The explanation of the fallacy is however too easy to be convincing.

There must have been some material, empirical reason why intelligent men

were so easily entrapped by a fairly obvious fallacy. That material

error was a belief in the fixity and simplicity of the self, a belief

which had been fostered by a school far removed from the one in

question, the theologians with their dogma of the unity and ready-made

completeness of the soul. We arrive at true conceptions of motivation

and interest only by the recognition that selfhood (except as it has

encased itself in a shell of routine) is in process of making, and that

any self is capable of including within itself a number of inconsistent

selves, of unharmonized dispositions. Even a Nero may be capable upon

occasion of acts of kindness. It is even conceivable that under certain

circumstances he may be appalled by the consequences of cruelty, and

turn to the fostering of kindlier impulses. A sympathetic person is not

immune to harsh arrogances, and he may find himself involved in so much

trouble as a consequence of a kindly act, that he allows his generous

impulses to shrivel and henceforth governs his conduct by the dictates

of the strictest worldly prudence. Inconsistencies and shiftings in

character are the commonest things in experience. Only the hold of a

traditional conception of the singleness and simplicity of soul and self

blinds us to perceiving what they mean: the relative fluidity and

diversity of the constituents of selfhood. There is no one ready-made

self behind activities. There are complex, unstable, opposing attitudes,

habits, impulses which gradually come to terms with one another, and

assume a certain consistency of configuration, even though only by means

of a distribution of inconsistencies which keeps them in water-tight

compartments, giving them separate turns or tricks in action.

Many good words get spoiled when the word self is prefixed to them:

Words like pity, confidence, sacrifice, control, love. The reason is not

far to seek. The word self infects them with a fixed introversion and

isolation. It implies that the act of love or trust or control is turned

back upon a self which already is in full existence and in whose behalf

the act operates. Pity fulfils and creates a self when it is directed

outward, opening the mind to new contacts and receptions. Pity for self

withdraws the mind back into itself, rendering its subject unable to

learn from the buffetings of fortune. Sacrifice may enlarge a self by

bringing about surrender of acquired possessions to requirements of new

growth. Self-sacrifice means a self-maiming which asks for compensatory

pay in some later possession or indulgence. Confidence as an outgoing

act is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life, trusting

them to bring instruction and support to a developing self. Confidence

which terminates in the self means a smug complacency that renders a

person obtuse to instruction by events. Control means a command of

resources that enlarges the self; self-control denotes a self which is

contracting, concentrating itself upon its own achievements, hugging

them tight, and thereby estopping the growth that comes when the self is

generously released; a self-conscious moral athleticism that ends in a

disproportionate enlargement of some organ.

What makes the difference in each of these cases is the difference

between a self taken as something already made and a self still making

through action. In the former case, action has to contribute profit or

security or consolation _to_ a self. In the latter, impulsive action

becomes an adventure in discovery of a self which is possible but as yet

unrealized, an experiment in creating a self which shall be more

inclusive than the one which exists. The idea that only those impulses

have moral validity which aim at the welfare of others, or are

altruistic, is almost as one-sided a doctrine as the dogma of self-love.

Yet altruism has one marked superiority; it at least suggests a

generosity of outgoing action, a liberation of power as against the

close, pent in, protected atmosphere of a ready-made ego.

The reduction of all impulses to forms of self-love is worth

investigation because it gives an opportunity to say something about

self as an ongoing process. The doctrine itself is faded, its advocates

are belated. The notion is too tame to appeal to a generation that has

experienced romanticism and has been intoxicated by imbibing from the

streams of power released by the industrial revolution. The fashionable

unification of today goes by the name of the will to power.

In the beginning, this is hardly more than a name for a quality of all

activity. Every fulfilled activity terminates in added control of

conditions, in an art of administering objects. Execution, satisfaction,

realization, fulfilment are all names for the fact that an activity

implies an accomplishment which is possible only by subduing

circumstance to serve as an accomplice of achievement. Each impulse or

habit is thus a will to its _own_ power. To say this is to clothe a

truism in a figure. It says that anger or fear or love or hate is

successful when it effects some change outside the organism which

measures its force and registers its efficiency. The achieved outcome

marks the difference between action and a cooped-up sentiment which is

expended upon itself. The eye hungers for light, the ear for sound, the

hand for surfaces, the arm for things to reach, throw and lift, the leg

for distance, anger for an enemy to destroy, curiosity for something to

shiver and cower before, love for a mate. Each impulse is a demand for

an object which will enable it to function. Denied an object in reality

it tends to create one in fancy, as pathology shows.

So far we have no generalized will to power, but only the inherent

pressure of every activity for an adequate manifestation. It is not so

much a demand for power as search for an opportunity to use a power

already existing. If opportunities corresponded to the need, a desire

_for_ power would hardly arise: power would be used and satisfaction

would accrue. But impulse is balked. If conditions are right for an

educative growth, the snubbed impulse will be "sublimated." That is, it

will become a contributory factor in some more inclusive and complex

activity, in which it is reduced to a subordinate yet effectual place.

Sometimes however frustration dams activity up, and intensifies it. A

longing for satisfaction at any cost is engendered. And when social

conditions are such that the path of least resistance lies through

subjugation of the energies of others, the will to power bursts into

flower.

This explains why we attribute a will to power to others but not to

ourselves, except in the complimentary sense that being strong we

naturally wish to exercise our strength. Otherwise for ourselves we only

want what we want when we want it, not being overscrupulous about the

means we take to get it. This psychology is naive but it is truer to

facts than the supposition that there exists by itself as a separate and

original thing a will to power. For it indicates that the real fact is

some existing power which demands outlet, and which becomes

self-conscious only when it is too weak to overcome obstacles.

Conventionally the will to power is imputed only to a comparatively

small number of ambitious and ruthless men. They are probably upon the

whole quite unconscious of any such will, being mastered by specific

intense impulses that find their realization most readily by bending

others to serve as tools of their aims. Self-conscious will to power is

found mainly in those who have a so-called inferiority complex, and who

would compensate for a sense of personal disadvantage (acquired early in

childhood) by making a striking impression upon others, in the reflex of

which they feel their strength appreciated. The literateur who has to

take his action out in imagination is much more likely to evince a will

to power than a Napoleon who sees definite objects with extraordinary

clearness and who makes directly for them. Explosive irritations,

naggings, the obstinacy of weak persons, dreams of grandeur, the

violence of those usually submissive are the ordinary marks of a will to

power.

Discussion of the false simplification involved in this doctrine

suggests another unduly fixed and limited classification. Critics of the

existing economic regime have divided instincts into the creative and

the acquisitive, and have condemned the present order because it

embodies the latter at the expense of the former. The division is

convenient, yet mistaken. Convenient because it sums up certain facts of

the present system, mistaken because it takes social products for

psychological originals. Speaking roughly we may say that native

activity is both creative and acquisitive, creative as a process,

acquisitive in that it terminates as a rule in some tangible product

which brings the process to consciousness of itself.

Activity is creative in so far as it moves to its own enrichment as

activity, that is, bringing along with itself a release of further

activities. Scientific inquiry, artistic production, social

companionship possess this trait to a marked degree; some amount of it

is a normal accompaniment of all successfully coordinated action. While

from the standpoint of what precedes it is a fulfilment, it is a

liberative expansion with respect to what comes after. There is here no

antagonism between creative expression and the production of results

which endure and which give a sense of accomplishment. Architecture at

its best, for example, would probably appear to most persons to be

_more_ creative, not less, than dancing at its best. There is nothing in

industrial production which of necessity excludes creative activity. The

fact that it terminates in tangible utilities no more lowers its status

than the uses of a bridge exclude creative art from a share in its

design and construction. What requires explanation is why process is so

definitely subservient to product in so much of modern industry:--that

is, why later use rather than present achieving is the emphatic thing.

The answer seems to be twofold.

An increasingly large portion of economic work is done with machines. As

a rule, these machines are not under the personal control of those who

operate them. The machines are operated for ends which the worker has no

share in forming and in which as such, or apart from his wage, he has no

interest. He neither understands the machines nor cares for their

purpose. He is engaged in an activity in which means are cut off from

ends, instruments from what they achieve. Highly mechanized activity

tends as Emerson said to turn men into spiders and needles. But if men

understand what they are about, if they see the whole process of which

their special work is a necessary part, and if they have concern, care,

for the whole, then the mechanizing effect is counteracted. But when a

man is only the tender of a machine, he can have no insight and no

affection; creative activity is out of the question.

What remains to the workman is however not so much acquisitive desires

as love of security and a wish for a good time. An excessive premium on

security springs from the precarious conditions of the workman; desire

for a good time, so far as it needs any explanation, from demand for

relief from drudgery, due to the absence of culturing factors in the

work done. Instead of acquisition being a primary end, the net effect of

the process is rather to destroy sober care for materials and products;

to induce careless wastefulness, so far as that can be indulged in

without lessening the weekly wage. From the standpoint of orthodox

economic theory, the most surprising thing about modern industry is the

small number of persons who have any effective interest in acquisition

of wealth. This disregard for acquisition makes it easier for a few who

do want to have things their own way, and who monopolize what is

amassed. If an acquisitive impulse were only more evenly developed, more

of a real fact, than it is, it is quite possible that things would be

better than they are.

Even with respect to men who succeed in accumulating wealth it is a

mistake to suppose that acquisitiveness plays with most of them a large

rôle, beyond getting control of the tools of the game. Acquisition is

necessary as an outcome, but it arises not from love of accumulation but

from the fact that without a large stock of possessions one cannot

engage effectively in modern business. It is an incident of love of

power, of desire to impress fellows, to obtain prestige, to secure

influence, to manifest ability, to "succeed" in short under the

conditions of the given regime. And if we are to shove a mythological

psychology of instincts behind modern economics, we should do better to

invent instincts for security, a good time, power and success than to

rely upon an acquisitive instinct. We should have also to give much

weight to a peculiar sporting instinct. Not acquiring dollars, but

chasing them, hunting them is the important thing. Acquisition has its

part in the big game, for even the most devoted sportsman prefers, other

things being equal, to bring home the fox's brush. A tangible result is

the mark to one's self and to others of success in sport.

