WILLIAM McDOUGALL 151 



stories, readily believe them and crave for fairies, 

 therefore fairies exist. 



Kant seems to have felt that man's capacity for 

 moral development was of peculiar significance. But 

 in the light of evolutionary theory, it seems no more 

 difficult to understand as a product of natural evolu- 

 tion than his capacity for fighting, or for playing. 

 All have their obvious biological functions. The 

 higher animals show the germs of all our moral quali- 

 ties, especially that most central of them, the tender 

 care for other creatures. Apart from the influence of 

 a moral tradition, product of a long process of ac- 

 cumulation and refinement, the best man among us 

 would hardly rise in the moral scale above the level 

 of a fine or, as we almost inevitably say, a noble dog. 



Reason is a chain of judgment involving consider- 

 able power of abstraction; but the germs of these 

 powers are exhibited by animals. And here again man 

 owes his superiority in the main to his sharing in a 



missive feelings; and that reverence is a still more complex synthesis 

 into which tender feeling enters. Unless it can be shown that this 

 analysis is wholly wrong or inadequate (and Otto makes no attempt 

 to examine the question), Otto's contention (that experiences of these 

 kinds imply a "mental pre-disposition, unique in kind and different 

 in a definite way from any 'natural' faculty,") has no claim upon 

 serious consideration. 



I may add that Otto's distinction between the rational and the non- 

 rational in experience, on which much of his argument turns, is very 

 unsatisfactory, resting as it does on the old-fashioned and very mis- 

 leading psychology of concepts as entities that play some essential 

 role in all rational processes; rational experience, he says, is such 

 as can be "formulated by means of a concept"; irrational experience 

 cannot be so formulated. For an exposition of the fallacy here in- 

 volved I must refer the reader to my article "The Confusion of the 

 Concept" in the Journal of Philosophical Studies, 1928. Otto writes: 

 "We should see the facts more clearly if psychology in general would 

 make a more decisive endeavor to examine and classify the feelings 

 and emotions according to their qualitative differences." Here I 

 agree entirely; but I must maintain that Otto himself has signally 

 failed in his particular endeavor along this line. 



