THE CONFLICT OF INTERESTS BETWEEN MEN AND GROUPS. How

comes it, then, that men whose whole activity is a complication

of these powerful original tendencies to action should not

follow these native impulses freely? The answer is that men

not only live, but live together. Wherever human wants, as

in any group, even a small one, must be filled through

cooperation, accommodation, compromise, give-and-take,

adjustment must be made. "Man," to adapt Kant's phrase,

"cannot get on with his fellows; and he cannot get on without

them." Other men are necessary to help us fulfill our desires,

and yet our desires conflict with theirs. The dual fact of

cooperation and conflict is, in a sense, the root of the moral

problem. How is one individual to attain happiness without

at the same time interfering with the happiness of others?

How can the desires with which all men come into the world be

fulfilled for all men?

The adjustment of these problems is at once complicated

and facilitated by the fact that one of man's most powerful

native desires is, as we have already seen, his desire to please

other men. This extreme sensitivity to the praise and blame

of his fellows operates powerfully to qualify men's other

instincts. The ruthlessness with which men might otherwise

fulfill their desires is checked by the fact that within

themselves there is a conflict between the desire to win other sorts

of gratification, and the desire to win the praise of others and

to avoid their blame. This is simply one instance of what we

shall have occasion presently to note, that not only is there a

conflict between men in the fulfillment of their native instincts,

but within individuals an adjustment must be made between

competing impulses themselves.

The kinds of conflict that occur between men in the fulfillment

of their original native tendencies, are as various as

those tendencies and their combinations. It may be a conflict,

as in primitive life, between individuals seeking food

from the same source. It may be a clash in the pursuit of one

form or another of self-enhancement, enhancement which

can come to only some individual out of a group. The sex

instinct has afforded, in the case of the "eternal triangle,"

an example of the sharing by two people of an imperious

desire for precisely the same object of satisfaction. These

conflicts of interest are an inevitable result of the constitution

of human nature. It is perfectly natural that human beings

constituted with largely identical impulses should not

infrequently seek identical satisfactions. Groups as well as

individuals may come into collision, and for analogous reasons.

Class divisions over the distribution of wealth, international

wars over the distribution of territory, are sufficiently

familiar examples.

THE LEVELS OF MORAL ACTION--CUSTOM--THE ESTABLISHMENT

OF "FOLKWAYS." No anthropologist seems to have

discovered anywhere individuals living totally alone or in total

oblivion to the needs or interests of others. The human

necessity for coöperation and the human desire for companionship

bring individuals together. And individuals, once living

together, find some _modus vivendi_. Adjustments are, in

general, effected through established and authoritative "folkways."[1]

That is, certain acts come to be recognized as sanctioned

or as disapproved by the group. And these sanctions

or disapprovals are powerful in the control of human action.

The fact that individuals live and must live together is thus

the surest guarantee that they will not, once they have grown

old enough to communicate with other people, altogether follow

their immediate capricious desires.

[Footnote 1: Professor Sumner's convenient term.]

The reason for the power of social approvals and disapprovals

over individuals lies partly in the fact, already noted,

of the human being's extremely high sensitivity to the praise

and blame of others. But part of the explanation is social

rather than psychological. Even primitive tribes take special

pains to make public and pervasive the commands and prohibitions

which have become affixed to given acts. The mere

fact that an act _is_ customary is itself a sufficiently strong

guarantee that it will be practiced, since the human being

tends to perform, as he likes to perform, the habitual. But

in primitive life, the enforcement of custom is not left to the

influence of habit. The prohibitions and sanctions, both in

savage and in civilized society, are made into law. In the

former instance, there are most elaborate devices and institutions

for enforcing the traditional approvals and disapprovals.

Tabus are one important instrument of the enforcement

of social checks upon individual action; "tabus

are perhaps not so much a means for enforcing custom as they

are themselves customs invested with peculiar and awful

sanction. They prohibit or ban any contact with certain

persons or objects under penalty of danger from unseen

beings."

Through ritual certain acts come to be performed with

great regularity, thoroughness, detail, and solemnity. "In

primitive life it [ritual] is widely and effectively used to insure

for educational, political, and domestic customs obedience to

the group standards." In contemporary life, certain social

forms and observances, as well as certain religious ceremonies,

are examples of the enforcement of given acts, by ritual.

Praise and blame are equally effective enforcements of

certain types of action and of the avoidance of others. In

primitive life, praise is as likely as not to take the form of

art--decorations, costumes, songs, and tattoos. In modern

life, as we have seen, praise and blame take the form of public

opinion, as expressed by friends, acquaintances, newspapers,

and the like.[1] Praise and blame are not so fixed and rigid

in civilized communities; individuals move freely among diverse

groups whose standards differ. But group approval is

none the less effective.

[Footnote 1: See page 106.]

In primitive life and, though less patently, in contemporary

society, physical force is the ultimate power for enforcing

custom. Primitive chiefs are usually the strong men

of the tribes; and behind law in modern social organization

is the physical power of the State to enforce it.