Instead of dividing sharply an acquisitive impulse manifested in

business and a creative instinct displayed in science, art and social

fellowship, we should rather first inquire why it is that so much of

creative activity is in our day diverted into business, and then ask why

it is that opportunity for exercise of the creative capacity in business

is now restricted to such a small class, those who have to do with

banking, finding a market, and manipulating investments; and finally ask

why creative activity is perverted into an over-specialized and

frequently inhumane operation. For after all it is not the bare fact of

creation but its quality which counts.

That captains of industry are creative artists of a sort, and that

industry absorbs an undue share of the creative activity of the present

time cannot be denied. To impute to the leaders of industry and commerce

simply an acquisitive motive is not merely to lack insight into their

conduct, but it is to lose the clew to bettering conditions. For a more

proportionate distribution of creative power between business and other

occupations, and a more humane, wider use of it in business depend upon

grasping aright the forces actually at work. Industrial leaders combine

interest in making far-reaching plans, large syntheses of conditions

based upon study, mastery of refined and complex technical skill,

control over natural forces and events, with love of adventure,

excitement and mastery of fellow-men. When these interests are

reinforced with actual command of all the means of luxury, of display

and procuring admiration from the less fortunate, it is not surprising

that creative force is drafted largely into business channels, and that

competition for an opportunity to display power becomes brutal.

The strategic question, as was said, is to understand how and why

political, legal, scientific and educational conditions of society for

the last centuries have stimulated and nourished such a one-sided

development of creative activities. To approach the problem from this

point of view is much more hopeful, though infinitely more complex

intellectually, than the approach which sets out with a fixed dualism

between acquisitive and creative impulses. The latter assumes a complete

split of higher and lower in the original constitution of man. Were this

the case, there would be no organic remedy. The sole appeal would be to

sentimental exhortation to men to wean themselves from devotion to the

things which are beloved by their lower and material nature. And if the

appeal were moderately successful the social result would be a fixed

class division. There would remain a lower class, superciliously looked

down upon by the higher, consisting of those in whom the acquisitive

instinct remains stronger and who do the necessary work of life, while

the higher "creative" class devotes itself to social intercourse,

science and art.

Since the underlying psychology is wrong, the problem and its solution

assumes in fact a radically different form. There are an indefinite

number of original or instinctive activities, which are organized into

interests and dispositions according to the situations to which they

respond. To increase the creative phase and the humane quality of these

activities is an affair of modifying the social conditions which

stimulate, select, intensify, weaken and coordinate native activities.

The first step in dealing with it is to increase our detailed scientific

knowledge. We need to know exactly the selective and directive force of

each social situation; exactly how each tendency is promoted and

retarded. Command of the physical environment on a large and deliberate

scale did not begin until belief in gross forces and entities was

abandoned. Control of physical energies is due to inquiry which

establishes specific correlations between minute elements. It will not

be otherwise with social control and adjustment. Having the knowledge we

may set hopefully at work upon a course of social invention and

experimental engineering. A study of the educative effect, the influence

upon habit, of each definite form of human intercourse, is prerequisite

to effective reform.

VI

In spite of what has been said, it will be asserted that there are

definite, independent, original instincts which manifest themselves in

specific acts in a one-to-one correspondence. Fear, it will be said, is

a reality, and so is anger, and rivalry, and love of mastery of others,

and self-abasement, maternal love, sexual desire, gregariousness and

envy, and each has its own appropriate deed as a result. Of course they

are realities. So are suction, rusting of metals, thunder and lightning

and lighter-than-air flying machines. But science and invention did not

get on as long as men indulged in the notion of special forces to

account for such phenomena. Men tried that road, and it only led them

into learned ignorance. They spoke of nature's abhorrence of a vacuum;

of a force of combustion; of intrinsic nisus toward this and that; of

heaviness and levity as forces. It turned out that these "forces" were

only the phenomena over again, translated from a specific and concrete

form (in which they were at least actual) into a generalized form in

which they were verbal. They converted a problem into a solution which

afforded a simulated satisfaction.

Advance in insight and control came only when the mind turned squarely

around. After it had dawned upon inquirers that their alleged causal

forces were only names which condensed into a duplicate form a variety

of complex occurrences, they set about breaking up phenomena into minute

detail and searching for correlations, that is, for elements in other

gross phenomena which also varied. Correspondence of variations of

elements took the place of large and imposing forces. The psychology of

behavior is only beginning to undergo similar treatment. It is probable

that the vogue of sensation-psychology was due to the fact that it

seemed to promise a similar detailed treatment of personal phenomena.

But as yet we tend to regard sex, hunger, fear, and even much more

complex active interests as if they were lump forces, like the

combustion or gravity of old-fashioned physical science.

It is not hard to see how the notion of a single and separate tendency

grew up in the case of simpler acts like hunger and sex. The paths of

motor outlet or discharge are comparatively few and are fairly well

defined. Specific bodily organs are conspicuously involved. Hence there

is suggested the notion of a correspondingly separate psychic force or

impulse. There are two fallacies in this assumption. The first consists

in ignoring the fact that no activity (even one that is limited by

routine habit) is confined to the channel which is most flagrantly

involved in its execution. The whole organism is concerned in every act

to some extent and in some fashion, internal organs as well as muscular,

those of circulation, secretion, etc. Since the total state of the

organism is never exactly twice alike, in so far the phenomena of hunger

and sex are never twice the same in fact. The difference may be

negligible for some purposes, and yet give the key for the purposes of a

psychological analysis which shall terminate in a correct judgment of

value. Even physiologically the context of organic changes accompanying

an act of hunger or sex makes the difference between a normal and a

morbid phenomenon.

In the second place, the environment in which the act takes place is

never twice alike. Even when the overt organic discharge is

substantially the same, the acts impinge upon a different environment

and thus have different consequences. It is impossible to regard these

differences of objective result as indifferent to the quality of the

acts. They are immediately sensed if not clearly perceived; and they are

the only _components of the meaning_ of the act. When feelings, dwelling

antecedently in the soul, were supposed to be the causes of acts, it was

natural to suppose that each psychic element had its own inherent

quality which might be directly read off by introspection. But when we

surrender this notion, it becomes evident that the only way of telling

what an organic act is like is by the sensed or perceptible changes

which it occasions. Some of these will be intra-organic, and (as just

indicated) they will vary with every act. Others will be external to the

organism, and these consequences are more important than the

intra-organic ones for determining the quality of the act. For they are

consequences in which others are concerned and which evoke reactions of

favor and disfavor as well as cooperative and resisting activities of a

more indirect sort.

Most so-called self-deception is due to employing immediate organic

states as criteria of the value of an act. To say that it feels good or

yields direct satisfaction is to say that it gives rise to a comfortable

internal state. The judgment based upon this experience may be entirely

different from the judgment passed by others upon the basis of its

objective or social consequences. As a matter of even the most

rudimentary precaution, therefore, every person learns to recognize to

some extent the quality of an act on the basis of its consequences in

the acts of others. But even without this judgment, the exterior changes

produced by an act are immediately sensed, and being associated with the

act become a part of its quality. Even a young child sees the smash of

things occasionally by his anger, and the smash may compete with his

satisfied feeling of discharged energy as an index of value.

A child gives way to what, grossly speaking, we call anger. Its felt or

appreciated quality depends in the first place upon the condition of his

organism at the time, and this is never twice alike. In the second

place, the act is at once modified by the environment upon which it

impinges so that different consequences are immediately reflected back

to the doer. In one case, anger is directed say at older and stronger

playmates who immediately avenge themselves upon the offender, perhaps

cruelly. In another case, it takes effect upon weaker and impotent

children, and the reflected appreciated consequence is one of

achievement, victory, power and a knowledge of the means of having one's

own way. The notion that anger still remains a single force is a lazy

mythology. Even in the cases of hunger and sex, where the channels of

action are fairly demarcated by antecedent conditions (or "nature"), the

actual content and feel of hunger and sex, are indefinitely varied

according to their social contexts. Only when a man is starving, is

hunger an unqualified natural impulse; as it approaches this limit, it

tends to lose, moreover, its psychological distinctiveness and to become

a raven of the entire organism.

The treatment of sex by psycho-analysts is most instructive, for it

flagrantly exhibits both the consequences of artificial simplification

and the transformation of social results into psychic causes. Writers,

usually male, hold forth on the psychology of woman, as if they were

dealing with a Platonic universal entity, although they habitually treat

men as individuals, varying with structure and environment. They treat

phenomena which are peculiarly symptoms of the civilization of the West

at the present time as if they were the necessary effects of fixed

native impulses of human nature. Romantic love as it exists today, with

all the varying perturbations it occasions, is as definitely a sign of

specific historic conditions as are big battle ships with turbines,

internal-combustion engines, and electrically driven machines. It would

be as sensible to treat the latter as effects of a single psychic cause

as to attribute the phenomena of disturbance and conflict which

accompany present sexual relations as manifestations of an original

single psychic force or _Libido_. Upon this point at least a Marxian

simplification is nearer the truth than that of Jung.

Again it is customary to suppose that there is a single instinct of

fear, or at most a few well-defined sub-species of it. In reality, when

one is afraid the whole being reacts, and this entire responding

organism is never twice the same. In fact, also, every reaction takes

place in a different environment, and its meaning is never twice alike,

since the difference in environment makes a difference in consequences.

