I propose to bring fresh evidence here for my theory of knowledge and expand it in new directions. We shall arrive most swiftly at the centre of the theory, by going back to the point from which I started about twenty years ago. Upon examining the grounds on which science is pursued, I saw that its progress is determined at every stage by indefinable powers of thought. No rules can account for the way a good idea is found for starting an inquiry; and there are no firm rules either for the verification or the refutation of the proposed solution of a problem. Rules widely current may be plausible enough, but scientific enquiry often proceeds and triumphs by contradicting them. Moreover, the explicit content of a theory fails to account for the guidance it affords to future discoveries. To hold a natural law to be true, is to believe that its presence may reveal itself in yet unknown and perhaps yet unthinkable consequences; it is to believe that such laws are features of a reality which as such will continue to bear consequences inexhaustibly.

It is a surprising fact that moral philosophers have rarely examined the distinction between what I shall call ‘positive’ or ‘social’ morality on the one hand and ‘autonomous’ or ‘individual’ morality on the other. Accordingly, conceptual and moral issues of the greatest importance have been neglected. The distinction is, I take it, recognised by Hegel, when he contrasts Sittlichkeit with Moralität. However, the rival sides who give a conceptual or a moral preference to one concept over the other rarely come to grips with one another, and the deep conflicts between them are concealed instead of being brought out into the open. Only in Burke's diatribe against Rousseau, Bradley's critique of Sidgwick (Collected Essays I, 122), Hobhouse's crusade against Bosanquet (Metaphysical Theory of the State), Prichard's attack on Green (Moral Obligation, p. 75), Hart's criticism of Hare (‘Legal and Moral Obligation’ in Essays in Moral Philosophy, edited by Melden), and above all in Oakeshott's onslaught on Rationalism (Rationalism in Politics, passim) do we get a glimpse of one of the main issues of moral philosophy and of morality. For just as we have two concepts, so we have two moral conceptual schemes, each of which gives a central place to one concept at the expense of the other. Those who suppose that morality is or ought to be wholly or mainly a social concept may recommend submission to a tradition. Those, on the other hand, who suppose morality to be primarily an individual or independent concept will recommend independent decisions. I want in this paper, firstly, to explain the differences between the two concepts, secondly, to show that neither of them is conceptually illegitimate or degenerate, and lastly, to determine what place, if any, each ought to have in a rational morality.

Freud is often assumed to have given an explanation of how human beings acquire a morality, especially as it is manifested in the phenomenon of moral conscience. Freud himself certainly lends credence to such an interpretation of his theory, as the following passage testifies.

Ideologies of progress sprout from an inextinguishable hope that one day things will be better. Somewhere ahead life will be more abundant and there will be less pain and fear. Somewhere ahead there will be more rationality, objectivity, and truth. Somewhere ahead there will always be more love and compassion for others. Any combination of these and of other values could easily be extracted from the literature of progress. When writers begin with the thesis, ‘there is progress in the realisation of values’, they assume two things. Firstly, they put forward a sociological-historical hypothesis according to which social changes proceed in a set direction and fall into some sort of sequential pattern, and secondly, they contrive to find that, on the whole, in this sequence, there is a linear increase in the realisation of some values which they regard as essential to humanity. A careful inspection of the second of these two assumptions discloses the belief that not only things will be getting better and better but people too. Those, then, who are ideologists of progress are committed to a coherent directionality not only in the betterment of circumstances but also in the betterment of people; in brief, social changes will be accompanied by changes in the ‘modal’ personality as well.