Subordination of activity to result; control of future;
production and consummation; idealism and distant goals.
_PART FOUR_
CONCLUSION
SECTION I: THE GOOD OF ACTIVITY 278
Better and worse; morality a process; evolution and progress;
optimism; Epicureanism; making others happy.
SECTION II: MORALS ARE HUMAN 295
Humane morals; natural law and morals; place of science.
SECTION III: WHAT IS FREEDOM? 303
Elements in freedom; capacity in action; novel possibilities;
force of desire.
SECTION IV: MORALITY IS SOCIAL 314
Conscience and responsibility; social pressure and
opportunity; exaggeration of blame; importance of social
psychology; category of right; the community as religious
symbol.
INTRODUCTION
"Give a dog a bad name and hang him." Human nature has been the dog of
professional moralists, and consequences accord with the proverb. Man's
nature has been regarded with suspicion, with fear, with sour looks,
sometimes with enthusiasm for its possibilities but only when these were
placed in contrast with its actualities. It has appeared to be so evilly
disposed that the business of morality was to prune and curb it; it
would be thought better of if it could be replaced by something else. It
has been supposed that morality would be quite superfluous were it not
for the inherent weakness, bordering on depravity, of human nature. Some
writers with a more genial conception have attributed the current
blackening to theologians who have thought to honor the divine by
disparaging the human. Theologians have doubtless taken a gloomier view
of man than have pagans and secularists. But this explanation doesn't
take us far. For after all these theologians are themselves human, and
they would have been without influence if the human audience had not
somehow responded to them.
Morality is largely concerned with controlling human nature. When we are
attempting to control anything we are acutely aware of what resists us.
So moralists were led, perhaps, to think of human nature as evil because
of its reluctance to yield to control, its rebelliousness under the
yoke. But this explanation only raises another question. Why did
morality set up rules so foreign to human nature? The ends it insisted
upon, the regulations it imposed, were after all outgrowths of human
nature. Why then was human nature so averse to them? Moreover rules can
be obeyed and ideals realized only as they appeal to something in human
nature and awaken in it an active response. Moral principles that exalt
themselves by degrading human nature are in effect committing suicide.
Or else they involve human nature in unending civil war, and treat it as
a hopeless mess of contradictory forces.
We are forced therefore to consider the nature and origin of that
control of human nature with which morals has been occupied. And the
fact which is forced upon us when we raise this question is the
existence of classes. Control has been vested in an oligarchy.
Indifference to regulation has grown in the gap which separates the
ruled from the rulers. Parents, priests, chiefs, social censors have
supplied aims, aims which were foreign to those upon whom they were
imposed, to the young, laymen, ordinary folk; a few have given and
administered rule, and the mass have in a passable fashion and with
reluctance obeyed. Everybody knows that good children are those who make
as little trouble as possible for their elders, and since most of them
cause a good deal of annoyance they must be naughty by nature. Generally
speaking, good people have been those who did what they were told to do,
and lack of eager compliance is a sign of something wrong in their
nature.
But no matter how much men in authority have turned moral rules into an
agency of class supremacy, any theory which attributes the origin of
rule to deliberate design is false. To take advantage of conditions
after they have come into existence is one thing; to create them for the
sake of an advantage to accrue is quite another thing. We must go back
to the bare fact of social division into superior and inferior. To say
that accident produced social conditions is to perceive they were not
produced by intelligence. Lack of understanding of human nature is the
primary cause of disregard for it. Lack of insight always ends in
despising or else unreasoned admiration. When men had no scientific
knowledge of physical nature they either passively submitted to it or
sought to control it magically. What cannot be understood cannot be
managed intelligently. It has to be forced into subjection from without.
The opaqueness of human nature to reason is equivalent to a belief in
its intrinsic irregularity. Hence a decline in the authority of social
oligarchy was accompanied by a rise of scientific interest in human
nature. This means that the make-up and working of human forces afford a
basis for moral ideas and ideals. Our science of human nature in
comparison with physical sciences is rudimentary, and morals which are
concerned with the health, efficiency and happiness of a development of
human nature are correspondingly elementary. These pages are a
discussion of some phases of the ethical change involved in positive
respect for human nature when the latter is associated with scientific
knowledge. We may anticipate the general nature of this change through
considering the evils which have resulted from severing morals from the
actualities of human physiology and psychology. There is a pathology of
goodness as well as of evil; that is, of that sort of goodness which is
nurtured by this separation. The badness of good people, for the most
part recorded only in fiction, is the revenge taken by human nature for
the injuries heaped upon it in the name of morality. In the first place,
morals cut off from positive roots in man's nature is bound to be mainly
negative. Practical emphasis falls upon avoidance, escape of evil, upon
not doing things, observing prohibitions. Negative morals assume as many
forms as there are types of temperament subject to it. Its commonest
form is the protective coloration of a neutral respectability, an
insipidity of character. For one man who thanks God that he is not as
other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other
men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention. Absence of social
blame is the usual mark of goodness for it shows that evil has been
avoided. Blame is most readily averted by being so much like everybody
else that one passes unnoticed. Conventional morality is a drab
morality, in which the only fatal thing is to be conspicuous. If there
be flavor left in it, then some natural traits have somehow escaped
being subdued. To be so good as to attract notice is to be priggish, too
good for this world. The same psychology that brands the convicted
criminal as forever a social outcast makes it the part of a gentleman
not to obtrude virtues noticeably upon others.
The Puritan is never popular, not even in a society of Puritans. In case
of a pinch, the mass prefer to be good fellows rather than to be good
men. Polite vice is preferable to eccentricity and ceases to be vice.
Morals that professedly neglect human nature end by emphasizing those
qualities of human nature that are most commonplace and average; they
exaggerate the herd instinct to conformity. Professional guardians of
morality who have been exacting with respect to themselves have accepted
avoidance of conspicuous evil as enough for the masses. One of the most
instructive things in all human history is the system of concessions,
tolerances, mitigations and reprieves which the Catholic Church with its
official supernatural morality has devised for the multitude. Elevation
of the spirit above everything natural is tempered by organized leniency
for the frailties of flesh. To uphold an aloof realm of strictly ideal
realities is admitted to be possible only for a few. Protestantism,
except in its most zealous forms, has accomplished the same result by a
sharp separation between religion and morality in which a higher
justification by faith disposes at one stroke of daily lapses into the
gregarious morals of average conduct.
There are always ruder forceful natures who cannot tame themselves to
the required level of colorless conformity. To them conventional
morality appears as an organized futility; though they are usually
unconscious of their own attitude since they are heartily in favor of
morality for the mass as making it easier to manage them. Their only
standard is success, putting things over, getting things done. Being
good is to them practically synonymous with ineffectuality; and
accomplishment, achievement is its own justification. They know by
experience that much is forgiven to those who succeed, and they leave
goodness to the stupid, to those whom they qualify as boobs. Their
gregarious nature finds sufficient outlet in the conspicuous tribute
they pay to all established institutions as guardians of ideal
interests, and in their denunciations of all who openly defy
conventionalized ideals. Or they discover that they are the chosen
agents of a higher morality and walk subject to specially ordained laws.
Hypocrisy in the sense of a deliberate covering up of a will to evil by
loud-voiced protestations of virtue is one of the rarest of occurrences.
But the combination in the same person of an intensely executive nature
with a love of popular approval is bound, in the face of conventional
morality, to produce what the critical term hypocrisy.
Another reaction to the separation of morals from human nature is a
romantic glorification of natural impulse as something superior to all
moral claims. There are those who lack the persistent force of the
executive will to break through conventions and to use them for their
own purposes, but who unite sensitiveness with intensity of desire.
Fastening upon the conventional element in morality, they hold that all
morality is a conventionality hampering to the development of
individuality. Although appetites are the commonest things in human
nature, the least distinctive or individualized, they identify
unrestraint in satisfaction of appetite with free realization of
individuality. They treat subjection to passion as a manifestation of
freedom in the degree in which it shocks the bourgeois. The urgent need
for a transvaluation of morals is caricatured by the notion that an
avoidance of the avoidances of conventional morals constitutes positive
achievement. While the executive type keeps its eyes on actual
conditions so as to manipulate them, this school abrogates objective
intelligence in behalf of sentiment, and withdraws into little coteries
of emancipated souls.
There are others who take seriously the idea of morals separated from
the ordinary actualities of humanity and who attempt to live up to it.
Some become engrossed in spiritual egotism. They are preoccupied with
the state of their character, concerned for the purity of their motives
and the goodness of their souls. The exaltation of conceit which
sometimes accompanies this absorption can produce a corrosive inhumanity
which exceeds the possibilities of any other known form of selfishness.
In other cases, persistent preoccupation with the thought of an ideal
realm breeds morbid discontent with surroundings, or induces a futile
withdrawal into an inner world where all facts are fair to the eye. The
needs of actual conditions are neglected, or dealt with in a
half-hearted way, because in the light of the ideal they are so mean and
sordid. To speak of evils, to strive seriously for change, shows a low
mind. Or, again, the ideal becomes a refuge, an asylum, a way of escape
from tiresome responsibilities. In varied ways men come to live in two
worlds, one the actual, the other the ideal. Some are tortured by the
sense of their irreconcilability. Others alternate between the two,
compensating for the strains of renunciation involved in membership in
the ideal realm by pleasurable excursions into the delights of the
actual.