MORALITY AS CONFORMITY TO THE ESTABLISHED. The beginning

of morals is thus to be found in conformity to the established

or customary. The criterion of morality is compliance--compliance

with the regular, the socially approved, the common

(that is, the communal) ways of action. Apart from

the consequences of violation, violation _per se_ is impure,

unholy, immoral. The terms are, in some cases, interchangeable.

In primitive life, violations are regarded with particular

horror, because they are frequently held to be not only

infringements of established ways of the tribe, but as offenses

against the gods, offenses which involve the whole tribe in

the retributive punishments of the gods. Violation of the

customary may, indeed, apart from arousing intellectual disapproval,

provoke a genuine revulsion of feeling on the part

of a group which has acquired certain fixed habits. We still

feel emotionally shocked by the infringement of a custom

that we do not intellectually value highly. If we examine our

moral furniture we find it made up of an immense number of

early acquired inhibitions or "checks." These not only prevent

us from violating, at least without qualms, standards to

which we have early been trained; they make deviations or

irregularities on the part of others appear as "immoral," even

before or without our intellectually classifying them as such.

There are adults, for example, who cannot outgrow the feeling

to which they have early been habituated, that card-playing

at any time, or baseball-playing on Sunday, is "evil," even

though they are no longer intellectually affected by scruples

in those respects. There is significance in the fact that by

speaking of "irregularities" in a man's conduct, we signify.

or imply moral disapproval.

The group, in any stage of civilization, rewards in some

form conformity to group standards, and punishes infringements

of them. Punishment may be nothing more tangible

than disrepute or ostracism; it may be as serious as execution.

Reward may range from a decoration or a chorus of praise

to all forms of compensation in the way of wealth, rank, and

power.

We have noted how sanctions and prohibitions are made

public and effective among the members of a group. But

it is further regarded as important by the group that these

customs, positive and negative, should be handed down from

the current to succeeding generations. In primitive life

transmission of the traditional practices is made a very special

occasion in the form of initiation ceremonies.

[Initiation ceremonies] are held with the purpose of inducting

boys into the privileges of manhood and into the full life of the group.

They are calculated at every step to impress upon the initiate his

own ignorance and helplessness in contrast with the wisdom and

power of the group; and as the mystery with which they are

conducted imposes reverence for the elders and the authorities of the

group, so the recital of the traditions and performances of the tribe,

the long series of ritual acts, common participation in the mystic

dance and song and decorations, serve to reinforce the ties that bind

the tribe.[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey and Tufts: _Ethics_, pp. 57-58.]

In civilized life, the whole institution of education, as

has been repeatedly emphasized in these pages, is designed

to transmit to the young those habits of thought, feeling,

and action which their influential elders wish to perpetuate.

As was noted in connection with man's gregariousness, the

normal becomes the "respectable," the regular becomes the

"proper." We still speak of things that it is not "nice" to

do. This tendency to identify the moral with the customary

is brought about through early habituating the members of

the group to the group standards and securing for them

thereby the emotional support that goes with all habitual

action.

Morality at this stage is clearly social in its origins and

its operations. The standards are group standards, and the

individual's single duty is obedience and conformity to the

established social sanctions.

THE VALUES OF CUSTOMARY MORALITY. The problem of morals

begins, as we have seen, in the collision of interests of similarly

constituted individuals living together. Adjustments of

conflicting interests are effected by group standards more or

less consciously transmitted and enforced by education, public

opinion, and law. We shall note presently that reflection

operates to modify and criticize these customary approvals

and disapprovals and to substitute more effective

standards. But whether on the level of custom or reflection,

the moral problem is essentially a _social_ problem, the problem

of the adjustment of the desires of individuals living together.

For an individual living altogether alone in the world there

could hardly be a moral problem, a question of "ought."

There might be problems of how to attain satisfaction, but no

sense of duty or moral obligation. Custom is the first great

stage through which morality passes, and the only form in

which morality exists for many people. In civilized life there

is, to be sure, considerable reflection and querying of custom,

but for the vast majority of men "right" and "wrong" are

determined by the standards to which their early education

and environment have accustomed them. In primitive life,

reflective criticism on the part of the individual is almost

unknown, and custom remains the great arbiter of action, the

outstanding source of social and moral control.

The values of custom as a moral force are, in both primitive

and civilized life, notable and not to be despised. Custom

is, in the first place, frequently rational in its origin. That

is, in general, those acts are made habitual in the group

which are associated with the general welfare. The customary

is the "right," but those activities most frequently

come to be regarded as "right" which are favorable to the

welfare of the group. In the literal struggle for existence

which characterizes primitive life, those tribes may alone

be expected to survive whose customs do promote the welfare

of their members. Persistence by a group in customs

like infanticide or excessive restriction of population will

result in their extinction. Customs are, for the most part,

standards of action established in the light of the conceptions

of well-being as understood at the time of their origin. The

intensity with which they are maintained, enforced, and

transmitted is an indication of how supremely and practically

important they are regarded by primitive groups.

