Hence the problem of deliberation is not to calculate future happenings

but to appraise present proposed actions. We judge present desires and

habits by their tendency to produce certain consequences. It is our

business to watch the course of our action so as to see what is the

significance, the import of our habits and dispositions. The future

outcome is not certain. But neither is it certain what the present fire

will do in the future. It may be unexpectedly fed or extinguished. But

its _tendency_ is a knowable matter, what it will do under certain

circumstances. And so we know what is the tendency of malice, charity,

conceit, patience. We know by observing their consequences, by

recollecting what we have observed, by using that recollection in

constructive imaginative forecasts of the future, by using the thought

of future consequence to tell the quality of the act now proposed.

Deliberation is not calculation of indeterminate future results. The

present, not the future, is ours. No shrewdness, no store of information

will make it ours. But by constant watchfulness concerning the tendency

of acts, by noting disparities between former judgments and actual

outcomes, and tracing that part of the disparity that was due to

deficiency and excess in disposition, we come to know the meaning of

present acts, and to guide them in the light of that meaning. The moral

is to develop conscientiousness, ability to judge the significance of

what we are doing and to use that judgment in directing what we do, not

by means of direct cultivation of something called conscience, or

reason, or a faculty of moral knowledge, but by fostering those impulses

and habits which experience has shown to make us sensitive, generous,

imaginative, impartial in perceiving the tendency of our inchoate

dawning activities. Every attempt to forecast the future is subject in

the end to the auditing of present concrete impulse and habit. Therefore

the important thing is the fostering of those habits and impulses which

lead to a broad, just, sympathetic survey of situations.

The occasion of deliberation, that is of the attempt to find a stimulus

to complete overt action in thought of some future object, is confusion

and uncertainty in present activities. A similar devision in activities

and need of a like deliberative activity for the sake of recovery of

unity is sure to recur, to recur again and again, no matter how wise the

decision. Even the most comprehensive deliberation leading to the most

momentous choice only fixes a disposition which has to be continuously

applied in new and unforeseen conditions, re-adapted by future

deliberations. Always our old habits and dispositions carry us into new

fields. We have to be always learning and relearning the meaning of our

active tendencies. Does not this reduce moral life to the futile toil of

a Sisyphus who is forever rolling a stone uphill only to have it roll

back so that he has to repeat his old task? Yes, judged from progress

made in a control of conditions which shall stay put and which excludes

the necessity of future deliberations and reconsiderations. No, because

continual search and experimentation to discover the meaning of changing

activity, keeps activity alive, growing in significance. The future

situation involved in deliberation is of necessity marked by

contingency. What it will be in fact remains dependent upon conditions

that escape our foresight and power of regulation. But foresight which

draws liberally upon the lessons of past experience reveals the

tendency, the meaning, of present action; and, once more, it is this

present meaning rather than the future outcome which counts. Imaginative

forethought of the probable consequences of a proposed act keeps that

act from sinking below consciousness into routine habit or whimsical

brutality. It preserves the meaning of that act alive, and keeps it

growing in depth and refinement of meaning. There is no limit to the

amount of meaning which reflective and meditative habit is capable of

importing into even simple acts, just as the most splendid successes of

the skilful executive who manipulates events may be accompanied by an

incredibly meager and superficial consciousness.

V

The reason for dividing conduct into two distinct regions, one of

expediency and the other of morality, disappears when the psychology

that identifies ordinary deliberation with calculation is disposed of.

There is seen to be but one issue involved in all reflection upon

conduct: The rectifying of present troubles, the harmonizing of present

incompatibilities by projecting a course of action which gathers into

itself the meaning of them all. The recognition of the true psychology

also reveals to us the nature of good or satisfaction. Good consists in

the meaning that is experienced to belong to an activity when conflict

and entanglement of various incompatible impulses and habits terminate

in a unified orderly release in action. This human good, being a

fulfilment conditioned upon thought, differs from the pleasures which an

animal nature--of course we also remain animals so far as we do not

think--hits upon accidentally. Moreover there is a genuine difference

between a false good, a spurious satisfaction, and a "true" good, and

there is an empirical test for discovering the difference. The

unification which ends thought in act may be only a superficial

compromise, not a real decision but a postponement of the issue. Many of

our so-called decisions are of this nature. Or it may present, as we

have seen, a victory of a temporarily intense impulse over its rivals, a

unity by oppression and suppression, not by coordination. These seeming

unifications which are not unifications of fact are revealed by the

event, by subsequent occurrences. It is one of the penalties of evil

choice, perhaps the chief penalty, that the wrong-doer becomes more and

more incapable of detecting these objective revelations of himself.

In quality, the good is never twice alike. It never copies itself. It is

new every morning, fresh every evening. It is unique in its every

presentation. For it marks the resolution of a distinctive complication

of competing habits and impulses which can never repeat itself. Only

with a habit rigid to the point of immobility could exactly the same

good recur twice. And with such rigid routines the same good does not

after all recur, for it does not even occur. There is no consciousness

at all, either of good or bad. Rigid habits sink below the level of any

meaning at all. And since we live in a moving world, they plunge us

finally against conditions to which they are not adapted and so

terminate in disaster.

To utilitarianism with all its defects belongs the distinction of

enforcing in an unforgettable way the fact that moral good, like every

good, consists in a satisfaction of the forces of human nature, in

welfare, happiness. To Bentham remains, in spite of all crudities and

eccentricities, the imperishable renown of forcing home to the popular

consciousness that "conscience," intelligence applied to in moral

matters, is too often not intelligence but is veiled caprice, dogmatic

_ipse dixitism_, vested class interest. It is truly conscience only as

it contributes to relief of misery and promotion of happiness. An

examination of utilitarianism brings out however the catastrophe

involved in thinking of the good to which intelligence is pertinent as

consisting in future pleasures and pains, and moral reflection as their

algebraic calculus. It emphasizes the contrast between such conceptions

of good and of intelligence, and the facts of human nature according to

which good, happiness, is found in the present meaning of activity,

depending upon the proportion, order and freedom introduced into it by

thought as it discovers objects which release and unify otherwise

contending elements.

An adequate discussion of why utilitarianism with its just insight into

the central place of good, and its ardent devotion to rendering morals

more intelligent and more equitably human took its onesided course (and

thereby provoked an intensified reaction to transcendental and dogmatic

morals) would take us far afield into social conditions and the

antecedent history of thought. We can deal with only one factor, the

domination of intellectual interest by economic considerations. The

industrial revolution was bound in any case to give a new direction to

thought. It enforced liberation from other-worldly concerns by fixing

attention upon the possibility of the betterment of this world through

control and utilization of natural forces; it opened up marvelous

possibilities in industry and commerce, and new social conditions

conducive to invention, ingenuity, enterprise, constructive energy and

an impersonal habit of mind dealing with mechanisms rather than

appearances. But new movements do not start in a new and clear field.

The context of old institutions and corresponding habits of thought

persisted. The new movement was perverted in theory because prior

established conditions deflected it in practice. Thus the new

industrialism was largely the old feudalism, living in a bank instead of

a castle and brandishing the check of credit instead of the sword.

An old theological doctrine of total depravity was continued and carried

over in the idea of an inherent laziness of human nature which rendered

it averse to useful work, unless bribed by expectations of pleasure, or

driven by fears of pains. This being the "incentive" to action, it

followed that the office of reason is only to enlighten the search for

good or gain by instituting a more exact calculus of profit and loss.

Happiness was thus identified with a maximum net gain of pleasures on

the basis of analogy with business conducted for pecuniary profit, and

directed by means of a science of accounting dealing with quantities of

receipts and expenses expressed in definite monetary units.[6] For

business was conducted as matter of fact with primary reference to

procuring gain and averting loss. Gain and loss were reckoned in terms

of units of money, assumed to be fixed and equal, exactly comparable

whether loss or gain occurred, while business foresight reduced future

prospects to definitely measured forms, to dollars and cents. A dollar

is a dollar, past, present or future; and every business transaction,

every expenditure and consumption of time, energy, goods, is, in theory,

capable of exact statement in terms of dollars. Generalize this point of

view into the notion that gain is the object of _all_ action; that gain

takes the form of pleasure; that there are definite, commensurable units

of pleasure, which are exactly offset by units of pain (loss), and the

working psychology of the Benthamite school is at hand.

[6] I owe the suggestion of this mode of interpreting the

hedonistic calculus of utilitarianism to Dr. Wesley Mitchell.

See his articles in _Journal of Political Economy_, vol. 18.

Compare also his article in _Political Science Quarterly_,

vol. 33.

Now admitting that the device of money accounting makes possible more

exact estimates of the consequences of many acts than is otherwise

possible, and that accordingly the use of money and accounting may work

a triumph for the application of intelligence in daily affairs, yet

there exists a difference in kind between business calculation of profit

and loss and deliberation upon what purposes to form. Some of these

differences are inherent and insuperable. Others of them are due to the

nature of present business conducted for pecuniary profit, and would

disappear if business were conducted primarily for service of needs. But

it is important to see _how_ in the latter case the assimilation of

business accounting and normal deliberation would occur. For it would

not consist in making deliberation identical with calculation of loss

and gain; it would proceed in the opposite direction. It would make

accounting and auditing a subordinate factor in discovering the meaning

of present activity. Calculation would be a means of stating future

results more exactly and objectively and thus of making action more

humane. Its function would be that of statistics in all social science.

But first as to the inherent difference between deliberation regarding

business profit and loss and deliberation about ordinary conduct. The

distinction between wide and narrow use of reason has already been

noted. The latter holds a fixed end in view and deliberates only upon

means of reaching it. The former regards the end-in-view in deliberation

as tentative and permits, nay encourages the coming into view of

consequences which will transform it and create a new purpose and plan.