If we turn from concrete effects upon character to theoretical issues,
we single out the discussion regarding freedom of will as typical of the
consequences that come from separating morals from human nature. Men are
wearied with bootless discussion, and anxious to dismiss it as a
metaphysical subtlety. But nevertheless it contains within itself the
most practical of all moral questions, the nature of freedom and the
means of its achieving. The separation of morals from human nature leads
to a separation of human nature in its moral aspects from the rest of
nature, and from ordinary social habits and endeavors which are found in
business, civic life, the run of companionships and recreations. These
things are thought of at most as places where moral notions need to be
applied, not as places where moral ideas are to be studied and moral
energies generated. In short, the severance of morals from human nature
ends by driving morals inwards from the public open out-of-doors air and
light of day into the obscurities and privacies of an inner life. The
significance of the traditional discussion of free will is that it
reflects precisely a separation of moral activity from nature and the
public life of men.
One has to turn from moral theories to the general human struggle for
political, economic and religious liberty, for freedom of thought,
speech, assemblage and creed, to find significant reality in the
conception of freedom of will. Then one finds himself out of the
stiflingly close atmosphere of an inner consciousness and in the
open-air world. The cost of confining moral freedom to an inner region
is the almost complete severance of ethics from politics and economics.
The former is regarded as summed up in edifying exhortations, and the
latter as connected with arts of expediency separated from larger issues
of good.
In short, there are two schools of social reform. One bases itself upon
the notion of a morality which springs from an inner freedom, something
mysteriously cooped up within personality. It asserts that the only way
to change institutions is for men to purify their own hearts, and that
when this has been accomplished, change of institutions will follow of
itself. The other school denies the existence of any such inner power,
and in so doing conceives that it has denied all moral freedom. It says
that men are made what they are by the forces of the environment, that
human nature is purely malleable, and that till institutions are
changed, nothing can be done. Clearly this leaves the outcome as
hopeless as does an appeal to an inner rectitude and benevolence. For it
provides no leverage for change of environment. It throws us back upon
accident, usually disguised as a necessary law of history or evolution,
and trusts to some violent change, symbolized by civil war, to usher in
an abrupt millennium. There is an alternative to being penned in between
these two theories. We can recognize that all conduct is _interaction_
between elements of human nature and the environment, natural and
social. Then we shall see that progress proceeds in two ways, and that
freedom is found in that kind of interaction which maintains an
environment in which human desire and choice count for something. There
are in truth forces in man as well as without him. While they are
infinitely frail in comparison with exterior forces, yet they may have
the support of a foreseeing and contriving intelligence. When we look at
the problem as one of an adjustment to be intelligently attained, the
issue shifts from within personality to an engineering issue, the
establishment of arts of education and social guidance.
The idea persists that there is something materialistic about natural
science and that morals are degraded by having anything seriously to do
with material things. If a sect should arise proclaiming that men ought
to purify their lungs completely before they ever drew a breath it ought
to win many adherents from professed moralists. For the neglect of
sciences that deal specifically with facts of the natural and social
environment leads to a side-tracking of moral forces into an unreal
privacy of an unreal self. It is impossible to say how much of the
remediable suffering of the world is due to the fact that physical
science is looked upon as merely physical. It is impossible to say how
much of the unnecessary slavery of the world is due to the conception
that moral issues can be settled within conscience or human sentiment
apart from consistent study of facts and application of specific
knowledge in industry, law and politics. Outside of manufacturing and
transportation, science gets its chance in war. These facts perpetuate
war and the hardest, most brutal side of modern industry. Each sign of
disregard for the moral potentialities of physical science drafts the
conscience of mankind away from concern with the interactions of man and
nature which must be mastered if freedom is to be a reality. It diverts
intelligence to anxious preoccupation with the unrealities of a purely
inner life, or strengthens reliance upon outbursts of sentimental
affection. The masses swarm to the occult for assistance. The cultivated
smile contemptuously. They might smile, as the saying goes, out of the
other side of their mouths if they realized how recourse to the occult
exhibits the practical logic of their own beliefs. For both rest upon a
separation of moral ideas and feelings from knowable facts of life, man
and the world.
It is not pretended that a moral theory based upon realities of human
nature and a study of the specific connections of these realities with
those of physical science would do away with moral struggle and defeat.
It would not make the moral life as simple a matter as wending one's way
along a well-lighted boulevard. All action is an invasion of the future,
of the unknown. Conflict and uncertainty are ultimate traits. But morals
based upon concern with facts and deriving guidance from knowledge of
them would at least locate the points of effective endeavor and would
focus available resources upon them. It would put an end to the
impossible attempt to live in two unrelated worlds. It would destroy
fixed distinction between the human and the physical, as well as that
between the moral and the industrial and political. A morals based on
study of human nature instead of upon disregard for it would find the
facts of man continuous with those of the rest of nature and would
thereby ally ethics with physics and biology. It would find the nature
and activities of one person coterminous with those of other human
beings, and therefore link ethics with the study of history, sociology,
law and economics.
Such a morals would not automatically solve moral problems, nor resolve
perplexities. But it would enable us to state problems in such forms
that action could be courageously and intelligently directed to their
solution. It would not assure us against failure, but it would render
failure a source of instruction. It would not protect us against the
future emergence of equally serious moral difficulties, but it would
enable us to approach the always recurring troubles with a fund of
growing knowledge which would add significant values to our conduct even
when we overtly failed--as we should continue to do. Until the integrity
of morals with human nature and of both with the environment is
recognized, we shall be deprived of the aid of past experience to cope
with the most acute and deep problems of life. Accurate and extensive
knowledge will continue to operate only in dealing with purely technical
problems. The intelligent acknowledgment of the continuity of nature,
man and society will alone secure a growth of morals which will be
serious without being fanatical, aspiring without sentimentality,
adapted to reality without conventionality, sensible without taking the
form of calculation of profits, idealistic without being romantic.
PART ONE
THE PLACE OF HABIT IN CONDUCT
I
Habits may be profitably compared to physiological functions, like
breathing, digesting. The latter are, to be sure, involuntary, while
habits are acquired. But important as is this difference for many
purposes it should not conceal the fact that habits are like functions
in many respects, and especially in requiring the cooperation of
organism and environment. Breathing is an affair of the air as truly as
of the lungs; digesting an affair of food as truly as of tissues of
stomach. Seeing involves light just as certainly as it does the eye and
optic nerve. Walking implicates the ground as well as the legs; speech
demands physical air and human companionship and audience as well as
vocal organs. We may shift from the biological to the mathematical use
of the word function, and say that natural operations like breathing
and digesting, acquired ones like speech and honesty, are functions of
the surroundings as truly as of a person. They are things done _by_ the
environment by means of organic structures or acquired dispositions. The
same air that under certain conditions ruffles the pool or wrecks
buildings, under other conditions purifies the blood and conveys
thought. The outcome depends upon what air acts upon. The social
environment acts through native impulses and speech and moral habitudes
manifest themselves. There are specific good reasons for the usual
attribution of acts to the person from whom they immediately proceed.
But to convert this special reference into a belief of exclusive
ownership is as misleading as to suppose that breathing and digesting
are complete within the human body. To get a rational basis for moral
discussion we must begin with recognizing that functions and habits are
ways of using and incorporating the environment in which the latter has
its say as surely as the former.
We may borrow words from a context less technical than that of biology,
and convey the same idea by saying that habits are arts. They involve
skill of sensory and motor organs, cunning or craft, and objective
materials. They assimilate objective energies, and eventuate in command
of environment. They require order, discipline, and manifest technique.
They have a beginning, middle and end. Each stage marks progress in
dealing with materials and tools, advance in converting material to
active use. We should laugh at any one who said that he was master of
stone working, but that the art was cooped up within himself and in no
wise dependent upon support from objects and assistance from tools.
In morals we are however quite accustomed to such a fatuity. Moral
dispositions are thought of as belonging exclusively to a self. The self
is thereby isolated from natural and social surroundings. A whole school
of morals flourishes upon capital drawn from restricting morals to
character and then separating character from conduct, motives from
actual deeds. Recognition of the analogy of moral action with functions
and arts uproots the causes which have made morals subjective and
"individualistic." It brings morals to earth, and if they still aspire
to heaven it is to the heavens of the earth, and not to another world.
Honesty, chastity, malice, peevishness, courage, triviality, industry,
irresponsibility are not private possessions of a person. They are
working adaptations of personal capacities with environing forces. All
virtues and vices are habits which incorporate objective forces. They
are interactions of elements contributed by the make-up of an individual
with elements supplied by the out-door world. They can be studied as
objectively as physiological functions, and they can be modified by
change of either personal or social elements.
If an individual were alone in the world, he would form his habits
(assuming the impossible, namely, that he would be able to form them) in
a moral vacuum. They would belong to him alone, or to him only in
reference to physical forces. Responsibility and virtue would be his
alone. But since habits involve the support of environing conditions, a
society or some specific group of fellow-men, is always accessory before
and after the fact. Some activity proceeds from a man; then it sets up
reactions in the surroundings. Others approve, disapprove, protest,
encourage, share and resist. Even letting a man alone is a definite
response. Envy, admiration and imitation are complicities. Neutrality is
non-existent. Conduct is always shared; this is the difference between
it and a physiological process. It is not an ethical "ought" that
conduct _should_ be social. It _is_ social, whether bad or good.
Washing one's hands of the guilt of others is a way of sharing guilt so
far as it encourages in others a vicious way of action. Non-resistance
to evil which takes the form of paying no attention to it is a way of
promoting it. The desire of an individual to keep his own conscience
stainless by standing aloof from badness may be a sure means of causing
evil and thus of creating personal responsibility for it. Yet there are
circumstances in which passive resistance may be the most effective form
of nullification of wrong action, or in which heaping coals of fire on
the evil-doer may be the most effective way of transforming conduct. To
sentimentalize over a criminal--to "forgive" because of a glow of
feeling--is to incur liability for production of criminals. But to
suppose that infliction of retributive suffering suffices, without
reference to concrete consequences, is to leave untouched old causes of
criminality and to create new ones by fostering revenge and brutality.