Custom is valuable, if for nothing else, in the fact that

it makes possible some accommodation or adjustment of

competing individual interests--and on the basis of a widely

considered social welfare. Customs are _social_, they are

binding on all; they apply to all, and to the extent that they do

promote welfare, they promote, within limits, the welfare

of all. A man conforming to custom is thereby consulting

something other than his arbitrary caprice or personal desire.

On the level of customary morality, action through

conformity to custom is referred to a wider context than

unconsidered individual impulse; it is, for better or worse,

performed with reference to the group with whose standards

it is in conformity. It is the beginning of the socialization

of human interests. Though unconsciously, the man conforming

to a custom is considering his fellows, and the values

and traditions which have become current among them.

Customs, moreover, are the first invasion of moral chaos.

They establish enduring standards; they give common and

permanent bases of action. It is only through the establishment

and transmission of customary standards that one generation

is in any way superior to its predecessors. Customs,

in civilized life, include all the established effective

ways of civilization, its arts, its sciences, its industries, and

its useful modes of coöperation.

If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is

obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the

death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if a plague

took them off all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact

that some are born as some die, makes possible through transmission

of ideas and practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric.

Yet this renewal is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see

that genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized

group will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery.[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey: _Democracy and Education_, p. 4.]

In all levels of civilization, there is a conscious transmission

of those social habits which are regarded as of importance.

If this transmission were suddenly to cease, not

only would each generation have to start afresh, but it would

be altogether impossible for it to grow to maturity.

THE DEFECTS OF CUSTOMARY MORALITY. While custom is thus

valuable as a moral agent in establishing standards of social

life and rendering them continuous and enduring, a morality

that is completely based upon it has serious defects. Though

customs may start as allegedly or actually useful practices,

they tend, so strong is the influence of habit over the individual,

to outlive their usefulness, and may become, indeed,

altogether disadvantageous conventions. "Dr. Arthur Smith

tells of the advantage it would be in some parts of China to

build a door on the south side of the house, in order to get

the breeze, in hot weather." The simple and sufficient

answer to such a suggestion is, "We don't build doors on the

south side."

We have but to examine our own civilization to see that

there are many customs which are practiced not for any

good assignable reason, but simply because they have become

fixed and traditional. This is not to say that everything

that has become "merely conventional" is evil. It is

to suggest how, even in civilized society, groups may fall

into modes of action that are practiced simply because they

_have been_ practiced, rather than from any reasoned

consideration that they _should_ be. An illustration may be taken

from the experience of civilians drawn into the military

routine during the Great War. Men engaged in war work

at Washington in civilian capacities reported repeatedly

their impatience at the "red tape" of tradition with which

certain classes of business were conducted by the military

establishment. In law also, progressive practitioners and

students have pointed out the well-known fact of the immense

and beclogging ritual which has come to surround

legal procedure. It is the contention of critics of one or

another of our contemporary social habits and institutions

that traditionalism, the persistence of custom simply because

it _is_ custom, is responsible for many of the anachronisms

in our social, political, and industrial life. Space does

not permit here a detailed consideration of this question,

but it must be noted that social habits, when they are acquired,

as they are, unreflectively by the vast majority of

people, will tend to be repeated and supported, apart from

any consideration of their consequences. This tendency

toward social inertia, earlier noted in connection with habit,

can only be checked by reflective criticism and appraisement

of our current accustomed ways of action.[1]

[Footnote 1: See chapter on "Cultural Continuity."]

In the case of the group, too complete a domination by

custom is dangerous in that it sanctions and promotes the

continuance of habits that have become useless or harmful.

In the case of the individual, the determination of action by

custom alone has its specific dangers and defects. Even

though the individual happens to conform to useful customs,

his conformity is purely mechanical. It involves no intelligent

discrimination. Merely to conform places one at

the disposition of the environment in which one chances to

be. There is not necessary any intelligent analysis on the

part of the agent, of the bearings and consequences of his

actions. He takes on with fatal facility the color of his

environment. To all men, however critical and reflective, a

certain degree of conformity to custom is both necessary and

useful. There must, in any social enterprise, be some common

basis of action. Because taking the right-hand side of the road

is a convention, it is none the less a useful one. But reflective

acquiescence in a custom differs from merely mechanical

conformity. It transforms a custom from a blind mechanism

into a consciously chosen instrument for achieving good.

The trivial and the important in a morality based upon

custom receive the same unconsidered support. "Tithing

mint, anise, and cummin are quite likely to involve the neglect

of weightier matters of the law." Physical, emotional, and

moral energies that should be devoted to matters genuinely

affecting human welfare are lavished upon the trivial and the

incidental. We may come to be concerned more with manners

than with morals; with ritual, than with right. Customary

morality tends to emphasize, moreover, the letter

rather than the spirit of the law. It implies complete and

punctilious obedience, meticulous conformity. It emphasizes

form rather than content. Since conformity is the only

criterion, the appearance of conformity is all that is required.