Now business calculation is obviously of the kind where the end is taken

for granted and does not enter into deliberation. It resembles the case

in which a man has already made his final decision, say to take a walk,

and deliberates only upon what walk to take. His end-in-view already

exists; it is not questioned. The question is as to comparative

advantages of this tramp or that. Deliberation is not free but occurs

within the limits of a decision reached by some prior deliberation or

else fixed by unthinking routine. Suppose, however, that a man's

question is not which path to walk upon, but whether to walk or to stay

with a friend whom continued confinement has rendered peevish and

uninteresting as a companion. The utilitarian theory demands that in the

latter case the two alternatives still be of the same kind, alike in

quality, that their only difference be a quantitative one, of plus or

minus in pleasure. This assumption that all desires and dispositions,

all habits and impulses, are the same in quality is equivalent to the

assertion that no real or significant conflict among them is possible;

and hence there is no need of discovering an object and an activity

which will bring them into unity. It asserts by implication that there

is no genuine doubt or suspense as to the meaning of any impulse or

habit. Their meaning is ready-made, fixed: pleasure. The only "problem"

or doubt is as to the _amount_ of pleasure (or pain) that is involved.

This assumption does violence to fact. The poignancy of situations that

evoke reflection lies in the fact that we really do not know the meaning

of the tendencies that are pressing for action. We have to search, to

experiment. Deliberation is a work of discovery. Conflict is acute; one

impulse carries us one way into one situation, and another impulse takes

us another way to a radically different objective result. Deliberation

is not an attempt to do away with this opposition of quality by reducing

it to one of amount. It is an attempt to _uncover_ the conflict in its

full scope and bearing. What we want to find out is what difference each

impulse and habit imports, to reveal qualitative incompatibilities by

detecting the different courses to which they commit us, the different

dispositions they form and foster, the different situations into which

they plunge us.

In short, the thing actually at stake in any serious deliberation is not

a difference of quantity, but what kind of person one is to become, what

sort of self is in the making, what kind of a world is making. This is

plain enough in those crucial decisions where the course of life is

thrown into widely different channels, where the pattern of life is

rendered different and diversely dyed according as this alternative or

that is chosen. Deliberation as to whether to be a merchant or a school

teacher, a physician or a politician is not a choice of quantities. It

is just what it appears to be, a choice of careers which are

incompatible with one another, within each of which definitive

inclusions and rejections are involved. With the difference in career

belongs a difference in the constitution of the self, of habits of

thought and feeling as well as of outward action. With it comes profound

differences in all future objective relationships. Our minor decisions

differ in acuteness and range, but not in principle. Our world does not

so obviously hang upon any one of them; but put together they make the

world what it is in meaning for each one of us. Crucial decisions can

hardly be more than a disclosure of the cumulative force of trivial

choices.

A radical distinction thus exists between deliberation where the only

question is whether to invest money in this bond or that stock, and

deliberation where the primary decision is as to the _kind_ of activity

which is to be engaged in. Definite quantitative calculation is possible

in the former case because a decision as to kind or direction of action

does not have to be made. It has been decided already, whether by

persistence of habit, or prior deliberation, that the man is to be an

investor. The significant thing in decisions proper, the course of

action, the kind of a self simply, doesn't enter in; it isn't in

question. To reduce all cases of judgment of action to this simplified

and comparatively unimportant case of calculation of quantities, is to

miss the whole point of deliberation.[7]

[7] So far as I am aware Dr. H. W. Stuart was the first to

point out this difference between economic and moral

valuations in his essay in _Studies in Logical Theory_.

It is another way of saying the same thing to note that business

calculations about pecuniary gain never concern direct use in

experience. They are, as such, not deliberations about good or

satisfaction at all. The man who decides to put business activity before

all other claims whatsoever, before that of family or country or art or

science, does make a choice about satisfaction or good. But he makes it

as a man, not as a business man. On the other hand, what is to be _done_

with business profit when it accrues (except to invest it in similar

undertakings) does not enter at all into a strictly business

deliberation. Its use, in which alone good or satisfaction is found, is

left indeterminate, contingent upon further deliberation, or else is

left matter of routine habit. We do not eat money, or wear it, or marry

it, or listen for musical strains to issue from it. If by any chance a

man prefers a less amount of money to a greater amount, it is not for

economic reasons. Pecuniary profit in itself, in other words, is always

strictly instrumental, and it is of the nature of this instrument to be

effective in proportion to size. In choosing with respect to it, we are

not making a significant choice, a choice of ends.

We have already seen, however, there is something abnormal and in the

strict sense impossible in mere means, in, that is, instruments totally

dissevered from ends. We may view economic activity in abstraction, but

it does not _exist_ by itself. Business takes for granted non-business

uses to which its results are to be put. The stimuli for economic

activity (in the sense in which business means activity subject to

monetary reckoning) are found in non-pecuniary, non-economic activities.

Taken by itself then economic action throws no light upon the nature of

satisfaction and the relation of intelligence to it, because the whole

question of satisfaction is either taken for granted or else is ignored

by it. Only when money-making is itself taken as a good does it exhibit

anything pertinent to the question. And when it is so taken, then the

question is not one of future gain but of present activity and its

meaning. Business then becomes an activity carried on for its own sake.

It is then a career, a continuous occupation in which are developed

daring, adventure, power, rivalry, overcoming of competitors,

conspicuous achievement which attracts admiration, play of imagination,

technical knowledge, skill in foresight and making combinations,

management of men and goods and so on. In this case, it exemplifies what

has been said about good or happiness as incorporating in itself at

_present_ the foreseen future consequences that result from intelligent

action. The problem concerns the quality of such a good.

In short the attempt to assimilate other activities to the model of

economic activity (defined as a calculated pursuit of gain) reverses the

state of the facts. The "economic man" defined as a creature devoted to

an enlightened or calculating pursuit of gain is morally objectionable

because the conception of such a being empirically falsifies empirical

facts. Love of pecuniary gain is an undoubted and powerful fact. But it

and its importance are affairs of social not of psychological nature. It

is not a primary fact which can be used to account for other phenomena.

It depends upon other impulses and habits. It expresses and organizes

the use to which they are put. It cannot be used to define the nature of

desire, effort and satisfaction, because it embodies a socially selected

type of desire and satisfaction. It affords, like steeple-chasing, or

collecting postage stamps, seeking political office, astronomical

observation of the heavens, a special case of desire, effort, and

happiness. And like them it is subject to examination, criticism and

valuation in the light of the place it occupies in the system of

developing activities.

The reason that it is so easy and for specific purposes so useful to

select economic activities and subject them to separate scientific

treatment is because the men who engage in it are men who are also more

than business men, whose usual habits may be more or less safely guessed

at. As human beings they have desires and occupations which are affected

by social custom, expectation and admiration. The uses to which gains

will be put, that is the current scheme of activities into which they

enter as factors, are passed over only because they are so inevitably

present. Support of family, of church, philanthropic benefactions,

political influence, automobiling, command of luxuries, freedom of

movement, respect from others, are in general terms some of the obvious

activities into which economic activity fits. This context of activities

enters into the real make-up and meaning of economic activity.

Calculated pursuit of gain is in fact never what it is made out to be

when economic action is separated from the rest of life, for in fact it

is what it is because of a complex social environment involving

scientific, legal, political and domestic conditions.

A certain tragic fate seems to attend all intellectual movements. That

of utilitarianism is suggested in the not infrequent criticism that it

exaggerated the rôle of rational thought in human conduct, that it

assumed that everybody is moved by conscious considerations and that all

that is really necessary is to make the process of consideration

sufficiently enlightened. Then it is objected that a better psychology

reveals that men are not moved by thought but rather by instinct and

habit. Thus a partially sound criticism is employed to conceal the one

factor in utilitarianism from which we ought to learn something; is used

to foster an obscurantist doctrine of trusting to impulse, instinct or

intuition. Neither the utilitarians nor any one else can exaggerate the

proper office of reflection, of intelligence, in conduct. The mistake

lay not here but in a false conception of what constitutes reflection,

deliberation. The truth that men are not moved by consideration of

self-interest, that men are not good judges of where their interests lie

and are not moved to act by these judgments, cannot properly be

converted into the belief that consideration of consequences is a

negligible factor in conduct. So far as it is negligible in fact it

evinces the rudimentary character of civilization. We may indeed safely

start from the assumption that impulse and habit, not thought, are the

primary determinants of conduct. But the conclusion to be drawn from

these facts is that the need is therefore the greater for cultivation of

thought. The error of utilitarianism is not at this point. It is found

in its wrong conception of what thought, deliberation, is and does.

VI

Our problem now concerns the nature of ends, that is ends-in-view or

aims. The essential elements in the problem have already been stated. It

has been pointed out that the ends, objectives, of conduct are those

foreseen consequences which influence present deliberation and which

finally bring it to rest by furnishing an adequate stimulus to overt

action. Consequently ends arise and function within action. They are

not, as current theories too often imply, things lying beyond activity

at which the latter is directed. They are not strictly speaking ends or

termini of action at all. They are terminals of deliberation, and so

turning points _in_ activity. Many opposed moral theories agree however

in placing ends beyond action, although they differ in their notions of

what the ends are. The utilitarian sets up pleasure as such an

outside-and-beyond, as something necessary to induce action and in which

it terminates. Many harsh critics of utilitarianism have however agreed

that there is some end in which action terminates, a final goal. They

have denied that pleasure is such an outside aim, and put perfection or

self-realization in its place. The entire popular notion of "ideals" is

infected with this conception of some fixed end beyond activity at which

we should aim. According to this view ends-in-themselves come before

aims. We have a moral aim only as our purpose coincides with some

end-in-itself. We _ought_ to aim at the latter whether we actually do or

not.

When men believed that fixed ends existed for all normal changes in

nature, the conception of similar ends for men was but a special case of

a general belief. If the changes in a tree from acorn to full-grown oak

were regulated by an end which was somehow immanent or potential in all

the less perfect forms, and if change was simply the effort to realize a

perfect or complete form, then the acceptance of a like view for human

conduct was consonant with the rest of what passed for science. Such a

view, consistent and systematic, was foisted by Aristotle upon western

culture and endured for two thousand years. When the notion was expelled

from natural science by the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth

century, logically it should also have disappeared from the theory of

human action. But man is not logical and his intellectual history is a

record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in

his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical

basis. So the doctrine of fixed ends-in-themselves at which human acts

are--or should be--directed and by which they are regulated if they are

regulated at all persisted in morals, and was made the cornerstone of

orthodox moral theory. The immediate effect was to dislocate moral from

natural science, to divide man's world as it never had been divided in

prior culture. One point of view, one method and spirit animated inquiry

into natural occurrences; a radically opposite set of ideas prevailed

about man's affairs. Completion of the scientific change begun in the

seventeenth century thus depends upon a revision of the current notion

of ends of action as fixed limits and conclusions.