It is only mythology which sets up a single, identical psychic force

which "causes" all the reactions of fear, a force beginning and ending

in itself. It is true enough that in all cases we are able to identify

certain more or less separable characteristic acts--muscular

contractions, withdrawals, evasions, concealments. But in the latter

words we have already brought in an environment. Such terms as

withdrawal and concealment have no meaning except as attitudes toward

objects. There is no such thing as an environment in general; there are

specific changing objects and events. Hence the kind of evasion or

running away or shrinking up which takes place is directly correlated

with specific surrounding conditions. There is no one fear having

diverse manifestations; there are as many qualitatively different fears

as there are objects responded to and different consequences sensed and

observed.

Fear of the dark is different from fear of publicity, fear of the

dentist from fear of ghosts, fear of conspicuous success from fear of

humiliation, fear of a bat from fear of a bear. Cowardice,

embarrassment, caution and reverence may all be regarded as forms of

fear. They all have certain physical organic acts in common--those of

organic shrinkage, gestures of hesitation and retreat. But each is

qualitatively unique. Each is what it is in virtue of its total

interactions or correlations with other acts and with the environing

medium, with consequences. High explosives and the aeroplane have

brought into being something new in conduct. There is no error in

calling it fear. But there is error, even from a limited clinical

standpoint, in permitting the classifying name to blot from view the

difference between fear of bombs dropped from the sky and the fears

which previously existed. The new fear is just as much and just as

little original and native as a child's fear of a stranger.

For any activity is original when it first occurs. As conditions are

continually changing, new and _primitive_ activities are continually

occurring. The traditional psychology of instincts obscures recognition

of this fact. It sets up a hard-and-fast preordained class under which

specific acts are subsumed, so that their own quality and originality

are lost from view. This is why the novelist and dramatist are so much

more illuminating as well as more interesting commentators on conduct

than the schematizing psychologist. The artist makes perceptible

individual responses and thus displays a new phase of human nature

evoked in new situations. In putting the case visibly and dramatically

he reveals vital actualities. The scientific systematizer treats each

act as merely another sample of some old principle, or as a mechanical

combination of elements drawn from a ready-made inventory.

When we recognize the diversity of native activities and the varied ways

in which they are modified through interactions with one another in

response to different conditions, we are able to understand moral

phenomena otherwise baffling. In the career of any impulse activity

there are speaking generally three possibilities. It may find a surging,

explosive discharge--blind, unintelligent. It may be sublimated--that

is, become a factor coordinated intelligently with others in a

continuing course of action. Thus a gust of anger may, because of its

dynamic incorporation into disposition, be converted into an abiding

conviction of social injustice to be remedied, and furnish the dynamic

to carry the conviction into execution. Or an excitation of sexual

attraction may reappear in art or in tranquil domestic attachments and

services. Such an outcome represents the normal or desirable functioning

of impulse; in which, to use our previous language, the impulse operates

as a pivot, or reorganization of habit. Or again a released impulsive

activity may be neither immediately expressed in isolated spasmodic

action, nor indirectly employed in an enduring interest. It may be

"suppressed."

Suppression is not annihilation. "Psychic" energy is no more capable of

being abolished than the forms we recognize as physical. If it is

neither exploded nor converted, it is turned inwards, to lead a

surreptitious, subterranean life. An isolated or spasmodic manifestation

is a sign of immaturity, crudity, savagery; a suppressed activity is the

cause of all kinds of intellectual and moral pathology. One form of the

resulting pathology constitutes "reaction" in the sense in which the

historian speaks of reactions. A conventionally familiar instance is

Stuart license after Puritan restraint. A striking modern instance is

the orgy of extravagance following upon the enforced economies and

hardships of war, the moral let-down after its highstrung exalted

idealisms, the deliberate carelessness after an attention too intense

and too narrow. Outward manifestation of many normal activities had been

suppressed. But activities were not suppressed. They were merely dammed

up awaiting their chance.

Now such "reactions" are simultaneous as well as successive. Resort to

artificial stimulation, to alcoholic excess, sexual debauchery, opium

and narcotics are examples. Impulses and interests that are not

manifested in the regular course of serviceable activity or in

recreation demand and secure a special manifestation. And it is

interesting to note that there are two opposite forms. Some phenomena

are characteristic of persons engaged in a routine monotonous life of

toil attended with fatigue and hardship. And others are found in persons

who are intellectual and executive, men whose activities are anything

but monotonous, but are narrowed through over-specialization. Such men

think too much, that is, too much along a _particular_ line. They carry

too heavy responsibilities; that is, their offices of service are not

adequately shared with others. They seek relief by escape into a more

sociable and easy-going world. The imperative demand for companionship

not satisfied in ordinary activity is met by convivial indulgence. The

other class has recourse to excess because its members have in ordinary

occupations next to no opportunity for imagination. They make a foray

into a more highly colored world as a substitute for a normal exercise

of invention, planning and judgment. Having no regular responsibilities,

they seek to recover an illusion of potency and of social recognition by

an artificial exaltation of their submerged and humiliated selves.

Hence the love of pleasure against which moralists issue so many

warnings. Not that love of pleasures is in itself in any way

demoralizing. Love of the pleasures of cheerfulness, of companionship is

one of the steadying influences in conduct. But pleasure has often

become identified with special thrills, excitations, ticklings of sense,

stirrings of appetite for the express purpose of enjoying the immediate

stimulation irrespective of results. Such pleasures are signs of

dissipation, dissoluteness, in the literal sense. An activity which is

deprived of regular stimulation and normal function is piqued into

isolated activity, and the result is division, disassociation. A life of

routine and of over-specialization in non-routine lines seek occasions

in which to arouse by abnormal means a _feeling_ of satisfaction without

any accompanying objective fulfilment. Hence, as moralists have pointed

out, the insatiable character of such appetites. Activities are not

really satisfied, that is fulfilled in objects. They continue to seek

for gratification in more intensified stimulations. Orgies of

pleasure-seeking, varying from saturnalia to mild sprees, result.

It does not follow however that the sole alternative is satisfaction by

means of objectively serviceable action, that is by action which effects

useful changes in the environment. There is an optimistic theory of

nature according to which wherever there is natural law there is also

natural harmony. Since man as well as the world is included in the scope

of natural law, it is inferred that there is natural harmony between

human activities and surroundings, a harmony which is disturbed only

when man indulges in "artificial" departures from nature. According to

this view, all man has to do is to keep his occupations in balance with

the energies of the environment and he will be both happy and efficient.

Rest, recuperation, relief can be found in a proper alternation of forms

of useful work. Do the things which surroundings indicate need doing,

and success, content, restoration of powers will take care of

themselves.

This benevolent view of nature falls in with a Puritanic devotion to

work for its own sake and creates distrust of amusement, play and

recreation. They are felt to be unnecessary, and worse, dangerous

diversions from the path of useful action which is also the path of

duty. Social conditions certainly impart to occupations as they are now

carried on an undue element of fatigue, strain and drudgery.

Consequently useful occupations which are so ordered socially as to

engage thought, feed imagination and equalize the impact of stress would

surely introduce a tranquillity and recreation which are now lacking.

But there is good reason to think that even in the best conditions there

is enough maladjustment between the necessities of the environment and

the activities "natural" to man, so that constraint and fatigue would

always accompany activity, and special forms of action be needed--forms

that are significantly called re-creation.

Hence the immense moral importance of play and of fine, or make-believe,

art--of activity, that is, which is make-believe from the standpoint of

the useful arts enforced by the demands of the environment. When

moralists have not regarded play and art with a censorious eye, they

often have thought themselves carrying matters to the pitch of

generosity by conceding that they may be morally indifferent or

innocent. But in truth they are moral necessities. They are required to

take care of the margin that exists between the total stock of impulses

that demand outlet and the amount expended in regular action. They keep

the balance which work cannot indefinitely maintain. They are required

to introduce variety, flexibility and sensitiveness into disposition.

Yet upon the whole the humanizing capabilities of sport in its varied

forms, drama, fiction, music, poetry, newspapers have been neglected.

They have been left in a kind of a moral no-man's territory. They have

accomplished part of their function but they have not done what they are

capable of doing. In many cases they have operated merely as reactions

like those artificial and isolated stimulations already mentioned.

The suggestion that play and art have an indispensable moral function

which should receive an attention now denied, calls out an immediate and

vehement protest. We omit reference to that which proceeds from

professional moralists to whom art, fun and sport are habitually under

suspicion. For those interested in art, professional estheticians, will

protest even more strenuously. They at once imagine that some kind of

organized supervision if not censorship of play, drama and fiction is

contemplated which will convert them into means of moral edification. If

they do not think of Comstockian interference in the alleged interest of

public morals, they at least think that what is intended is the

elimination by persons of a Puritanic, unartistic temperament of

everything not found sufficiently earnest and elevating, a fostering of

art not for its own sake but as a means of doing good by something to

somebody. There is a natural fear of injecting into art a spirit of

earnest uplift, of surrendering art to the reformers.

But something quite other than this is meant. Relief from continuous

moral activity--in the conventional sense of moral--is itself a moral

necessity. The service of art and play is to engage and release impulses

in ways quite different from those in which they are occupied and

employed in ordinary activities. Their function is to forestall and

remedy the usual exaggerations and deficits of activity, even of "moral"

activity and to prevent a stereotyping of attention. To say that society

is altogether too careless about the moral worth of art is not to say

that carelessness about useful occupations is not a necessity for art.

On the contrary, whatever deprives play and art of their own careless

rapture thereby deprives them of their moral function. Art then becomes

poorer as art as a matter of course, but it also becomes in the same

measure less effectual in its pertinent moral office. It tries to do

what other things can do better, and it fails to do what nothing but

itself can do for human nature, softening rigidities, relaxing strains,

allaying bitterness, dispelling moroseness, and breaking down the

narrowness consequent upon specialized tasks.