The abstract theory of justice which demands the "vindication" of law
irrespective of instruction and reform of the wrong-doer is as much a
refusal to recognize responsibility as is the sentimental gush which
makes a suffering victim out of a criminal.
Courses of action which put the blame exclusively on a person as if his
evil will were the sole cause of wrong-doing and those which condone
offense on account of the share of social conditions in producing bad
disposition, are equally ways of making an unreal separation of man from
his surroundings, mind from the world. Causes for an act always exist,
but causes are not excuses. Questions of causation are physical, not
moral except when they concern future consequences. It is as causes of
future actions that excuses and accusations alike must be considered. At
present we give way to resentful passion, and then "rationalize" our
surrender by calling it a vindication of justice. Our entire tradition
regarding punitive justice tends to prevent recognition of social
partnership in producing crime; it falls in with a belief in
metaphysical free-will. By killing an evil-doer or shutting him up
behind stone walls, we are enabled to forget both him and our part in
creating him. Society excuses itself by laying the blame on the
criminal; he retorts by putting the blame on bad early surroundings, the
temptations of others, lack of opportunities, and the persecutions of
officers of the law. Both are right, except in the wholesale character
of their recriminations. But the effect on both sides is to throw the
whole matter back into antecedent causation, a method which refuses to
bring the matter to truly moral judgment. For morals has to do with acts
still within our control, acts still to be performed. No amount of guilt
on the part of the evil-doer absolves us from responsibility for the
consequences upon him and others of our way of treating him, or from our
continuing responsibility for the conditions under which persons develop
perverse habits.
We need to discriminate between the physical and the moral question. The
former concerns what _has_ happened, and how it happened. To consider
this question is indispensable to morals. Without an answer to it we
cannot tell what forces are at work nor how to direct our actions so as
to improve conditions. Until we know the conditions which have helped
form the characters we approve and disapprove, our efforts to create the
one and do away with the other will be blind and halting. But the moral
issue concerns the future. It is prospective. To content ourselves with
pronouncing judgments of merit and demerit without reference to the fact
that our judgments are themselves facts which have consequences and that
their value depends upon _their_ consequences, is complacently to dodge
the moral issue, perhaps even to indulge ourselves in pleasurable
passion just as the person we condemn once indulged himself. The moral
problem is that of modifying the factors which now influence future
results. To change the working character or will of another we have to
alter objective conditions which enter into his habits. Our own schemes
of judgment, of assigning blame and praise, of awarding punishment and
honor, are part of these conditions.
In practical life, there are many recognitions of the part played by
social factors in generating personal traits. One of them is our
habit of making social classifications. We attribute distinctive
characteristics to rich and poor, slum-dweller and captain of
industry, rustic and suburbanite, officials, politicians, professors,
to members of races, sets and parties. These judgments are usually too
coarse to be of much use. But they show our practical awareness that
personal traits are functions of social situations. When we generalize
this perception and act upon it intelligently we are committed by it
to recognize that we change character from worse to better only by
changing conditions--among which, once more, are our own ways of
dealing with the one we judge. We cannot change habit directly: that
notion is magic. But we can change it indirectly by modifying
conditions, by an intelligent selecting and weighting of the objects
which engage attention and which influence the fulfilment of desires.
A savage can travel after a fashion in a jungle. Civilized activity is
too complex to be carried on without smoothed roads. It requires signals
and junction points; traffic authorities and means of easy and rapid
transportation. It demands a congenial, antecedently prepared
environment. Without it, civilization would relapse into barbarism in
spite of the best of subjective intention and internal good disposition.
The eternal dignity of labor and art lies in their effecting that
permanent reshaping of environment which is the substantial foundation
of future security and progress. Individuals flourish and wither away
like the grass of the fields. But the fruits of their work endure and
make possible the development of further activities having fuller
significance. It is of grace not of ourselves that we lead civilized
lives. There is sound sense in the old pagan notion that gratitude is
the root of all virtue. Loyalty to whatever in the established
environment makes a life of excellence possible is the beginning of all
progress. The best we can accomplish for posterity is to transmit
unimpaired and with some increment of meaning the environment that makes
it possible to maintain the habits of decent and refined life. Our
individual habits are links in forming the endless chain of humanity.
Their significance depends upon the environment inherited from our
forerunners, and it is enhanced as we foresee the fruits of our labors
in the world in which our successors live.
For however much has been done, there always remains more to do. We can
retain and transmit our own heritage only by constant remaking of our
own environment. Piety to the past is not for its own sake nor for the
sake of the past, but for the sake of a present so secure and enriched
that it will create a yet better future. Individuals with their
exhortations, their preachings and scoldings, their inner aspirations
and sentiments have disappeared, but their habits endure, because these
habits incorporate objective conditions in themselves. So will it be
with _our_ activities. We may desire abolition of war, industrial
justice, greater equality of opportunity for all. But no amount of
preaching good will or the golden rule or cultivation of sentiments of
love and equity will accomplish the results. There must be change in
objective arrangements and institutions. We must work on the environment
not merely on the hearts of men. To think otherwise is to suppose that
flowers can be raised in a desert or motor cars run in a jungle. Both
things can happen and without a miracle. But only by first changing the
jungle and desert.
Yet the distinctively personal or subjective factors in habit count.
Taste for flowers may be the initial step in building reservoirs and
irrigation canals. The stimulation of desire and effort is one
preliminary in the change of surroundings. While personal exhortation,
advice and instruction is a feeble stimulus compared with that which
steadily proceeds from the impersonal forces and depersonalized
habitudes of the environment, yet they may start the latter going.
Taste, appreciation and effort always spring from some accomplished
objective situation. They have objective support; they represent the
liberation of something formerly accomplished so that it is useful in
further operation. A genuine appreciation of the beauty of flowers is
not generated within a self-enclosed consciousness. It reflects a world
in which beautiful flowers have already grown and been enjoyed. Taste
and desire represent a prior objective fact recurring in action to
secure perpetuation and extension. Desire for flowers comes after actual
enjoyment of flowers. But it comes before the work that makes the desert
blossom, it comes before _cultivation_ of plants. Every ideal is
preceded by an actuality; but the ideal is more than a repetition in
inner image of the actual. It projects in securer and wider and fuller
form some good which has been previously experienced in a precarious,
accidental, fleeting way.
II
It is a significant fact that in order to appreciate the peculiar place
of habit in activity we have to betake ourselves to bad habits, foolish
idling, gambling, addiction to liquor and drugs. When we think of such
habits, the union of habit with desire and with propulsive power is
forced upon us. When we think of habits in terms of walking, playing a
musical instrument, typewriting, we are much given to thinking of habits
as technical abilities existing apart from our likings and as lacking in
urgent impulsion. We think of them as passive tools waiting to be called
into action from without. A bad habit suggests an inherent tendency to
action and also a hold, command over us. It makes us do things we are
ashamed of, things which we tell ourselves we prefer not to do. It
overrides our formal resolutions, our conscious decisions. When we are
honest with ourselves we acknowledge that a habit has this power because
it is so intimately a part of ourselves. It has a hold upon us because
we are the habit.
Our self-love, our refusal to face facts, combined perhaps with a sense
of a possible better although unrealized self, leads us to eject the
habit from the thought of ourselves and conceive it as an evil power
which has somehow overcome us. We feed our conceit by recalling that the
habit was not deliberately formed; we never intended to become idlers or
gamblers or rouès. And how can anything be deeply ourselves which
developed accidentally, without set intention? These traits of a bad
habit are precisely the things which are most instructive about all
habits and about ourselves. They teach us that all habits are
affections, that all have projectile power, and that a predisposition
formed by a number of specific acts is an immensely more intimate and
fundamental part of ourselves than are vague, general, conscious
choices. All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they
constitute the self. In any intelligible sense of the word will, they
_are_ will. They form our effective desires and they furnish us with our
working capacities. They rule our thoughts, determining which shall
appear and be strong and which shall pass from light into obscurity.
We may think of habits as means, waiting, like tools in a box, to be
used by conscious resolve. But they are something more than that. They
are active means, means that project themselves, energetic and
dominating ways of acting. We need to distinguish between materials,
tools and means proper. Nails and boards are not strictly speaking means
of a box. They are only materials for making it. Even the saw and hammer
are means only when they are employed in some actual making. Otherwise
they are tools, or potential means. They are actual means only when
brought in conjunction with eye, arm and hand in some specific
operation. And eye, arm and hand are, correspondingly, means proper only
when they are in active operation. And whenever they are in action they
are cooperating with external materials and energies. Without support
from beyond themselves the eye stares blankly and the hand moves
fumblingly. They are means only when they enter into organization with
things which independently accomplish definite results. These
organizations are habits.
This fact cuts two ways. Except in a contingent sense, with an "if,"
neither external materials nor bodily and mental organs are in
themselves means. They have to be employed in coordinated conjunction
with one another to be actual means, or habits. This statement may seem
like the formulation in technical language of a common-place. But belief
in magic has played a large part in human history. And the essence of
all hocus-pocus is the supposition that results can be accomplished
without the joint adaptation to each other of human powers and physical
conditions. A desire for rain may induce men to wave willow branches and
to sprinkle water. The reaction is natural and innocent. But men then go
on to believe that their act has immediate power to bring rain without
the cooperation of intermediate conditions of nature. This is magic;
while it may be natural or spontaneous, it is not innocent. It obstructs
intelligent study of operative conditions and wastes human desire and
effort in futilities.
