Wannamaker Summary- Chapter 12

Chapter Summary Of The Philosophy Of Freedom
Olin D. Wannamaker

Chapter 12 Moral Imagination (Darwinism and Morality)
A free action requires moral intuition as its impulse, and motive and moral imagination to visualize the concrete form in which this general moral concept can best be realized. This activity is necessarily purely individual. Ethics, therefore, can never be a regulative science; it can be a science only in the descriptive and historical sense. It can trace the evolution of moral behavior throughout human history. Indeed, evolution should be conceived as extending from the lowest forms of life upward to the free human spirit. This does not contradict the truth that the individual human being can observe his own thinking and know that he can draw his motive for action from the world of moral intuitions, and that, in such action, he is a free individual spirit.

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