No particular stress is here laid on the term "faculty," as a
designation of the moral power. There is, indeed, no validity in the
claim of some recent psychologists that the term must be abandoned
on the ground that psychology discovers only mental acts, without a
psychic subject with distinct faculties back of the acts. Yet the term
faculty has often been used and understood in a way inconsistent with
the essential and conscious unity of the personal _ego_ or self, making
the soul seem a bundle of independent and separately acting parts of a
psychical organism. The perfect oneness of the personal self must be
maintained, and the term faculty, when used for any form of psychical
ability, must be understood simply as expressing the soul's capacity
or power to do any specific form of work, or to act in any particular
and distinctively definable way, as, for instance, to know, to feel, to
will, to remember, to compare. In this sense the use of the term stands
fully justified in psychological usage and propriety. But the reason
for abating from the claim of strict exactness in the term in this
connection is that the conscience, in its full conception and action,
as will hereafter appear, while exhibiting a specific and simple power
as its central reality, will be found to include also subordinately
the conjoint action of several other forms of psychical power. It
stands for a complex of capacities and powers. This will appear when we
reach its analysis. But the question of the absolute simplicity of the
faculty does not affect the substance of our inquiry into its existence
nor the propriety of employing the term for the power in its totality.
For, as naming the central and decisive reality in the conscience, it
is justly spoken of as a special faculty. Even when it is viewed as
standing for a complex of powers converging, in their functions, to
the discernment of moral distinctions and the reality of duty, it has
sufficient individuality to be rightly and scientifically designated
in this way. The question to be considered, and upon which the logical
conclusions of the science will depend, is not its absolute simplicity,
but the fact of such a power as a normal part in the soul's essential
constitution of powers. If the power be found integral and normal in
the soul's actual capacities, we have all that is essential for the
foundation of ethics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account