Belief in magic did not cease when the coarser forms of superstitious
practice ceased. The principle of magic is found whenever it is hoped to
get results without intelligent control of means; and also when it is
supposed that means can exist and yet remain inert and inoperative. In
morals and politics such expectations still prevail, and in so far the
most important phases of human action are still affected by magic. We
think that by feeling strongly enough about something, by wishing hard
enough, we can get a desirable result, such as virtuous execution of a
good resolve, or peace among nations, or good will in industry. We slur
over the necessity of the cooperative action of objective conditions,
and the fact that this cooperation is assured only by persistent and
close study. Or, on the other hand, we fancy we can get these results by
external machinery, by tools or potential means, without a corresponding
functioning of human desires and capacities. Often times these two false
and contradictory beliefs are combined in the same person. The man who
feels that _his_ virtues are his own personal accomplishments is likely
to be also the one who thinks that by passing laws he can throw the fear
of God into others and make them virtuous by edict and prohibitory
mandate.
Recently a friend remarked to me that there was one superstition current
among even cultivated persons. They suppose that if one is told what to
do, if the right _end_ is pointed to them, all that is required in order
to bring about the right act is will or wish on the part of the one who
is to act. He used as an illustration the matter of physical posture;
the assumption is that if a man is told to stand up straight, all that
is further needed is wish and effort on his part, and the deed is done.
He pointed out that this belief is on a par with primitive magic in its
neglect of attention to the means which are involved in reaching an end.
And he went on to say that the prevalence of this belief, starting with
false notions about the control of the body and extending to control of
mind and character, is the greatest bar to intelligent social progress.
It bars the way because it makes us neglect intelligent inquiry to
discover the means which will produce a desired result, and intelligent
invention to procure the means. In short, it leaves out the importance
of intelligently controlled habit.
We may cite his illustration of the real nature of a physical aim or
order and its execution in its contrast with the current false
notion.[1] A man who has a bad habitual posture tells himself, or is
told, to stand up straight. If he is interested and responds, he braces
himself, goes through certain movements, and it is assumed that the
desired result is substantially attained; and that the position is
retained at least as long as the man keeps the idea or order in his
mind. Consider the assumptions which are here made. It is implied that
the means or effective conditions of the realization of a purpose exist
independently of established habit and even that they may be set in
motion in opposition to habit. It is assumed that means are there, so
that the failure to stand erect is wholly a matter of failure of purpose
and desire. It needs paralysis or a broken leg or some other equally
gross phenomenon to make us appreciate the importance of objective
conditions.
[1] I refer to Alexander, "Man's Supreme Inheritance."
Now in fact a man who _can_ stand properly does so, and only a man who
can, does. In the former case, fiats of will are unnecessary, and in the
latter useless. A man who does not stand properly forms a habit of
standing improperly, a positive, forceful habit. The common implication
that his mistake is merely negative, that he is simply failing to do the
right thing, and that the failure can be made good by an order of will
is absurd. One might as well suppose that the man who is a slave of
whiskey-drinking is merely one who fails to drink water. Conditions have
been formed for producing a bad result, and the bad result will occur as
long as those conditions exist. They can no more be dismissed by a
direct effort of will than the conditions which create drought can be
dispelled by whistling for wind. It is as reasonable to expect a fire to
go out when it is ordered to stop burning as to suppose that a man can
stand straight in consequence of a direct action of thought and desire.
The fire can be put out only by changing objective conditions; it is the
same with rectification of bad posture.
Of course something happens when a man acts upon his idea of standing
straight. For a little while, he stands differently, but only a
different kind of badly. He then takes the unaccustomed feeling which
accompanies his unusual stand as evidence that he is now standing right.
But there are many ways of standing badly, and he has simply shifted his
usual way to a compensatory bad way at some opposite extreme. When we
realize this fact, we are likely to suppose that it exists because
control of the _body_ is physical and hence is external to mind and
will. Transfer the command inside character and mind, and it is fancied
that an idea of an end and the desire to realize it will take immediate
effect. After we get to the point of recognizing that habits must
intervene between wish and execution in the case of bodily acts, we
still cherish the illusions that they can be dispensed with in the case
of mental and moral acts. Thus the net result is to make us sharpen the
distinction between non-moral and moral activities, and to lead us to
confine the latter strictly within a private, immaterial realm. But in
fact, formation of ideas as well as their execution depends upon habit.
_If_ we could form a correct idea without a correct habit, then possibly
we could carry it out irrespective of habit. But a wish gets definite
form only in connection with an idea, and an idea gets shape and
consistency only when it has a habit back of it. Only when a man can
already perform an act of standing straight does he know what it is like
to have a right posture and only then can he summon the idea required
for proper execution. The act must come before the thought, and a habit
before an ability to evoke the thought at will. Ordinary psychology
reverses the actual state of affairs.
Ideas, thoughts of ends, are not spontaneously generated. There is no
immaculate conception of meanings or purposes. Reason pure of all
influence from prior habit is a fiction. But pure sensations out of
which ideas can be framed apart from habit are equally fictitious. The
sensations and ideas which are the "stuff" of thought and purpose are
alike affected by habits manifested in the acts which give rise to
sensations and meanings. The dependence of thought, or the more
intellectual factor in our conceptions, upon prior experience is usually
admitted. But those who attack the notion of thought pure from the
influence of experience, usually identify experience with sensations
impressed upon an empty mind. They therefore replace the theory of
unmixed thoughts with that of pure unmixed sensations as the stuff of
all conceptions, purposes and beliefs. But distinct and independent
sensory qualities, far from being original elements, are the products of
a highly skilled analysis which disposes of immense technical scientific
resources. To be able to single out a definitive sensory element in any
field is evidence of a high degree of previous training, that is, of
well-formed habits. A moderate amount of observation of a child will
suffice to reveal that even such gross discriminations as black, white,
red, green, are the result of some years of active dealings with things
in the course of which habits have been set up. It is not such a simple
matter to have a clear-cut sensation. The latter is a sign of training,
skill, habit.
Admission that the idea of, say, standing erect is dependent upon
sensory materials is, therefore equivalent to recognition that it is
dependent upon the habitual attitudes which govern concrete sensory
materials. The medium of habit filters all the material that reaches our
perception and thought. The filter is not, however, chemically pure. It
is a reagent which adds new qualities and rearranges what is received.
Our ideas truly depend upon experience, but so do our sensations. And
the experience upon which they both depend is the operation of
habits--originally of instincts. Thus our purposes and commands
regarding action (whether physical or moral) come to us through the
refracting medium of bodily and moral habits. Inability to think aright
is sufficiently striking to have caught the attention of moralists. But
a false psychology has led them to interpret it as due to a necessary
conflict of flesh and spirit, not as an indication that our ideas are as
dependent, to say the least, upon our habits as are our acts upon our
conscious thoughts and purposes.
Only the man who can maintain a correct posture has the stuff out of
which to form that idea of standing erect which can be the starting
point of a right act. Only the man whose habits are already good can
know what the good is. Immediate, seemingly instinctive, feeling of the
direction and end of various lines of behavior is in reality the feeling
of habits working below direct consciousness. The psychology of
illusions of perception is full of illustrations of the distortion
introduced by habit into observation of objects. The same fact accounts
for the intuitive element in judgments of action, an element which is
valuable or the reverse in accord with the quality of dominant habits.
For, as Aristotle remarked, the untutored moral perceptions of a good
man are usually trustworthy, those of a bad character, not. (But he
should have added that the influence of social custom as well as
personal habit has to be taken into account in estimating who is the
good man and the good judge.)
What is true of the dependence of execution of an idea upon habit is
true, then, of the formation and quality of the idea. Suppose that by a
happy chance a right concrete idea or purpose--concrete, not simply
correct in words--has been hit upon: What happens when one with an
incorrect habit tries to act in accord with it? Clearly the idea can be
carried into execution only with a mechanism already there. If this is
defective or perverted, the best intention in the world will yield bad
results. In the case of no other engine does one suppose that a
defective machine will turn out good goods simply because it is invited
to. Everywhere else we recognize that the design and structure of the
agency employed tell directly upon the work done. Given a bad habit and
the "will" or mental direction to get a good result, and the actual
happening is a reverse or looking-glass manifestation of the usual
fault--a compensatory twist in the opposite direction. Refusal to
recognize this fact only leads to a separation of mind from body, and to
supposing that mental or "psychical" mechanisms are different in kind
from those of bodily operations and independent of them. So deep seated
is this notion that even so "scientific" a theory as modern
psycho-analysis thinks that mental habits can be straightened out by
some kind of purely psychical manipulation without reference to the
distortions of sensation and perception which are due to bad bodily
sets. The other side of the error is found in the notion of "scientific"
nerve physiologists that it is only necessary to locate a particular
diseased cell or local lesion, independent of the whole complex of
organic habits, in order to rectify conduct.
Means are means; they are intermediates, middle terms. To grasp this
fact is to have done with the ordinary dualism of means and ends. The
"end" is merely a series of acts viewed at a remote stage; and a means
is merely the series viewed at an earlier one. The distinction of means
and end arises in surveying the _course_ of a proposed _line_ of action,
a connected series in time. The "end" is the last act thought of; the
means are the acts to be performed prior to it in time. To _reach_ an
end we must take our mind off from it and attend to the act which is
next to be performed. We must make that the end. The only exception to
this statement is in cases where customary habit determines the course
of the series. Then all that is wanted is a cue to set it off. But when
the proposed end involves any deviation from usual action, or any
rectification of it--as in the case of standing straight--then the main
thing is to find some act which is different from the usual one. The
discovery and performance of this unaccustomed act is the "end" to which
we must devote all attention. Otherwise we shall simply do the old thing
over again, no matter what is our conscious command. The only way of
accomplishing this discovery is through a flank movement. We must stop
even thinking of standing up straight. To think of it is fatal, for it
commits us to the operation of an established habit of standing wrong.