In fact, ends are ends-in-view or aims. They arise out of natural

effects or consequences which in the beginning are hit upon, stumbled

upon so far as any purpose is concerned. Men _like_ some of the

consequences and _dislike_ others. Henceforth (or till attraction and

repulsion alter) attaining or averting similar consequences are aims or

ends. These consequences constitute the meaning and value of an activity

as it comes under deliberation. Meantime of course imagination is busy.

Old consequences are enhanced, recombined, modified in imagination.

Invention operates. Actual consequences, that is effects which have

happened in the past, become possible future consequences of acts still

to be performed. This operation of imaginative thought complicates the

relation of ends to activity, but it does not alter the substantial

fact: Ends are foreseen consequences which arise in the course of

activity and which are employed to give activity added meaning and to

direct its further course. They are in no sense ends _of_ action. In

being ends of _deliberation_ they are redirecting pivots _in_ action.

Men shoot and throw. At first this is done as an "instinctive" or

natural reaction to some situation. The result when it is observed gives

a new meaning to the activity. Henceforth men in throwing and shooting

think of it in terms of its outcome; they act intelligently or have an

end. Liking the activity in its acquired meaning, they not only "take

aim" when they throw instead of throwing at random, but they find or

make targets at which to aim. This is the origin and nature of "goals"

of action. They are ways of defining and deepening the meaning of

activity. Having an end or aim is thus a characteristic of _present_

activity. It is the means by which an activity becomes adapted when

otherwise it would be blind and disorderly, or by which it gets meaning

when otherwise it would be mechanical. In a strict sense an end-in-view

is a _means_ in present action; present action is not a means to a

remote end. Men do not shoot because targets exist, but they set up

targets in order that throwing and shooting may be more effective and

significant.

A mariner does not sail towards the stars, but by noting the stars he is

aided in conducting his present activity of sailing. A port or harbor is

his objective, but only in the sense of _reaching_ it not of taking

possession of it. The harbor stands in his thought as a significant

point at which his activity will need re-direction. Activity will not

cease when the port is attained, but merely the _present direction_ of

activity. The port is as truly the beginning of another mode of activity

as it is the termination of the present one. The only reason we ignore

this fact is because it is empirically taken for granted. We know

without thinking that our "ends" are perforce beginnings. But theories

of ends and ideals have converted a theoretical ignoring which is

equivalent to practical acknowledgment into an intellectual denial, and

have thereby confused and perverted the nature of ends.

Even the most important among all the consequences of an act is not

necessarily its aim. Results which are objectively most important may

not even be thought of at all; ordinarily a man does not think in

connection with exercise of his profession that it will sustain him and

his family in existence. The end-thought-of is uniquely important, but

it is indispensable to state the respect in which it is important. It

gives the decisive clew to the act to be performed under the existing

circumstances. It is that particular foreseen object that will stimulate

the act which relieves existing troubles, straightens out existing

entanglements. In a temporary annoyance, even if only that caused by the

singing of a mosquito, the thought of that which gives relief may

engross the mind in spite of consequences much more important,

objectively speaking. Moralists have deplored such facts as evidence of

levity. But the remedy, if a remedy be needed, is not found in insisting

upon the importance of ends in general. It is found in a change of the

dispositions which make things either immediately troublesome or

tolerable or agreeable.

When ends are regarded as literally ends to action rather than as

directive stimuli to present choice they are frozen and isolated. It

makes no difference whether the "end" is "natural" good like health or a

"moral" good like honesty. Set up as complete and exclusive, as

demanding and justifying action as a means to itself, it leads to

narrowness; in extreme cases fanaticism, inconsiderateness, arrogance

and hypocrisy. Joshua's reputed success in getting the sun to stand

still to serve his desire is recognized to have involved a miracle. But

moral theorists constantly assume that the continuous course of events

can be arrested at the point of a particular object; that men can plunge

with their own desires into the unceasing flow of changes, and seize

upon some object as their end irrespective of everything else. The use

of intelligence to discover the object that will best operate as a

releasing and unifying stimulus in the existing situation is discounted.

One reminds one's self that one's end is justice or charity or

professional achievement or putting over a deal for a needed public

improvement, and further questionings and qualms are stilled.

It is customary to suppose that such methods merely ignore the question

of the morality of the means which are used to secure the end desired.

Common sense revolts against the maxim, conveniently laid off upon

Jesuits or other far-away people, that the end justifies the means.

There is no incorrectness in saying that the question of means employed

is overlooked in such cases. But analysis would go further if it were

also pointed out that overlooking means is only a device for failing to

note those ends, or consequences, which, if they were noted would be

seen to be so evil that action would be estopped. Certainly nothing can

justify or condemn means except ends, results. But we have to include

consequences impartially. Even admitting that lying will save a man's

soul, whatever that may mean, it would still be true that lying will

have other consequences, namely, the usual consequences that follow from

tampering with good faith and that lead lying to be condemned. It is

wilful folly to fasten upon some single end or consequence which is

liked, and permit the view of that to blot from perception all other

undesired and undesirable consequences. It is like supposing that

when a finger held close to the eye covers up a distant mountain the

finger is really larger than the mountain. Not _the_ end--in the

singular--justifies the means; for there is no such thing as the single

all-important end. To suppose that there is such an end is like working

over again, in behalf of our private wishes, the miracle of Joshua in

arresting the course of nature. It is not possible adequately to

characterize the presumption, the falsity and the deliberate perversion

of intelligence involved in refusal to note the plural effects that flow

from any act, a refusal adopted in order that we may justify an act by

picking out that one consequence which will enable us to do what we wish

to do and for which we feel the need of justification.

Yet this assumption is continually made. It is made by implication in

the current view of purposes or ends-in-view as objects in themselves,

instead of means to unification and liberation of present conflicting,

confused habits and impulses. There is something almost sinister in the

desire to label the doctrine that the end justifies the means with the

name of some one obnoxious school. Politicians, especially if they have

to do with the foreign affairs of a nation and are called statesmen,

almost uniformly act upon the doctrine that the welfare of their own

country justifies any measure irrespective of all the demoralization it

works. Captains of industry, great executives in all lines, usually work

upon this plan. But they are not the original offenders by any means.

Every man works upon it so far as he permits himself to become so

absorbed in one aspect of what he is doing that he loses a view of its

varied consequences, hypnotizing his attention by consideration of just

those consequences which in the abstract are desirable and slurring over

other consequences equally real. Every man works upon this principle who

becomes over-interested in any cause or project, and who uses its

desirability in the abstract to justify himself in employing any means

that will assist him in arriving, ignoring all the collateral "ends" of

his behavior. It is frequently pointed out that there is a type of

executive-man whose conduct seems to be as non-moral as the action of

the forces of nature. We all tend to relapse into this non-moral

condition whenever we want any one thing intensely. In general, the

identification of the end prominent in conscious desire and effort with

_the_ end is part of the technique of avoiding a reasonable survey of

consequences. The survey is avoided because of a subconscious

recognition that it would reveal desire in its true worth and thus

preclude action to satisfy it--or at all events give us an uneasy

conscience in striving to realize it. Thus the doctrine of the isolated,

complete or fixed end limits intelligent examination, encourages

insincerity, and puts a pseudo-stamp of moral justification upon success

at any price.

Moralistic persons are given to escaping this evil by falling into

another pit. They deny that consequences have anything at all to do with

the morality of acts. Not ends but motives they say justify or condemn

acts. The thing to do, accordingly, is to cultivate certain motives or

dispositions, benevolence, purity, love of perfection, loyalty. The

denial of consequences thus turns out formal, verbal. In reality a

consequence is set up at which to aim, only it is a subjective

consequence. "Meaning well" is selected as _the_ consequence or end to

be cultivated at all hazards, an end which is all-justifying and to

which everything else is offered up in sacrifice. The result is a

sentimental futile complacency rather than the brutal efficiency of the

executive. But the root of both evils is the same. One man selects some

external consequence, the other man a state of internal feeling, to

serve as the end. The doctrine of meaning well as _the_ end is if

anything the more contemptible of the two, for it shrinks from accepting

any responsibility for actual results. It is negative, self-protective

and sloppy. It lends itself to complete self-deception.

Why have men become so attached to fixed, external ends? Why is it not

universally recognized that an end is a device of intelligence in

guiding action, instrumental to freeing and harmonizing troubled and

divided tendencies? The answer is virtually contained in what was

earlier said about rigid habits and their effect upon intelligence.

Ends are, in fact, literally endless, forever coming into existence as

new activities occasion new consequences. "Endless ends" is a way of

saying that there are no ends--that is no fixed self-enclosed

finalities. While however we cannot actually prevent change from

occurring we can and do regard it as evil. We strive to retain action

in ditches already dug. We regard novelties as dangerous, experiments

as illicit and deviations as forbidden. Fixed and separate ends

reflect a projection of our own fixed and non-interacting

compartmental habits. We see only consequences which correspond to our

habitual courses. As we have said, men did not begin to shoot because

there were ready-made targets to aim at. They made things into targets

by shooting at them, and then made special targets to make shooting

more significantly interesting. But if generation after generation

were shown targets they had had no part in constructing, if bows and

arrows were thrust into their hands, and pressure were brought to bear

upon them to keep them shooting in season and out, some wearied soul

would soon propound to willing listeners the theory that shooting was

unnatural, that man was naturally wholly at rest, and that targets

existed in order that men might be forced to be active; that the duty

of shooting and the virtue of hitting are externally imposed and

fostered, and that otherwise there would be no such thing as a

shooting-activity--that is, morality.

