and distinctness of the conception of an object easily produces the belief in its truth, so the intensity of a moral emotion makes him who feels it disposed to objectivise the moral estimate to which it gives rise, in other words, to assign to it universal validity. The enthusiast is more likely than anybody else to regard his judgments as true, and so is the moral enthusiast with reference to his moral judgments. The intensity of his emotions makes him the victim of an illusion. [Footnote 22: "Besides the ideal king, the personification of Power and Justice, another ideal has played an important part in the formation of early Buddhist ideas regarding their Master. . . . It was the ideal of a perfectly Wise Man, the personification of Wisdom, the Buddha" (Rhys Davids, _Hibbert Lectures on Some Points in the History of Buddhism_, p. 141).] [Footnote 23: Sidgwick, _op. cit._ p. 104.] The presumed objectivity of moral judgments thus being a chimera, there can be no moral truth in the sense in which this term is generally understood. The ultimate reason for this is, that the moral concepts are based upon emotions, and that the contents of an emotion fall entirely outside the category of truth. But it may be true or not that we have a certain emotion, it may be true or not that a given mode of conduct has a tendency to evoke in us moral indignation or moral approval. Hence a moral judgment is true or false according as its subject has or has not that tendency which the predicate attributes to it. If I say that it is wrong to resist evil, and yet resistance to evil has no tendency whatever to call {18} forth in me an emotion of moral disapproval, then my judgment is false. If there are no general moral truths, the object of scientific ethics cannot be to fix rules for human conduct, the aim of all science being the discovery of some truth. It has been said by Bentham and others that moral principles cannot be proved because they are first principles which are used to prove everything else.[24] But the real reason for their being inaccessible to demonstration is that, owing to their very nature, they can never be true. If the word "Ethics," then, is to be used as the name for a science, the object of that science can only be to study the moral consciousness as a fact.[25] [Footnote 24: Bentham, _Principles of Morals and Legislation_, p. 4. _Cf._ Höffding, _Etik_, p. 43.] [Footnote 25: _Cf._ Simmel, _Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft_, i. p. iii. _sq._; Westermarck, 'Normative und psychologische Ethik,' in _Dritter Internationaler Congress für Psychologie in München_, p. 428 _sq._]