We must find an act within our power which is disconnected from any
thought about standing. We must start to do another thing which on one
side inhibits our falling into the customary bad position and on the
other side is the beginning of a series of acts which may lead into the
correct posture.[2] The hard-drinker who keeps thinking of not drinking
is doing what he can to initiate the acts which lead to drinking. He is
starting with the stimulus to his habit. To succeed he must find some
positive interest or line of action which will inhibit the drinking
series and which by instituting another course of action will bring him
to his desired end. In short, the man's true aim is to discover some
course of action, having nothing to do with the habit of drink or
standing erect, which will take him where he wants to go. The discovery
of this other series is at once his means and his end. Until one takes
intermediate acts seriously enough to treat them as ends, one wastes
one's time in any effort at change of habits. Of the intermediate acts,
the most important is the _next_ one. The first or earliest means is the
most important _end_ to discover.
[2]The technique of this process is stated in the book of Mr.
Alexander already referred to, and the theoretical statement
given is borrowed from Mr. Alexander's analysis.
Means and ends are two names for the same reality. The terms denote not
a division in reality but a distinction in judgment. Without
understanding this fact we cannot understand the nature of habits nor
can we pass beyond the usual separation of the moral and non-moral in
conduct. "End" is a name for a series of acts taken collectively--like
the term army. "Means" is a name for the same series taken
distributively--like this soldier, that officer. To think of the end
signifies to extend and enlarge our view of the act to be performed. It
means to look at the next act in perspective, not permitting it to
occupy the entire field of vision. To bear the end in mind signifies
that we should not stop thinking about our _next_ act until we form some
reasonably clear idea of the _course_ of action to which it commits us.
To attain a remote end means on the other hand to treat the end as a
series of means. To say that an end is remote or distant, to say in fact
that it is an end at all, is equivalent to saying that obstacles
intervene between us and it. If, however, it remains a distant end, it
becomes a _mere_ end, that is a dream. As soon as we have projected it,
we must begin to work backward in thought. We must change _what_ is to
be done into a _how_, the means whereby. The end thus re-appears as a
series of "what nexts," and the what next of chief importance is the one
nearest the present state of the one acting. Only as the end is
converted into means is it definitely conceived, or intellectually
defined, to say nothing of being executable. Just as end, it is vague,
cloudy, impressionistic. We do not _know_ what we are really after until
a _course_ of action is mentally worked out. Aladdin with his lamp could
dispense with translating ends into means, but no one else can do so.
Now the thing which is closest to us, the means within our power, is a
habit. Some habit impeded by circumstances is the source of the
projection of the end. It is also the primary means in its realization.
The habit is propulsive and moves anyway toward some end, or result,
whether it is projected as an end-in-view or not. The man who can walk
does walk; the man who can talk does converse--if only with himself. How
is this statement to be reconciled with the fact that we are not always
walking and talking; that our habits seem so often to be latent,
inoperative? Such inactivity holds only of _overt_, visibly obvious
operation. In actuality each habit operates all the time of waking life;
though like a member of a crew taking his turn at the wheel, its
operation becomes the dominantly characteristic trait of an act only
occasionally or rarely.
The habit of walking is expressed in what a man sees when he keeps
still, even in dreams. The recognition of distances and directions of
things from his place at rest is the obvious proof of this statement.
The habit of locomotion is latent in the sense that it is covered up,
counteracted, by a habit of seeing which is definitely at the fore. But
counteraction is not suppression. Locomotion is a potential energy, not
in any metaphysical sense, but in the physical sense in which potential
energy as well as kinetic has to be taken account of in any scientific
description. Everything that a man who has the habit of locomotion does
and thinks he does and thinks differently on that account. This fact is
recognized in current psychology, but is falsified into an association
of sensations. Were it not for the continued operation of all habits in
every act, no such thing as character could exist. There would be simply
a bundle, an untied bundle at that, of isolated acts. Character is the
interpenetration of habits. If each habit existed in an insulated
compartment and operated without affecting or being affected by others,
character would not exist. That is, conduct would lack unity being only
a juxtaposition of disconnected reactions to separated situations. But
since environments overlap, since situations are continuous and those
remote from one another contain like elements, a continuous modification
of habits by one another is constantly going on. A man may give himself
away in a look or a gesture. Character can be read through the medium of
individual acts.
Of course interpenetration is never total. It is most marked in what we
call strong characters. Integration is an achievement rather than a
datum. A weak, unstable, vacillating character is one in which different
habits alternate with one another rather than embody one another. The
strength, solidity of a habit is not its own possession but is due to
reinforcement by the force of other habits which it absorbs into itself.
Routine specialization always works against interpenetration. Men with
"pigeon-hole" minds are not infrequent. Their diverse standards and
methods of judgment for scientific, religious, political matters testify
to isolated compartmental habits of action. Character that is unable to
undergo successfully the strain of thought and effort required to bring
competing tendencies into a unity, builds up barriers between different
systems of likes and dislikes. The emotional stress incident to conflict
is avoided not by readjustment but by effort at confinement. Yet the
exception proves the rule. Such persons are successful in keeping
different ways of reacting apart from one another in consciousness
rather than in action. Their character is marked by stigmata resulting
from this division.
The mutual modification of habits by one another enables us to define
the nature of the moral situation. It is not necessary nor advisable to
be always considering the interaction of habits with one another, that
is to say the effect of a particular habit upon character--which is a
name for the total interaction. Such consideration distracts attention
from the problem of building up an effective habit. A man who is
learning French, or chess-playing or engineering has his hands full with
his particular occupation. He would be confused and hampered by constant
inquiry into its effect upon character. He would resemble the centipede
who by trying to think of the movement of each leg in relation to all
the others was rendered unable to travel. At any given time, certain
habits must be taken for granted as a matter of course. Their operation
is not a matter of moral judgment. They are treated as technical,
recreational, professional, hygienic or economic or esthetic rather than
moral. To lug in morals, or ulterior effect on character at every point,
is to cultivate moral valetudinarianism or priggish posing. Nevertheless
any act, even that one which passes ordinarily as trivial, may entail
such consequences for habit and character as upon occasion to require
judgment from the standpoint of the whole body of conduct. It then comes
under moral scrutiny. To know when to leave acts without distinctive
moral judgment and when to subject them to it is itself a large factor
in morality. The serious matter is that this relative pragmatic, or
intellectual, distinction between the moral and non-moral, has been
solidified into a fixed and absolute distinction, so that some acts are
popularly regarded as forever within and others forever without the
moral domain. From this fatal error recognition of the relations of one
habit to others preserves us. For it makes us see that character is the
name given to the working interaction of habits, and that the cumulative
effect of insensible modifications worked by a particular habit in the
body of preferences may at any moment require attention.
The word habit may seem twisted somewhat from its customary use when
employed as we have been using it. But we need a word to express that
kind of human activity which is influenced by prior activity and in that
sense acquired; which contains within itself a certain ordering or
systematization of minor elements of action; which is projective,
dynamic in quality, ready for overt manifestation; and which is
operative in some subdued subordinate form even when not obviously
dominating activity. Habit even in its ordinary usage comes nearer to
denoting these facts than any other word. If the facts are recognized we
may also use the words attitude and disposition. But unless we have
first made clear to ourselves the facts which have been set forth under
the name of habit, these words are more likely to be misleading than is
the word habit. For the latter conveys explicitly the sense of
operativeness, actuality. Attitude and, as ordinarily used, disposition
suggest something latent, potential, something which requires a positive
stimulus outside themselves to become active. If we perceive that they
denote positive forms of action which are released merely through
removal of some counteracting "inhibitory" tendency, and then become
overt, we may employ them instead of the word habit to denote subdued,
non-patent forms of the latter.
In this case, we must bear in mind that the word disposition means
predisposition, readiness to act overtly in a specific fashion whenever
opportunity is presented, this opportunity consisting in removal of the
pressure due to the dominance of some overt habit; and that attitude
means some special case of a predisposition, the disposition waiting as
it were to spring through an opened door. While it is admitted that the
word habit has been used in a somewhat broader sense than is usual, we
must protest against the tendency in psychological literature to limit
its meaning to repetition. This usage is much less in accord with
popular usage than is the wider way in which we have used the word. It
assumes from the start the identity of habit with routine. Repetition is
in no sense the essence of habit. Tendency to repeat acts is an incident
of many habits but not of all. A man with the habit of giving way to
anger may show his habit by a murderous attack upon some one who has
offended. His act is nonetheless due to habit because it occurs only
once in his life. The essence of habit is an acquired predisposition to
_ways_ or modes of response, not to particular acts except as, under
special conditions, these express a way of behaving. Habit means special
sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing
predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific
acts. It means will.
III
The dynamic force of habit taken in connection with the continuity of
habits with one another explains the unity of character and conduct, or
speaking more concretely of motive and act, will and deed. Moral
theories have frequently separated these things from each other. One
type of theory, for example, has asserted that only will, disposition,
motive counts morally; that acts are external, physical, accidental;
that moral good is different from goodness in act since the latter is
measured by consequences, while moral good or virtue is intrinsic,
complete in itself, a jewel shining by its own light--a somewhat
dangerous metaphor however. The other type of theory has asserted that
such a view is equivalent to saying that all that is necessary to be
virtuous is to cultivate states of feeling; that a premium is put on
disregard of the actual consequences of conduct, and agents are deprived
of any objective criterion for the rightness and wrongness of acts,
being thrown back on their own whims, prejudices and private
peculiarities. Like most opposite extremes in philosophic theories, the
two theories suffer from a common mistake. Both of them ignore the
projective force of habit and the implication of habits in one another.
Hence they separate a unified deed into two disjoined parts, an inner
called motive and an outer called act.