The doctrine of fixed ends not only diverts attention from examination

of consequences and the intelligent creation of purpose, but, since

means and ends are two ways of regarding the same actuality, it also

renders men careless in their inspection of existing conditions. An aim

not framed on the basis of a survey of those present conditions which

are to be employed as means of its realization simply throws us back

upon past habits. We then do not do what we intended to do but what we

have got used to doing, or else we thrash about in a blind ineffectual

way. The result is failure. Discouragement follows, assuaged perhaps by

the thought that in any case the end is too ideal, too noble and remote,

to be capable of realization. We fall back on the consoling thought that

our moral ideals are too good for this world and that we must accustom

ourselves to a gap between aim and execution. Actual life is then

thought of as a compromise with the best, an enforced second or third

best, a dreary exile from our true home in the ideal, or a temporary

period of troubled probation to be followed by a period of unending

attainment and peace. At the same time, as has been repeatedly pointed

out, persons of a more practical turn of mind accept the world "as it

is," that is as past customs have made it to be, and consider what

advantages for themselves may be extracted from it. They form aims on

the basis of existing habits of life which may be turned to their own

private account. They employ intelligence in framing ends and selecting

and arranging means. But intelligence is confined to manipulation; it

does not extend to construction. It is the intelligence of the

politician, administrator and professional executive--the kind of

intelligence which has given a bad meaning to a word that ought to have

a fine meaning, opportunism. For the highest task of intelligence is to

grasp and realize genuine opportunity, possibility.

Roughly speaking, the course of forming aims is as follows. The

beginning is with a wish, an emotional reaction against the present

state of things and a hope for something different. Action fails to

connect satisfactorily with surrounding conditions. Thrown back upon

itself, it projects itself in an imagination of a scene which if it were

present would afford satisfaction. This picture is often called an aim,

more often an ideal. But in itself it is a fancy which may be only a

fantasy, a dream, a castle in the air. In itself it is a romantic

embellishment of the present; at its best it is material for poetry or

the novel. Its natural home is not in the future but in the dim past or

in some distant and supposedly better part of the present world. Every

such idealized object is suggested by something actually experienced, as

the flight of birds suggests the liberation of human beings from the

restrictions of slow locomotion on dull earth. It becomes an aim or end

only when it is worked out in terms of concrete conditions available for

its realization, that is in terms of "means."

This transformation depends upon study of the conditions which generate

or make possible the fact observed to exist already. The fancy of the

delight of moving at will through the air became an actuality only after

men carefully studied the way in which a bird although heavier than air

actually sustains itself in air. A fancy becomes an aim, in short, when

some past sequence of known cause-and-effect is projected into the

future, and when by assembling its causal conditions we strive to

generate a like result. We have to fall back upon what has already

happened naturally without design, and study it to see _how_ it

happened, which is what is meant by causation. This knowledge joined to

wish creates a purpose. Many men have doubtless dreamed of ability to

have light in darkness without the trouble of oil, lamps and friction.

Glow-worms, lightning, the sparks of cut electric conductors suggest

such a possibility. But the picture remained a dream until an Edison

studied all that could be found out about such casual phenomena of

light, and then set to work to search out and gather together the means

for reproducing their operation. The great trouble with what passes for

moral ends and ideals is that they do not get beyond the stage of fancy

of something agreeable and desirable based upon an emotional wish; very

often, at that, not even an original wish, but the wish of some leader

which has been conventionalized and transmitted through channels of

authority. Every gain in natural science makes possible new aims. That

is, the discovery of how things _do_ occur makes it possible to conceive

of their happening at will, and gives us a start on selecting and

combining the conditions, the means, to command their happening. In

technical matters, this lesson has been fairly well learned. But in

moral matters, men still largely neglect the need of studying the way in

which results similar to those which we desire actually happen.

Mechanism is despised as of importance only in low material things. The

consequent divorce of moral ends from scientific study of natural events

renders the former impotent wishes, compensatory dreams in

consciousness. In _fact_ ends or consequences are still determined by

fixed habit and the force of circumstance. The evils of idle dreaming

and of routine are experienced in conjunction. "Idealism" must indeed

come first--the imagination of some better state generated by desire.

But unless ideals are to be dreams and idealism a synonym for

romanticism and fantasy-building, there must be a most realistic study

of actual conditions and of the mode or law of natural events, in order

to give the imagined or ideal object definite form and solid

substance--to give it, in short, practicality and constitute it a

working end.

The acceptance of fixed ends in themselves is an aspect of man's

devotion to an ideal of certainty. This affection was inevitably

cherished as long as men believed that the highest things in physical

nature are at rest, and that science is possible only by grasping

immutable forms and species: in other words, for much the greater part

of the intellectual history of mankind. Only reckless sceptics would

have dared entertain any idea of ends except as fixed in themselves as

long as the whole structure of science was erected upon the immobile.

Behind however the conception of fixity whether in science or morals lay

adherence to certainty of "truth," a clinging to something fixed, born

of fear of the new and of attachment to possessions. When the classicist

condemns concession to impulse and holds up to admiration the patterns

tested in tradition, he little suspects how much he is himself affected

by unavowed impulses--timidity which makes him cling to authority,

conceit which moves him to be himself the authority who speaks in the

name of authority, possessive impulse which fears to risk acquisition in

new adventures. Love of certainty is a demand for guarantees in advance

of action. Ignoring the fact that truth can be bought only by the

adventure of experiment, dogmatism turns truth into an insurance

company. Fixed ends upon one side and fixed "principles"--that is

authoritative rules--on the other, are props for a feeling of safety,

the refuge of the timid and the means by which the bold prey upon the

timid.

VII

Intelligence is concerned with foreseeing the future so that action may

have order and direction. It is also concerned with principles and

criteria of judgment. The diffused or wide applicability of habits is

reflected in the _general_ character of principles: a principle is

intellectually what a habit is for direct action. As habits set in

grooves dominate activity and swerve it from conditions instead of

increasing its adaptability, so principles treated as fixed rules

instead of as helpful methods take men away from experience. The more

complicated the situation, and the less we really know about it, the

more insistent is the orthodox type of moral theory upon the prior

existence of some fixed and universal principle or law which is to be

directly applied and followed. Ready-made rules available at a moment's

notice for settling any kind of moral difficulty and resolving every

species of moral doubt have been the chief object of the ambition of

moralists. In the much less complicated and less changing matters of

bodily health such pretensions are known as quackery. But in morals a

hankering for certainty, born of timidity and nourished by love of

authoritative prestige, has led to the idea that absence of immutably

fixed and universally applicable ready-made principles is equivalent to

moral chaos.

In fact, situations into which change and the unexpected enter are a

challenge to intelligence to create new principles. Morals must be a

growing science if it is to be a science at all, not merely because all

truth has not yet been appropriated by the mind of man, but because life

is a moving affair in which old moral truth ceases to apply. Principles

are methods of inquiry and forecast which require verification by the

event; and the time honored effort to assimilate morals to mathematics

is only a way of bolstering up an old dogmatic authority, or putting a

new one upon the throne of the old. But the experimental character of

moral judgments does not mean complete uncertainty and fluidity.

Principles exist as hypotheses with which to experiment. Human history

is long. There is a long record of past experimentation in conduct, and

there are cumulative verifications which give many principles a well

earned prestige. Lightly to disregard them is the height of foolishness.

But social situations alter; and it is also foolish not to observe how

old principles actually work under new conditions, and not to modify

them so that they will be more effectual instruments in judging new

cases. Many men are now aware of the harm done in legal matters by

assuming the antecedent existence of fixed principles under which every

new case may be brought. They recognize that this assumption merely puts

an artificial premium on ideas developed under bygone conditions, and

that their perpetuation in the present works inequity. Yet the choice is

not between throwing away rules previously developed and sticking

obstinately by them. The intelligent alternative is to revise, adapt,

expand and alter them. The problem is one of continuous, vital

readaptation.

The popular objection to casuistry is similar to the popular objection

to the maxim that the end justifies the means. It is creditable to

practical moral sense, but not to popular logical consistency. For

recourse to casuistry is the only conclusion which can be drawn from

belief in fixed universal principles, just as the Jesuit maxim is the

only conclusion proper to be drawn from belief in fixed ends. Every act,

every deed is individual. What is the sense in having fixed general

rules, commandments, laws, unless they are such as to confer upon

individual cases of action (where alone instruction is finally needed)

something of their own infallible certainty? Casuistry, so-called, is

simply the systematic effort to secure for particular instances of

conduct the advantage of general rules which are asserted and believed

in. By those who accept the notion of immutable regulating principles,

casuistry ought to be lauded for sincerity and helpfulness, not

dispraised as it usually is. Or else men ought to carry back their

aversion to manipulation of particular cases, until they will fit into

the procrustean beds of fixed rules, to the point where it is clear that

all principles are empirical generalizations from the ways in which

previous judgments of conduct have practically worked out. When this

fact is apparent, these generalizations will be seen to be not fixed

rules for deciding doubtful cases, but instrumentalities for their

investigation, methods by which the net value of past experience is

rendered available for present scrutiny of new perplexities. Then it

will also follow that they are hypotheses to be tested and revised by

their further working.[8]

[8] Among contemporary moralists, Mr. G. E. Moore may be

cited as almost alone in having the courage of the

convictions shared by many. He insists that it is the true

business of moral theory to enable men to arrive at precise

and sure judgments in concrete cases of moral perplexity.

Every such statement meets with prompt objection. We are told that in

deliberation rival goods present themselves. We are faced by competing

desires and ends which are incompatible with one another. They are all

attractive, seductive. How then shall we choose among them? We can

choose rationally among values, the argument continues, only if we have

some fixed measure of values, just as we decide the respective lengths

of physical things by recourse to the fixed foot-rule. One might reply

that after all there is no fixed foot-rule, no fixed foot "in itself"

and that the standard length or weight of measure is only another

special portion of matter, subject to change from heat, moisture and

gravitational position, defined only by conditions, relations. One might

reply that the foot-rule is a tool which has been worked out in actual

prior comparisons of concrete things for use in facilitating further

comparisons. But we content ourselves with remarking that we find in

this conception of a fixed antecedent standard another manifestation of

the desire to escape the strain of the actual moral situation, its

genuine uncertainty of possibilities and consequences. We are confronted

with another case of the all too human love of certainty, a case of the

wish for an intellectual patent issued by authority. The issue after all

is one of fact. The critic is not entitled to enforce against the facts

his private wish for a ready-made standard which will relieve him from

the burden of examination, observation and continuing generalization and

test.