Even if the matter be put in this negative way, the moral value of art

cannot be depreciated. But there is a more positive function. Play and

art add fresh and deeper meanings to the usual activities of life. In

contrast with a Philistine relegation of the arts to a trivial by-play

from serious concerns, it is truer to say that most of the significance

now found in serious occupations originated in activities not

immediately useful, and gradually found its way from them into

objectively serviceable employments. For their spontaneity and

liberation from external necessities permits to them an enhancement and

vitality of meaning not possible in preoccupation with immediate needs.

Later this meaning is transferred to useful activities and becomes a

part of their ordinary working. In saying then that art and play have a

moral office not adequately taken advantage of it is asserted that they

are responsible to life, to the enriching and freeing of its meanings,

not that they are responsible to a moral code, commandment or special

task.

To a coarse view--and professed moral refinement is often given to

taking coarse views--there is something vulgar not only in recourse to

abnormal artificial exigents and stimulations but also in interest in

useless games and arts. Negatively the two things have features which

are alike. They both spring from failure of regular occupations to

engage the full scope of impulses and instincts in an elastically

balanced way. They both evince a surplusage of imagination over fact; a

demand in imaginative activity for an outlet which is denied in overt

activity. They both aim at reducing the domination of the prosaic; both

are protests against the lowering of meanings attendant upon ordinary

vocations. As a consequence no rule can be laid down for discriminating

by direct inspection between unwholesome stimulations and invaluable

excursions into appreciative enhancements of life. Their difference lies

in the way they work, the careers to which they commit us.

Art releases energy and focuses and tranquilizes it. It releases energy

in constructive forms. Castles in the air like art have their source in

a turning of impulse away from useful production. Both are due to the

failure in some part of man's constitution to secure fulfilment in

ordinary ways. But in one case the conversion of direct energy into

imagination is the starting point of an activity which _shapes_

material; fancy is fed upon a stuff of life which assumes under its

influence a rejuvenated, composed and enhanced form. In the other case,

fancy remains an end in itself. It becomes an indulging in fantasies

which bring about withdrawal from all realities, while wishes impotent

in action build a world which yields temporary excitement. Any

imagination is a sign that impulse is impeded and is groping for

utterance. Sometimes the outcome is a refreshed useful habit; sometimes

it is an articulation in creative art; and sometimes it is a futile

romancing which for some natures does what self-pity does for others.

The amount of potential energy of reconstruction that is dissipated in

unexpressed fantasy supplies us with a fair measure of the extent to

which the current organization of occupation balks and twists impulse,

and, by the same sign, with a measure of the function of art which is

not yet utilized.

The development of mental pathologies to the point where they need

clinical attention has of late enforced a widespread consciousness of

some of the evils of suppression of impulse. The studies of

psychiatrists have made clear that impulses driven into pockets distil

poison and produce festering sores. An organization of impulse into a

working habit forms an interest. A surreptitious furtive organization

which does not articulate in avowed expression forms a "complex."

Current clinical psychology has undoubtedly overworked the influence of

sexual impulse in this connection, refusing at the hands of some writers

to recognize the operation of any other modes of disturbance. There are

explanations of this onesidedness. The intensity of the sexual instinct

and its organic ramifications produce many of the cases that are so

noticeable as to demand the attention of physicians. And social taboos

and the tradition of secrecy have put this impulse under greater strain

than has been imposed upon others. If a society existed in which the

existence of impulse toward food were socially disavowed until it was

compelled to live an illicit, covert life, alienists would have plenty

of cases of mental and moral disturbance to relate in connection with

hunger.

The significant thing is that the pathology arising from the sex

instinct affords a striking case of a universal principle. Every impulse

is, as far as it goes, force, urgency. It must either be used in some

function, direct or sublimated, or be driven into a concealed, hidden

activity. It has long been asserted on empirical grounds that expression

and enslavement result in corruption and perversion. We have at last

discovered the reason for this fact. The wholesome and saving force of

intellectual freedom, open confrontation, publicity, now has the stamp

of scientific sanction. The evil of checking impulses is not that they

are checked. Without inhibition there is no instigation of imagination,

no redirection into more discriminated and comprehensive activities. The

evil resides in a refusal of direct attention which forces the impulse

into disguise and concealment, until it enacts its own unavowed uneasy

private life subject to no inspection and no control.

A rebellious disposition is also a form of romanticism. At least rebels

set out as romantics, or, in popular parlance, as idealists. There is no

bitterness like that of conscious impotency, the sense of suffocatingly

complete suppression. The world is hopeless to one without hope. The

rage of total despair is a vain effort at blind destructiveness. Partial

suppression induces in some natures a picture of complete freedom, while

it arouses a destructive protest against existing institutions as

enemies that stand in the way of freedom. Rebellion has at least one

advantage over recourse to artificial stimulation and to subconscious

nursings of festering sore spots. It engages in action and thereby comes

in contact with realities. It contains the possibility of learning

something. Yet learning by this method is immensely expensive. The costs

are incalculable. As Napoleon said, every revolution moves in a vicious

circle. It begins and ends in excess.

To view institutions as enemies of freedom, and all conventions as

slaveries, is to deny the only means by which positive freedom in action

can be secured. A general liberation of impulses may set things going

when they have been stagnant, but if the released forces are on their

way to anything they do not know the way nor where they are going.

Indeed, they are bound to be mutually contradictory and hence

destructive--destructive not only of the habits they wish to destroy but

of themselves, of their own efficacy. Convention and custom are

necessary to carrying forward impulse to any happy conclusion. A

romantic return to nature and a freedom sought within the individual

without regard to the existing environment finds its terminus in chaos.

Every belief to the contrary combines pessimism regarding the actual

with an even more optimistic faith in some natural harmony or other--a

faith which is a survival of some of the traditional metaphysics and

theologies which professedly are to be swept away. Not convention but

stupid and rigid convention is the foe. And, as we have noted, a

convention can be reorganized and made mobile only by using some other

custom for giving leverage to an impulse.

Yet it is too easy to utter commonplaces about the superiority of

constructive action to destructive. At all events the professed

conservative and classicist of tradition seeks too cheap a victory over

the rebel. For the rebel is not self-generated. In the beginning no one

is a revolutionist simply for the fun of it, however it may be after the

furor of destructive power gets under way. The rebel is the product of

extreme fixation and unintelligent immobilities. Life is perpetuated

only by renewal. If conditions do not permit renewal to take place

continuously it will take place explosively. The cost of revolutions

must be charged up to those who have taken for their aim arrest of

custom instead of its readjustment. The only ones who have the right to

criticize "radicals"--adopting for the moment that perversion of

language which identifies the radical with the destructive rebel--are

those who put as much effort into reconstruction as the rebels are

putting into destruction. The primary accusation against the

revolutionary must be directed against those who having power refuse to

use it for ameliorations. They are the ones who accumulate the wrath

that sweeps away customs and institutions in an undiscriminating

avalanche. Too often the man who should be criticizing institutions

expends his energy in criticizing those who would re-form them. What he

really objects to is any disturbance of his own vested securities,

comforts and privileged powers.

VII

We return to the original proposition. The position of impulse in

conduct is intermediary. Morality is an endeavor to find for the

manifestation of impulse in special situations an office of refreshment

and renewal. The endeavor is not easy of accomplishment. It is easier to

surrender the main and public channels of action and belief to the

sluggishness of custom, and idealize tradition by emotional attachment

to its ease, comforts and privileges instead of idealizing it in

practice by making it more equably balanced with present needs. Again,

impulses not used for the work of rejuvenation and vital recovery are

sidetracked to find their own lawless barbarities or their own

sentimental refinements. Or they are perverted to pathological

careers--some of which have been mentioned.

In the course of time custom becomes intolerable because of what it

suppresses and some accident of war or inner catastrophe releases

impulses for unrestrained expression. At such times we have philosophies

which identify progress with motion, blind spontaneity with freedom, and

which under the name of the sacredness of individuality or a return to

the norms of nature make impulse a law unto itself. The oscillation

between impulse arrested and frozen in rigid custom and impulse isolated

and undirected is seen most conspicuously when epochs of conservatism

and revolutionary ardor alternate. But the same phenomenon is repeated

on a smaller scale in individuals. And in society the two tendencies and

philosophies exist simultaneously; they waste in controversial strife

the energy that is needed for specific criticism and specific

reconstruction.

The release of some portion of the stock of impulses is an opportunity,

not an end. In its origin it is the product of chance; but it affords

imagination and invention _their_ chance. The moral correlate of

liberated impulse is not immediate activity, but reflection upon the way

in which to use impulse to renew disposition and reorganize habit.

Escape from the clutch of custom gives an opportunity to do old things

in new ways, and thus to construct new ends and means. Breach in the

crust of the cake of custom releases impulses; but it is the work of

intelligence to find the ways of using them. There is an alternative

between anchoring a boat in the harbor till it becomes a rotting hulk

and letting it loose to be the sport of every contrary gust. To discover

and define this alternative is the business of mind, of observant,

remembering, contriving disposition.

Habit as a vital art depends upon the animation of habit by impulse;

only this inspiriting stands between habit and stagnation. But art,

little as well as great, anonymous as well as that distinguished by

titles of dignity, cannot be improvised. It is impossible without

spontaneity, but it is not spontaneity. Impulse is needed to arouse

thought, incite reflection and enliven belief. But only thought notes

obstructions, invents tools, conceives aims, directs technique, and thus

converts impulse into an art which lives in objects. Thought is born as

the twin of impulse in every moment of impeded habit. But unless it is

nurtured, it speedily dies, and habit and instinct continue their civil

warfare. There is instinctive wisdom in the tendency of the young to

ignore the limitations of the environment. Only thus can they discover

their own power and learn the differences in different kinds of

environing limitations. But this discovery when once made marks the

birth of intelligence; and with its birth comes the responsibility of

the mature to observe, to recall, to forecast. Every moral life has its

radicalism; but this radical factor does not find its full expression in

direct action but in the courage of intelligence to go deeper than

either tradition or immediate impulse goes. To the study of intelligence

in action we now turn our attention.