The doctrine that the chief good of man is good will easily wins
acceptance from honest men. For common-sense employs a juster psychology
than either of the theories just mentioned. By will, common-sense
understands something practical and moving. It understands the body of
habits, of active dispositions which makes a man do what he does. Will
is thus not something opposed to consequences or severed from them. It
is a _cause_ of consequences; it is causation in its personal aspect,
the aspect immediately preceding action. It hardly seems conceivable to
practical sense that by will is meant something which can be complete
without reference to deeds prompted and results occasioned. Even the
sophisticated specialist cannot prevent relapses from such an absurdity
back into common-sense. Kant, who went the limit in excluding
consequences from moral value, was sane enough to maintain that a
society of men of good will would be a society which in fact would
maintain social peace, freedom and cooperation. We take the will for the
deed not as a substitute for doing, or a form of doing nothing, but in
the sense that, other things being equal, the right disposition will
produce the right deed. For a disposition means a tendency to act, a
potential energy needing only opportunity to become kinetic and overt.
Apart from such tendency a "virtuous" disposition is either hypocrisy or
self-deceit.
Common-sense in short never loses sight wholly of the two facts which
limit and define a moral situation. One is that consequences fix the
moral quality of an act. The other is that upon the whole, or in the
long run but not unqualifiedly, consequences are what they are because
of the nature of desire and disposition. Hence there is a natural
contempt for the morality of the "good" man who does not show his
goodness in the results of his habitual acts. But there is also an
aversion to attributing omnipotence to even the best of good
dispositions, and hence an aversion to applying the criterion of
consequences unreservedly. A holiness of character which is celebrated
only on holy-days is unreal. A virtue of honesty, or chastity or
benevolence which lives upon itself apart from definite results consumes
itself and goes up in smoke. The separation of motive from motive-force
in action accounts both for the morbidities and futilities of the
professionally good, and for the more or less subconscious contempt for
morality entertained by men of a strong executive habit with their
preference for "getting things done."
Yet there is justification for the common assumption that deeds cannot
be judged properly without taking their animating disposition as well as
their concrete consequences into account. The reason, however, lies not
in isolation of disposition from consequences, but in the need for
viewing consequences broadly. _This_ act is only one of a multitude of
acts. If we confine ourselves to the consequences of this one act we
shall come out with a poor reckoning. Disposition is habitual,
persistent. It shows itself therefore in many acts and in many
consequences. Only as we keep a running account, can we judge
disposition, disentangling its tendency from accidental accompaniments.
When once we have got a fair idea of its tendency, we are able to place
the particular consequences of a single act in a wider context of
continuing consequences. Thus we protect ourselves from taking as
trivial a habit which is serious, and from exaggerating into
momentousness an act which, viewed in the light of aggregate
consequences, is innocent. There is no need to abandon common-sense
which tells us in judging acts first to inquire into disposition; but
there is great need that the estimate of disposition be enlightened by a
scientific psychology. Our legal procedure, for example, wobbles between
a too tender treatment of criminality and a viciously drastic treatment
of it. The vacillation can be remedied only as we can analyze an act in
the light of habits, and analyze habits in the light of education,
environment and prior acts. The dawn of truly scientific criminal law
will come when each individual case is approached with something
corresponding to the complete clinical record which every competent
physician attempts to procure as a matter of course in dealing with his
subjects.
Consequences include effects upon character, upon confirming and
weakening habits, as well as tangibly obvious results. To keep an eye
open to these effects upon character may signify the most reasonable of
precautions or one of the most nauseating of practices. It may mean
concentration of attention upon personal rectitude in neglect of
objective consequences, a practice which creates a wholly unreal
rectitude. But it may mean that the survey of objective consequences is
duly extended in time. An act of gambling may be judged, for example, by
its immediate overt effects, consumption of time, energy, disturbance of
ordinary monetary considerations, etc. It may also be judged by its
consequences upon character, setting up an enduring love of excitement,
a persistent temper of speculation, and a persistent disregard of sober,
steady work. To take the latter effects into account is equivalent to
taking a broad view of future consequences; for these dispositions
affect future companionships, vocation and avocations, the whole tenor
of domestic and public life.
For similar reasons, while common-sense does not run into that sharp
opposition of virtues or moral goods and natural goods which has played
such a large part in professed moralities, it does not insist upon an
exact identity of the two. Virtues are ends because they are such
important means. To be honest, courageous, kindly is to be in the way of
producing specific natural goods or satisfactory fulfilments. Error
comes into theories when the moral goods are separated from their
consequences and also when the attempt is made to secure an exhaustive
and unerring identification of the two. There is a reason, valid as far
as it goes, for distinguishing virtue as a moral good resident in
character alone, from objective consequences. As matter of fact, a
desirable trait of character does not always produce desirable results
while good things often happen with no assistance from good will. Luck,
accident, contingency, plays its part. The act of a good character is
deflected in operation, while a monomaniacal egotism may employ a desire
for glory and power to perform acts which satisfy crying social needs.
Reflection shows that we must supplement the conviction of the moral
connection between character or habit and consequences by two
considerations.
One is the fact that we are inclined to take the notions of goodness in
character and goodness in results in too fixed a way. Persistent
disparity between virtuous disposition and actual outcome shows that we
have misjudged either the nature of virtue or of success. Judgments of
both motive and consequences are still, in the absence of methods of
scientific analysis and continuous registration and reporting,
rudimentary and conventional. We are inclined to wholesale judgments of
character, dividing men into goats and sheep, instead of recognizing
that all character is speckled, and that the problem of moral judgment
is one of discriminating the complex of acts and habits into tendencies
which are to be _specifically_ cultivated and condemned. We need to
study consequences more thoroughly and keep track of them more
continuously before we shall be in a position where we can pass with
reasonable assurance upon the good and evil in either disposition or
results. But even when proper allowances are made, we are forcing the
pace when we assume that there is or ever can be an exact equation of
disposition and outcome. We have to admit the rôle of accident.
We cannot get beyond tendencies, and must perforce content ourselves
with judgments of tendency. The honest man, we are told, acts upon
"principle" and not from considerations of expediency, that is, of
particular consequences. The truth in this saying is that it is not safe
to judge the worth of a proposed act by its probable consequences in an
isolated case. The word "principle" is a eulogistic cover for the fact
of _tendency_. The word "tendency" is an attempt to combine two facts,
one that habits have a certain causal efficacy, the other that their
outworking in any particular case is subject to contingencies, to
circumstances which are unforeseeable and which carry an act one side of
its usual effect. In cases of doubt, there is no recourse save to stick
to "tendency," that is, to the probable effect of a habit in the long
run, or as we say upon the whole. Otherwise we are on the lookout for
exceptions which favor our immediate desire. The trouble is that we are
not content with modest probabilities. So when we find that a good
disposition may work out badly, we say, as Kant did, that the
working-out, the consequence, has nothing to do with the moral quality
of an act, or we strain for the impossible, and aim at some infallible
calculus of consequences by which to measure moral worth in each
specific case.
Human conceit has played a great part. It has demanded that the whole
universe be judged from the standpoint of desire and disposition, or at
least from that of the desire and disposition of the good man. The
effect of religion has been to cherish this conceit by making men think
that the universe invariably conspires to support the good and bring the
evil to naught. By a subtle logic, the effect has been to render morals
unreal and transcendental. For since the world of actual experience does
not guarantee this identity of character and outcome, it is inferred
that there must be some ulterior truer reality which enforces an
equation that is violated in this life. Hence the common notion of
another world in which vice and virtue of character produce their exact
moral meed. The idea is equally found as an actuating force in Plato.
Moral realities must be supreme. Yet they are flagrantly contradicted in
a world where a Socrates drinks the hemlock of the criminal, and where
the vicious occupy the seats of the mighty. Hence there must be a truer
ultimate reality in which justice is only and absolutely justice.
Something of the same idea lurks behind every aspiration for realization
of abstract justice or equality or liberty. It is the source of all
"idealistic" utopias and also of all wholesale pessimism and distrust of
life.
Utilitarianism illustrates another way of mistreating the situation.
Tendency is not good enough for the utilitarians. They want a
mathematical equation of act and consequence. Hence they make light of
the steady and controllable factor, the factor of disposition, and
fasten upon just the things which are most subject to incalculable
accident--pleasures and pains--and embark upon the hopeless enterprise
of judging an act apart from character on the basis of definite results.
An honestly modest theory will stick to the probabilities of tendency,
and not import mathematics into morals. It will be alive and sensitive
to consequences as they actually present themselves, because it knows
that they give the only instruction we can procure as to the meaning of
habits and dispositions. But it will never assume that a moral judgment
which reaches certainty is possible. We have just to do the best we can
with habits, the forces most under our control; and we shall have our
hands more than full in spelling out their general tendencies without
attempting an exact judgment upon each deed. For every habit
incorporates within itself some part of the objective environment, and
no habit and no amount of habits can incorporate the entire environment
within itself or themselves. There will always be disparity between them
and the results actually attained. Hence the work of intelligence in
observing consequences and in revising and readjusting habits, even the
best of good habits, can never be foregone. Consequences reveal
unexpected potentialities in our habits whenever these habits are
exercised in a different environment from that in which they were
formed. The assumption of a stably uniform environment (even the
hankering for one) expresses a fiction due to attachment to old habits.
The utilitarian theory of equation of acts with consequences is as much
a fiction of self-conceit as is the assumption of a fixed transcendental
world wherein moral ideals are eternally and immutably real. Both of
them deny in effect the relevancy of time, of change, to morals, while
time is of the essence of the moral struggle.