The worth of this private wish is moreover open to question in the light

of the history of the development of natural science. There was a time

when in astronomy, chemistry and biology men claimed that judgment of

individual phenomena was possible only because the mind was already in

possession of fixed truths, universal principles, pre-ordained axioms.

Only by their means could contingent, varying particular events be truly

known. There was, it was argued, no way to judge the truth of any

particular statement about a particular plant, heavenly body, or case of

combustion unless there was a general truth already in hand with which

to compare a particular empirical occurrence. The contention was

successful, that is for a long time it maintained its hold upon men's

minds. But its effect was merely to encourage intellectual laziness,

reliance upon authority and blind acceptance of conceptions that had

somehow become traditional. The actual advance of science did not begin

till men broke away from this method. When men insisted upon judging

astronomical phenomena by bringing them directly under established

truths, those of geometry, they had no astronomy, but only a private

esthetic construction. Astronomy began when men trusted themselves to

embarking upon the uncertain sea of events and were willing to be

instructed by changes in the concrete. Then antecedent principles were

tentatively employed as methods for conducting observations and

experiments, and for organizing special facts: as hypotheses.

In morals now, as in physical science then, the work of intelligence in

reaching such relative certainty, or tested probability, as is open to

man is retarded by the false notion of fixed antecedent truths.

Prejudice is confirmed. Rules formed accidentally or under the pressure

of conditions long past, are protected from criticism and thus

perpetuated. Every group and person vested with authority strengthens

possessed power by harping upon the sacredness of immutable principle.

Moral facts, that is the concrete careers of special courses of action,

are not studied. There is no counterpart to clinical medicine. Rigid

classifications forced upon facts are relied upon. And all is done, as

it used to be done in natural science, in praise of Reason and in fear

of the variety and fluctuation of actual happenings.

The hypothesis that each moral situation is unique and that consequently

general moral principles are instrumental to developing the

individualized meaning of situations is declared to be anarchic. It is

said to be ethical atomism, pulverizing the order and dignity of morals.

The question, again is not what our inherited habits lead us to prefer,

but where the facts take us. But in this instance the facts do not take

us into atomism and anarchy. These things are specters seen by the

critic when he is suddenly confused by the loss of customary spectacles.

He takes his own confusion due to loss of artificial aids for an

objective situation. _Because_ situations in which deliberation is

evoked are new, and therefore unique, general principles are needed.

Only an uncritical vagueness will assume that the sole alternative to

fixed generality is absence of continuity. Rigid habits insist upon

duplication, repetition, recurrence; in their case there is accordingly

fixed principles. Only there is no _principle_ at all, that is, no

conscious intellectual rule, for thought is not needed. But all habit

has _continuity_, and while a flexible habit does not secure in its

operation bare recurrence nor absolute assurance neither does it plunge

us into the hopeless confusion of the absolutely different. To insist

upon change and the new is to insist upon alteration _of_ the old. In

denying that the meaning of any genuine case of deliberation can be

exhausted by treating it as a mere case of an established classification

the value of classification is not denied. It is shown where its value

lies, namely, in directing attention to resemblances and differences in

the new case, in economizing effort in foresight. To call a

generalization a tool is not to say it is useless; the contrary is

patently the case. A tool is something to use. Hence it is also

something to be improved by noting how it works. The need of such noting

and improving is indispensable if, as is the case with moral principles,

the tool has to be used in unwonted circumstances. Continuity of growth

not atomism is thus the alternative to fixity of principles and aims.

This is no Bergsonian plea for dividing the universe into two portions,

one all of fixed, recurrent habits, and the other all spontaneity of

flux. Only in such a universe would reason in morals have to take its

choice between absolute fixity and absolute looseness.

Nothing is more instructive about the genuine value of generalization in

conduct than the errors of Kant. He took the doctrine that the essence

of reason is complete universality (and hence necessity and

immutability), with the seriousness becoming the professor of logic.

Applying the doctrine to morality he saw that this conception severed

morals from connection with experience. Other moralists had gone that

far before his day. But none of them had done what Kant proceeded to do:

carry this separation of moral principles and ideals from experience to

its logical conclusion. He saw that to exclude from principles all

connection with empirical details meant to exclude all reference of any

kind to consequences. He then saw with a clearness which does his logic

credit that with such exclusion, reason becomes entirely empty: nothing

is left except the universality of the universal. He was then confronted

by the seemingly insoluble problem of getting moral instruction

regarding special cases out of a principle that having forsworn

intercourse with experience was barren and empty. His ingenious method

was as follows. Formal universality means at least logical identity; it

means self-consistency or absence of contradiction. Hence follows the

method by which a would-be truly moral agent will proceed in judging the

rightness of any proposed act. He will ask: Can its motive be made

universal for all cases? How would one like it if by one's act one's

motive in that act were to be erected into a universal law of actual

nature? Would one then be willing to make the same choice?

Surely a man would hesitate to steal if by his choice to make stealing

the motive of his act he were also to erect it into such a fixed law of

nature that henceforth he and everybody else would always steal whenever

property was in question. No stealing without property, and with

universal stealing also no property; a clear self-contradiction. Looked

at in the light of reason every mean, insincere, inconsiderate motive of

action shrivels into a private exception which a person wants to take

advantage of in his own favor, and which he would be horrified to have

others act upon. It violates the great principle of logic that A is A.

Kindly, decent acts, on the contrary, extend and multiply themselves in

a continuing harmony.

This treatment by Kant evinces deep insight into the office of

intelligence and principle in conduct. But it involves flat

contradiction of Kant's own original intention to exclude consideration

of concrete consequences. It turns out to be a method of recommending a

broad impartial view of consequences. Our forecast of consequences is

always subject, as we have noted, to the bias of impulse and habit. We

see what we want to see, we obscure what is unfavorable to a cherished,

probably unavowed, wish. We dwell upon favoring circumstances till they

become weighted with reinforcing considerations. We don't give opposing

consequences half a chance to develop in thought. Deliberation needs

every possible help it can get against the twisting, exaggerating and

slighting tendency of passion and habit. To form the habit of asking

how we should be willing to be treated in a similar case--which is what

Kant's maxim amounts to--is to gain an ally for impartial and sincere

deliberation and judgment. It is a safeguard against our tendency to

regard our own case as exceptional in comparison with the case of

others. "Just this once," a plea for isolation; secrecy--a plea for

non-inspection, are forces which operate in every passionate desire.

Demand for consistency, for "universality," far from implying a

rejection of all consequences, is a demand to survey consequences

broadly, to link effect to effect in a chain of continuity. Whatever

force works to this end _is_ reason. For reason, let it be repeated is

an outcome, a function, not a primitive force. What we need are those

habits, dispositions which lead to impartial and consistent foresight

of consequences. Then our judgments are reasonable; we are then

reasonable creatures.

VIII

Certain critics in sympathy with at least the negative contention, the

critical side, of such a theory as has been advanced, regard it as

placing too much emphasis upon intelligence. They find it

intellectualistic, cold-blooded. They say we must change desire, love,

aspiration, admiration, and then action will be transformed. A new

affection, a changed appreciation, brings with it a revaluation of life

and insists upon its realization. A refinement of intellect at most only

figures out better ways of reaching old and accustomed ends. In fact we

are lucky if intellect does not freeze the ardor of generous desire and

paralyze creative endeavor. Intellect is critical, unproductive while

desire is generative. In its dispassionateness intellect is aloof from

humanity and its needs. It fosters detachment where sympathy is needed.

It cultivates contemplation when salvation lies in liberating desire.

Intellect is analytic, taking things to pieces; its devices are the

scalpel and test-tube. Affection is synthetic, unifying. This argument

affords an opportunity for making more explicit those respective offices

of wish and thought in forming ends which have already been touched

upon.

First we must undertake an independent analysis of desire. It is

customary to describe desires in terms of their objects, meaning by

objects the things which figure as in imagination their goals. As the

object is noble or base, so, it is thought, is desire. In any case,

emotions rise and cluster about the object. This stands out so

conspicuously in immediate experience that it monopolizes the central

position in the traditional psychological theory of desire. Barring

gross self-deception or the frustration of external circumstance, the

outcome, or end-result, of desire is regarded by this theory as similar

to the end-in-view or object consciously desired. Such, however, is not

the case, as readily appears from the analysis of deliberation. In

saying that the actual outcome of desire is different in kind from the

object upon which desire consciously fastens, I do not mean to repeat

the old complaint about the fallibility and feebleness of mortals in

virtue of which man's hopes are frustrated and twisted in realization.

The difference is one of diverse dimensions, not of degree or amount.

The object desired and the attainment of desire are no more alike than a

signboard on the road is like the garage to which it points and which it

recommends to the traveler. Desire is the forward urge of living

creatures. When the push and drive of life meets no obstacle, there is

nothing which we call desire. There is just life-activity. But

obstructions present themselves, and activity is dispersed and divided.

Desire is the outcome. It is activity surging forward to break through

what dams it up. The "object" which then presents itself in thought as

the goal of desire is the object of the environment _which, if it were

present_, would secure a re-unification of activity and the restoration

of its ongoing unity. The end-in-view of desire is that object which

were it present would link into an organized whole activities which are

now partial and competing. It is no more like the actual end of desire,

or the resulting state attained, than the coupling of cars which have

been separated is like an ongoing single train. Yet the train cannot go

on without the coupling.

