Our whole account of the place of intelligence in conduct is exposed

however to the charge of being itself romantic, a compensatory

idealization. The history of mind is a record of intellect which

registers, with more or less inaccuracy, what has happened after it has

happened. The crisis in which the intervention of foreseeing and

directing mind is needed passes unnoted, with attention directed toward

incidentals and irrelevancies. The work of intellect is _post mortem_.

The rise of social science, it will be pointed out, has increased the

amount of registering that occurs. Social post mortems occur much more

frequently than they used to. But one of the things which the unbiased

mind will register is the impotency of discussion, analysis and

reporting in modifying the course of events. The latter goes its way

unheeding. The reply that this condition of matters shows not the

impotency of intelligence but that what passes for science is not

science is too easy a retort to be satisfactory. We must have recourse

to some concrete facts or surrender our doctrine just at the moment when

we have formulated it.

Technical affairs give evidence that the work of inquiry, reporting

and analysis is not always ineffectual. The development of a chain

of "nation-wide" tobacco shops, of a well managed national telephone

system, of the extension of the service of an electric-light plant

testify to the fact that study, reflection and the formation of plans do

in some instances determine a course of events. The effect is seen in

both engineering management and in national commercial expansion. Such

potency however, it must be admitted, is limited to just those matters

that are called technical in contrast with the larger affairs of

humanity. But if we seek, as we should, for a definition of "technical,"

we can hardly find any save one that goes in a circle: Affairs are

technical in which observation, analysis and intellectual organization

are determining factors. Is the conclusion to be drawn a conviction that

our wider social interests are so different from those in which

intelligence is a directing factor that in the former science must

always remain a belated visitor coming upon the scene after matters are

settled? No, the logical conclusion is that as yet we have no technique

in important economic, political and international affairs. Complexity

of conditions render the difficulties in the way of the development of a

technique enormous. It is imaginable they will never be overcome. But

our choice is between the development of a technique by which

intelligence will become an intervening partner and a continuation of a

regime of accident, waste and distress.

PART FOUR

CONCLUSION

Conduct when distributed under heads like habit, impulse and

intelligence gets artificially shredded. In discussing each of these

topics we have run into the others. We conclude, then, with an attempt

to gather together some outstanding considerations about conduct as a

whole.

I

The foremost conclusion is that morals has to do with all activity into

which alternative possibilities enter. For wherever they enter a

difference between better and worse arises. Reflection upon action means

uncertainty and consequent need of decision as to which course is

better. The better is the good; the best is not better than the good but

is simply the discovered good. Comparative and superlative degrees are

only paths to the positive degree of action. The worse or evil is a

rejected good. In deliberation and before choice no evil presents itself

as evil. Until it is rejected, it is a competing good. After rejection,

it figures not as a lesser good, but as the bad of that situation.

Actually then only deliberate action, conduct into which reflective

choice enters, is distinctively moral, for only then does there enter

the question of better and worse. Yet it is a perilous error to draw a

hard and fast line between action into which deliberation and choice

enter and activity due to impulse and matter-of-fact habit. One of the

consequences of action is to involve us in predicaments where we have to

reflect upon things formerly done as matter of course. One of the chief

problems of our dealings with others is to induce them to reflect upon

affairs which they usually perform from unreflective habit. On the other

hand, every reflective choice tends to relegate some conscious issue

into a deed or habit henceforth taken for granted and not thought upon.

Potentially therefore every and any act is within the scope of morals,

being a candidate for possible judgment with respect to its

better-or-worse quality. It thus becomes one of the most perplexing

problems of reflection to discover just how far to carry it, what to

bring under examination and what to leave to unscrutinized habit.

Because there is no final recipe by which to decide this question all

moral judgment is experimental and subject to revision by its issue.

The recognition that conduct covers every act that is judged with

reference to better and worse and that the need of this judgment is

potentially coextensive with all portions of conduct, saves us from the

mistake which makes morality a separate department of life. Potentially

conduct is one hundred per cent of our acts. Hence we must decline to

admit theories which identify morals with the purification of motives,

edifying character, pursuing remote and elusive perfection, obeying

supernatural command, acknowledging the authority of duty. Such notions

have a dual bad effect. First they get in the way of observation of

conditions and consequences. They divert thought into side issues.

Secondly, while they confer a morbid exaggerated quality upon things

which are viewed under the aspect of morality, they release the larger

part of the acts of life from serious, that is moral, survey. Anxious

solicitude for the few acts which are deemed moral is accompanied by

edicts of exemption and baths of immunity for most acts. A moral

moratorium prevails for everyday affairs.

When we observe that morals is at home wherever considerations of the

worse and better are involved, we are committed to noting that morality

is a continuing process not a fixed achievement. Morals means growth of

conduct in meaning; at least it means that kind of expansion in meaning

which is consequent upon observations of the conditions and outcome of

conduct. It is all one with growing. Growing and growth are the same

fact expanded in actuality or telescoped in thought. In the largest

sense of the word, morals is education. It is learning the meaning of

what we are about and employing that meaning in action. The good,

satisfaction, "end," of growth of present action in shades and scope of

meaning is the only good within our control, and the only one,

accordingly, for which responsibility exists. The rest is luck, fortune.

And the tragedy of the moral notions most insisted upon by the morally

self-conscious is the relegation of the only good which can fully engage

thought, namely present meaning of action, to the rank of an incident of

a remote good, whether that future good be defined as pleasure, or

perfection, or salvation, or attainment of virtuous character.

"Present" activity is not a sharp narrow knife-blade in time. The

present is complex, containing within itself a multitude of habits and

impulses. It is enduring, a course of action, a process including

memory, observation and foresight, a pressure forward, a glance backward

and a look outward. It is of _moral_ moment because it marks a

transition in the direction of breadth and clarity of action or in that

of triviality and confusion. Progress is present reconstruction adding

fullness and distinctness of meaning, and retrogression is a present

slipping away of significance, determinations, grasp. Those who hold

that progress can be perceived and measured only by reference to a

remote goal, first confuse meaning with space, and then treat spatial

position as absolute, as limiting movement instead of being bounded in

and by movement. There are plenty of negative elements, due to conflict,

entanglement and obscurity, in most of the situations of life, and we do

not require a revelation of some supreme perfection to inform us whether

or no we are making headway in present rectification. We move on from

the worse and into, not just towards, the better, which is authenticated

not by comparison with the foreign but in what is indigenous. Unless

progress is a present reconstructing, it is nothing; if it cannot be

told by qualities belonging to the movement of transition it can never

be judged.

Men have constructed a strange dream-world when they have supposed that

without a fixed ideal of a remote good to inspire them, they have no

inducement to get relief from present troubles, no desires for

liberation from what oppresses and for clearing-up what confuses present

action. The world in which we could get enlightenment and instruction

about the direction in which we are moving only from a vague conception

of an unattainable perfection would be totally unlike our present world.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient it is to

stimulate us to remedial action, to endeavor in order to convert strife

into harmony, monotony into a variegated scene, and limitation into

expansion. The converting is progress, the only progress conceivable or

attainable by man. Hence every situation has its own measure and quality

of progress, and the need for progress is recurrent, constant. If it is

better to travel than to arrive, it is because traveling is a constant

arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily

attained by going to sleep or dying. We find our clews to direction in

the projected recollections of definite experienced goods not in vague

anticipations, even when we label the vagueness perfection, the Ideal,

and proceed to manipulate its definition with dry dialectic logic.

Progress means increase of present meaning, which involves

multiplication of sensed distinctions as well as harmony, unification.

This statement may, perhaps, be made generally, in application to the

experience of humanity. If history shows progress it can hardly be found

elsewhere than in this complication and extension of the significance

found within experience. It is clear that such progress brings no

surcease, no immunity from perplexity and trouble. If we wished to

transmute this generalization into a categorical imperative we should

say: "So act as to increase the meaning of present experience." But even

then in order to get instruction about the concrete quality of such

increased meaning we should have to run away from the law and study the

needs and alternative possibilities lying within a unique and localized

situation. The imperative, like everything absolute, is sterile. Till

men give up the search for a general formula of progress they will not

know where to look to find it.

A business man proceeds by comparing today's liabilities and assets with

yesterday's, and projects plans for tomorrow by a study of the movement

thus indicated in conjunction with study of the conditions of the

environment now existing. It is not otherwise with the business of

living. The future is a projection of the subject-matter of the present,

a projection which is not arbitrary in the extent in which it divines

the movement of the moving present. The physician is lost who would

guide his activities of healing by building up a picture of perfect

health, the same for all and in its nature complete and self-enclosed

once for all. He employs what he has discovered about actual cases of

good health and ill health and their causes to investigate the present

ailing individual, so as to further his recovering; recovering, an

intrinsic and living process rather than recovery, which is comparative

and static. Moral theories, which however have not remained mere

theories but which have found their way into the opinions of the common

man, have reversed the situation and made the present subservient to a

rigid yet abstract future.

The ethical import of the doctrine of evolution is enormous. But its

import has been misconstrued because the doctrine has been appropriated

by the very traditional notions which in truth it subverts. It has been

thought that the doctrine of evolution means the complete subordination

of present change to a future goal. It has been constrained to teach a

futile dogma of approximation, instead of a gospel of present growth.