We thus come, by an unexpected path, upon the old question of the
objectivity or subjectivity of morals. Primarily they are objective. For
will, as we have seen, means, in the concrete, habits; and habits
incorporate an environment within themselves. They are adjustments _of_
the environment, not merely _to_ it. At the same time, the environment
is many, not one; hence will, disposition, is plural. Diversity does not
of itself imply conflict, but it implies the possibility of conflict,
and this possibility is realized in fact. Life, for example, involves
the habit of eating, which in turn involves a unification of organism
and nature. But nevertheless this habit comes into conflict with other
habits which are also "objective," or in equilibrium with _their_
environments. Because the environment is not all of one piece, man's
house is divided within itself, against itself. Honor or consideration
for others or courtesy conflict with hunger. Then the notion of the
complete objectivity of morals gets a shock. Those who wish to maintain
the idea unimpaired take the road which leads to transcendentalism. The
empirical world, they say, is indeed divided, and hence any natural
morality must be in conflict with itself. This self-contradiction
however only points to a higher fixed reality with which a true and
superior morality is alone concerned. Objectivity is saved but at the
expense of connection with human affairs. Our problem is to see what
objectivity signifies upon a naturalistic basis; how morals are
objective and yet secular and social. Then we may be able to decide in
what crisis of experience morals become legitimately dependent upon
character or self--that is, "subjective."
Prior discussion points the way to the answer. A hungry man could not
conceive food as a good unless he had actually experienced, with the
support of environing conditions, food as good. The objective
satisfaction comes first. But he finds himself in a situation where the
good is denied in fact. It then lives in imagination. The habit denied
overt expression asserts itself in idea. It sets up the thought, the
ideal, of food. This thought is not what is sometimes called thought, a
pale bloodless abstraction, but is charged with the motor urgent force
of habit. Food as a good is now subjective, personal. But it has its
source in objective conditions and it moves forward to new objective
conditions. For it works to secure a change of environment so that food
will again be present in fact. Food is a "subjective" good during a
temporary transitional stage from one object to another.
The analogy with morals lies upon the surface. A habit impeded in overt
operation continues nonetheless to operate. It manifests itself in
desireful thought, that is in an ideal or imagined object which embodies
within itself the force of a frustrated habit. There is therefore demand
for a changed environment, a demand which can be achieved only by some
modification and rearrangement of old habits. Even Plato preserves an
intimation of the natural function of ideal objects when he insists upon
their value as patterns for use in reorganization of the actual scene.
The pity is that he could not see that patterns exist only within and
for the sake of reorganization, so that they, rather than empirical or
natural objects, are the instrumental affairs. Not seeing this, he
converted a function of reorganization into a metaphysical reality. If
we essay a technical formulation we shall say that morality becomes
legitimately subjective or personal when activities which once included
objective factors in their operation temporarily lose support from
objects, and yet strive to change existing conditions until they regain
a support which has been lost. It is all of a kind with the doings of a
man, who remembering a prior satisfaction of thirst and the conditions
under which it occurred, digs a well. For the time being water in
reference to his activity exists in imagination not in fact. But this
imagination is not a self-generated, self-enclosed, psychical existence.
It is the persistent operation of a prior object which has been
incorporated in effective habit. There is no miracle in the fact that an
object in a new context operates in a new way.
Of transcendental morals, it may at least be said that they retain the
intimation of the objective character of purposes and goods. Purely
subjective morals arise when the incidents of the temporary (though
recurrent) crisis of reorganization are taken as complete and final in
themselves. A self having habits and attitudes formed with the
cooperation of objects runs ahead of immediately surrounding objects to
effect a new equilibration. Subjective morals substitutes a self always
set over against objects and generating its ideals independently of
objects, and in permanent, not transitory, opposition to them.
Achievement, any achievement, is to it a negligible second best, a cheap
and poor substitute for ideals that live only in the mind, a compromise
with actuality made from physical necessity not from moral reasons. In
truth, there is but a temporal episode. For a time, a self, a person,
carries in his own habits against the forces of the immediate
environment, a good which the existing environment denies. For this self
moving temporarily, in isolation from objective conditions, between a
good, a completeness, that has been and one that it is hoped to restore
in some new form, subjective theories have substituted an erring soul
wandering hopelessly between a Paradise Lost in the dim past and a
Paradise to be Regained in a dim future. In reality, even when a person
is in some respects at odds with his environment and so has to act for
the time being as the sole agent of a good, he in many respects is still
supported by objective conditions and is in possession of undisturbed
goods and virtues. Men do die from thirst at times, but upon the whole
in their search for water they are sustained by other fulfilled powers.
But subjective morals taken wholesale sets up a solitary self without
objective ties and sustenance. In fact, there exists a shifting mixture
of vice and virtue. Theories paint a world with a God in heaven and a
Devil in hell. Moralists in short have failed to recall that a severance
of moral desire and purpose from immediate actualities is an inevitable
phase of activity when habits persist while the world which they have
incorporated alters. Back of this failure lies the failure to recognize
that in a changing world, old habits must perforce need modification, no
matter how good they have been.
Obviously any such change can be only experimental. The lost objective
good persists in habit, but it can recur in objective form only through
some condition of affairs which has not been yet experienced, and which
therefore can be anticipated only uncertainly and inexactly. The
essential point is that anticipation should at least guide as well as
stimulate effort, that it should be a working hypothesis corrected and
developed by events as action proceeds. There was a time when men
believed that each object in the external world carried its nature
stamped upon it as a form, and that intelligence consisted in simply
inspecting and reading off an intrinsic self-enclosed complete nature.
The scientific revolution which began in the seventeenth century came
through a surrender of this point of view. It began with recognition
that every natural object is in truth an event continuous in space and
time with other events; and is to be _known_ only by experimental
inquiries which will exhibit a multitude of complicated, obscure and
minute relationships. Any observed form or object is but a challenge.
The case is not otherwise with ideals of justice or peace or human
brotherhood, or equality, or order. They too are not things
self-enclosed to be known by introspection, as objects were once
supposed to be known by rational insight. Like thunderbolts and
tubercular disease and the rainbow they can be known only by extensive
and minute observation of consequences incurred in action. A false
psychology of an isolated self and a subjective morality shuts out from
morals the things important to it, acts and habits in their objective
consequences. At the same time it misses the point characteristic of the
personal subjective aspect of morality: the significance of desire and
thought in breaking down old rigidities of habit and preparing the way
for acts that re-create an environment.
IV
We often fancy that institutions, social custom, collective habit, have
been formed by the consolidation of individual habits. In the main this
supposition is false to fact. To a considerable extent customs, or
wide-spread uniformities of habit, exist because individuals face the
same situation and react in like fashion. But to a larger extent customs
persist because individuals form their personal habits under conditions
set by prior customs. An individual usually acquires the morality as he
inherits the speech of his social group. The activities of the group are
already there, and some assimilation of his own acts to their pattern is
a prerequisite of a share therein, and hence of having any part in what
is going on. Each person is born an infant, and every infant is subject
from the first breath he draws and the first cry he utters to the
attentions and demands of others. These others are not just persons in
general with minds in general. They are beings with habits, and beings
who upon the whole esteem the habits they have, if for no other reason
than that, having them, their imagination is thereby limited. The nature
of habit is to be assertive, insistent, self-perpetuating. There is no
miracle in the fact that if a child learns any language he learns the
language that those about him speak and teach, especially since his
ability to speak that language is a pre-condition of his entering into
effective connection with them, making wants known and getting them
satisfied. Fond parents and relatives frequently pick up a few of the
child's spontaneous modes of speech and for a time at least they are
portions of the speech of the group. But the ratio which such words bear
to the total vocabulary in use gives a fair measure of the part played
by purely individual habit in forming custom in comparison with the part
played by custom in forming individual habits. Few persons have either
the energy or the wealth to build private roads to travel upon. They
find it convenient, "natural," to use the roads that are already there;
while unless their private roads connect at some point with the high-way
they cannot build them even if they would.
These simple facts seem to me to give a simple explanation of matters
that are often surrounded with mystery. To talk about the priority of
"society" to _the_ individual is to indulge in nonsensical metaphysics.
But to say that some pre-existent association of human beings is prior
to every particular human being who is born into the world is to
mention a commonplace. These associations are definite modes of
interaction of persons with one another; that is to say they form
customs, institutions. There is no problem in all history so
artificial as that of how "individuals" manage to form "society." The
problem is due to the pleasure taken in manipulating concepts, and
discussion goes on because concepts are kept from inconvenient contact
with facts. The facts of infancy and sex have only to be called to
mind to see how manufactured are the conceptions which enter into this
particular problem.
The problem, however, of how those established and more or less deeply
grooved systems of interaction which we call social groups, big and
small, modify the activities of individuals who perforce are caught-up
within them, and how the activities of component individuals remake
and redirect previously established customs is a deeply significant
one. Viewed from the standpoint of custom and its priority to the
formation of habits in human beings who are born babies and gradually
grow to maturity, the facts which are now usually assembled under the
conceptions of collective minds, group-minds, national-minds,
crowd-minds, etc., etc., lose the mysterious air they exhale when mind
is thought of (as orthodox psychology teaches us to think of it) as
something which precedes action. It is difficult to see that
collective mind means anything more than a custom brought at some
point to explicit, emphatic consciousness, emotional or
intellectual.[3]
[3] Mob psychology comes under the same principles, but in a
negative aspect. The crowd and mob express a disintegration
of habits which releases impulse and renders persons
susceptible to immediate stimuli, rather than such a
functioning of habits as is found in the mind of a club or
school of thought or a political party. Leaders of an
organization, that is of an interaction having settled
habits, may, however, in order to put over some schemes
deliberately resort to stimuli which will break through the
crust of ordinary custom and release impulses on such a scale
as to create a mob psychology. Since fear is a normal
reaction to the unfamiliar, dread and suspicion are the
forces most played upon to accomplish this result, together
with vast vague contrary hopes. This is an ordinary technique
in excited political campaigns, in starting war, etc. But an
assimilation like that of Le Bon of the psychology of
democracy to the psychology of a crowd in overriding
individual judgment shows lack of psychological insight. A
political democracy exhibits an overriding of thought like
that seen in any convention or institution. That is, thought
is submerged in habit. In the crowd and mob, it is submerged
in undefined emotion. China and Japan exhibit crowd
psychology more frequently than do western democratic
countries. Not in my judgment because of any essentially
Oriental psychology but because of a nearer background of
rigid and solid customs conjoined with the phenomena of a
period of transition. The introduction of many novel stimuli
creates occasions where habits afford no ballast. Hence great
waves of emotion easily sweep through masses. Sometimes they
are waves of enthusiasm for the new; sometimes of violent
reaction against it--both equally undiscriminating. The war
has left behind it a somewhat similar situation in western
countries.
