Recent Tendencies in Ethics by William Ritchie Sorley
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'Utilitarianism,' p. 9 n.) A couple of sentences from Galt may be
quoted: "As there was at the time a bruit and a sound about universal benevolence, philanthropy, utility, and all the other disguises with which an infidel philosophy appropriated to itself the charity, brotherly love, and well-doing inculcated by our holy religion, I set myself to task upon these heads.... With well-doing, however, I went more roundly to work. I told my people that I thought they had more sense than to secede from Christianity to become Utilitarians, for that it would be a confession of ignorance of the faith they deserted, seeing that it was the main duty inculcated by our religion to do all in morals and manners to which the new-fangled doctrine of utility pretended." Mill is wrong in supposing that his use of the term "was the first time that any one had taken the title of Utilitarian"; and Galt, who represents his annalist as writing of the year 1794, is historically justified. Writing in 1781 Bentham uses the word 'utilitarian,' and again in 1802 he definitely asserts that it is the only name of his creed ('Works,' x. 92, 392). M. Halévy ('L'évolution de la doctrine utilitaire,' p. 300) draws attention to the presence of the word in Jane Austen's 'Sense and Sensibility,' published in 1811.] The Intuitionists maintained--to put the matter briefly--that the moral consciousness of man could not be entirely accounted for by experiences of the kind laid stress on by the Utilitarians. They maintained that moral ideas were in their origin spiritual, although they might be called into definite consciousness by the experience of the facts to which they could be applied. Experience might call them forth into the light of day; but it was held that they belonged, in nature and origin, to the constitution of man's mind. On this ground, therefore, the school was properly called Intuitional: they held that moral ideas were received by direct vision or intuition, as it were, |
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