he called a "mutual consist-
ency" among things, that is to say, they "consist" together
in such a way as to exhibit the workings of law. If everything
in the universe behaved purely individually and
showed no likeness to the behaviour of anything else, the
formulation of physical laws would, it is obvious, be impossible.
But such purely individual behaviour is not found.
Not only docs ice which has been subjected to a certain