The family into which one is born is a family in a village or city which
interacts with other more or less integrated systems of activity, and
which includes a diversity of groupings within itself, say, churches,
political parties, clubs, cliques, partnerships, trade-unions,
corporations, etc. If we start with the traditional notion of mind as
something complete in itself, then we may well be perplexed by the
problem of how a common mind, common ways of feeling and believing and
purposing, comes into existence and then forms these groups. The case is
quite otherwise if we recognize that in any case we must start with
grouped action, that is, with some fairly settled system of interaction
among individuals. The problem of origin and development of the various
groupings, or definite customs, in existence at any particular time in
any particular place is not solved by reference to psychic causes,
elements, forces. It is to be solved by reference to facts of action,
demand for food, for houses, for a mate, for some one to talk to and to
listen to one talk, for control of others, demands which are all
intensified by the fact already mentioned that each person begins a
helpless, dependent creature. I do not mean of course that hunger, fear,
sexual love, gregariousness, sympathy, parental love, love of bossing
and of being ordered about, imitation, etc., play no part. But I do mean
that these words do not express elements or forces which are psychic or
mental in their first intention. They denote _ways of behavior_. These
ways of behaving involve interaction, that is to say, and prior
groupings. And to understand the existence of organized ways or habits
we surely need to go to physics, chemistry and physiology rather than to
psychology.
There is doubtless a great mystery as to why any such thing as being
conscious should exist at all. But _if_ consciousness exists at all,
there is no mystery in its being connected with what it is connected
with. That is to say, if an activity which is an interaction of various
factors, or a grouped activity, comes to consciousness it seems natural
that it should take the form of an emotion, belief or purpose that
reflects the interaction, that it should be an "our" consciousness or a
"my" consciousness. And by this is meant both that it will be shared by
those who are implicated in the associative custom, or more or less
alike in them all, and that it will be felt or thought to concern others
as well as one's self. A family-custom or organized habit of action
comes into contact and conflict for example with that of some other
family. The emotions of ruffled pride, the belief about superiority or
being "as good as other people," the intention to hold one's own are
naturally _our_ feeling and idea of _our_ treatment and position.
Substitute the Republican party or the American nation for the family
and the general situation remains the same. The conditions which
determine the nature and extent of the particular grouping in question
are matters of supreme import. But they are not as such subject-matter
of psychology, but of the history of politics, law, religion, economics,
invention, the technology of communication and intercourse. Psychology
comes in as an indispensable tool. But it enters into the matter of
understanding these various special topics, not into the question of
what psychic forces form a collective mind and therefore a social group.
That way of stating the case puts the cart a long way before the horse,
and naturally gathers obscurities and mysteries to itself. In short, the
primary facts of social psychology center about collective habit,
custom. In addition to the general psychology of habit--which _is_
general not individual in any intelligible sense of that word--we need
to find out just how different customs shape the desires, beliefs,
purposes of those who are affected by them. The problem of social
psychology is not how either individual or collective mind forms social
groups and customs, but how different customs, established interacting
arrangements, form and nurture different minds. From this general
statement we return to our special problem, which is how the rigid
character of past custom has unfavorably influenced beliefs, emotions
and purposes having to do with morals.
We come back to the fact that individuals begin their career as infants.
For the plasticity of the young presents a temptation to those having
greater experience and hence greater power which they rarely resist. It
seems putty to be molded according to current designs. That plasticity
also means power to change prevailing custom is ignored. Docility is
looked upon not as ability to learn whatever the world has to teach, but
as subjection to those instructions of others which reflect _their_
current habits. To be truly docile is to be eager to learn all the
lessons of active, inquiring, expanding experience. The inert, stupid
quality of current customs perverts learning into a willingness to
follow where others point the way, into conformity, constriction,
surrender of scepticism and experiment. When we think of the docility of
the young we first think of the stocks of information adults wish to
impose and the ways of acting they want to reproduce. Then we think of
the insolent coercions, the insinuating briberies, the pedagogic
solemnities by which the freshness of youth can be faded and its vivid
curiosities dulled. Education becomes the art of taking advantage of the
helplessness of the young; the forming of habits becomes a guarantee for
the maintenance of hedges of custom.
Of course it is not wholly forgotten that habits are abilities, arts.
Any striking exhibition of acquired skill in physical matters, like that
of an acrobat or billiard-player, arouses universal admiration. But we
like to have innovating power limited to technical matters and reserve
our admiration for those manifestations that display virtuosity rather
than virtue. In moral matters it is assumed that it is enough if some
ideal has been exemplified in the life of a leader, so that it is now
the part of others to follow and reproduce. For every branch of conduct,
there is a Jesus or Buddha, a Napoleon or Marx, a Froebel or Tolstoi,
whose pattern of action, exceeding our own grasp, is reduced to a
practicable copy-size by passage through rows and rows of lesser
leaders.
The notion that it suffices if the idea, the end, is present in the mind
of some authority dominates formal schooling. It permeates the
unconscious education derived from ordinary contact and intercourse.
Where following is taken to be normal, moral originality is pretty sure
to be eccentric. But if independence were the rule, originality would be
subjected to severe, experimental tests and be saved from cranky
eccentricity, as it now is in say higher mathematics. The regime of
custom assumes that the outcome is the same whether an individual
understands what he is about or whether he goes through certain motions
while mouthing the words of others--repetition of formulæ being esteemed
of greater importance, upon the whole, than repetition of deeds. To say
what the sect or clique or class says is the way of proving that one
also understands and approves what the clique clings to. In theory,
democracy should be a means of stimulating original thought, and of
evoking action deliberately adjusted in advance to cope with new forces.
In fact it is still so immature that its main effect is to multiply
occasions for imitation. If progress in spite of this fact is more rapid
than in other social forms, it is by accident, since the diversity of
models conflict with one another and thus give individuality a chance in
the resulting chaos of opinions. Current democracy acclaims success more
boisterously than do other social forms, and surrounds failure with a
more reverberating train of echoes. But the prestige thus given
excellence is largely adventitious. The achievement of thought attracts
others not so much intrinsically as because of an eminence due to
multitudinous advertising and a swarm of imitators.
Even liberal thinkers have treated habit as essentially, not because of
the character of existing customs, conservative. In fact only in a
society dominated by modes of belief and admiration fixed by past custom
is habit any more conservative than it is progressive. It all depends
upon its quality. Habit is an ability, an art, formed through past
experience. But whether an ability is limited to repetition of past acts
adopted to past conditions or is available for new emergencies depends
wholly upon what kind of habit exists. The tendency to think that only
"bad" habits are disserviceable and that bad habits are conventionally
enumerable, conduces to make all habits more or less bad. For what makes
a habit bad is enslavement to old ruts. The common notion that
enslavement to good ends converts mechanical routine into good is a
negation of the principle of moral goodness. It identifies morality with
what _was_ sometime rational, possibly in some prior experience of one's
own, but more probably in the experience of some one else who is now
blindly set up as a final authority. The genuine heart of reasonableness
(and of goodness in conduct) lies in effective mastery of the conditions
which _now_ enter into action. To be satisfied with repeating, with
traversing the ruts which in other conditions led to good, is the surest
way of creating carelessness about present and actual good.
Consider what happens to thought when habit is merely power to repeat
acts without thought. Where does thought exist and operate when it is
excluded from habitual activities? Is not such thought of necessity shut
out from effective power, from ability to control objects and command
events? Habits deprived of thought and thought which is futile are two
sides of the same fact. To laud habit as conservative while praising
thought as the main spring of progress is to take the surest course to
making thought abstruse and irrelevant and progress a matter of accident
and catastrophe. The concrete fact behind the current separation of body
and mind, practice and theory, actualities and ideals, is precisely this
separation of habit and thought. Thought which does not exist within
ordinary habits of action lacks means of execution. In lacking
application, it also lacks test, criterion. Hence it is condemned to a
separate realm. If we try to act upon it, our actions are clumsy,
forced. In fact, contrary habits (as we have already seen) come into
operation and betray our purpose. After a few such experiences, it is
subconsciously decided that thought is too precious and high to be
exposed to the contingencies of action. It is reserved for separate
uses; thought feeds only thought not action. Ideals must not run the
risk of contamination and perversion by contact with actual conditions.
Thought then either resorts to specialized and technical matters
influencing action in the library or laboratory alone, or else it
becomes sentimentalized.
Meantime there are certain "practical" men who combine thought and habit
and who are effectual. Their thought is about their own advantage; and
their habits correspond. They dominate the actual situation. They
encourage routine in others, and they also subsidize such thought and
learning as are kept remote from affairs. This they call sustaining the
standard of the ideal. Subjection they praise as team-spirit, loyalty,
devotion, obedience, industry, law-and-order. But they temper respect
for law--by which they mean the order of the existing status--on the
part of others with most skilful and thoughtful manipulation of it in
behalf of their own ends. While they denounce as subversive anarchy
signs of independent thought, of thinking for themselves, on the part of
others lest such thought disturb the conditions by which they profit,
they think quite literally _for_ themselves, that is, _of_ themselves.
This is the eternal game of the practical men. Hence it is only by
accident that the separate and endowed "thought" of professional
thinkers leaks out into action and affects custom.