The individual may fear to dissent openly rather than actually.

This is seen frequently in the ritualistic performance

or fulfillment of a duty in all its external details, rather

than the actual and positive performance of its content. It

is just such Pharisaism that is protested against in the Sermon

on the Mount:

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are;

for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners

of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you,

They have their reward....

But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions as the heathen do; for

they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.

Formalism in morality has periodically roused protest from

the Prophets down, and formalism is the result of an unconsidered

mechanical acquiescence in custom, or deliberate insistence

on traditional details when the spirit and motive are

forgotten.

CUSTOM AND PROGRESS. Emphasis upon customs as already

established tends to promote fixity and repetition, and to discourage

change regardless of the benefits to be derived from

specific changes. Custom is supported by the group merely

because it is custom; and the ineffective modes of life are

maintained along with those which are more useful. Progress

comes about through individual variation, and conformity

and individual variation are frequently in diametrical collision.

It is only when, in Bagehot's phrase, "the cake of

custom" is broken, that changes making for good have a

possibility of introduction and support. Where the only

moral sanctions are the sanctions of custom, change of

whatever sort is at a discount. For change implies deviation

from the ways of life sanctioned by the group, and

deviation is itself, in a custom-bound morality, regarded with

suspicion.

It is clear that complete conformity is impossible save in

a society of automata. There will be some individuals who

will not be able to curb their desires to fit the inhibitions

fixed by the group; there will be some who will deliberately

stand out against the group commands and prohibitions, and

assert their own imperious impulses against their fellows.

Where such men are powerful or persuasive they may indeed

bring about a transvaluation of all values; they may create

a new morality. There are geniuses of the moral as well

as the intellectual life, whose sudden insight becomes a

standard for succeeding generations.

There may, again, be more infringement of the moral code

than is overtly noticeable. Frequently, as in a Puritanical

régime, there may be, along with fanatic public professions

and practice of virtue, private violation of the conventional

moral codes. Our civilization is unpleasantly decorated with

countless examples of this discrepancy between professed

and practiced codes. The desire for praise and the fear of

blame and its consequences, the desire, as we say, for the

"good-will" and "respect of others," will lead to all the public

manifestations of virtue, "with a private vice or two to

appease the wayward flesh." The utterance of conventional

moral formulas by men in public, and the infringement of

those high doctrines in private, needs unfortunately not to

be illustrated. Molière drew Tartuffe from real life.

ORIGIN AND NATURE OF REFLECTIVE MORALITY. If the customs

current were adequate to adjust men to their environment,

reflection upon them might never arise. Reflection does

arise precisely because customs are not, or do not remain,

adequate. An individual is brought up to believe that certain

actions are good, and that their performance promotes

human happiness. He discovers, by an alert and unclouded

insight, that in specific cases the virtues highly regarded by

his group do not bring the felicitous results which they are

commonly and proverbially held to produce. He observes,

let us say, that meekness, humility, honesty are not modes

of adaptation that bring happy results. He observes, as

Job observed, that the wicked prosper; he notes that those

who follow the path called righteous bring unhappiness

to themselves and to others.

Or the individual's first reflection upon moral standards

may arise in his discovery that moral standards are not

absolute, that what is virtue in the Occident is vice in the

Orient, and _vice versa_. He discovers that those actions which

he regards as virtuous are so regarded by him simply because

he has been trained to their acceptance. Given another

environment, his moral revulsions and approvals might be

diametrically reversed. He makes the discovery that Protagoras

made two thousand years ago: "Man is the measure

of all things"; standards of good and evil depend on the

accidents of time, space, and circumstance. In such a discovery

an individual may well query, What _is_ the good? Not

what passes for good, but what is the essence of goodness?

What is justice? Not what is accredited justice in the courts

of law, or in the market-place, or in the easy generalizations

of common opinion. But what constitutes _justice_ essentially?

What is the _standard_ by which actions may be rated just and

unjust?

Where individuals are habituated to one single tradition

or set of customs, such questions may not arise. But where

one, through personal experience or acquaintance with history

and literature, discovers the multiplicity of standards

which have been current with regard to the just and the good

in human conduct, the search for some reasonable standard

arises. The great historical instance of the discovery of the

relativity and irrationality of customary morality and the

emergence of reflective standards of moral value is the Athenian

period of Greek philosophy. The Sophists pointed out

with merciless perspicuity the welter, the confusion, the

essential irrationality of current social and religious traditions

and beliefs. They went no further in moral analysis than

destructive criticism. They pointed out the want of authenticity

or reason in the traditional morality by which men lived.

