" IDIOPSYCHOLOGICAL ETHICS." 39

the region of external effects, and not among the different propensions, passions, affections or sentiments impelling the agent. It may be said, perhaps, that the issue as I have stated it cannot be fundamental, because the effects as foreseen must operate as motives as causing desires or aversions other- wise action would not result. 1 But my point is that the effects which, in our judgment, make an action bad may not have been desired at all, but only accepted as inevitable accompaniments of what was desired, and that the effects which make it good may have only been desired as a means to some further end ; and that it is not to the desired effects of volition, qua desired, but to the effects foreseen as certain or highly probable and so chosen instead of other possible consequences that our judgments of approbation and dis- approbation are commonly directed under the heads of justice, temperance, good faith, veracity and other leading branches of duty. I contend that the approbation im- plied by the designation of agents or acts as truthful, just, temperate and the disapprobation implied by the opposite terms are commonly given independently of any considera- tion of motive, as distinct from intention or choice to produce certain external effects (using ' external ' to include effects on the agent's physical system). I do not say, as Dr. Mar- tineau has understood me to say, that we regard the motives of such acts as ethically unimportant : I recognise that com- mon sense distinguishes motives as higher and lower, and even positively as good and bad ; and if we definitely con- ceive of (say) truth-speaking as prompted by a motive recog- nised as bad, we do not approve of the agent's state of mind, 1 Dr. Martineau would not exactly urge this ; because he considers it fundamentally important to lay stress on the absence of any conscious fore- sight of effects in the case of what he distinguishes as " primary springs of action," which urge us, " in the way of unreflecting instinct," to seek blindly ends not preconceived. I agree that such blind impulses have a considerable place among the normal causes of our voluntary action, though I think he has exaggerated their place ; according to my experience, they cannot be at all powerful or prolonged without arousing some representation of the effects to which they prompt. But, in any case, I cannot understand how they can be morally judged as blind; I conceive that the effects of the action to which such unreflecting impulses prompt, however absent or faintly represented when the impulse operates, are necessarily represented when it becomes the object of a moral judgment. This will appear, I think, if we reflect on any example included in Dr. Martineau's exposition of the " scale of springs of action" e.g., in comparing the appetite for food with the desire of the pleasure of eating, he says, " it is surely meaner to eat for the pleasure's sake than to appease the simple hunger " : well, it seems to me clear that, so far as I pass this judgment, it is not on hunger, qua blind impulse, but on hunger conceived as an impulse directed towards the removal of an organic want.