PART THREE

THE PLACE OF INTELLIGENCE IN CONDUCT

I

In discussing habit and impulse we have repeatedly met topics where

reference to the work of thought was imperative. Explicit consideration

of the place and office of intelligence in conduct can hardly begin

otherwise than by gathering together these incidental references and

reaffirming their significance. The stimulation of reflective

imagination by impulse, its dependence upon established habits, and its

effect in transforming habit and regulating impulse forms, accordingly,

our first theme.

Habits are conditions of intellectual efficiency. They operate in two

ways upon intellect. Obviously, they restrict its reach, they fix its

boundaries. They are blinders that confine the eyes of mind to the road

ahead. They prevent thought from straying away from its imminent

occupation to a landscape more varied and picturesque but irrelevant to

practice. Outside the scope of habits, thought works gropingly, fumbling

in confused uncertainty; and yet habit made complete in routine shuts in

thought so effectually that it is no longer needed or possible. The

routineer's road is a ditch out of which he cannot get, whose sides

enclose him, directing his course so thoroughly that he no longer thinks

of his path or his destination. All habit-forming involves the beginning

of an intellectual specialization which if unchecked ends in thoughtless

action.

Significantly enough this fullblown result is called absentmindedness.

Stimulus and response are mechanically linked together in an unbroken

chain. Each successive act facilely evoked by its predecessor pushes us

automatically into the next act of a predetermined series. Only a signal

flag of distress recalls consciousness to the task of carrying on.

Fortunately nature which beckons us to this path of least resistance

also puts obstacles in the way of our complete acceptance of its

invitation. Success in achieving a ruthless and dull efficiency of

action is thwarted by untoward circumstance. The most skilful aptitude

bumps at times into the unexpected, and so gets into trouble from which

only observation and invention extricate it. Efficiency in following a

beaten path has then to be converted into breaking a new road through

strange lands.

Nevertheless what in effect is love of ease has masqueraded morally as

love of perfection. A goal of finished accomplishment has been set up

which if it were attained would mean only mindless action. It has been

called complete and free activity when in truth it is only a treadmill

activity or marching in one place. The practical impossibility of

reaching, in an all around way and all at once such a "perfection" has

been recognized. But such a goal has nevertheless been conceived as the

ideal, and progress has been defined as approximation to it. Under

diverse intellectual skies the ideal has assumed diverse forms and

colors. But all of them have involved the conception of a completed

activity, a static perfection. Desire and need have been treated as

signs of deficiency, and endeavor as proof not of power but of

incompletion.

In Aristotle this conception of an end which exhausts all realization

and excludes all potentiality appears as a definition of the highest

excellence. It of necessity excludes all want and struggle and all

dependencies. It is neither practical nor social. Nothing is left but a

self-revolving, self-sufficing thought engaged in contemplating its own

sufficiency. Some forms of Oriental morals have united this logic with a

profounder psychology, and have seen that the final terminus on this

road is Nirvana, an obliteration of all thought and desire. In medieval

science, the ideal reappeared as a definition of heavenly bliss

accessible only to a redeemed immortal soul. Herbert Spencer is far

enough away from Aristotle, medieval Christianity and Buddhism; but the

idea re-emerges in his conception of a goal of evolution in which

adaptation of organism to environment is complete and final. In popular

thought, the conception lives in the vague thought of a remote state of

attainment in which we shall be beyond "temptation," and in which virtue

by its own inertia will persist as a triumphant consummation. Even Kant

who begins with a complete scorn for happiness ends with an "ideal" of

the eternal and undisturbed union of virtue and joy, though in his case

nothing but a symbolic approximation is admitted to be feasible.

The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most

pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one

questions whether it might not be called _the_ philosophical fallacy. It

consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain

conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and

conditions. Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water,

bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular

struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action,

therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless

smooth activity endlessly maintained. It is forgotten that success is

success _of_ a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfilment _of_ a

specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless

when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are,

or when taken universally. The philosophy of Nirvana comes the closest

to admission of this fact, but even it holds Nirvana to be desirable.

Habit is however more than a restriction of thought. Habits become

negative limits because they are first positive agencies. The more

numerous our habits the wider the field of possible observation and

foretelling. The more flexible they are, the more refined is perception

in its discrimination and the more delicate the presentation evoked by

imagination. The sailor is intellectually at home on the sea, the hunter

in the forest, the painter in his studio, the man of science in his

laboratory. These commonplaces are universally recognized in the

concrete; but their significance is obscured and their truth denied in

the current general theory of mind. For they mean nothing more or less

than that habits formed in process of exercising biological aptitudes

are the sole agents of observation, recollection, foresight and

judgment: a mind or consciousness or soul in general which performs

these operations is a myth.

The doctrine of a single, simple and indissoluble soul was the cause and

the effect of failure to recognize that concrete habits are the means of

knowledge and thought. Many who think themselves scientifically

emancipated and who freely advertise the soul for a superstition,

perpetuate a false notion of what knows, that is, of a separate knower.

Nowadays they usually fix upon consciousness in general, as a stream or

process or entity; or else, more specifically upon sensations and images

as the tools of intellect. Or sometimes they think they have scaled the

last heights of realism by adverting grandiosely to a formal knower in

general who serves as one term in the knowing relation; by dismissing

psychology as irrelevant to knowledge and logic, they think to conceal

the psychological monster they have conjured up.

Now it is dogmatically stated that no such conceptions of the seat,

agent or vehicle will go psychologically at the present time. Concrete

habits do all the perceiving, recognizing, imagining, recalling,

judging, conceiving and reasoning that is done. "Consciousness," whether

as a stream or as special sensations and images, expresses functions of

habits, phenomena of their formation, operation, their interruption and

reorganization.

Yet habit does not, of itself, know, for it does not of itself stop to

think, observe or remember. Neither does impulse of itself engage in

reflection or contemplation. It just lets go. Habits by themselves are

too organized, too insistent and determinate to need to indulge in

inquiry or imagination. And impulses are too chaotic, tumultuous and

confused to be able to know even if they wanted to. Habit as such is too

definitely adapted to an environment to survey or analyze it, and

impulse is too indeterminately related to the environment to be capable

of reporting anything about it. Habit incorporates, enacts or overrides

objects, but it doesn't know them. Impulse scatters and obliterates them

with its restless stir. A certain delicate combination of habit and

impulse is requisite for observation, memory and judgment. Knowledge

which is not projected against the black unknown lives in the muscles,

not in consciousness.

We may, indeed, be said to _know how_ by means of our habits. And a

sensible intimation of the practical function of knowledge has led men

to identify all acquired practical skill, or even the instinct of

animals, with knowledge. We walk and read aloud, we get off and on

street cars, we dress and undress, and do a thousand useful acts without

thinking of them. We know something, namely, how to do them. Bergson's

philosophy of intuition is hardly more than an elaborately documented

commentary on the popular conception that by instinct a bird knows how

to build a nest and a spider to weave a web. But after all, this

practical work done by habit and instinct in securing prompt and exact

adjustment to the environment is not knowledge, except by courtesy. Or,

if we choose to call it knowledge--and no one has the right to issue an

ukase to the contrary--then other things also called knowledge,

knowledge _of_ and _about_ things, knowledge _that_ things are thus and

so, knowledge that involves reflection and conscious appreciation,

remains of a different sort, unaccounted for and undescribed.

For it is a commonplace that the more suavely efficient a habit the more

unconsciously it operates. Only a hitch in its workings occasions

emotion and provokes thought. Carlyle and Rousseau, hostile in

temperament and outlook, yet agree in looking at consciousness as a kind

of disease, since we have no consciousness of bodily or mental organs as

long as they work at ease in perfect health. The idea of disease is,

however, aside from the point, unless we are pessimistic enough to

regard every slip in total adjustment of a person to its surroundings as

something abnormal--a point of view which once more would identify

well-being with perfect automatism. The truth is that in every waking

moment, the complete balance of the organism and its environment is

constantly interfered with and as constantly restored. Hence the "stream

of consciousness" in general, and in particular that phase of it

celebrated by William James as alternation of flights and perchings.

Life is interruptions and recoveries. Continuous interruption is not

possible in the activities of an individual. Absence of perfect

equilibrium is not equivalent to a complete crushing of organized

activity. When the disturbance amounts to such a pitch as that, the self

goes to pieces. It is like shell-shock. Normally, the environment

remains sufficiently in harmony with the body of organized activities to

sustain most of them in active function. But a novel factor in the

surroundings releases some impulse which tends to initiate a different

and incompatible activity, to bring about a redistribution of the

elements of organized activity between those have been respectively

central and subsidiary. Thus the hand guided by the eye moves toward a

surface. Visual quality is the dominant element. The hand comes in

contact with an object. The eye does not cease to operate but some

unexpected quality of touch, a voluptuous smoothness or annoying heat,

compels a readjustment in which the touching, handling activity strives

to dominate the action. Now at these moments of a shifting in activity

conscious feeling and thought arise and are accentuated. The disturbed

adjustment of organism and environment is reflected in a temporary

strife which concludes in a coming to terms of the old habit and the new

impulse.

In this period of redistribution impulse determines the direction of

movement. It furnishes the focus about which reorganization swirls. Our

attention in short is always directed forward to bring to notice

something which is imminent but which as yet escapes us. Impulse defines

the peering, the search, the inquiry. It is, in logical language, the

movement into the unknown, not into the immense inane of the unknown at

large, but into that special unknown which when it is hit upon restores

an ordered, unified action. During this search, old habit supplies

content, filling, definite, recognizable, subject-matter. It begins as

vague presentiment of what we are going towards. As organized habits are

definitely deployed and focused, the confused situation takes on form,

it is "cleared up"--the essential function of intelligence. Processes

become objects. Without habit there is only irritation and confused

hesitation. With habit alone there is a machine-like repetition, a

duplicating recurrence of old acts. With conflict of habits and release

of impulse there is conscious search.