Such statements may seem contrary to common sense. The pertinency of the

illustration used will be denied. No man desires the signboard which he

sees, he desires the garage, the objective, the ulterior thing. But does

he? Or is the garage simply a means by which a divided body of

activities is redintegrated or coordinated? Is it desired in any sense

for itself, or only because it is the means of effective adjustment of a

whole set of underlying habits? While common sense responds to the

ordinary statement of the end of desire, it also responds to a statement

that no one desires the object for its own sake, but only for what can

be got out of it. Here is just the point at which the theory that

pleasure is the real objective of desire makes its appeal. It points out

that not the physical object nor even its possession is really wanted;

that they are only means to something personal and experiential. And

hence it is argued that they are means to pleasure. The present

hypothesis offers an alternative: it says that they are means of removal

of obstructions to an ongoing, unified system of activities. It is easy

to see why an objective looms so large and why emotional surge and

stress gather about it and lift it high above the floor of

consciousness. The objective is (or is taken to be) the key to the

situation. If we can attain it, lay hold of it, the trick is turned. It

is like the piece of paper which carries the reprieve a condemned man

waits for. Issues of life hang upon it. The desired object is in no

sense the end or goal of desire, but it is the _sine qua non_ of that

end. A practical man will fix his attention upon it, and not dream about

eventualities which are only dreams if the objective is not attained,

but which will follow in their own natural course if it is reached. For

then it becomes a factor in the system of activities. Hence the truth in

the various so-called paradoxes of desire. If pleasure or perfection

were the true end of desire, it would still be true that the way to

attainment is not to think of them. For object thought of and object

achieved exist in different dimensions.

In addition to the popular notions that either the object in view or

else pleasure is the end of desire, there is a less popular theory that

quiescence is the actual outcome or true terminal of desire. The theory

finds its most complete practical statement in Buddhism. It is nearer

the psychological truth than either of the other notions. But it views

the attained outcome simply in its negative aspect. The end reached

quiets the clash and removes the discomfort attendant upon divided and

obstructed activity. The uneasiness, unrest, characteristic of desire is

put to sleep. For this reason, some persons resort to intoxicants and

anodynes. If quiescence were the end and it could be perpetuated, this

way of removing disagreeable uneasiness would be as satisfactory a way

out as the way of objective effort. But in fact desire satisfied does

not bring quiescence unqualifiedly, but that _kind_ of quiescence which

marks the recovery of unified activity: the absence of internal strife

among habits and instincts. Equilibration of activities rather than

quiescence is the actual result of satisfied desire. This names the

outcome positively, rather than comparatively and negatively.

This disparity of dimensions in desire between the object thought of and

the outcome reached is the explanation of those self-deceptions which

psycho-analysis has brought home to us so forcibly, but of which it

gives elaborately cumbrous accounts. The object thought of and the

outcome _never_ agree. There is no self-deceit in this fact. What, then,

really happens when the actual outcome of satisfied revenge figures in

thought as virtuous eagerness for justice? Or when the tickled vanity of

social admiration is masked as pure love of learning? The trouble lies

in the refusal of a person to note the quality of the outcome, not in

the unavoidable disparity of desire's object and the outcome. The honest

or integral mind attends to the result, and sees what it really is. For

no terminal condition is exclusively terminal. Since it exists in time

it has consequences as well as antecedents. In being a consummation it

is also a force having causal potentialities. It is initial as well as

terminal.

Self-deception originates in looking at an outcome in one direction

only--as a satisfaction of what has gone before, ignoring the fact that

what is attained is a state of habits which will continue in action and

which will determine future results. Outcomes of desire are also

beginnings of new acts and hence are portentous. Satisfied revenge may

_feel_ like justice vindicated; the prestige of learning may _feel_ like

an enlargement and rectification of an objective outlook. But since

different instincts and habits have entered into them, they are

actually, that is dynamically, unlike. The function of moral judgment is

to detect this unlikeness. Here, again, the belief that we can know

ourselves immediately is as disastrous to moral science as the

corresponding idea regarding knowledge of nature was to physical

science. Obnoxious "subjectivity" of moral judgment is due to the fact

that the immediate or esthetic quality swells and swells and displaces

the thought of the active potency which gives activity its moral

quality.

We are all natural Jack Horners. If the plum comes when we put in and

pull out our thumb we attribute the satisfactory result to personal

virtue. The plum is obtained, and it is not easy to distinguish

obtaining from attaining, acquisition from achieving. Jack Horner, Esq.,

put forth _some_ effort; and results and efforts are always more or less

incommensurate. For the result is always dependent to some extent upon

the favor or disfavor of circumstance. Why then should not the

satisfactory plum shed its halo retrospectively upon what precedes and

be taken as a sign of virtue? In this way heroes and leaders are

constructed. Such is the worship of success. And the evil of

success-worship is precisely the evil with which we have been dealing.

"Success" is never merely final or terminal. Something else succeeds it,

and its successors are influenced by its nature, that is by the

persisting habits and impulses that enter into it. The world does not

stop when the successful person pulls out his plum; nor does he stop,

and the kind of success he obtains, and his attitude toward it, is a

factor in what comes afterwards. By a strange turn of the wheel, the

success of the ultra-practical man is psychologically like the refined

enjoyment of the ultra-esthetic person. Both ignore the eventualities

with which every state of experience is charged. There is no reason for

not enjoying the present, but there is every reason for examination of

the objective factors of _what_ is enjoyed before we translate enjoyment

into a belief in excellence. There is every reason in other words for

cultivating another enjoyment, that of the habit of examining the

productive potentialities of the objects enjoyed.

Analysis of desire thus reveals the falsity of theories which magnify it

at the expense of intelligence. Impulse is primary and intelligence is

secondary and in some sense derivative. There should be no blinking of

this fact. But recognition of it as a fact exalts intelligence. For

thought is not the slave of impulse to do its bidding. Impulse does not

know what it is after; it cannot give orders, not even if it wants to.

It rushes blindly into any opening it chances to find. Anything that

expends it, satisfies it. One outlet is like another to it. It is

indiscriminate. Its vagaries and excesses are the stock theme of

classical moralists; and while they point the wrong moral in urging the

abdication of impulse in favor of reason, their characterization of

impulse is not wholly wrong. What intelligence has to do in the service

of impulse is to act not as its obedient servant but as its clarifier

and liberator. And this can be accomplished only by a study of the

conditions and causes, the workings and consequences of the greatest

possible variety of desires and combinations of desire. Intelligence

converts desire into plans, systematic plans based on assembling facts,

reporting events as they happen, keeping tab on them and analyzing them.

Nothing is so easy to fool as impulse and no one is deceived so readily

as a person under strong emotion. Hence the idealism of man is easily

brought to naught. Generous impulses are aroused; there is a vague

anticipation, a burning hope, of a marvelous future. Old things are to

pass speedily away and a new heavens and earth are to come into

existence. But impulse burns itself up. Emotion cannot be kept at its

full tide. Obstacles are encountered upon which action dashes itself

into ineffectual spray. Or if it achieves, by luck, a transitory

success, it is intoxicated, and plumes itself on victory while it is on

the road to sudden defeat. Meantime, other men, not carried away by

impulse, use established habits and a shrewd cold intellect that

manipulates them. The outcome is the victory of baser desire directed by

insight and cunning over generous desire which does not know its way.

The realistic man of the world has evolved a regular technique for

dealing with idealistic outbursts that threaten his supremacy. His aims

are low, but he knows the means by which they are to be executed. His

knowledge of conditions is narrow but it is effective within its

confines. His foresight is limited to results that concern personal

success, but is sharp, clearcut. He has no great difficulty in drafting

the idealistic desire of others with its vague enthusiasms and its

cloudy perceptions into canals where it will serve his own purposes. The

energies excited by emotional idealism run into the materialistic

reservoirs provided by the contriving thought of those who have not

surrendered their minds to their sentiment.

The glorification of affection and aspiration at the expense of thought

is a survival of romantic optimism. It assumes a pre-established harmony

between natural impulse and natural objects. Only such a harmony

justifies the belief that generous feeling will find its way illuminated

by the sheer nobility of its own quality. Persons of a literary turn of

mind are as subject to this fallacy as intellectual specialists are apt

to the contrary fallacy that theorizing apart from force of impulse and

habit will get affairs forward. They tend to fancy that things are as

pliant to imagination as are words, that an emotion can compose affairs

as if they were materials for a lyric poem. But if the objects of the

environment were only as plastic as the materials of poetic art, men

would never have been obliged to have recourse to creation in the medium

of words. We idealize in fancy because our idealizations in fact are

balked. And while the latter must start with imaginative idealizations

instigated by release of generous impulse, they can be carried through

only when the hard labor of observation, memory and foresight weds the

vision of imagination to the organized efficiencies of habit.

Sometimes desire means not bare impulse but impulse which has sense of

an objective. In this case desire and thought cannot be opposed, for

desire includes thought within itself. The question is now how far the

work of thought has been done, how adequate is its perception of its

directing object. For the moving force may be a shadowy presentiment

constructed by wishful hope rather than by study of conditions; it may

be an emotional indulgence rather than a solid plan built upon the rocks

of actuality discovered by accurate inquiries. There is no thought

without the impeding of impulse. But the obstruction may merely

intensify its blind surge forward; or it may divert the force of forward

impulse into observation of existing conditions and forecast of their

future consequences. This long way around is the short way home for

desire.

No issue of morals is more far-reaching than the one herewith sketched.

Historically speaking, there is point in the attacks of those who speak

slightingly of science and intellect, and who would limit their moral

significance to supplying incidental help to execution of purposes born

of affection. Thought too often is specialized in a remote and separate

pursuit, or employed in a hard way to contrive the instrumentalities of

"success." Intellect is too often made a tool for a systematized apology

for things as "they are," that is for customs that benefit the class in

power, or else a road to an interesting occupation which accumulates

facts and ideas as other men gather dollars, while priding itself on its

ideal quality. No wonder that at times catastrophes that affect men in

common are welcomed. For the moment they turn science away from its

abstract technicalities into a servant of some human aspiration; the

hard, chilly calculations of intellect are swept away by floods of

sympathy and common loyalties.