The usufruct of the new science has been seized upon by the old

tradition of fixed and external ends. In fact evolution means continuity

of change; and the fact that change may take the form of present growth

of complexity and interaction. Significant stages in change are found

not in access of fixity of attainment but in those crises in which a

seeming fixity of habits gives way to a release of capacities that have

not previously functioned: in times that is of readjustment and

redirection.

No matter what the present success in straightening out difficulties and

harmonizing conflicts, it is certain that problems will recur in the

future in a new form or on a different plane. Indeed every genuine

accomplishment instead of winding up an affair and enclosing it as a

jewel in a casket for future contemplation, complicates the practical

situation. It effects a new distribution of energies which have

henceforth to be employed in ways for which past experience gives no

exact instruction. Every important satisfaction of an old want creates a

new one; and this new one has to enter upon an experimental adventure to

find its satisfaction. From the side of what has gone before achievement

settles something. From the side of what comes after, it complicates,

introducing new problems, unsettling factors. There is something

pitifully juvenile in the idea that "evolution," progress, means a

definite sum of accomplishment which will forever stay done, and which

by an exact amount lessens the amount still to be done, disposing once

and for all of just so many perplexities and advancing us just so far on

our road to a final stable and unperplexed goal. Yet the typical

nineteenth century, mid-victorian conception of evolution was precisely

a formulation of such a consummate juvenilism.

If the true ideal is that of a stable condition free from conflict and

disturbance, then there are a number of theories whose claims are

superior to those of the popular doctrine of evolution. Logic points

rather in the direction of Rousseau and Tolstoi who would recur to some

primitive simplicity, who would return from complicated and troubled

civilization to a state of nature. For certainly progress in

civilization has not only meant increase in the scope and intricacy of

problems to be dealt with, but it entails increasing instability. For in

multiplying wants, instruments and possibilities, it increases the

variety of forces which enter into relations with one another and which

have to be intelligently directed. Or again, Stoic indifference or

Buddhist calm have greater claims. For, it may be argued, since all

objective achievement only complicates the situation, the victory of a

final stability can be secured only by renunciation of desire. Since

every satisfaction of desire increases force, and this in turn creates

new desires, withdrawal into an inner passionless state, indifference to

action and attainment, is the sole road to possession of the eternal,

stable and final reality.

Again, from the standpoint of definite approximation to an ultimate

goal, the balance falls heavily on the side of pessimism. The more

striving the more attainments, perhaps; but also assuredly the more

needs and the more disappointments. The more we do and the more we

accomplish, the more the end is vanity and vexation. From the standpoint

of attainment of good that stays put, that constitutes a definite sum

performed which lessens the amount of effort required in order to reach

the ultimate goal of final good, progress _is_ an illusion. But we are

looking for it in the wrong place. The world war is a bitter commentary

on the nineteenth century misconception of moral achievement--a

misconception however which it only inherited from the traditional

theory of fixed ends, attempting to bolster up that doctrine with aid

from the "scientific" theory of evolution. The doctrine of progress is

not yet bankrupt. The bankruptcy of the notion of fixed goods to be

attained and stably possessed may possibly be the means of turning the

mind of man to a tenable theory of progress--to attention to present

troubles and possibilities.

Adherents of the idea that betterment, growth in goodness, consists in

approximation to an exhaustive, stable, immutable end or good, have been

compelled to recognize the truth that in fact we envisage the good in

specific terms that are relative to existing needs, and that the

attainment of every specific good merges insensibly into a new condition

of maladjustment with its need of a new end and a renewed effort. But

they have elaborated an ingenious dialectical theory to account for the

facts while maintaining their theory intact. The goal, the ideal, is

infinite; man is finite, subject to conditions imposed by space and

time. The specific character of the ends which man entertains and of the

satisfaction he achieves is due therefore precisely to his empirical and

finite nature in its contrast with the infinite and complete character

of the true reality, the end. Consequently when man reaches what he had

taken to be the destination of his journey he finds that he has only

gone a piece on the road. Infinite vistas still stretch before him.

Again he sets his mark a little way further ahead, and again when he

reaches the station set, he finds the road opening before him in

unexpected ways, and sees new distant objects beckoning him forward.

Such is the popular doctrine.

By some strange perversion this theory passes for moral idealism. An

office of inspiration and guidance is attributed to the thought of the

goal of ultimate completeness or perfection. As matter of fact, the idea

sincerely held brings discouragement and despair not inspiration or

hopefulness. There is something either ludicrous or tragic in the notion

that inspiration to continued progress is had in telling man that no

matter what he does or what he achieves, the outcome is negligible in

comparison with what he set out to achieve, that every endeavor he makes

is bound to turn out a failure compared with what should be done, that

every attained satisfaction is only forever bound to be only a

disappointment. The honest conclusion is pessimism. All is vexation, and

the greater the effort the greater the vexation. But the fact is that it

is not the negative aspect of an outcome, its failure to reach infinity,

which renews courage and hope. Positive attainment, actual enrichment of

meaning and powers opens new vistas and sets new tasks, creates new aims

and stimulates new efforts. The facts are not such as to yield

unthinking optimism and consolation; for they render it impossible to

rest upon attained goods. New struggles and failures are inevitable. The

total scene of action remains as before, only for us more complex, and

more subtly unstable. But this very situation is a consequence of

expansion, not of failures of power, and when grasped and admitted it is

a challenge to intelligence. Instruction in what to do next can never

come from an infinite goal, which for us is bound to be empty. It can be

derived only from study of the deficiencies, irregularities and

possibilities of the actual situation.

In any case, however, arguments about pessimism and optimism based upon

considerations regarding fixed attainment of good and evil are mainly

literary in quality. Man continues to live because he is a living

creature not because reason convinces him of the certainty or

probability of future satisfactions and achievements. He is instinct

with activities that carry him on. Individuals here and there cave in,

and most individuals sag, withdraw and seek refuge at this and that

point. But man as man still has the dumb pluck of the animal. He has

endurance, hope, curiosity, eagerness, love of action. These traits

belong to him by structure, not by taking thought. Memory of past and

foresight of future convert dumbness to some degree of articulateness.

They illumine curiosity and steady courage. Then when the future arrives

with its inevitable disappointments as well as fulfilments, and with new

sources of trouble, failure loses something of its fatality, and

suffering yields fruit of instruction not of bitterness. Humility is

more demanded at our moments of triumph than at those of failure. For

humility is not a caddish self-depreciation. It is the sense of our

slight inability even with our best intelligence and effort to command

events; a sense of our dependence upon forces that go their way without

our wish and plan. Its purport is not to relax effort but to make us

prize every opportunity of present growth. In morals, the infinitive and

the imperative develop from the participle, present tense. Perfection

means perfecting, fulfilment, fulfilling, and the good is now or never.

Idealistic philosophies, those of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, like the

hypothesis now offered, have found the good in meanings belonging to a

conscious life, a life of reason, not in external achievement. Like it,

they have exalted the place of intelligence in securing fulfilment of

conscious life. These theories have at least not subordinated conscious

life to external obedience, not thought of virtue as something different

from excellence of life. But they set up a transcendental meaning and

reason, remote from present experience and opposed to it; or they insist

upon a special form of meaning and consciousness to be attained by

peculiar modes of knowledge inaccessible to the common man, involving

not continuous reconstruction of ordinary experience, but its wholesale

reversal. They have treated regeneration, change of heart, as wholesale

and self-enclosed, not as continuous.

The utilitarians also made good and evil, right and wrong, matters of

conscious experience. In addition they brought them down to earth, to

everyday experience. They strove to humanize other-worldly goods. But

they retained the notion that the good is future, and hence outside the

meaning of present activity. In so far it is sporadic, exceptional,

subject to accident, passive, an enjoyment not a joy, something hit

upon, not a fulfilling. The future end is for them not _so_ remote from

present action as the Platonic realm of ideals, or as the Aristotelian

rational thought, or the Christian heaven, or Spinoza's conception of

the universal whole. But still it is separate in principle and in fact

from present activity. The next step is to identify the sought for good

with the meaning of our impulses and our habits, and the specific

_moral_ good or virtue with _learning_ this meaning, a learning that

takes us back not into an isolated self but out into the open-air world

of objects and social ties, terminating in an increment of present

significance.

Doubtless there are those who will think that we thus escape from remote

and external ends only to fall into an Epicureanism which teaches us to

subordinate everything else to present satisfactions. The hypothesis

preferred may seem to some to advise a subjective, self-centered life of

intensified consciousness, an esthetically dilettante type of egoism.

For is not its lesson that we should concentrate attention, each upon

the consciousness accompanying his action so as to refine and develop

it? Is not this, like all subjective morals, an anti-social doctrine,

instructing us to subordinate the objective consequences of our acts,

those which promote the welfare of others, to an enrichment of our

private conscious lives?

