DETERMINISM AND SELF-DIRECTION. 57 



failed to correct. The study of a number of criminal trials 

 brought clearly before his view the forces of different 

 passions and propensities, and the relative feebleness of the 

 checks imposed upon them by the will. In the discussion 

 of insanity and of responsibility for acts of violence, he 

 found himself compelled to analyze the whole processes of 

 the moral life, and his results were surprisingly different in 

 1847 from those which he had previously announced in 

 1845.* Starting from the frequent experience of moral 

 conflict between (for example) the duty of a professional 

 visit to a patient needing aid, and the desire to escape a 

 wet ride or to avoid bringing home infection, he inquired in 

 what lay the deciding power. Rejecting the current ex- 

 planations of the autocratic nature of conscience or the 

 moral sense, which pronounced directly on the right or 

 wrong of any action, he expressed his sympathy with a 

 view of its real function propounded shortly before by an 

 "anonymous critic," in the Prospective Review, who affirmed 

 that moral good was not a quality resident in actions, but 

 that ethical judgments were always relative, and involved a 

 preference for one spring of action over another.! 



We cannot, therefore (said Dr. Carpenter), attach a moral 

 character to the actions of animals that are performed under 

 the direction of a blind undesigning instinct, which operates in 

 them as the spring which moves an automaton, leaving them 

 no choice between one course and another ; nor can we say 

 that a human action is in itself morally wrong as regards the 

 individual, when it directly results from a violent iminilse which 

 he has no power to restrain. . . . According to this view, then, 

 what is termed conscience is nothing else than the idea of right 



* The following quotations are from an article in the British and Foreign 

 Medico- Chiriirgical kevie-.u, July, 1847, entitled, "Dr. M.i)oonthe Relations 

 of Crime, Insanity, and Punishment." 



t The " anonymous critic " was Mr. (now Dr.) Martineau, who thus sketched 

 in his article on Whewell's "Elements of Morality " the outlines of the ethical 

 system now expounded in the second volume of his "Types of Ethical Theory." 