But, alas, emotion without thought is unstable. It rises like the tide

and subsides like the tide irrespective of what it has accomplished. It

is easily diverted into any side channel dug by old habits or provided

by cool cunning, or it disperses itself aimlessly. Then comes the

reaction of disillusionment, and men turn all the more fiercely to the

pursuit of narrow ends where they are habituated to use observation and

planning and where they have acquired some control of conditions. The

separation of warm emotion and cool intelligence is the great moral

tragedy. This division is perpetuated by those who deprecate science and

foresight in behalf of affection as it is by those who in the name of an

idol labeled reason would quench passion. The intellect is always

inspired by some impulse. Even the most case-hardened scientific

specialist, the most abstract philosopher, is moved by some passion. But

an actuating impulse easily hardens into isolated habit. It is unavowed

and disconnected. The remedy is not lapse of thought, but its quickening

and extension to contemplate the continuities of existence, and restore

the connection of the isolated desire to the companionship of its

fellows. The glorification of "will" apart from thought turns out either

a commitment to blind action which serves the purpose of those who guide

their deeds by narrow plans, or else a sentimental, romantic faith in

the harmonies of nature leading straight to disaster.

In words at least, the association of idealism with emotion and impulse

has been repeatedly implied in the foregoing. The connection is more

than verbal. Every end that man holds up, every project he entertains is

ideal. It marks something wanted, rather than something existing. It is

wanted because existence as it _now_ is does not furnish it. It carries

with itself, then, a sense of contrast to the achieved, to the existent.

It outruns the seen and touched. It is the work of faith and hope even

when it is the plan of the most hard-headed "practical" man. But though

ideal in this sense it is not _an_ ideal. Common sense revolts at

calling every project, every design, every contrivance of cunning,

ideal, because common sense includes above all in its conception of the

ideal the _quality_ of the plan proposed.

Idealistic revolt is blind and like every blind reaction sweeps us away.

The quality of the ideal is exalted till it is something beyond all

possibility of definite plan and execution. Its sublimity renders it

inaccessibly remote. An ideal becomes a synonym for whatever is

inspiring--and impossible. Then, since intelligence cannot be wholly

suppressed, the ideal is hardened by thought into some high, far-away

object. It is so elevated and so distant that it does not belong to this

world or to experience. It is in technical language, transcendental; in

common speech, supernatural, of heaven not of earth. The ideal is then a

goal of final exhaustive, comprehensive perfection which can be defined

only by complete contrast with the actual. Although impossible of

realization and of conception, it is still regarded as the source of all

generous discontent with actualities and of all inspiration to progress.

This notion of the nature and office of ideals combines in one

contradictory whole all that is vicious in the separation of desire and

thought. It strives while retaining the vagueness of emotion to simulate

the objective definiteness of thought. It follows the natural course of

intelligence in demanding an object which will unify and fulfil desire,

and then cancels the work of thought by treating the object as ineffable

and unrelated to present action and experience. It converts the surge of

present impulse into a future end only to swamp the endeavor to clarify

this end in a gush of unconsidered feeling. It is supposed that the

thought of the ideal is necessary to arouse dissatisfaction with the

present and to arouse effort to change it. But in reality the ideal is

itself the product of discontent with conditions. Instead however of

serving to organize and direct effort, it operates as a compensatory

dream. It becomes another ready-made world. Instead of promoting effort

at concrete transformations of what exists, it constitutes another kind

of existence already somewhere in being. It is a refuge, an asylum from

effort. Thus the energy that might be spent in transforming present ills

goes into oscillating flights into a far away perfect world and the

tedium of enforced returns into the necessities of the present evil

world.

We can recover the genuine import of ideals and idealism only by

disentangling this unreal mixture of thought and emotion. The action of

deliberation, as we have seen, consists in selecting some foreseen

consequence to serve as a stimulus to present action. It brings future

possibilities into the present scene and thereby frees and expands

present tendencies. But the selected consequence is set in an indefinite

context of other consequences just as real as it is, and many of them

much more certain in fact. The "ends" that are foreseen and utilized

mark out a little island in an infinite sea. This limitation would be

fatal were the proper function of ends anything else than to liberate

and guide present action out of its perplexities and confusions. But

this service constitutes the sole meaning of aims and purposes. Hence

their slight extent in comparison with ignored and unforeseen

consequences is of no import in itself. The "ideal" as it stands in

popular thought, the notion of a complete and exhaustive realization, is

remote from the true functions of ends, and would only embarrass us if

it could be embraced in thought instead of being, as it is, a comment by

the emotions.

For the sense of an indefinite context of consequences from among which

the aim is selected enters into the _present_ meaning of activity. The

"end" is the figured pattern at the center of the field through which

runs the axis of conduct. About this central figuration extends

infinitely a supporting background in a vague whole, undefined and

undiscriminated. At most intelligence but throws a spotlight on that

little part of the whole which marks out the axis of movement. Even if

the light is flickering and the illuminated portion stands forth only

dimly from the shadowy background, it suffices if we are shown the way

to move. To the rest of the consequences, collateral and remote,

corresponds a background of feeling, of diffused emotion. This forms the

stuff of the ideal.

From the standpoint of its _definite_ aim any act is petty in comparison

with the totality of natural events. What is accomplished directly as

the outcome of a turn which our action gives the course of events is

infinitesimal in comparison with their total sweep. Only an illusion of

conceit persuades us that cosmic difference hangs upon even our wisest

and most strenuous effort. Yet discontent with this limitation is as

unreasonable as relying upon an illusion of external importance to keep

ourselves going. In a genuine sense every act is already possessed of

infinite import. The little part of the scheme of affairs which is

modifiable by our efforts is continuous with the rest of the world. The

boundaries of our garden plot join it to the world of our neighbors and

our neighbors' neighbors. That small effort which we can put forth is in

turn connected with an infinity of events that sustain and support it.

The consciousness of this encompassing infinity of connections is ideal.

When a sense of the infinite reach of an act physically occurring in a

small point of space and occupying a petty instant of times comes home

to us, the _meaning_ of a present act is seen to be vast, immeasurable,

unthinkable. This ideal is not a goal to be attained. It is a

significance to be felt, appreciated. Though consciousness of it cannot

become intellectualized (identified in objects of a distinct character)

yet emotional appreciation of it is won only by those willing to think.

It is the office of art and religion to evoke such appreciations and

intimations; to enhance and steady them till they are wrought into the

texture of our lives. Some philosophers define religious consciousness

as beginning where moral and intellectual consciousness leave off. In

the sense that definite purposes and methods shade off of necessity into

a vast whole which is incapable of objective presentation this view is

correct. But they have falsified the conception by treating the

religious consciousness as something that comes _after_ an experience in

which striving, resolution and foresight are found. To them morality and

science are a striving; when striving ceases a moral holiday begins, an

excursion beyond the utmost flight of legitimate thought and endeavor.

But there is a point in _every_ intelligent activity where effort

ceases; where thought and doing fall back upon a course of events which

effort and reflection cannot touch. There is a point _in_ deliberate

action where definite thought fades into the ineffable and

undefinable--into emotion. If the sense of this effortless and

unfathomable whole comes only in alternation with the sense of strain in

action and labor in thought, then we spend our lives in oscillating

between what is cramped and enforced and a brief transitory escape. The

function of religion is then caricatured rather than realized. Morals,

like war, is thought of as hell, and religion, like peace, as a respite.

The religious experience is a reality in so far as in the midst of

effort to foresee and regulate future objects we are sustained and

expanded in feebleness and failure by the sense of an enveloping whole.

Peace in action not after it is the contribution of the ideal to

conduct.

IX

Over and over again, one point has recurred for criticism;--the

subordination of activity to a result outside itself. Whether that goal

be thought of as pleasure, as virtue, as perfection, as final enjoyment

of salvation, is secondary to the fact that the moralists who have

asserted fixed ends have in all their differences from one another

agreed in the basic idea that present activity is but a means. We have

insisted that happiness, reasonableness, virtue, perfecting, are on the

contrary parts of the present significance of present action. Memory of

the past, observation of the present, foresight of the future are

indispensable. But they are indispensable _to_ a present liberation, an

enriching growth of action. Happiness is fundamental in morals only

because happiness is not something to be sought for, but is something

now attained, even in the midst of pain and trouble, whenever

recognition of our ties with nature and with fellow-men releases and

informs our action. Reasonableness is a necessity because it is the

perception of the continuities that take action out of its immediateness

and isolation into connection with the past and future.

Perhaps the criticism and insistence have been too incessant. They may

have provoked the reader to reaction. He may readily concede that

orthodox theories have been onesided in sacrificing the present to

future good, making of the present but an onerous obligation or a

sacrifice endured for future gain. But why, he may protest, go to an

opposite extreme and make the future but a means to the significance of

the present? Why should the power of foresight and effort to shape the

future, to regulate what is to happen, be slighted? Is not the effect of

such a doctrine to weaken putting forth of endeavor in order to make the

future better than the present? Control of the future may be limited in

extent, but it is correspondingly precious; we should jealously cherish

whatever encourages and sustains effort to that end. To make little of

this possibility, in effect, it will be argued, is to decrease the care

and endeavor upon which progress depends.

Control of the future is indeed precious in exact proportion to its

difficulty, its moderate degree of attainability. Anything that actually

tends to make that control less than it now is would be a movement

backward into sloth and triviality. But there is a difference between

future improvement as a result and as a direct aim. To make it an aim is

to throw away the surest means of attaining it, namely attention to the

full use of present resources in the present situation. Forecast of

future conditions, scientific study of past and present in order that

the forecast may be intelligent, are indeed necessities. Concentration

of intellectual concern upon the future, solicitude for scope and

precision of estimate characteristic of any well conducted affair,

naturally give the impression that their animating purpose is control of

the future. But thought about future happenings is the only way we can

judge the present; it is the only way to appraise its significance.

Without such projection, there can be no projects, no plans for

administering present energies, overcoming present obstacles.

Deliberately to subordinate the present to the future is to subject the

comparatively secure to the precarious, exchange resources for

liabilities, surrender what is under control to what is, relatively,

incapable of control.