It can hardly be denied that as compared with the dogmas against which

it reacted there is an element of truth in Epicureanism. It strove to

center attention upon what is actually within control and to find the

good in the present instead of in a contingent uncertain future. The

trouble with it lies in its account of present good. It failed to

connect this good with the full reach of activities. It contemplated

good of withdrawal rather than of active participation. That is to say,

the objection to Epicureanism lies in its conception of what constitutes

present good, not in its emphasis upon satisfaction as at present. The

same remark may be made about every theory which recognizes the

individual self. If any such theory is objectionable, the objection is

against the character or quality assigned to the self. Of course an

individual is the bearer or carrier of experience. What of that?

Everything depends upon the kind of experience that centers in him. Not

the residence of experience counts, but its contents, what's in the

house. The center is not in the abstract amenable to our control, but

what gathers about it is our affair. We can't help being individual

selves, each one of us. If selfhood as such is a bad thing, the blame

lies not with the self but with the universe, with providence. But in

fact the distinction between a selfishness with which we find fault and

an unselfishness which we esteem is found in the quality of the

activities which proceed from and enter into the self, according as they

are contractive, exclusive, or expansive, outreaching. Meaning exists

for some self, but this truistic fact doesn't fix the quality of any

particular meaning. It may be such as to make the self small, or such as

to exalt and dignify the self. It is as impertinent to decry the worth

of experience because it is connected with a self as it is fantastic to

idealize personality just as personality aside from the question what

sort of a person one is.

Other persons are selves too. If one's own present experience is to be

depreciated in its meaning because it centers in a self, why act for the

welfare of others? Selfishness for selfishness, one is as good as

another; our own is worth as much as another's. But the recognition that

good is always found in a present growth of significance in activity

protects us from thinking that welfare can consist in a soup-kitchen

happiness, in pleasures we can confer upon others from without. It shows

that good is the same in quality wherever it is found, whether in some

other self or in one's own. An activity has meaning in the degree in

which it establishes and acknowledges variety and intimacy of

connections. As long as any social impulse endures, so long an activity

that shuts itself off will bring inward dissatisfaction and entail a

struggle for compensatory goods, no matter what pleasures or external

successes acclaim its course.

To say that the welfare of others, like our own, consists in a widening

and deepening of the perceptions that give activity its meaning, in an

educative growth, is to set forth a proposition of political import. To

"make others happy" except through liberating their powers and engaging

them in activities that enlarge the meaning of life is to harm them and

to indulge ourselves under cover of exercising a special virtue. Our

moral measure for estimating any existing arrangement or any proposed

reform is its effect upon impulse and habits. Does it liberate or

suppress, ossify or render flexible, divide or unify interest? Is

perception quickened or dulled? Is memory made apt and extensive or

narrow and diffusely irrelevant? Is imagination diverted to fantasy and

compensatory dreams, or does it add fertility to life? Is thought

creative or pushed one side into pedantic specialisms? There is a sense

in which to set up social welfare as an end of action only promotes an

offensive condescension, a harsh interference, or an oleaginous display

of complacent kindliness. It always tends in this direction when it is

aimed at giving happiness to others directly, that is, as we can hand a

physical thing to another. To foster conditions that widen the horizon

of others and give them command of their own powers, so that they can

find their own happiness in their own fashion, is the way of "social"

action. Otherwise the prayer of a freeman would be to be left alone, and

to be delivered, above all, from "reformers" and "kind" people.

II

Since morals is concerned with conduct, it grows out of specific

empirical facts. Almost all influential moral theories, with the

exception of the utilitarian, have refused to admit this idea. For

Christendom as a whole, morality has been connected with supernatural

commands, rewards and penalties. Those who have escaped this

superstition have contented themselves with converting the difference

between this world and the next into a distinction between the actual

and the ideal, what is and what should be. The actual world has not been

surrendered to the devil in name, but it is treated as a display of

physical forces incapable of generating moral values. Consequently,

moral considerations must be introduced from above. Human nature may not

be officially declared to be infected because of some aboriginal sin,

but it is said to be sensuous, impulsive, subjected to necessity, while

natural intelligence is such that it cannot rise above a reckoning of

private expediency.

But in fact morals is the most humane of all subjects. It is that which

is closest to human nature; it is ineradicably empirical, not

theological nor metaphysical nor mathematical. Since it directly

concerns human nature, everything that can be known of the human mind

and body in physiology, medicine, anthropology, and psychology is

pertinent to moral inquiry. Human nature exists and operates in an

environment. And it is not "in" that environment as coins are in a box,

but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil. It is of them, continuous

with their energies, dependent upon their support, capable of increase

only as it utilizes them, and as it gradually rebuilds from their crude

indifference an environment genially civilized. Hence physics,

chemistry, history, statistics, engineering science, are a part of

disciplined moral knowledge so far as they enable us to understand the

conditions and agencies through which man lives, and on account of which

he forms and executes his plans. Moral science is not something with a

separate province. It is physical, biological and historic knowledge

placed in a human context where it will illuminate and guide the

activities of men.

The path of truth is narrow and straitened. It is only too easy to

wander beyond the course from this side to that. In a reaction from that

error which has made morals fanatic or fantastic, sentimental or

authoritative by severing them from actual facts and forces, theorists

have gone to the other extreme. They have insisted that natural laws are

themselves moral laws, so that it remains, after noting them, only to

conform to them. This doctrine of accord with nature has usually marked

a transition period. When mythology is dying in its open forms, and when

social life is so disturbed that custom and tradition fail to supply

their wonted control, men resort to Nature as a norm. They apply to

Nature all the eulogistic predicates previously associated with divine

law; or natural law is conceived of as the only true divine law. This

happened in one form in Stoicism. It happened in another form in the

deism of the eighteenth century with its notion of a benevolent,

harmonious, wholly rational order of Nature.

In our time this notion has been perpetuated in connection with a

laissez-faire social philosophy and the theory of evolution. Human

intelligence is thought to mark an artificial interference if it does

more than register fixed natural laws as rules of human action. The

process of natural evolution is conceived as the exact model of human

endeavor. The two ideas met in Spencer. To the "enlightened" of a former

generation, Spencer's evolutionary philosophy seemed to afford a

scientific sanction for the necessity of moral progress, while it also

proved, up to the hilt, the futility of deliberate "interference" with

the benevolent operations of nature. The idea of justice was identified

with the law of cause and effect. Transgression of natural law wrought

in the struggle for existence its own penalty of elimination, and

conformity with it brought the reward of increased vitality and

happiness. By this process egoistic desire is gradually coming into

harmony with the necessity of the environment, till at last the

individual automatically finds happiness in doing what the natural and

social environment demands, and serves himself in serving others. From

this point of view, earlier "scientific" philosophers made a mistake,

but only the mistake of anticipating the date of complete natural

harmony. All that reason can do is to acknowledge the evolutionary

forces, and thereby refrain from retarding the arrival of the happy day

of perfect harmony. Meantime justice demands that the weak and ignorant

suffer the effect of violation of natural law, while the wise and able

reap the rewards of their superiority.

The fundamental defect of such views is that they fail to see the

difference made in conditions and energies by perception of them. It is

the first business of mind to be "realistic," to see things "as they

are." If, for example, biology can give us knowledge of the causes of

competency and incompetency, strength and weakness, that knowledge is

all to the good. A non-sentimental morals will seek for all the

instruction natural science can give concerning the biological

conditions and consequences of inferiority and superiority. But

knowledge of facts does not entail conformity and acquiescence. The

contrary is the case. Perception of things as they are is but a stage in

the process of making them different. They have already begun to be

different in being known, for by that fact they enter into a different

context, a context of foresight and judgment of better and worse. A

false psychology of a separate realm of consciousness is the only reason

this fact is not generally acknowledged. Morality resides not in

perception of fact, but in the _use_ made of its perception. It is a

monstrous assumption that its sole use is to utter benedictions upon

fact and its offspring. It is the part of intelligence to tell when to

use the fact to conform and perpetuate, and when to use it to vary

conditions and consequences.

It is absurd to suppose that knowledge about the connection between

inferiority and its consequences prescribes adherence to that

connection. It is like supposing that knowledge of the connection

between malaria and mosquitoes enjoins breeding mosquitoes. The fact

when it is known enters into a new environment. Without ceasing to

belong to the physical environment it enters also into a medium of human

activities, of desires and aversions, habits and instincts. It thereby

gains new potencies, new capacities. Gunpowder in water does not act the

same as gunpowder next a flame. A fact known does not operate the same

as a fact unperceived. When it is known it comes into contact with the

flame of desire and the cold bath of antipathy. Knowledge of the

conditions that breed incapacity may fit into some desire to maintain

others in that state while averting it for one's self. Or it may fall in

with a character which finds itself blocked by such facts, and therefore

strives to use knowledge of causes to make a change in effects. Morality

begins at this point of use of knowledge of natural law, a use varying

with the active system of dispositions and desires. Intelligent action

is not concerned with the bare consequences of the thing known, but with

consequences _to be_ brought into existence by action conditioned on the

knowledge. Men may use their knowledge to induce conformity or

exaggeration, or to effect change and abolition of conditions. The

quality of these consequences determines the question of better or

worse.

The exaggeration of the harmony attributed to Nature aroused men to note

its disharmonies. An optimistic view of natural benevolence was followed

by a more honest, less romantic view of struggle and conflict in nature.