Socrates went a step further. If current customs are not

authoritative, he said, let us find those that have and _ought_ to

have enduring authority over men. If the traditional standards

are proved to be futile and inefficacious, let us find the

unfaltering standards authenticated by reason. Let us substitute

relevant and adequate codes and creeds for those

which have by reason been shown to be unreasonable. Beneath

the multiplicity of contradictory and often vicious

customs, reason must be able to discover ways of life, which,

if followed, will lead men to eventual happiness.

There are thus two stages in the process of reflection upon

morals. In the first stage reflection does no more than to

point out the essential discrepancies and absurdities of the

current moral codes. Reflection upon morals begins by

being critical and querying. It starts when an individual,

a little more thoughtful and perspicacious than his fellows,

notes the discrepancies between the customs of different

men, and notes also the discrepancies between the threatened

results of the violation of traditional codes and the actual

results. He may then come to the cynic's conclusion that

morality is a myth and a delusion, and, in the words of the

Sophist in Plato's _Republic_, "justice is merely the right of

the stronger." Men in whom reflection or social sympathy

extends not very far may, as they frequently do, stop at this

point. These are the worldly wise; they are interested not

in goodness, truth, and justice, but in those effective

representations of those things publicly accounted good, true, and

just which will win them public approval and increase their

own wealth or power and position. Plato, in the _Republic_,

pictures the type with magnificent irony:

All those mercenary adventurers who, as we know, are called

sophist by the multitude, and regarded as rivals, really teach nothing

but the opinions of the majority to which expression is given when

large masses are collected, and dignify them with the title of wisdom.

As well might a person investigate the caprices and desires of some

huge and powerful monster in his keeping, studying how it is to be

approached, and how handled,--at what times and under what

circumstances it becomes most dangerous, or most gentle--on what

occasions it is in the habit of uttering its various cries, and further,

what sounds uttered by another person soothe or exasperate it,--and

when he has mastered all these particulars, by long-continued

intercourse, as well might he call his results wisdom, systematize

them into an art, and open a school, though in reality he is wholly

ignorant which of these humours and desires is fair, and which foul,

which good and which evil, which just and which unjust; and therefore

is content to affix all these names to the fancies of the huge

animal, calling what it likes good, and what it dislikes evil, without

being able to render any other account of them,--nay, giving the

titles of "just" and "fair" to things done under compulsion, because

he has not discerned himself, and therefore cannot point out to

others, that wide distinction which really holds between the nature

of the compulsory and the good.[1]

[Footnote 1: Plato: _Republic_ (Golden Treasury edition), pp. 209-10.]

Throughout human history, there have been periods of

individualism, of self-assertion against the traditional morality,

which have been marked by loss of moral restraints,

by a breakdown of the old standards without a substitution

of new and sounder ones. There has been, in the beginning

of almost every advance toward a new stage of moral valuation,

the accompaniment of liberty by license.

Reflection upon morals is not likely to produce immediately

good results. The established morality is at least established.

In so far as it is controlling in men's actions, it keeps those

actions ordered and regular. The traditional code by which

a man's life is governed may be a poor code, but it is more

satisfactory than no code at all. On discovering the inadequacy

of the morality by which he has lived, a man may reject

morality altogether. From that time forth he may have

no other standard than his own selfish desires. When a whole

society, as at the time of the Renaissance, throws its traditional

morality to the winds, it may make havoc of its freedom.

In place of a bad moral order it may cease to have any

moral order at all.

The discovery that the codes by which we have lived are

misleading and delusive may lead us to have nothing whatsoever

to do with morals. The individual may decide simply

to employ his superior insight in the exploitation of other people.

It is something of this point of view that is expressed

in the rampant individualism of Nietzsche and Max Stirner.

The customary morality is meant for slaves; the Superman

must stride above the signs and shibboleths by which men

are led, and create himself a morality more adequate to his

own superb and insolent welfare.

For the reconstruction of a morality more adequate than the

prevailing codes, more is demanded than merely a reflective

criticism of prevailing standards. Where reflection

goes no further than this, the net result is merely cynicism

and libertinism. For moral progress there is needed "a person

who is individual in choice, in feeling, in responsibility,

and at the same time social in what he regards as good, in his

sympathies and in his purposes."

REFLECTIVE RECONSTRUCTION OF MORAL STANDARDS. The second

stage of reflection upon morals consists in the reconstruction

of moral standards, in a deliberate discovery of codes by

which men can live together happily. It attempts to establish

standards of action which are enforced and recommended

not because they have been current and are currently

approved, but because they give promise, upon critical

examination, of contributing to human happiness. It must be

recalled here that reflective morality is not a substitute for

action based upon instinct or custom. It merely modifies these

types of action in the light of the desirable consequences which

would result from such modification.