II

We are going far afield from any direct moral issue. But the problem of

the place of knowledge and judgment in conduct depends upon getting the

fundamental psychology of thought straightened out. So the excursion

must be continued. We compare life to a traveler faring forth. We may

consider him first at a moment where his activity is confident,

straightforward, organized. He marches on giving no direct attention to

his path, nor thinking of his destination. Abruptly he is pulled up,

arrested. Something is going wrong in his activity. From the standpoint

of an onlooker, he has met an obstacle which must be overcome before his

behavior can be unified into a successful ongoing. From his own

standpoint, there is shock, confusion, perturbation, uncertainty. For

the moment he doesn't know what hit him, as we say, nor where he is

going. But a new impulse is stirred which becomes the starting point of

an investigation, a looking into things, a trying to see them, to find

out what is going on. Habits which were interfered with begin to get a

new direction as they cluster about the impulse to look and see. The

blocked habits of locomotion give him a sense of where he _was_ going,

of what he had set out to do, and of the ground already traversed. As he

looks, he sees definite things which are not just things at large but

which are related to his course of action. The momentum of the activity

entered upon persists as a sense of direction, of aim; it is an

anticipatory project. In short, he recollects, observes and plans.

The trinity of these forecasts, perceptions and remembrances form a

subject-matter of discriminated and identified objects. These objects

represent habits turned inside out. They exhibit both the onward

tendency of habit and the objective conditions which have been

incorporated within it. Sensations in immediate consciousness are

elements of action dislocated through the shock of interruption. They

never, however, completely monopolize the scene; for there is a body of

residual undisturbed habits which is reflected in remembered and

perceived objects having a meaning. Thus out of shock and puzzlement

there gradually emerges a figured framework of objects, past, present,

future. These shade off variously into a vast penumbra of vague,

unfigured things, a setting which is taken for granted and not at all

explicitly presented. The complexity of the figured scene in its scope

and refinement of contents depends wholly upon prior habits and their

organization. The reason a baby can know little and an experienced adult

know much when confronting the same things is not because the latter has

a "mind" which the former has not, but because one has already formed

habits which the other has still to acquire. The scientific man and the

philosopher like the carpenter, the physician and politician know with

their habits not with their "consciousness." The latter is eventual, not

a source. Its occurrence marks a peculiarly delicate connection between

highly organized habits and unorganized impulses. Its contents or

objects, observed, recollected, projected and generalized into

principles, represent the incorporated material of habits coming to the

surface, because habits are disintegrating at the touch of conflicting

impulses. But they also gather themselves together to comprehend impulse

and make it effective.

This account is more or less strange as psychology but certain aspects

of it are commonplaces in a static logical formulation. It is, for

example, almost a truism that knowledge is both synthetic and analytic;

a set of discriminated elements connected by relations. This combination

of opposite factors of unity and difference, elements and relations, has

been a standing paradox and mystery of the theory of knowledge. It will

remain so until we connect the theory of knowledge with an empirically

verifiable theory of behavior. The steps of this connection have been

sketched and we may enumerate them. We know at such times as habits are

impeded, when a conflict is set up in which impulse is released. So far

as this impulse sets up a definite forward tendency it constitutes the

forward, prospective character of knowledge. In this phase unity or

synthesis is found. We are striving to unify our responses, to achieve a

consistent environment which will restore unity of conduct. Unity,

relations, are prospective; they mark out lines converging to a focus.

They are "ideal." But _what_ we know, the objects that present

themselves with definiteness and assurance, are retrospective; they are

the conditions which have been mastered, incorporated in the past. They

are elements, discriminated, analytic just because old habits so far as

they are checked are also broken into objects which define the

obstruction of ongoing activity. They are "real," not ideal. Unity is

something sought; split, division is something given, at hand. Were we

to carry the same psychology into detail we should come upon the

explanation of perceived particulars and conceived universals, of the

relation of discovery and proof, induction and deduction, the discrete

and the continuous. Anything approaching an adequate discussion is too

technical to be here in place. But the main point, however technical and

abstract it may be in statement, is of far reaching importance for

everything concerned with moral beliefs, conscience and judgments of

right and wrong.

The most general, if vaguest issue, concerns the nature of the organ of

moral knowledge. As long as knowledge in general is thought to be the

work of a special agent, whether soul, consciousness, intellect or a

knower in general, there is a logical propulsion towards postulating a

special agent for knowledge of moral distinctions. Consciousness and

conscience have more than a verbal connection. If the former is

something in itself, a seat or power which antecedes intellectual

functions, why should not the latter be also a unique faculty with its

own separate jurisdiction? If reason in general is independent of

empirically verifiable realities of human nature, such as instincts and

organized habits, why should there not also exist a moral or practical

reason independent of natural operations? On the other hand if it is

recognized that knowing is carried on through the medium of natural

factors, the assumption of special agencies for moral knowing becomes

outlawed and incredible. Now the matter of the existence or

non-existence of such special agencies is no technically remote matter.

The belief in a separate organ involves belief in a separate and

independent subject-matter. The question fundamentally at issue is

nothing more or less than whether moral values, regulations, principles

and objects form a separate and independent domain or whether they are

part and parcel of a normal development of a life process.

These considerations explain why the denial of a separate organ of

knowledge, of a separate instinct or impulse toward knowing, is not the

wilful philistinism it is sometimes alleged to be. There is of course a

sense in which there is a distinctive impulse, or rather habitual

disposition, to know. But in the same sense there is an impulse to

aviate, to run a typewriter or write stories for magazines. Some

activities result in knowledge, as others result in these other things.

The result may be so important as to induce distinctive attention to the

activities in order to foster them. From an incident, almost a

by-product, attainment of truth, physical, social, moral, may become the

leading characteristic of some activities. Under such circumstances,

they become transformed. Knowing is then a distinctive activity, with

its own ends and its peculiarly adapted processes. All this is a matter

of course. Having hit upon knowledge accidentally, as it were, and the

product being liked and its importance noted, knowledge-getting becomes,

upon occasion, a definite occupation. And education confirms the

disposition, as it may confirm that of a musician or carpenter or

tennis-player. But there is no more an original separate impulse or

power in one case than in the other. Every habit is impulsive, that is

projective, urgent, and the habit of knowing is no exception.

The reason for insisting on this fact is not failure to appreciate the

distinctive value of knowledge when once it comes into existence. This

value is so immense it may be called unique. The aim of the discussion

is not to subordinate knowing to some hard, prosaic utilitarian end. The

reason for insistence upon the derivative position of knowing in

activity, roots in a sense for fact, and in a realization that the

doctrine of a separate original power and impulse of knowledge cuts

knowledge off from other phases of human nature, and results in its

non-natural treatment. The isolation of intellectual disposition from

concrete empirical facts of biological impulse and habit-formation

entails a denial of the continuity of mind with nature. Aristotle

asserted that the faculty of pure knowing enters a man from without as

through a door. Many since his day have asserted that knowing and doing

have no intrinsic connection with each other. Reason is asserted to have

no responsibility to experience; conscience is said to be a sublime

oracle independent of education and social influences. All of these

views follow naturally from a failure to recognize that all knowing,

judgment, belief represent an acquired result of the workings of natural

impulses in connection with environment.

Upon the ethical side, as has been intimated, the matter at issue

concerns the nature of conscience. Conscience has been asserted by

orthodox moralists to be unique in origin and subject-matter. The same

view is embodied by implication in all those popular methods of moral

training which attempt to fix rigid authoritative notions of right and

wrong by disconnecting moral judgments from the aids and tests which are

used in other forms of knowledge. Thus it has been asserted that

conscience is an original faculty of illumination which (if it has not

been dimmed by indulgence in sin) shines upon moral truths and objects

and reveals them without effort for precisely what they are. Those who

hold this view differ enormously among themselves as to the nature of

the objects of conscience. Some hold them to be general principles,

others individual acts, others the order of worth among motives, others

the sense of duty in general, others the unqualified authority of right.

Still others carry the implied logic of authority to conclusion, and

identify knowledge of moral truths with a divine supernatural revelation

of a code of commandments.

But among these diversities there is agreement about one fundamental.

There must be a separate non-natural faculty of moral knowledge because

the things to be known, the matters of right and wrong, good and evil,

obligation and responsibility, form a separate domain, separate that is

from that of ordinary action in its usual human and social significance.

The latter activities may be prudential, political, scientific,

economic. But, from the standpoint of these theories, they have no moral

meaning until they are brought under the purview of this separate unique

department of our nature. It thus turns out that the so-called

intuitional theories of moral knowledge concentrate in themselves all

the ideas which are subject to criticism in these pages: Namely, the

assertion that morality is distinct in origin, working and destiny from

the natural structure and career of human nature. This fact is the

excuse, if excuse be desired, for a seemingly technical excursion that

links intellectual activity with the conjoint operation of habit and

impulse.

III

So far the discussion has ignored the fact that there is an influential

school of moralists (best represented in contemporary thought by the

utilitarians) which also insists upon the natural, empirical character

of moral judgments and beliefs. But unfortunately this school has

followed a false psychology; and has tended, by calling out a reaction,

actually to strengthen the hands of those who persist in assigning to

morals a separate domain of action and in demanding a separate agent of

moral knowledge. The essentials of this false psychology consist in two

traits. The first, that knowledge originates from sensations (instead of

from habits and impulses); and the second, that judgment about good and

evil in action consists in calculation of agreeable and disagreeable

consequences, of profit and loss. It is not surprising that this view

seems to many to degrade morals, as well as to be false to facts. If the

logical outcome of an empirical view of moral knowledge is that all

morality is concerned with calculating what is expedient, politic,

prudent, measured by consequences in the ways of pleasurable and painful

sensations, then, say moralists of the orthodox school, we will have

naught to do with such a sordid view: It is a reduction to the absurd of

its premisses. We will have a separate department for morals and a

separate organ of moral knowledge.