After Helvetius and Bentham came Malthus and Darwin. The problem of

morals is the problem of desire and intelligence. What is to be done

with these facts of disharmony and conflict? After we have discovered

the place and consequences of conflict in nature, we have still to

discover its place and working in human need and thought. What is its

office, its function, its _possibility_, or use? In general, the answer

is simple. Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation

and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like

passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving. Not that it always

effects this result; but that conflict is a _sine qua non_ of reflection

and ingenuity. When this possibility of making use of conflict has once

been noted, it is possible to utilize it systematically to substitute

the arbitration of mind for that of brutal attack and brute collapse.

But the tendency to take natural law for a norm of action which the

supposedly scientific have inherited from eighteenth century rationalism

leads to an idealization of the principle of conflict itself. Its office

in promoting progress through arousing intelligence is overlooked, and

it is erected into the generator of progress. Karl Marx borrowed from

the dialectic of Hegel the idea of the necessity of a negative element,

of opposition, for advance. He projected it into social affairs and

reached the conclusion that all social development comes from conflict

between classes, and that therefore class-warfare is to be cultivated.

Hence a supposedly scientific form of the doctrine of social evolution

preaches social hostility as the road to social harmony. It would be

difficult to find a more striking instance of what happens when natural

events are given a social and practical sanctification. Darwinism has

been similarly used to justify war and the brutalities of competition

for wealth and power.

The excuse, the provocation, though not the justification for such a

doctrine is found in the actions of those who say peace, peace, when

there is no peace, who refuse to recognize facts as they are, who

proclaim a natural harmony of wealth and merit, of capital and labor,

and the natural justice, in the main, of existing conditions. There is

something horrible, something that makes one fear for civilization, in

denunciations of class-differences and class struggles which proceed

from a class in power, one that is seizing every means, even to a

monopoly of moral ideals, to carry on its struggle for class-power. This

class adds hypocrisy to conflict and brings all idealism into disrepute.

It does everything which ingenuity and prestige can do to give color to

the assertions of those who say that all moral considerations are

irrelevant, and that the issue is one of brute trial of forces between

this side and that. The alternative, here as elsewhere, is not between

denying facts in behalf of something termed moral ideals and accepting

facts as final. There remains the possibility of recognizing facts and

using them as a challenge to intelligence to modify the environment and

change habits.

III

The place of natural fact and law in morals brings us to the problem of

freedom. We are told that seriously to import empirical facts into

morals is equivalent to an abrogation of freedom. Facts and laws mean

necessity we are told. The way to freedom is to turn our back upon them

and take flight to a separate ideal realm. Even if the flight could be

successfully accomplished, the efficacy of the prescription may be

doubted. For we need freedom in and among actual events, not apart from

them. It is to be hoped therefore that there remains an alternative;

that the road to freedom may be found in that knowledge of facts which

enables us to employ them in connection with desires and aims. A

physician or engineer is free in his thought and his action in the

degree in which he knows what he deals with. Possibly we find here the

key to any freedom.

What men have esteemed and fought for in the name of liberty is varied

and complex--but certainly it has never been a metaphysical freedom of

will. It seems to contain three elements of importance, though on their

face not all of them are directly compatible with one another. (i) It

includes efficiency in action, ability to carry out plans, the absence

of cramping and thwarting obstacles. (ii) It also includes capacity to

vary plans, to change the course of action, to experience novelties. And

again (iii) it signifies the power of desire and choice to be factors in

events.

Few men would purchase even a high amount of efficient action along

definite lines at the price of monotony, or if success in action were

bought by all abandonment of personal preference. They would probably

feel that a more precious freedom was possessed in a life of ill-assured

objective achievement that contained undertaking of risks, adventuring

in new fields, a pitting of personal choice against the odds of events,

and a mixture of success and failures, provided choice had a career. The

slave is a man who executes the wish of others, one doomed to act along

lines predetermined to regularity. Those who have defined freedom as

ability to act have unconsciously assumed that this ability is exercised

in accord with desire, and that its operation introduces the agent into

fields previously unexplored. Hence the conception of freedom as

involving three factors.

Yet efficiency in execution cannot be ignored. To say that a man is free

to choose to walk while the only walk he can take will lead him over a

precipice is to strain words as well as facts. Intelligence is the key

to freedom in act. We are likely to be able to go ahead prosperously in

the degree in which we have consulted conditions and formed a plan which

enlists their consenting cooperation. The gratuitous help of unforeseen

circumstance we cannot afford to despise. Luck, bad if not good, will

always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and

showing its back to the stupid. And the gifts of fortune when they come

are fleeting except when they are made taut by intelligent adaptation of

conditions. In neutral and adverse circumstances, study and foresight

are the only roads to unimpeded action. Insistence upon a metaphysical

freedom of will is generally at its most strident pitch with those who

despise knowledge of matters-of-fact. They pay for their contempt by

halting and confined action. Glorification of freedom in general at the

expense of positive abilities in particular has often characterized the

official creed of historic liberalism. Its outward sign is the

separation of politics and law from economics. Much of what is called

the "individualism" of the early nineteenth century has in truth little

to do with the nature of individuals. It goes back to a metaphysics

which held that harmony between man and nature can be taken for granted,

if once certain artificial restrictions upon man are removed. Hence it

neglected the necessity of studying and regulating industrial conditions

so that a nominal freedom can be made an actuality. Find a man who

believes that all men need is freedom _from_ oppressive legal and

political measures, and you have found a man who, unless he is merely

obstinately maintaining his own private privileges, carries at the back

of his head some heritage of the metaphysical doctrine of free-will,

plus an optimistic confidence in natural harmony. He needs a philosophy

that recognizes the objective character of freedom and its dependence

upon a congruity of environment with human wants, an agreement which can

be obtained only by profound thought and unremitting application. For

freedom as a fact depends upon conditions of work which are socially and

scientifically buttressed. Since industry covers the most pervasive

relations of man with his environment, freedom is unreal which does not

have as its basis an economic command of environment.

I have no desire to add another to the cheap and easy solutions which

exist of the seeming conflict between freedom and organization. It is

reasonably obvious that organization may become a hindrance to freedom;

it does not take us far to say that the trouble lies not in organization

but in over-organization. At the same time, it must be admitted that

there is no effective or objective freedom without organization. It is

easy to criticize the contract theory of the state which states that

individuals surrender some at least of their natural liberties in order

to make secure as civil liberties what they retain. Nevertheless there

is some truth in the idea of surrender and exchange. A certain natural

freedom is possessed by man. That is to say, in some respects harmony

exists between a man's energies and his surroundings such that the

latter support and execute his purposes. In so far he is free; without

such a basic natural support, conscious contrivances of legislation,

administration and deliberate human institution of social arrangements

cannot take place. In this sense natural freedom is prior to political

freedom and is its condition. But we cannot trust wholly to a freedom

thus procured. It is at the mercy of accident. Conscious agreements

among men must supplement and in some degree supplant freedom of action

which is the gift of nature. In order to arrive at these agreements,

individuals have to make concessions. They must consent to curtailment

of some natural liberties in order that any of them may be rendered

secure and enduring. They must, in short, enter into an organization

with other human beings so that the activities of others may be

permanently counted upon to assure regularity of action and far-reaching

scope of plans and courses of action. The procedure is not, in so far,

unlike surrendering a portion of one's income in order to buy insurance

against future contingencies, and thus to render the future course of

life more equably secure. It would be folly to maintain that there is no

sacrifice; we can however contend that the sacrifice is a reasonable

one, justified by results.

Viewed in this light, the relation of individual freedom to organization

is seen to be an experimental affair. It is not capable of being settled

by abstract theory. Take the question of labor unions and the closed or

open shop. It is folly to fancy that no restrictions and surrenders of

prior freedoms and possibilities of future freedoms are involved in the

extension of this particular form of organization. But to condemn such

organization on the theoretical ground that a restriction of liberty is

entailed is to adopt a position which would have been fatal to every

advance step in civilization, and to every net gain in effective

freedom. Every such question is to be judged not on the basis of

antecedent theory but on the basis of concrete consequences. The

question is to the balance of freedom and security achieved, as compared

with practicable alternatives. Even the question of the point where

membership in an organization ceases to be a voluntary matter and

becomes coercive or required, is also an experimental matter, a thing to

be decided by scientifically conducted study of consequences, of pros

and cons. It is definitely an affair of specific detail, not of

wholesale theory. It is equally amusing to see one man denouncing on

grounds of pure theory the coercion of workers by a labor union while he

avails himself of the increased power due to corporate action in

business and praises the coercion of the political state; and to see

another man denouncing the latter as pure tyranny, while lauding the

power of industrial labor organizations. The position of one or the

other may be justified in particular cases, but justification is due to

results in practice not to general theory.

Organization tends, however, to become rigid and to limit freedom. In

addition to security and energy in action, novelty, risk, change are

ingredients of the freedom which men desire. Variety is more than the

spice of life; it is largely of its essence, making a difference between

the free and the enslaved. Invariant virtue appears to be as mechanical

as uninterrupted vice, for true excellence changes with conditions.