The establishment of reflective standards is limited by two

general conditions. The first, previously mentioned, is that

human beings come into the world with certain fixed tendencies

to act. These original impulses may be obscured,

but cannot be abolished. Secondly, reflection upon morals

always must occur in a given social situation, that is, in a

situation where certain habits of mind, emotion and action,

are already in operation. Moral standards are not fresh

constructions; they are _reconstructions_. We may want to

_change_ current customs and traditions; but that is simply

another way of iterating the fact that they _are there to be

changed_. The moral reformer who would improve society

must take into account the fact that there exist among the

adult members of a generation, powerful habits, which may

be improved or amended, but which cannot be ignored. Any

attempt to improve men's ways of action starts within

processes of action already going on. It is not as if we could

hold up the processes of human life, and say, "Let us begin

afresh." The generation whose habits are to be changed

consists of living men, who are acting on the basis of

customs which have become intimately and powerfully controlling

in their lives. These customs, though they may not

be altogether satisfactory, are yet great social economies.

They give men certain determinate and efficacious modes of

action. Reflection must start with them and from them.

Unless men, furthermore, did act according to custom, they

would have to reflect in detail about every step of their

conduct. The aim of reflection is simply to transform existing

customs into more effective methods for achieving the good.

Reflection, indeed, must move within certain limits; it must

take certain things for granted. We have already seen that

reflection arises in a crisis of greater or lesser degree; it settles

ambiguities, resolves the obscure and doubtful phases of

situations. It is designed to secure adjustments where instinct and

habit are inadequate to adapt the individual to his environment.

But unless there were certain fixed, determined points

to start with, certain limits within which reflection could

operate, and which it could use as points of reference or

departure, all would be chaos, and reflection would be impossible.

It is precisely because we do take certain things as settled,

because, as the phrase runs, "they go without saying," that we

can think to any purpose whatsoever. Useful customs once

established provide precisely these fixed points. If arbitration

of labor disputes has become a fixed social habit, for

example, attention can be turned to ways and means. If

education has become a generally approved social habit, we

can spend our time on instruments and methods. Every useful

custom firmly established gives a basis of operations.

That much is settled; that much does not demand our alert

attention and inquiry. A society without any fixed habits

would be sheer anarchy. The aim of intelligent consideration

of morals is not to abolish customs, but to bring about their

modification so that they will be the most effective adjustment

of the individual and the group to their environment.

Indeed, in advanced societies, reflection may itself become

a custom, and the most highly valued of all. For where alert

and conscious criticism of existing folkways is habitual among

all the members of a society, that society is saved from

subjection through inertia to disserviceable habits. It acts as

a continual check and control; it prevents social and moral

stagnation. The habit of reflection upon conduct, if it could

be made generally current, would insure social progress.

For customs would be regarded merely as tools, as instruments

to be modified and adapted to new circumstances, as

provisional modes of attaining the good. Fixity and rigidity

in social life would give place to flexibility and wise continual

adaptation.

THE VALUES OF REFLECTIVE MORALITY. Some of these have

already been noted. We may briefly summarize the foregoing

discussion, and call attention to some additional values of a

morality based upon reason, as contrasted with a morality of

mere mechanical conformity to custom. It has already been

pointed out that intellectual preferences and valuations are

rooted in primary impulses; that is, our desires are anterior to

reflection. What we intellectually value and prefer has its

roots in primary impulses. Reason can discover how man may

attain the good; but what _is_ good is determined by the

desires with which man is, willy-nilly, endowed. Our preferences

are, within limits, fixed for us. As Santayana writes:

Reason was born, as it has since discovered, into a world already

wonderfully organized, in which it found its precursor in what is

called life, its seat in an animal body of unusual plasticity, and its

function in rendering that body's volatile instincts and sensations

harmonious with one another and with the outer world on which

they depend.[1]

[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Life of Reason_, vol. I, p. 40.]

Our chief aim in reflective behavior is to discover ways and

means by which a harmony may be achieved, a harmony of

those very instincts which, left to themselves, would be in

perpetual collision, frustrating and checking each other.

Reflection not only seeks to find a way of life in which no

natural impulse shall be frustrated, but it is through reflection

that desires are broadened, and that new desires arise. Out

of reflection upon social relations, which is in the first instance

prompted by man's innate gregariousness, arise the conception

of ideal friendship and the thirst for and movement

toward ideal society. Out of reflection upon the animal

passion of sex may rise Dante's beatific vision of Beatrice.

Conduct, consciously controlled, finds not only ways by which

animal desires may be fulfilled without catastrophe; it

transmutes animal desires into ideal values.

REFLECTION TRANSFORMS CUSTOMS INTO PRINCIPLES. In

reflective behavior, as contrasted with that which is controlled by

instinct and custom, there are established standards of action

to which the individual consciously conforms. That is, instead

of merely conforming to custom, an individual comes to

act upon principles, consciously avowed and maintained. A

man who sets up a standard of action in his professional or

business relations is not conforming to an arbitrary code; he is

living according to a way of life which he has deliberately and

consciously chosen. When a man acts upon principles because

he has consciously adopted them in view of the consequences

which he believes to be associated with them, he will

not make his standard an idol. Reflection establishes standards,

but it is not mastered by them. It is persistently critical.

