Introduction to the Pedagogy of Herbart

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART II. ETHICAL BASIS. THE FIVE ETHICAL IDEAS. Ethics, or moral philosophy, is the science of good and evil. It gives us directions as to how we must arrange our conduct, and is therefore called practical philosophy. Theoretical philosophy does not discuss what should be done or left undone. In the case...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART II. ETHICAL BASIS. THE FIVE ETHICAL IDEAS. Ethics, or moral philosophy, is the science of good and evil. It gives us directions as to how we must arrange our conduct, and is therefore called practical philosophy. Theoretical philosophy does not discuss what should be done or left undone. In the case of the will, for instance, it investigates only how it proceeds from ideas, what it is; to judge whether it be good or bad, whether it ought to be or ought not to be, belongs to the province of practical philosophy. When we consider the actions of men, we find some that are praiseworthy and some that deserve censure; or some good and some bad. Again, there are occurrences in the presence of which our judgment as to whether these are good or bad is not aroused at all. If a person in a somnambulant, therefore unconscious, condition commits homicide, we cannot accuse him of a bad action, even though the misfortune should touch us closely. If a woodchopper's axe unexpectedly flies from its helve and kills a human being near by, it does not occur to us to declare the man a criminal, since the accident has happened without (contrary to) his will. If a rich man throws away a pair of shoes that might still be serviceable, and a poor man picks them up and is pleased with them, we do not attribute any praise to the former, because without his will the poor man has received a kindness. From these illustrations it follows that what is done withoutconsciousness and without (contrary to) will is neither good nor bad, neither praiseworthy nor censurable, but in the ethical sense, indifferent. This does not, however, prevent its being personally very agreeable or very unpleasant to us. If an action is done with consciousness and will, it is subject to the ethical judgment, but this judg...