Unless character rises to overcome some new difficulty or conquer some

temptation from an unexpected quarter we suspect its grain is only a

veneer. Choice is an element in freedom and there can be no choice

without unrealized and precarious possibilities. It is this demand for

genuine contingency which is caricatured in the orthodox doctrine of a

freedom of indifference, a power to choose this way or that apart from

any habit or impulse, without even a desire on the part of will to show

off. Such an indetermination of choice is not desired by the lover of

either reason or excitement. The theory of arbitrary free choice

represents indeterminateness of conditions grasped in a vague and lazy

fashion and hardened into a desirable attribute of will. Under the title

of freedom men prize such uncertainty of conditions as give deliberation

and choice an opportunity. But uncertainty of volition which is more

than a reflection of uncertainty of conditions is the mark of a person

who has acquired imbecility of character through permanent weakening of

his springs of action.

Whether or not indeterminateness, uncertainty, actually exists in the

world is a difficult question. It is easier to think of the world as

fixed, settled once for all, and man as accumulating all the uncertainty

there is in his will and all the doubt there is in his intellect. The

rise of natural science has facilitated this dualistic partitioning,

making nature wholly fixed and mind wholly open and empty. Fortunately

for us we do not have to settle the question. A hypothetical answer is

enough. _If_ the world is already done and done for, if its character is

entirely achieved so that its behavior is like that of a man lost in

routine, then the only freedom for which man can hope is one of

efficiency in overt action. But _if_ change is genuine, if accounts are

still in process of making, and if objective uncertainty is the stimulus

to reflection, then variation in action, novelty and experiment, have a

true meaning. In any case the question is an objective one. It concerns

not man in isolation from the world but man in his connection with it. A

world that is at points and times indeterminate enough to call out

deliberation and to give play to choice to shape its future is a world

in which will is free, not because it is inherently vacillating and

unstable, but because deliberation and choice are determining and

stabilizing factors.

Upon an empirical view, uncertainty, doubt, hesitation, contingency and

novelty, genuine change which is not mere disguised repetition, are

facts. Only deductive reasoning from certain fixed premisses creates a

bias in favor of complete determination and finality. To say that these

things exist only in human experience not in the world, and exist there

only because of our "finitude" is dangerously like paying ourselves with

words. Empirically the life of man seems in these respects as in others

to express a culmination of facts in nature. To admit ignorance and

uncertainty in man while denying them to nature involves a curious

dualism. Variability, initiative, innovation, departure from routine,

experimentation are empirically the manifestation of a genuine nisus in

things. At all events it is these things that are precious to us under

the name of freedom. It is their elimination from the life of a slave

which makes his life servile, intolerable to the freeman who has once

been on his own, no matter what his animal comfort and security. A free

man would rather take his chance in an open world than be guaranteed in

a closed world.

These considerations give point to the third factor in love of freedom:

the desire to have desire count as a factor, a force. Even if will

chooses unaccountably, even if it be a capricious impulse, it does not

follow that there are real alternatives, genuine possibilities, open in

the future. What we want is possibilities open in the _world_ not in the

will, except as will or deliberate activity reflects the world. To

foresee future objective alternatives and to be able by deliberation to

choose one of them and thereby weight its chances in the struggle for

future existence, measures our freedom. It is assumed sometimes that if

it can be shown that deliberation determines choice and deliberation is

determined by character and conditions, there is no freedom. This is

like saying that because a flower comes from root and stem it cannot

bear fruit. The question is not what are the antecedents of deliberation

and choice, but what are their consequences. What do they do that is

distinctive? The answer is that they give us all the control of future

possibilities which is open to us. And this control is the crux of our

freedom. Without it, we are pushed from behind. With it we walk in the

light.

The doctrine that knowledge, intelligence rather than will, constitutes

freedom is not new. It has been preached by moralists of many a school.

All rationalists have identified freedom with action emancipated by

insight into truth. But insight into necessity has by them been

substituted for foresight of possibilities. Tolstoi for example

expressed the idea of Spinoza and Hegel when he said that the ox is a

slave as long as he refuses to recognize the yoke and chafes under it,

while if he identifies himself with its necessity and draws willingly

instead of rebelliously, he is free. But as long as the yoke is a yoke

it is impossible that voluntary identification with it should occur.

Conscious submission is then either fatalistic submissiveness or

cowardice. The ox accepts in fact not the yoke but the stall and the hay

to which the yoke is a necessary incident. But if the ox foresees the

consequences of the use of the yoke, if he anticipates the possibility

of harvest, and identifies himself not with the yoke but with the

realization of its possibilities, he acts freely, voluntarily. He hasn't

accepted a necessity as unavoidable; he has welcomed a possibility as a

desirability.

Perception of necessary law plays, indeed, a part. But no amount of

insight into necessity brings with it, as such, anything but a

consciousness of necessity. Freedom is the "truth of necessity" only

when we use one "necessity" to alter another. When we use the law to

foresee consequences and to consider how they may be averted or secured,

then freedom begins. Employing knowledge of law to enforce desire in

execution gives power to the engineer. Employing knowledge of law in

order to submit to it without further action constitutes fatalism, no

matter how it be dressed up. Thus we recur to our main contention.

Morality depends upon events, not upon commands and ideals alien to

nature. But intelligence treats events as moving, as fraught with

possibilities, not as ended, final. In forecasting their possibilities,

the distinction between better and worse arises. Human desire and

ability cooperates with this or that natural force according as this or

that eventuality is judged better. We do not use the present to control

the future. We use the foresight of the future to refine and expand

present activity. In this use of desire, deliberation and choice,

freedom is actualized.

IV

Intelligence becomes ours in the degree in which we use it and accept

responsibility for consequences. It is not ours originally or by

production. "It thinks" is a truer psychological statement than "I

think." Thoughts sprout and vegetate; ideas proliferate. They come from

deep unconscious sources. "I think" is a statement about voluntary

action. Some suggestion surges from the unknown. Our active body of

habits appropriates it. The suggestion then becomes an assertion. It no

longer merely comes to us. It is accepted and uttered by us. We act upon

it and thereby assume, by implication, its consequences. The stuff of

belief and proposition is not originated by us. It comes to us from

others, by education, tradition and the suggestion of the environment.

Our intelligence is bound up, so far as its materials are concerned,

with the community life of which we are a part. We know what it

communicates to us, and know according to the habits it forms in us.

Science is an affair of civilization not of individual intellect.

So with conscience. When a child acts, those about him re-act. They

shower encouragement upon him, visit him with approval, or they bestow

frowns and rebuke. What others do to us when we act is as natural a

consequence of our action as what the fire does to us when we plunge our

hands in it. The social environment may be as artificial as you please.

But its action in response to ours is natural not artificial. In

language and imagination we rehearse the responses of others just as we

dramatically enact other consequences. We foreknow how others will act,

and the foreknowledge is the beginning of judgment passed on action. We

know _with_ them; there is conscience. An assembly is formed within our

breast which discusses and appraises proposed and performed acts. The

community without becomes a forum and tribunal within, a judgment-seat

of charges, assessments and exculpations. Our thoughts of our own

actions are saturated with the ideas that others entertain about them,

ideas which have been expressed not only in explicit instruction but

still more effectively in reaction to our acts.

Liability is the beginning of responsibility. We are held accountable by

others for the consequences of our acts. They visit their like and

dislike of these consequences upon us. In vain do we claim that these

are not ours; that they are products of ignorance not design, or are

incidents in the execution of a most laudable scheme. Their authorship

is imputed to us. We are disapproved, and disapproval is not an inner

state of mind but a most definite act. Others say to us by their deeds

we do not care a fig whether you did this deliberately or not. We intend

that you _shall_ deliberate before you do it again, and that if possible

your deliberation shall prevent a repetition of this act we object to.

The reference in blame and every unfavorable judgment is prospective,

not retrospective. Theories about responsibility may become confused,

but in practice no one is stupid enough to try to change the past.

Approbation and disapprobation are ways of influencing the formation of

habits and aims; that is, of influencing future acts. The individual is

_held_ accountable for what he _has_ done in order that he may be

responsive in what he is _going_ to do. Gradually persons learn by

dramatic imitation to hold themselves accountable, and liability becomes

a voluntary deliberate acknowledgment that deeds are our own, that their

consequences come from us.

These two facts, that moral judgment and moral responsibility are the

work wrought in us by the social environment, signify that all morality

is social; not because we _ought_ to take into account the effect of our

acts upon the welfare of others, but because of facts. Others _do_ take

account of what we do, and they respond accordingly to our acts. Their

responses actually _do_ affect the meaning of what we do. The

significance thus contributed is as inevitable as is the effect of

interaction with the physical environment. In fact as civilization

advances the physical environment gets itself more and more humanized,

for the meaning of physical energies and events becomes involved with

the part they play in human activities. Our conduct _is_ socially

conditioned whether we perceive the fact or not.