Our first problem is then to investigate the nature of ordinary

judgments upon what it is best or wise to do, or, in ordinary language,

the nature of deliberation. We begin with a summary assertion that

deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various

competing possible lines of action. It starts from the blocking of

efficient overt action, due to that conflict of prior habit and newly

released impulse to which reference has been made. Then each habit, each

impulse, involved in the temporary suspense of overt action takes its

turn in being tried out. Deliberation is an experiment in finding out

what the various lines of possible action are really like. It is an

experiment in making various combinations of selected elements of habits

and impulses, to see what the resultant action would be like if it were

entered upon. But the trial is in imagination, not in overt fact. The

experiment is carried on by tentative rehearsals in thought which do not

affect physical facts outside the body. Thought runs ahead and foresees

outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual

failure and disaster. An act overtly tried out is irrevocable, its

consequences cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in imagination is

not final or fatal. It is retrievable.

Each conflicting habit and impulse takes its turn in projecting itself

upon the screen of imagination. It unrolls a picture of its future

history, of the career it would have if it were given head. Although

overt exhibition is checked by the pressure of contrary propulsive

tendencies, this very inhibition gives habit a chance at manifestation

in thought. Deliberation means precisely that activity is disintegrated,

and that its various elements hold one another up. While none has force

enough to become the center of a re-directed activity, or to dominate a

course of action, each has enough power to check others from exercising

mastery. Activity does not cease in order to give way to reflection;

activity is turned from execution into intra-organic channels, resulting

in dramatic rehearsal.

If activity were directly exhibited it would result in certain

experiences, contacts with the environment. It would succeed by making

environing objects, things and persons, co-partners in its forward

movement; or else it would run against obstacles and be troubled,

possibly defeated. These experiences of contact with objects and their

qualities give meaning, character, to an otherwise fluid, unconscious

activity. We find out what seeing means by the objects which are seen.

They constitute the significance of visual activity which would

otherwise remain a blank. "Pure" activity is for consciousness pure

emptiness. It acquires a content or filling of meanings only in static

termini, what it comes to rest in, or in the obstacles which check its

onward movement and deflect it. As has been remarked, the object is that

which objects.

There is no difference in this respect between a visible course of

conduct and one proposed in deliberation. We have no direct

consciousness of what we purpose to do. We can judge its nature, assign

its meaning, only by following it into the situations whither it leads,

noting the objects against which it runs and seeing how they rebuff or

unexpectedly encourage it. In imagination as in fact we know a road only

by what we see as we travel on it. Moreover the objects which prick out

the course of a proposed act until we can see its design also serve to

direct eventual overt activity. Every object hit upon as the habit

traverses its imaginary path has a direct effect upon existing

activities. It reinforces, inhibits, redirects habits already working or

stirs up others which had not previously actively entered in. In thought

as well as in overt action, the objects experienced in following out a

course of action attract, repel, satisfy, annoy, promote and retard.

Thus deliberation proceeds. To say that at last it ceases is to say that

choice, decision, takes place.

What then is choice? Simply hitting in imagination upon an object which

furnishes an adequate stimulus to the recovery of overt action. Choice

is made as soon as some habit, or some combination of elements of habits

and impulse, finds a way fully open. Then energy is released. The mind

is made up, composed, unified. As long as deliberation pictures shoals

or rocks or troublesome gales as marking the route of a contemplated

voyage, deliberation goes on. But when the various factors in action fit

harmoniously together, when imagination finds no annoying hindrance,

when there is a picture of open seas, filled sails and favoring winds,

the voyage is definitely entered upon. This decisive direction of action

constitutes choice. It is a great error to suppose that we have no

preferences until there is a choice. We are always biased beings,

tending in one direction rather than another. The occasion of

deliberation is an _excess_ of preferences, not natural apathy or an

absence of likings. We want things that are incompatible with one

another; therefore we have to make a choice of what we _really_ want, of

the course of action, that is, which most fully releases activities.

Choice is not the emergence of preference out of indifference. It is the

emergence of a unified preference out of competing preferences. Biases

that had held one another in check now, temporarily at least, reinforce

one another, and constitute a unified attitude. The moment arrives when

imagination pictures an objective consequence of action which supplies

an adequate stimulus and releases definitive action. All deliberation is

a search for a _way_ to act, not for a final terminus. Its office is to

facilitate stimulation.

Hence there is reasonable and unreasonable choice. The object thought of

may simply stimulate some impulse or habit to a pitch of intensity where

it is temporarily irresistible. It then overrides all competitors and

secures for itself the sole right of way. The object looms large in

imagination; it swells to fill the field. It allows no room for

alternatives; it absorbs us, enraptures us, carries us away, sweeps us

off our feet by its own attractive force. Then choice is arbitrary,

unreasonable. But the object thought of may be one which stimulates by

unifying, harmonizing, different competing tendencies. It may release an

activity in which all are fulfilled, not indeed, in their original form,

but in a "sublimated" fashion, that is in a way which modifies the

original direction of each by reducing it to a component along with

others in an action of transformed quality. Nothing is more

extraordinary than the delicacy, promptness and ingenuity with which

deliberation is capable of making eliminations and recombinations in

projecting the course of a possible activity. To every shade of imagined

circumstance there is a vibrating response; and to every complex

situation a sensitiveness as to its integrity, a feeling of whether it

does justice to all facts, or overrides some to the advantage of others.

Decision is reasonable when deliberation is so conducted. There may be

error in the result, but it comes from lack of data not from ineptitude

in handling them.

These facts give us the key to the old controversy as to the respective

places of desire and reason in conduct. It is notorious that some

moralists have deplored the influence of desire; they have found the

heart of strife between good and evil in the conflict of desire with

reason, in which the former has force on its side and the latter

authority. But reasonableness is in fact a quality of an effective

relationship among desires rather than a thing opposed to desire. It

signifies the order, perspective, proportion which is achieved, during

deliberation, out of a diversity of earlier incompatible preferences.

Choice is reasonable when it induces us to act reasonably; that is, with

regard to the claims of each of the competing habits and impulses. This

implies, of course, the presence of a comprehensive object, one which

coordinates, organizes and functions each factor of the situation which

gave rise to conflict, suspense and deliberation. This is as true when

some "bad" impulses and habits enter in as when approved ones require

unification. We have already seen the effects of choking them off, of

efforts at direct suppression. Bad habits can be subdued only by being

utilized as elements in a new, more generous and comprehensive scheme of

action, and good ones be preserved from rot only by similar use.

The nature of the strife of reason and passion is well stated by William

James. The cue of passion, he says in effect, is to keep imagination

dwelling upon those objects which are congenial to it, which feed it,

and which by feeding it intensify its force, until it crowds out all

thought of other objects. An impulse or habit which is strongly

emotional magnifies all objects that are congruous with it and smothers

those which are opposed whenever they present themselves. A passionate

activity learns to work itself up artificially--as Oliver Cromwell

indulged in fits of anger when he wanted to do things that his

conscience would not justify. A presentiment is felt that if the thought

of contrary objects is allowed to get a lodgment in imagination, these

objects will work and work to chill and freeze out the ardent passion of

the moment.

The conclusion is not that the emotional, passionate phase of action can

be or should be eliminated in behalf of a bloodless reason. More

"passions," not fewer, is the answer. To check the influence of hate

there must be sympathy, while to rationalize sympathy there are needed

emotions of curiosity, caution, respect for the freedom of

others--dispositions which evoke objects which balance those called up

by sympathy, and prevent its degeneration into maudlin sentiment and

meddling interference. Rationality, once more, is not a force to evoke

against impulse and habit. It is the attainment of a working harmony

among diverse desires. "Reason" as a noun signifies the happy

cooperation of a multitude of dispositions, such as sympathy, curiosity,

exploration, experimentation, frankness, pursuit--to follow things

through--circumspection, to look about at the context, etc., etc. The

elaborate systems of science are born not of reason but of impulses at

first slight and flickering; impulses to handle, move about, to hunt, to

uncover, to mix things separated and divide things combined, to talk and

to listen. Method is their effectual organization into continuous

dispositions of inquiry, development and testing. It occurs after these

acts and because of their consequences. Reason, the rational attitude,

is the resulting disposition, not a ready-made antecedent which can be

invoked at will and set into movement. The man who would intelligently

cultivate intelligence will widen, not narrow, his life of strong

impulses while aiming at their happy coincidence in operation.

The clew of impulse is, as we say, to start something. It is in a hurry.

It rushes us off our feet. It leaves no time for examination, memory and

foresight. But the clew of reason is, as the phrase also goes, to stop

and think. Force, however, is required to stop the ongoing of a habit or

impulse. This is supplied by another habit. The resulting period of

delay, of suspended and postponed overt action, is the period in which

activities that are refused direct outlet project imaginative

counterparts. It signifies, in technical phrase, the mediation of

impulse. For an isolated impulse _is_ immediate, narrowing the world

down to the directly present. Variety of competing tendencies enlarges

the world. It brings a diversity of considerations before the mind, and

enables action to take place finally in view of an object generously

conceived and delicately refined, composed by a long process of

selections and combinations. In popular phrase, to be deliberate is to

be slow, unhurried. It takes time to put objects in order.