Standards are tools, instruments toward the achievement

of the good. They are merely general rules, derived from

experience and retained so long as they bear desirable fruits

in experience. Moral laws are not regarded as arbitrary and

eternal, but as good only in so far as they produce good. A

virtue is a virtue because it is conducive to human well-being.

Standards are not absolute, but relative--relative to their

fruits in practice.

REFLECTIVE ACTION GENUINELY MORAL. Action is most genuinely

moral when it is reflective. It is only then that the

individual is a conscious and controlling agent. It is only

then that he knows what he is doing. When a machine performs

actions that happen to have useful results, we do not

speak of the action as moral or virtuous. And action in

conformity with custom is purely mechanical and arbitrary. An

individual who is merely conforming to the customary is no

more moral than an automaton. Given a certain situation,

he makes a certain response. It makes no difference that the

act happens to have fruitful consequences. It is not a matter

of individual choice, of conscious volition. Aristotle long ago

stated the indispensable conditions of moral actions:

It is necessary that the agent at the time of performing them

should satisfy certain conditions, _i.e._ in the first place that he should

know what he is doing, secondly that he should deliberately choose

to do it and to do it for its own sake, and thirdly that he should do

it as an instance of a fixed and immutable moral state.[1]

[Footnote 1: Aristotle: _Ethics_, book II, p. 42 (Weldon translation).]

Only when the individual is aware of the consequences of

his action, and deliberately chooses those consequences, is

there any individuality, any exhibition of choice--in other

words, any moral value in the act. When an act is prompted

by mere habit and custom, we have an evidence of an individual's

environment rather than of his character. Creatures

thus moved by capricious and arbitrary impulse are hardly

persons, and certainly not personalities. They are played

upon by every whimsicality of circumstance; their own character

makes no difference at all in the world in which they live.

To act reflectively is to be the controlling rather than the

controlled element in a situation. Action guided by intelligence

is freed from the enslavement of passion, prejudice, and

routine. It becomes genuinely free. The individual, emancipated

from emotion, sense, and circumstance, from the accidental

environment in which he happens to be born, is in command

of his conduct. "Though shakes the magnet, steady is

the pole." Morally, at least, he is "the master of his fate, the

captain of his soul."

REFLECTION SETS UP IDEAL STANDARDS. Reflection constantly

sets up ideal standards by which current codes of conduct are

judged and corrected. It is clear that ideals of life, even when

sincerely entertained, are not always possible of immediate

fulfillment. Theory tends continually to outrun practice,

since human reflection tends to set up goals in advance of its

achievement. For many individuals, anxious to attain immediate

self-enhancement, the current cones are not criticized

at all, but are taken for granted, as inevitable and irrefragable

bases of operation.

Many men, perhaps after a first flush of altruistic rebellion

in adolescence, settle down with more or less complacency to

the current moral codes. They do in Rome as the Romans do.

They may have an intellectual awareness of the crassness, the

stupidity, the essential injustice and inadequacy of the codes

by which men in contemporary society live, but they may also,

out of selfish preoccupation with their own interests, let things

go at that. If the established ways are not as they ought to

be, at least they are as they are. And since the current system

is the one by which a man must live, assent is the better

part of wisdom. There are comparatively few who persist in a

criticism of prevailing standards, or who are troubled very

much beyond their early twenties by a tormenting conviction

that things are not done as they ought to be done. It is from

the few who realize intellectually the inadequacies of prevailing

customs, and are emotionally disturbed by them, that

moral criticism arises. And it is only by such criticism that

moral progress is made possible. "The duty of some exercise

of discriminating intelligence as to existing customs, for the

sake of improvement and progress, is thus a mark of reflective

morality--of the régime of conscience as over against custom."[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey and Tufts: _Ethics_, pp. 181-82.]

Reflection is thus the process by which progress is made

possible, although, as we shall presently see, it is not thereby

insured. The function of intelligence is precisely to indicate

anticipated goods, "to imagine a future which is the projection

of the desirable in the present." Even the best ordered

life or society reveals some maladjustment, some remove,

near or far, from perfection. It is the business of

reflection and imagination to note the discrepancy between

what is, and what ought to be, and assiduously to foster the

vision of the latter, so that in the light of that imagined good,

men's ways of life may be amended.

Nor does the setting-up of ideal standards mean the construction

of fruitless Utopias. Reflection upon the present

ways of life and the prospect of their improvement does not

mean a mere wistful yearning after better things. It means

careful inquiry into those elements of established ways which

may be incorporated into the construction of the ideal. It

means the resolute application of intelligence to an analysis of

present maladjustments in the interests of preserving out of

inherited and current ways those factors which point towards

the goal desired. It means to be eager for perfection, and

sensitive to current imperfections. Moral progress demands a

vision of the desirable future, and a persistent and discriminating

reflection upon the means of its attainment out of the

materials of the present.