The effect of custom on habit, and of habit upon thought is enough to

prove this statement. When we begin to forecast consequences, the

consequences that most stand out are those which will proceed from other

people. The resistance and the cooperation of others is the central fact

in the furtherance or failure of our schemes. Connections with our

fellows furnish both the opportunities for action and the

instrumentalities by which we take advantage of opportunity. All of the

actions of an individual bear the stamp of his community as assuredly as

does the language he speaks. Difficulty in reading the stamp is due to

variety of impressions in consequence of membership in many groups. This

social saturation is, I repeat, a matter of fact, not of what should be,

not of what is desirable or undesirable. It does not guarantee the

rightness of goodness of an act; there is no excuse for thinking of evil

action as individualistic and right action as social. Deliberate

unscrupulous pursuit of self-interest is as much conditioned upon social

opportunities, training and assistance as is the course of action

prompted by a beaming benevolence. The difference lies in the quality

and degree of the perception of ties and interdependencies; in the use

to which they are put. Consider the form commonly assumed today by

self-seeking; namely command of money and economic power. Money is a

social institution; property is a legal custom; economic opportunities

are dependent upon the state of society; the objects aimed at, the

rewards sought for, are what they are because of social admiration,

prestige, competition and power. If money-making is morally obnoxious it

is because of the way these social facts are handled, not because a

money-making man has withdrawn from society into an isolated selfhood or

turned his back upon society. His "individualism" is not found in his

original nature but in his habits acquired under social influences. It

is found in his concrete aims, and these are reflexes of social

conditions. Well-grounded moral objection to a mode of conduct rests

upon the kind of social connections that figure, not upon lack of social

aim. A man may attempt to utilize social relationships for his own

advantage in an inequitable way; he may intentionally or unconsciously

try to make them feed one of his own appetites. Then he is denounced as

egoistic. But both his course of action and the disapproval he is

subject to are facts _within_ society. They are social phenomena. He

pursues his unjust advantage as a social asset.

Explicit recognition of this fact is a prerequisite of improvement in

moral education and of an intelligent understanding of the chief ideas

or "categories" of morals. Morals is as much a matter of interaction of

a person with his social environment as walking is an interaction of

legs with a physical environment. The character of walking depends upon

the strength and competency of legs. But it also depends upon whether a

man is walking in a bog or on a paved street, upon whether there is a

safeguarded path set aside or whether he has to walk amid dangerous

vehicles. If the standard of morals is low it is because the education

given by the interaction of the individual with his social environment

is defective. Of what avail is it to preach unassuming simplicity and

contentment of life when communal admiration goes to the man who

"succeeds"--who makes himself conspicuous and envied because of command

of money and other forms of power? If a child gets on by peevishness or

intrigue, then others are his accomplices who assist in the habits which

are built up. The notion that an abstract ready-made conscience exists

in individuals and that it is only necessary to make an occasional

appeal to it and to indulge in occasional crude rebukes and punishments,

is associated with the causes of lack of definitive and orderly moral

advance. For it is associated with lack of attention to social forces.

There is a peculiar inconsistency in the current idea that morals

_ought_ to be social. The introduction of the moral "ought" into the

idea contains an implicit assertion that morals depend upon something

apart from social relations. Morals _are_ social. The question of ought,

should be, is a question of better and worse _in_ social affairs. The

extent to which the weight of theories has been thrown against the

perception of the place of social ties and connections in moral activity

is a fair measure of the extent to which social forces work blindly and

develop an accidental morality. The chief obstacle for example to

recognizing the truth of a proposition frequently set forth in these

pages to the effect that all conduct is potential, if not actual, matter

of moral judgment is the habit of identifying moral judgment with praise

and blame. So great is the influence of this habit that it is safe to

say that every professed moralist when he leaves the pages of theory and

faces some actual item of his own or others' behavior, first or

"instinctively" thinks of acts as moral or non-moral in the degree in

which they are exposed to condemnation or approval. Now this kind of

judgment is certainly not one which could profitably be dispensed with.

Its influence is much needed. But the tendency to equate it with all

moral judgment is largely responsible for the current idea that there is

a sharp line between moral conduct and a larger region of non-moral

conduct which is a matter of expediency, shrewdness, success or manners.

Moreover this tendency is a chief reason why the social forces effective

in shaping actual morality work blindly and unsatisfactorily. Judgment

in which the emphasis falls upon blame and approbation has more heat

than light. It is more emotional than intellectual. It is guided by

custom, personal convenience and resentment rather than by insight into

causes and consequences. It makes toward reducing moral instruction, the

educative influence of social opinion, to an immediate personal matter,

that is to say, to an adjustment of personal likes and dislikes.

Fault-finding creates resentment in the one blamed, and approval,

complacency, rather than a habit of scrutinizing conduct objectively. It

puts those who are sensitive to the judgments of others in a standing

defensive attitude, creating an apologetic, self-accusing and

self-exculpating habit of mind when what is needed is an impersonal

impartial habit of observation. "Moral" persons get so occupied with

defending their conduct from real and imagined criticism that they have

little time left to see what their acts really amount to, and the habit

of self-blame inevitably extends to include others since it is a habit.

Now it is a wholesome thing for any one to be made aware that

thoughtless, self-centered action on his part exposes him to the

indignation and dislike of others. There is no one who can be safely

trusted to be exempt from immediate reactions of criticism, and there

are few who do not need to be braced by occasional expressions of

approval. But these influences are immensely overdone in comparison with

the assistance that might be given by the influence of social judgments

which operate without accompaniments of praise and blame; which enable

an individual to see for himself what he is doing, and which put him in

command of a method of analyzing the obscure and usually unavowed forces

which move him to act. We need a permeation of judgments on conduct by

the method and materials of a science of human nature. Without such

enlightenment even the best-intentioned attempts at the moral guidance

and improvement of others often eventuate in tragedies of

misunderstanding and division, as is so often seen in the relations of

parents and children.

The development therefore of a more adequate science of human nature is

a matter of first-rate importance. The present revolt against the notion

that psychology is a science of consciousness may well turn out in the

future to be the beginning of a definitive turn in thought and action.

Historically there are good reasons for the isolation and exaggeration

of the conscious phase of human action, an isolation which forgot that

"conscious" is an adjective of some acts and which erected the resulting

abstraction, "consciousness," into a noun, an existence separate and

complete. These reasons are interesting not only to the student of

technical philosophy but also to the student of the history of culture

and even of politics. They have to do with the attempt to drag realities

out of occult essences and hidden forces and get them into the light of

day. They were part of the general movement called phenomenalism, and of

the growing importance of individual life and private voluntary

concerns. But the effect was to isolate the individual from his

connections both with his fellows and with nature, and thus to create an

artificial human nature, one not capable of being understood and

effectively directed on the basis of analytic understanding. It shut out

from view, not to say from scientific examination, the forces which

really move human nature. It took a few surface phenomena for the whole

story of significant human motive-forces and acts.

As a consequence physical science and its technological applications

were highly developed while the science of man, moral science, is

backward. I believe that it is not possible to estimate how much of the

difficulties of the present world situation are due to the disproportion

and unbalance thus introduced into affairs. It would have seemed absurd

to say in the seventeenth century that in the end the alteration in

methods of physical investigation which was then beginning would prove

more important than the religious wars of that century. Yet the wars

marked the end of one era; the dawn of physical science the beginning of

a new one. And a trained imagination may discover that the nationalistic

and economic wars which are the chief outward mark of the present are in

the end to be less significant than the development of a science of

human nature now inchoate.

It sounds academic to say that substantial bettering of social relations

waits upon the growth of a scientific social psychology. For the term

suggests something specialized and remote. But the formation of habits

of belief, desire and judgment is going on at every instant under the

influence of the conditions set by men's contact, intercourse and

associations with one another. This is the fundamental fact in social

life and in personal character. It is the fact about which traditional

human science gives no enlightenment--a fact which this traditional

science blurs and virtually denies. The enormous rôle played in popular

morals by appeal to the supernatural and quasi-magical is in effect a

desperate admission of the futility of our science. Consequently the

whole matter of the formation of the predispositions which effectively

control human relationships is left to accident, to custom and immediate

personal likings, resentments and ambitions. It is a commonplace that

modern industry and commerce are conditioned upon a control of physical

energies due to proper methods of physical inquiry and analysis. We have

no social arts which are comparable because we have so nearly nothing in

the way of psychological science. Yet through the development of

physical science, and especially of chemistry, biology, physiology,

medicine and anthropology we now have the basis for the development of

such a science of man. Signs of its coming into existence are present in

the movements in clinical, behavioristic and social (in its narrower

sense) psychology.

At present we not only have no assured means of forming character except

crude devices of blame, praise, exhortation and punishment, but the very

meaning of the general notions of moral inquiry is matter of doubt and

dispute. The reason is that these notions are discussed in isolation

from the concrete facts of the interactions of human beings with one

another--an abstraction as fatal as was the old discussion of

phlogiston, gravity and vital force apart from concrete correlations of

changing events with one another. Take for example such a basic

conception as that of Right involving the nature of authority in

conduct. There is no need here to rehearse the multitude of contending

views which give evidence that discussion of this matter is still in the

realm of opinion. We content ourselves with pointing out that this

notion is the last resort of the anti-empirical school in morals and

that it proves the effect of neglect of social conditions.