There are however vices of reflection as well as of impulse. We may not

look far enough ahead because we are hurried into action by stress of

impulse; but we may also become overinterested in the delights of

reflection; we become afraid of assuming the responsibilities of

decisive choice and action, and in general be sicklied over by a pale

cast of thought. We may become so curious about remote and abstract

matters that we give only a begrudged, impatient attention to the things

right about us. We may fancy we are glorifying the love of truth for its

own sake when we are only indulging a pet occupation and slighting

demands of the immediate situation. Men who devote themselves to

thinking are likely to be unusually unthinking in some respects, as for

example in immediate personal relationships. A man to whom exact

scholarship is an absorbing pursuit may be more than ordinarily vague in

ordinary matters. Humility and impartiality may be shown in a

specialized field, and pettiness and arrogance in dealing with other

persons. "Reason" is not an antecedent force which serves as a panacea.

It is a laborious achievement of habit needing to be continually worked

over. A balanced arrangement of propulsive activities manifested in

deliberation--namely, reason--depends upon a sensitive and proportionate

emotional sensitiveness. Only a one-sided, over-specialized emotion

leads to thinking of it as separate from emotion. The traditional

association of justice and reason has good psychology back of it. Both

imply a balanced distribution of thought and energy. Deliberation is

irrational in the degree in which an end is so fixed, a passion or

interest so absorbing, that the foresight of consequences is warped to

include only what furthers execution of its predetermined bias.

Deliberation is rational in the degree in which forethought flexibly

remakes old aims and habits, institutes perception and love of new ends

and acts.

IV

We now return to a consideration of the utilitarian theory according to

which deliberation consists in calculation of courses of action on the

basis of the profit and loss to which they lead. The contrast of this

notion with fact is obvious. The office of deliberation is not to supply

an inducement to act by figuring out where the most advantage is to be

procured. It is to resolve entanglements in existing activity, restore

continuity, recover harmony, utilize loose impulse and redirect habit.

To this end observation of present conditions, recollection of previous

situations are devoted. Deliberation has its beginning in troubled

activity and its conclusion in choice of a course of action which

straightens it out. It no more resembles the casting-up of accounts of

profit and loss, pleasures and pains, than an actor engaged in drama

resembles a clerk recording debit and credit items in his ledger.

The primary fact is that man is a being who responds in action to the

stimuli of the environment. This fact is complicated in deliberation,

but it certainly is not abolished. We continue to react to an object

presented in imagination as we react to objects presented in

observation. The baby does not move to the mother's breast because of

calculation of the advantages of warmth and food over against the pains

of effort. Nor does the miser seek gold, nor the architect strive to

make plans, nor the physician to heal, because of reckonings of

comparative advantage and disadvantage. Habit, occupation, furnishes the

necessity of forward action in one case as instinct does in the other.

We do not act _from_ reasoning; but reasoning puts before us objects

which are not directly or sensibly present, so that we then may react

directly to these objects, with aversion, attraction, indifference or

attachment, precisely as we would to the same objects if they were

physically present. In the end it results in a case of direct stimulus

and response. In one case the stimulus is presented at once through

sense; in the other case, it is indirectly reached through memory and

constructive imagination. But the matter of directness and indirectness

concerns the way the stimulus is reached, not the way in which it

operates.

Joy and suffering, pain and pleasure, the agreeable and disagreeable,

play their considerable rôle in deliberation. Not, however, by way of a

calculated estimate of future delights and miseries, but by way of

experiencing present ones. The reaction of joy and sorrow, elation and

depression, is as natural a response to objects presented in imagination

as to those presented in sense. Complacency and annoyance follow hard at

the heels of any object presented in image as they do upon its sensuous

experience. Some objects when thought of are congruent to our existing

state of activity. They fit in, they are welcome. They agree, or are

agreeable, not as matter of calculation but as matter of experienced

fact. Other objects rasp; they cut across activity; they are tiresome,

hateful, unwelcome. They disagree with the existing trend of activity,

that is, they are disagreeable, and in no other way than as a bore who

prolongs his visit, a dun we can't pay, or a pestiferous mosquito who

goes on buzzing. We do not think of future losses and expansions. We

think, through imagination, of objects into which in the future some

course of action will run, and we are _now_ delighted or depressed,

pleased or pained at what is presented. This running commentary of likes

and dislikes, attractions and disdains, joys and sorrows, reveals to any

man who is intelligent enough to note them and to study their occasions

his own character. It instructs him as to the composition and direction

of the activities that make him what he is. To know what jars an

activity and what agrees with it is to know something important about

that activity and about ourselves.

Some one may ask what practical difference it makes whether we are

influenced by calculation of future joys and annoyances or by experience

of present ones. To such a question one can hardly reply except in the

words "All the difference in the world." In the first place, no

difference can be more important than that which concerns the nature of

the _subject-matter_ of deliberation. The calculative theory would have

it that this subject-matter is future feelings, sensations, and that

actions and thought are external means to get and avoid these

sensations. If such a theory has any practical influence, it is to

advise a person to concentrate upon his own most subjective and private

feelings. It gives him no choice except between a sickly introspection

and an intricate calculus of remote, inaccessible and indeterminate

results. In fact, deliberation, as a tentative trying-out of various

courses of action, is outlooking. It flies toward and settles upon

objective situations not upon feelings. No doubt we sometimes fall to

deliberating upon the effect of action upon our future feelings,

thinking of a situation mainly with reference to the comforts and

discomforts it will excite in us. But these moments are precisely our

sentimental moments of self-pity or self-glorification. They conduce to

morbidity, sophistication, isolation from others; while facing our acts

in terms of their objective consequences leads to enlightenment and to

consideration of others. The first objection therefore to deliberation

as a calculation of future feelings is that, if it is consistently

adhered to, it makes an abnormal case the standard one.

If however an objective estimate is attempted, thought gets speedily

lost in a task impossible of achievement. Future pleasures and pains are

influenced by two factors which are independent of present choice and

effort. They depend upon our own state at some future moment and upon

the surrounding circumstances of that moment. Both of these are

variables which change independently of present resolve and action. They

are much more important determinants of future sensations than is

anything which can now be calculated. Things sweet in anticipation are

bitter in actual taste, things we now turn from in aversion are welcome

at another moment in our career. Independently of deep changes in

character, such as from mercifulness to callousness, from fretfulness to

cheerfulness, there are unavoidable changes in the waxing and waning of

activity. A child pictures a future of unlimited toys and unrestricted

sweetmeats. An adult pictures an object as giving pleasure while he is

empty while the thing arrives in a moment of repletion. A sympathetic

person reckons upon the utilitarian basis the pains of others as a debit

item in his calculations. But why not harden himself so that others'

sufferings won't count? Why not foster an arrogant cruelty so that the

suffering of others which will follow from one's own action will fall on

the credit side of the reckoning, be pleasurable, all to the good?

Future pleasures and pains, even of one's own, are among the things most

elusive of calculation. Of all things they lend themselves least readily

to anything approaching a mathematical calculus. And the further into

the future we extend our view, and the more the pleasures of others

enter into the account, the more hopeless does the problem of estimating

future consequences become. All of the elements become more and more

indeterminate. Even if one could form a fairly accurate picture of the

things that give pleasure to most people at the present moment--an

exceedingly difficult task--he cannot foresee the detailed circumstances

which will give a decisive turn to enjoyment at future times and remote

places. Do pleasures due to defective education or unrefined

disposition, to say nothing of the pleasures of sensuality and

brutality, rank the same as those of cultivated persons having acute

social sensitiveness? The only reason the impossibility of the

hedonistic calculus is not self-evident is that theorists in considering

it unconsciously substitute for calculation of future pleasures an

appreciation of present ones, a present realization in imagination of

future objective situations.

For, in truth, a man's judgment of future joys and sorrows is but a

projection of what now satisfies and annoys him. A man of considerate

disposition now feels hurt at the thought of an act bringing harm to

others, and so he is on the lookout for consequences of that sort,

ranking them as of high importance. He may even be so abnormally

sensitive to such consequences that he is held back from needed vigorous

action. He fears to do the things which are for the real welfare of

others because he shrinks from the thought of the pain to be inflicted

upon them by needed measures. A man of an executive type, engrossed in

carrying through a scheme, will react in present emotion to everything

concerned with its external success; the pain its execution brings to

others will not occur to him, or if it does, his mind will easily glide

over it. This sort of consequence will seem to him of slight importance

in comparison with the commercial or political changes which bulk in his

plans. What a man foresees and fails to foresee, what he appraises

highly and at a low rate, what he deems important and trivial, what he

dwells upon and what he slurs over, what he easily recalls and what he

naturally forgets--all of these things depend upon his character. His

estimate of future consequences of the agreeable and annoying is

consequently of much greater value as an index of what he now is than as

a prediction of future results.

One has only to read between the lines to see the enormous difference

that marks off modern utilitarianism from epicureanism, in spite of

similarities in professed psychologies. Epicureanism is too worldly-wise

to indulge in attempts to base present action upon precarious estimates

of future and universal pleasures and pains. On the contrary it says let

the future go, for life is uncertain. Who knows when it will end, or

what fortune the morrow will bring? Foster, then, with jealous care

every gift of pleasure now allotted to you, dwell upon it with lingering

love, prolong it as best you may. Utilitarianism on the contrary was a

part of a philanthropic and reform movement of the nineteenth century.

Its commendation of an elaborate and impossible calculus was in reality

part of a movement to develop a type of character which should have a

wide social outlook, sympathy with the experiences of all sentient

creatures, one zealous about the social effects of all proposed acts,

especially those of collective legislation and administration. It was

concerned not with extracting the honey of the passing moment but with

breeding improved bees and constructing hives.

After all, the object of foresight of consequences is not to predict the

future. It is to ascertain the meaning of present activities and to

secure, so far as possible, a present activity with a unified meaning.

We are not the creators of heaven and earth; we have no responsibility

for their operations save as their motions are altered by our movements.

Our concern is with the significance of that slight fraction of total

activity which starts from ourselves. The best laid plans of men as well

of mice gang aglee; and for the same reason: inability to dominate the

future. The power of man and mouse is infinitely constricted in

comparison with the power of events. Men always build better or worse

than they know, for their acts are taken up into the broad sweep of

events.