The _amount_ of control which will come into existence in the future is

not within control. But such an amount as turns out to be practicable

accrues only in consequence of the best possible management of present

means and obstacles. Dominating _intellectual_ pre-occupation with the

future is the way by which efficiency in dealing with the present is

attained. It is a way, not a goal. And, upon the very most hopeful

outlook, study and planning are more important in the meaning, the

enrichment of content, which they add to present activity than is the

increase of external control they effect. Nor is this doctrine

passivistic in tendency. What sense is there in increased external

control except to increase the intrinsic significance of living? The

future that is foreseen is a future that is sometime to be a present. Is

the value of _that_ present also to be postponed to a future date, and

so on indefinitely? Or, if the good we are struggling to attain in the

future is one to be actually realized when that future becomes present,

why should not the good of _this_ present be equally precious? And is

there, again, any intelligent way of modifying the future except to

attend to the full possibilities of the present? Scamping the present in

behalf of the future leads only to rendering the future less manageable.

It increases the probability of molestation by future events.

Remarks cast in this form probably seem too much like a logical

manipulation of the concepts of present and future to be convincing.

Building a house is a typical instance of an intelligent activity. It is

an activity directed by a plan, a design. The plan is itself based upon

a foresight of future uses. This foresight is in turn dependent upon an

organized survey of past experiences and of present conditions, a

recollection of former experiences of living in houses and an

acquaintance with present materials, prices, resources, etc. Now if a

legitimate case of subordination of present to regulation of the future

may anywhere be found, it is in such a case as this. For a man usually

builds a house for the sake of the comfort and security, the "control,"

thereby afforded to future living rather than just for the fun--or the

trouble--of building. If in such a case inspection shows that, after

all, intellectual concern with the past and future is for the sake of

directing present activity and giving it meaning, the conclusion may be

accepted for other cases.

Note that the present activity is the only one really under control. The

man may die before the house is built, or his financial conditions may

change, or he may need to remove to another place. If he attempts to

provide for all contingencies, he will never do anything; if he allows

his attention to be much distracted by them, he won't do well his

present planning and execution. The more he considers the future uses to

which the house will probably be put the better he will do his present

job which is the activity of building. Control of future living, such as

it may turn out to be, is wholly dependent upon taking his present

activity, seriously and devotedly, as an end, not a means. And a man has

his hands full in doing well what now needs to be done. Until men have

formed the habit of using intelligence fully as a guide to present

action they will never find out how much control of future contingencies

is possible. As things are, men so habitually scamp present action in

behalf of future "ends" that the facts for estimating the extent of the

possibility of reduction of future contingencies have not been

disclosed. What a man _is_ doing limits both his direct control and his

responsibility. We must not confuse the act of building with the house

when built. The latter _is_ a means, not a fulfilment. But it is such

only because it enters into a new activity which is present not future.

Life is continuous. The act of building in time gives way to the acts

connected with a domicile. But everywhere the good, the fulfilment, the

meaning of activity, resides in a present made possible by judging

existing conditions in their connections.

If we seek for an illustration on a larger scale, education furnishes us

with a poignant example. As traditionally conducted, it strikingly

exhibits a subordination of the living present to a remote and

precarious future. To prepare, to get ready, is its key-note. The actual

outcome is lack of adequate preparation, of intelligent adaptation. The

professed exaltation of the future turns out in practice a blind

following of tradition, a rule of thumb muddling along from day to day;

or, as in some of the projects called industrial education, a determined

effort on the part of one class of the community to secure _its_ future

at the expense of another class. If education were conducted as a

process of fullest utilization of present resources, liberating and

guiding capacities that are now urgent, it goes without saying that the

lives of the young would be much richer in meaning than they are now. It

also follows that intelligence would be kept busy in studying all

indications of power, all obstacles and perversions, all products of the

past that throw light upon present capacity, and in forecasting the

future career of impulse and habit now active--not for the sake of

subordinating the latter but in order to treat them intelligently. As a

consequence whatever fortification and expansion of the future that is

possible will be achieved--as it is now dismally unattained.

A more complicated instance is found in the dominant quality of our

industrial activity. It may be dogmatically declared that the roots of

its evils are found in the separation of production from

consumption--that is, actual consummation, fulfilment. A normal case of

their relationship is found in the taking of food. Food is consumed and

vigor is produced. The difference between the two is one of directions

or dimensions distinguished by intellect. In reality there is simply

conversion of energy from one form to another wherein it is more

available--of greater significance. The activity of the artist, the

sportsman, the scientific inquirer exemplifies the same balance.

Activity should be productive. This is to say it should have a bearing

on the future, should effect control of it. But so far as a productive

action is intrinsically creative, it has its own intrinsic value.

Reference to future products and future enjoyments is but a way of

enhancing perception of an immanent meaning. A skilled artisan who

enjoys his work is aware that what he is making is made for future use.

Externally his action is one technically labeled "production." It seems

to illustrate the subjection of present activity to remote ends. But

actually, morally, psychologically, the sense of the utility of the

article produced is a factor in the present significance of action due

to the present utilization of abilities, giving play to taste and skill,

accomplishing something now. The moment production is severed from

immediate satisfaction, it becomes "labor," drudgery, a task reluctantly

performed.

Yet the whole tendency of modern economic life has been to assume that

consumption will take care of itself provided only production is grossly

and intensely attended to. Making things is frantically accelerated; and

every mechanical device used to swell the senseless bulk. As a result

most workers find no replenishment, no renewal and growth of mind, no

fulfilment in work. They labor to get mere means of later satisfaction.

This when procured is isolated in turn from production and is reduced to

a barren physical affair or a sensuous compensation for normal goods

denied. Meantime the fatuity of severing production from consumption,

from present enriching of life, is made evident by economic crises, by

periods of unemployment alternating with periods of exercise, work or

"over-production." Production apart from fulfilment becomes purely a

matter of quantity; for distinction, quality, is a matter of present

meaning. Esthetic elements being excluded, the mechanical reign.

Production lacks criteria; one thing is better than another if it can be

made faster or in greater mass. Leisure is not the nourishment of mind

in work, nor a recreation; it is a feverish hurry for diversion,

excitement, display, otherwise there is no leisure except a sodden

torpor. Fatigue due for some to monotony and for others to overstrain in

maintaining the pace is inevitable. Socially, the separation of

production and consumption, means and ends, is the root of the most

profound division of classes. Those who fix the "ends" for production

are in control, those who engage in isolated productive activity are the

subject-class. But if the latter are oppressed the former are not truly

free. Their consumptions are accidental ostentation and extravagance,

not a normal consummation or fulfilment of activity. The remainder of

their lives is spent in enslavement to keeping the machinery going at an

increasingly rapid rate.

Meantime class struggle grows between those whose productive labor is

enforced by necessity and those who are privileged consumers. And the

exaggeration of production due to its isolation from ignored consumption

so hypnotizes attention that even would-be reformers, like Marxian

socialists, assert that the entire social problem focuses at the point

of production. Since this separation of means from ends signifies an

erection of means into ends, it is no wonder that a "materialistic

conception of history" emerges. It is not an invention of Marx; it is a

record of fact so far as the separation in question obtains. For

practicable idealism is found only in a fulfilment, a consumption which

is a replenishing, growth, renewal of mind and body. Harmony of social

interests is found in the wide-spread sharing of activities significant

in themselves, that is to say, at the point of _consumption_.[9] But the

forcing of production apart from consumption leads to the monstrous

belief that class-struggle civil war is a means of social progress,

instead of a register of the barriers to its attainment. Yet here too

the Marxian reads aright the character of most current economic

activity.

[9] Acknowledgment is due "The Social Interpretation of

History" by Maurice Williams.

The history of economic activity thus exemplifies the moral consequences

of the separation of present activity and future "ends" from each other.

It also embodies the difficulty of the problem--the tax placed by it

upon thought and good will. For the professed idealist and the

hard-headed materialist or "practical" man, have conspired together to

sustain this situation. The "idealist" sets up as the ideal not fullness

of meaning of the present but a remote goal. Hence the present is

evacuated of meaning. It is reduced to being a mere external instrument,

an evil necessity due to the distance between us and significant valid

satisfaction. Appreciation, joy, peace in present activity are suspect.

They are regarded as diversions, temptations, unworthy relaxations. Then

since human nature _must_ have present realization, a sentimental,

romantic enjoyment of the ideal becomes a substitute for intelligent and

rewarding activity. The utopia cannot be realized in fact but it may be

appropriated in fantasy and serve as an anodyne to blunt the sense of a

misery which after all endures. Some private key to a present entering

upon remote and superior bliss is sought, just as the evangelical enjoys

a complacent and superior sense of a salvation unobtained by fellow

mortals. Thus the normal demand for realization, for satisfaction in the

present, is abnormally met.

Meantime the practical man wants something definite, tangible and

presumably obtainable for which to work. He is looking after "a good

thing" as the average man is looking after a "good time," that natural

caricature of an intrinsically significant activity. Yet his activity is

impractical. He is looking for satisfaction somewhere else than where it

can be found. In his utopian search for a future good he neglects the

only place where good can be found. He empties present activity of

meaning by making it a mere instrumentality. When the future arrives it

is only after all another despised present. By habit as well as by

definition it is still a means to something which has yet to come. Again

human nature must have its claims satisfied, and sensuality is the

inevitable recourse. Usually a compromise is worked out, by which a man

for his working-hours accepts the philosophy of activity for some future

result, while at odd leisure times he enters by conventionally

recognized channels upon an enjoyment of "spiritual" blessings and

"ideal" refinements. The problem of serving God and Mammon is thus

solved. The situation exemplifies the concrete meaning of the separation

of means from ends which is the intellectual reflex of the divorce of

theory and practice, intelligence and habit, foresight and present

impulse. Moralists have spent time and energy in showing what happens

when appetite, impulse, is indulged without reference to consequences

and reason. But they have mostly ignored the counterpart evils of an

intelligence that conceives ideals and goods which do not enter into

present impulse and habit. The life of reason has been specialized,

romanticized, or made a heavy burden. This situation embodies the import

of the problem of actualizing the place of intelligence in conduct.