In effect its adherents argue as follows: "Let us concede that concrete

ideas about right and wrong and particular notions of what is obligatory

have grown up within experience. But we cannot admit this about the idea

of Right, of Obligation itself. Why does moral authority exist at all?

Why is the claim of the Right recognized in conscience even by those who

violate it in deed? Our opponents say that such and such a course is

wise, expedient, better. But _why_ act for the wise, or good, or better?

Why not follow our own immediate devices if we are so inclined? There is

only one answer: We have a moral nature, a conscience, call it what you

will. And this nature responds directly in acknowledgment of the supreme

authority of the Right over all claims of inclination and habit. We may

not act in accordance with this acknowledgment, but we still know that

the authority of the moral law, although not its power, is

unquestionable. Men may differ indefinitely according to what their

experience has been as to just _what_ is Right, what its contents are.

But they all spontaneously agree in recognizing the supremacy of the

claims of whatever is thought of as Right. Otherwise there would be no

such thing as morality, but merely calculations of how to satisfy

desire."

Grant the foregoing argument, and all the apparatus of abstract moralism

follows in its wake. A remote goal of perfection, ideals that are

contrary in a wholesale way to what is actual, a free will of arbitrary

choice; all of these conceptions band themselves together with that of a

non-empirical authority of Right and a non-empirical conscience which

acknowledges it. They constitute its ceremonial or formal train.

Why, indeed, acknowledge the authority of Right? That many persons do

not acknowledge it in fact, in action, and that all persons ignore it at

times, is assumed by the argument. Just what is the significance of an

alleged recognition of a supremacy which is continually denied in fact?

How much would be lost if it were dropped out, and we were left face to

face with actual facts? If a man lived alone in the world there might be

some sense in the question "Why be moral?" were it not for one thing: No

such question would then arise. As it is, we live in a world where other

persons live too. Our acts affect them. They perceive these effects, and

react upon us in consequence. Because they are living beings they make

demands upon us for certain things from us. They approve and

condemn--not in abstract theory but in what they do to us. The answer to

the question "Why not put your hand in the fire?" is the answer of fact.

If you do your hand will be burnt. The answer to the question why

acknowledge the right is of the same sort. For Right is only an abstract

name for the multitude of concrete demands in action which others

impress upon us, and of which we are obliged, if we would live, to take

some account. Its authority is the exigency of their demands, the

efficacy of their insistencies. There may be good ground for the

contention that in theory the idea of the right is subordinate to that

of the good, being a statement of the course proper to attain good. But

in fact it signifies the totality of social pressures exercised upon us

to induce us to think and desire in certain ways. Hence the right can in

fact become the road to the good only as the elements that compose this

unremitting pressure are enlightened, only as social relationships

become themselves reasonable.

It will be retorted that all pressure is a non-moral affair partaking of

force, not of right; that right must be ideal. Thus we are invited to

enter again the circle in which the ideal has no force and social

actualities no ideal quality. We refuse the invitation because social

pressure is involved in our own lives, as much so as the air we breathe

and the ground we walk upon. If we had desires, judgments, plans, in

short a mind, apart from social connections, then the latter would be

external and their action might be regarded as that of a non-moral

force. But we live mentally as physically only _in_ and _because_ of our

environment. Social pressure is but a name for the interactions which

are always going on and in which we participate, living so far as we

partake and dying so far as we do not. The pressure is not ideal but

empirical, yet empirical here means only actual. It calls attention to

the fact that considerations of right are claims originating not outside

of life, but within it. They are "ideal" in precisely the degree in

which we intelligently recognize and act upon them, just as colors and

canvas become ideal when used in ways that give an added meaning to

life.

Accordingly failure to recognize the authority of right means defect in

effective apprehension of the realities of human association, not an

arbitrary exercise of free will. This deficiency and perversion in

apprehension indicates a defect in education--that is to say, in the

operation of actual conditions, in the consequences upon desire and

thought of existing interactions and interdependencies. It is false that

every person has a consciousness of the supreme authority of right and

then misconceives it or ignores it in action. One has such a sense of

the claims of social relationships as those relationships enforce in

one's desires and observations. The belief in a separate, ideal or

transcendental, practically ineffectual Right is a reflex of the

inadequacy with which existing institutions perform their educative

office--their office in generating observation of social continuities.

It is an endeavor to "rationalize" this defect. Like all

rationalizations, it operates to divert attention from the real state of

affairs. Thus it helps maintain the conditions which created it,

standing in the way of effort to make our institutions more humane and

equitable. A theoretical acknowledgment of the supreme authority of

Right, of moral law, gets twisted into an effectual substitute for acts

which would better the customs which now produce vague, dull, halting

and evasive observation of actual social ties. We are not caught in a

circle; we traverse a spiral in which social customs generate some

consciousness of interdependencies, and this consciousness is embodied

in acts which in improving the environment generate new perceptions of

social ties, and so on forever. The relationships, the interactions are

forever there as fact, but they acquire meaning only in the desires,

judgments and purposes they awaken.

We recur to our fundamental propositions. Morals is connected with

actualities of existence, not with ideals, ends and obligations

independent of concrete actualities. The facts upon which it depends are

those which arise out of active connections of human beings with one

another, the consequences of their mutually intertwined activities in

the life of desire, belief, judgment, satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

In this sense conduct and hence morals are social: they are not just

things which _ought_ to be social and which fail to come up to the

scratch. But there are enormous differences of better and worse in the

quality of what is social. Ideal morals begin with the perception of

these differences. Human interaction and ties are there, are operative

in any case. But they can be regulated, employed in an orderly way for

good only as we know how to observe them. And they cannot be observed

aright, they cannot be understood and utilized, when the mind is left to

itself to work without the aid of science. For the natural unaided mind

means precisely the habits of belief, thought and desire which have been

accidentally generated and confirmed by social institutions or customs.

But with all their admixture of accident and reasonableness we have at

last reached a point where social conditions create a mind capable of

scientific outlook and inquiry. To foster and develop this spirit is the

social obligation of the present because it is its urgent need.

Yet the last word is not with obligation nor with the future. Infinite

relationships of man with his fellows and with nature already exist. The

ideal means, as we have seen, a sense of these encompassing continuities

with their infinite reach. This meaning even now attaches to present

activities because they are set in a whole to which they belong and

which belongs to them. Even in the midst of conflict, struggle and

defeat a consciousness is possible of the enduring and comprehending

whole.

To be grasped and held this consciousness needs, like every form of

consciousness, objects, symbols. In the past men have sought many

symbols which no longer serve, especially since men have been idolators

worshiping symbols as things. Yet within these symbols which have so

often claimed to be realities and which have imposed themselves as

dogmas and intolerances, there has rarely been absent some trace of a

vital and enduring reality, that of a community of life in which

continuities of existence are consummated. Consciousness of the whole

has been connected with reverences, affections, and loyalties which are

communal. But special ways of expressing the communal sense have been

established. They have been limited to a select social group; they have

hardened into obligatory rites and been imposed as conditions of

salvation. Religion has lost itself in cults, dogmas and myths.

Consequently the office of religion as sense of community and one's

place in it has been lost. In effect religion has been distorted into a

possession--or burden--of a limited part of human nature, of a limited

portion of humanity which finds no way to universalize religion except

by imposing its own dogmas and ceremonies upon others; of a limited

class within a partial group; priests, saints, a church. Thus other gods

have been set up before the one God. Religion as a sense of the whole is

the most individualized of all things, the most spontaneous, undefinable

and varied. For individuality signifies unique connections in the whole.

Yet it has been perverted into something uniform and immutable. It has

been formulated into fixed and defined beliefs expressed in required

acts and ceremonies. Instead of marking the freedom and peace of the

individual as a member of an infinite whole, it has been petrified into

a slavery of thought and sentiment, an intolerant superiority on the

part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many.

Yet every act may carry within itself a consoling and supporting

consciousness of the whole to which it belongs and which in some sense

belongs to it. With responsibility for the intelligent determination of

particular acts may go a joyful emancipation from the burden for

responsibility for the whole which sustains them, giving them their

final outcome and quality. There is a conceit fostered by perversion of

religion which assimilates the universe to our personal desires; but

there is also a conceit of carrying the load of the universe from which

religion liberates us. Within the flickering inconsequential acts of

separate selves dwells a sense of the whole which claims and dignifies

them. In its presence we put off mortality and live in the universal.

The life of the community in which we live and have our being is the fit

symbol of this relationship. The acts in which we express our perception

of the ties which bind us to others are its only rites and ceremonies.

