This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ...of experiencing the emotion, or at least of understanding and respecting its existence in others through the analogy of something more or less similar in his own experience. It is not the existence of the feeling but our judgement that that feeling is good that enables us to say that the act which ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ...of experiencing the emotion, or at least of understanding and respecting its existence in others through the analogy of something more or less similar in his own experience. It is not the existence of the feeling but our judgement that that feeling is good that enables us to say that the act which excites it is right or wrong. It is not merely because it is a feeling excited by conduct that it can claim any pre-eminence over other feelings. If that were so, it would have no validity except for the persons naturally disposed to feel it. But our judgement that certain conduct is wrong does not disappear because as a matter of fact we may know that it excites no such feeling of disgust or repulsion in the person guilty of it. There are doubtless individuals who really do feel no disgust whatever at isolated or even habitual acts of drunkenness (though they are probably fewer than those who merely pretend to feel none): but we do not say that on that account drunkenness is right for such men. On the contrary we say that, if a man has not got such feelings, so much the worse for him: they are feelings which he ought to have. He falls short of the ideal of manhood if he has them not1. There are other cases where natural feelings of disgust at particular kinds of conduct are pronounced on reflection to have no value whatever--e.g. the young medical student's sensations on first entering a dissecting room. We pronounce that such feelings should simply be got over as quickly as possible. The ultimate truth then which the Moral Sense school distorts is that in some cases a state of feeling is judged to have an absolute value, which, though more or less pleasant, is not measured merely by its pleasantness, and that such states of feeling form in and...
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