INDEX

Absentmindedness, 173

Accidents, in history, 101;

in consequences, 49, 51, 206-208, 241, 253, 304, 309

Acquisition, 116-118, 143-148

Activity is natural, 118-123, 160, 226, 293

Aims, _see_ Consequences, Ends

Alexander M., 28, 36

Altruism, 133, 293

Analysis, 183

Anger, 90, 152

Appetite, 7, 275;

_see_ Impulse

Aristotle, 33, 109, 174, 224, 290

Arts, 15, 23, 71, 159-164, 263

Atomism moral, 243

Attitude, 41;

_see_ Habit

Authority, 2, 65, 72, 79, 187, 324

Benevolence, 133

Bergson, 73, 178, 245

Blame, 18, 121, 320

Causation, 18, 44

Calculation, 189, 199-209;

_see_ Deliberation

Casuistry, 240

Certainty, love of, 236

Character, defined, 38;

and consequences, 47

Childhood, 2, 64, 89, 96, 99

Choice, 192, 304, 311

Classes, 2, 82, 270

Classification, 131, 244

Codes, 103

Compensatory, 8, 30, 33, 257, 275

Conduct, _see_ Character, Habit, Impulse, Intelligence

Confidence, 139

Conflict, 12, 39, 66, 82, 194, 208, 217, 300

Conscience, 184-188, 314

Consciousness, 62, 179, 184, 208

Consequences, and motives, 45-47;

and aims, 225-229, 245-247

Conservatism, 66, 106, 168

Continuity, 12, 232, 239, 244, 259

Control, 21, 23, 37, 101, 139, 148, 266-270;

_see_ Accident

Conventions, 6, 97, 166

Crowd psychology, 60

Creative and acquisitive, 143-148

Customs and habits, 58-69;

and standards, 75-83;

rigidity, 103-105

Deliberation, 189-209;

as discovery, 216

Democracy, 61n, 66, 72

Desire, 24, 33, 194, 234, 299, 304;

and intelligence, 248-264;

object of, 249-252

Disposition, 41;

_see_ Habit

Docility, 64, 97

Dualism, 8, 12, 40, 55, 67, 71, 147, 275, 309

Economic man, 220

Economics, 9, 12, 120-124, 132, 143-148, 212-221, 270-273, 305

Education, 64, 72, 91, 107, 270, 320

Egotism, 7

Emerson, 100, 144

Emotion, 75, 83, 255, 264

End, 28, 34-37;

knowledge as, 187, 215;

nature of, 223-237;

of desire, 250, 261;

and means, 269-272;

_see_ Consequences, Means

Environments, 2, 10, 15, 18, 21, 51, 151, 159, 179, 316

Epicureanism, 205, 291

Equilibration, 179, 252

Evolution, 284-287, 297

Execution, of desires, 33-35

Expediency, 49, 189, 210;

_see_ Deliberation

Experience, 31, 245

Experimentation, moral, 56, 307

Fallacy, philosophic, 175

Fanaticism, 228

Fantasies, 158, 164, 236

Fear, 111, 132-133, 154-155, 237

Fiat of will, 29

Foresight, 204-206, 238, 265-270;

_see_ Deliberation, Ends

Freedom, 8, 165;

three phases of, 303-313;

_see_ Will

Functions, 18

Gain, 117

Goal, 260, 265, 274, 281, 287-289;

_see_ Evolution, Perfection

Good, 2, 44, 210-222, 274, 278

Goodness, 4-8, 16, 43-45, 48, 67, 227

Good-will, 44

Habits, place in conduct, 14-88;

and desire, 24;

as functions, 14;

as arts or abilities, 15, 64, 66, 71, 170;

and thought, 31-33, 66-69, 172-180, 182;

definition, 41;

and impulses, 90-98, 107-111;

and principles, 238

Harmony, natural, 159, 167, 298

Hedonistic calculus, 204

Hegel, 312

Helvetius, 106, 300

Herd-instinct, 4

History, 101, 110

Hobbes, 133

Human nature, 1;

and morals, 1-13, 295;

alterability, 106-124

Humility, 289

Hypocrisy, 6

Hypothesis, moral, 239, 243

Ideas, _see_ Ends, Thought

Ideals and Idealism, 2, 8, 50, 68, 77, 81, 99, 157, 166, 184, 233,

236, 255, 259-264, 274, 282-288, 301, 331

Imagination, 52, 163, 190-192, 204, 225, 234

Imitation, 66, 97, 132

Impulse, place in conduct, 89-171;

secondary, 89;

intermediary, 169-170;

as means of reorganization, 93, 102, 104, 179;

plastic, 95;

same as human instincts, 105n;

and habit, 107-111;

false simplification, 131-149;

and reason, 196, 254

Individualism, 7, 85, 93

Industry, 11

Infantilisms, 98

Instinct, not fixed, 149-168;

and knowledge, 178;

_see_ Impulse

Institutions, 9, 80, 102, 111, 166

Intelligence, 10, 13, 51, 299, 312;

place of, in conduct, 172-277;

relation to habits, 172-180, 228;

and desire, 248-264, 276

Interpenetration of habits, 37-39

Intuitions, 33, 188

James, Wm., 112, 179, 195

Justice, 18, 52, 198

Kant, 44, 49, 55, 245

Knowledge, moral, 181-188;

_see_ Conscience, Intelligence

Labor, 121, 144

Language, 58, 79, 95

Le Bon, 61

Liberalism, 305

Locke, 106

Marx, 154, 273, 300

Magic, 20, 26

Meaning, 37, 90, 151, 207, 262, 271, 280

Means, 20;

relation to ends, 25-36, 218-220, 251;

_see_ Habit

Mechanization, 28, 70, 96, 144

Mediation, 197

Mind, 61, 95;

and habit, 175-180

Mind and body, 30, 67, 71

Mitchell, W. C., 213

Moore, G. E., 241n

Morals, introduction, 40;

conclusion, as objective, 52;

of art, 167;

scope, 278-281

Motives, 43-45, 118-122, 213, 231, 329

Natural law and morals, 296-300

Necessity, 312

Nirvana, 175, 286

Non-moral, 8, 27, 40, 188, 230

Occult, 11

Oligarchy, 2-3

Optimism, 286-288

Organization, 306

Passion, 9, 193-196

Pathology, 4, 50

Perfection, 173-175, 223, 282

Pessimism, 286

Plato, 50, 78, 134, 290

Play, 159-164

Pleasure, 158, 200-205, 250

Posture, 32

Potentiality, 37

Power, will to, 140-142

Pragmatic knowing, 181-188

Principles, 2;

and tendencies, 49;

nature of, 238-247

Private, 9, 16, 43, 85

Process and product, 142-143, 280

Progress, 10, 21, 93, 96, 101, 105n;

in science, 149;

nature of, 281-288

Property, 116-118;

_see_ Economics

Psycho-analysis, 34, 86, 133, 153, 252

Psychology and moral theory, 12, 46, 91;

social, 60-63, 84-88;

current, 118, 135, 147, 155;

and scientific method, 150, 322-324

Punishment, 18

Puritanism, 5, 157

Purpose, _see_ Ends

Radicalism, 168

Reactions, 157

Realism, 176, 256, 298

Reason, pure, 31;

reasonableness, 67, 77, 193-198, 215

Rebellion, 166

Reconstruction, 164

Religion, 5, 263, 330-332

Responsibility, 315

Revolution, 10, 108

Right, 324-328

Romanticism, 6, 100, 166, 256

Routine, 42, 66, 70, 98, 211, 232, 238

Satisfaction, 140, 158, 175, 210, 213, 265, 285

Savagery, 93, 101, 103

Science of morals, 3, 11-12, 18, 56, 224, 243, 296, 321

Self, 16, 55, 85-87, 136-139, 217, 292, 314

Self-deception, 152, 252

Self-love, 134-139, 293

Sensations, 18, 31, 189

Sentimentalism, 17

Sex, 133, 150, 153, 164-165

Social, _see_ Environments

Social mind, 60-63

Socrates, 56

Soul, 85, 94, 138, 176

Spencer, 175, 297

Standards, 75-82, 241

Stimulation, 157

Stimulus and response, 199-207

Stuart, H. W., 218

Subjective, 16, 22, 27, 52, 54, 85, 202;

_see_ Dualism

Sublimation, 141, 156, 164, 194

Success, 6, 173, 254

Sumner, 77

Suppression, 156, 166

Synthesis, 183-184

Tendency, 49

Thought, 30, 67, 98, 108, 171, 190, 200, 222, 258;

vices of, 197

Tolstoi, 285, 312

Tools, 25, 32;

intellectual, 244

Transcendentalism, 50-52, 54, 81

Universality, 245-247

Utilitarianism, 50, 189, 199-209, 211, 221-222, 291

Virtues, 4, 16, 22;

_see_ Goodness

War, 110-115

Westermarck, 76

Will, and habits, 25, 29, 40-44, 259;

will to power, 140-143;

freedom of, 9

Williams, M., 273n

CORRECTIONS:

page original correction

v FUNCTIONS 13 FUNCTIONS 14

3 go back of the go back to the

8 by pleasureable excursions by pleasurable excursions

17 infliction of retibutive infliction of retributive

41 some-counteracting some counteracting

74 an ungoing splurge an ongoing splurge

90 wind on a mudpuddle wind on a mud puddle

92 the southsea islander the Southsea islander

123 to find fulfillment, to find fulfilment,

l45 it it quite possible it is quite possible

163 artificial exitents artificial exigents

211 its every presentation its every presentation.

212 with only one factor, with only one factor,

234 only a phantasy only a fantasy,

236 and phantasy-building, and fantasy-building,

262 is as unreasonble as is as unreasonable as

276 reporting and analysis reporting and analysis

325 how to satisfy desire. how to satisfy desire."

334 Phantasies, 158, Fantasies, 158,