THE DEFECTS OF REFLECTIVE MORALITY. Reflection, as already

pointed out, tends to stop with merely destructive criticism.

Provoked by maladjustment and imperfection, it frequently

goes no further than to note these, with cynicism or despair.

Criticism of established customs and ways of life frequently

rests with the exhibition of absurdities in men's ways, finding

refuge in laughter or rebellion. There is no one so cynical as

the man who has been recently wakened out of dogmatic and

innocent faith in the traditions to which he has been reared.

The child receives from the herd the doctrines, let us say, that

truthfulness is the most valuable of all the virtues, that honesty is

the best policy, that to the religious man death has no terrors, and

that there is in store a future life of perfect happiness and delight.

And yet experience tells him with persistence that truthfulness as

often as not brings him punishment, that his dishonest playfellow has

as good if not a better time than he, that the religious man shrinks

from death with as great a terror as the unbeliever, is as broken-hearted

by bereavement, and as determined to continue his hold

upon this imperfect life rather than trust himself to what he declares

to be the certainty of future bliss.... Who of us is there who cannot

remember the vague feeling of dissatisfaction, the obscure and elusive

sense of something being wrong, which is left by these and

similar conflicts?[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter: _Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War_, p. 49.]

A little reflection is, in morals, a dangerous thing. It discovers

difficulties, and does not solve them. It finds that

human life is darkly strewn with hypocrisies, with shams, with

makeshifts and compromises. And having made this discovery,

it sighs or satirizes or forgets. It is notorious with

what frequency men "go to pieces" when they are loosed from

the moorings of their childhood moralities, before they have

had a chance to acquire new and more reasonable constraints.

Plato, in protesting that young men should not study philosophy

too early, has well described the dangers of shallow

analysis.[2]

[Footnote 2: "And will it not be one great precaution to forbid

their meddling with it [philosophy] while young? For I suppose

you have noticed, that whenever boys taste dialectic for the

first time, they pervert it into an amusement, and always employ

it for purposes of contradiction, and imitate in their own persons

the artifices of those who study refutation,--delighting, like

puppies, in pulling and tearing to pieces with logic any one who

comes near them.... Hence, when they have experienced many triumphs

and many defeats, they fall, quickly and vehemently, into an utter

disbelief of their former sentiments: and thereby both they and

the whole cause of philosophy have been prejudiced in the eyes

of the world." (Plato: _Republic_, Golden Treasury edition,

p. 267.)]

THE INADEQUACY OF THEORY IN MORAL LIFE. Reflection upon

morals, even when it goes beyond the stage of criticism and

proceeds to the reconstruction of habits and customs upon a

more reasonable basis, is yet inadequate. However logically

convincing a code of morals may be, it is not efficacious simply

as logic. In Aristotle's still relevant words:

It may fairly be said then that a just man becomes just by doing

what is just and a temperate man becomes temperate by doing what

is temperate, and if a man did not so act, he would not have so much

as a chance of becoming good. But most people, instead of doing

such actions, take refuge in theorizing; they imagine that they are

philosophers and that philosophy will make them virtuous; in fact

they behave like people who listen attentively to their doctors, but

never do anything that their doctors tell them. But it is as improbable

that a healthy state of the soul will be produced by this kind of

philosophizing as that a healthy state of the body will be produced

by this kind of medical treatment.[1]

[Footnote 1: Aristotle: _Ethics_, book II, chap. III,

pp. 42-43 (Weldon translation).]

Moral standards, in order to be effective, must have emotional

support and be constantly applied. Men must be in

love with the good, if good is to be their habitual practice.

And only when the good is an habitual practice, can men be

said to be living a moral life instead of merely subscribing

verbally to a set of moral ideals. Justice, honesty, charity,

mercy, benevolence, these are names for types of behavior,

and are real in so far as they do describe men's actions. As

Aristotle says, in another connection: "A person must be

utterly senseless if he does not know that moral states are

formed by the exercise of the powers in one way or another."

The virtues are not static or frozen; they are names we give

to varieties of action, and are exhibited, as they exist, _only_ in

action.[2]

[Footnote 2: "But the virtues we acquire by first exercising them,

as is the case with all the arts, for it is by doing what we ought

to do when we have learned the arts, that we learn the arts

themselves; we become, _e.g._ builders by building, and harpists

by playing the harp. Similarly it is by doing just acts that we

become just, by doing temperate acts that we become temperate,

by doing courageous acts that we become courageous.... Again

the causes and means by which any virtue is produced, and by

which it is destroyed, are the same; and it is equally so with

any art; for it is by playing the harp that both good and bad

harpists are produced, and the case of builders and all other

artisans is similar, as it is by building well that they will

be good builders, and by building badly that they will be bad

builders.... It is by acting in such transactions as take place

between man and man that we become either just or unjust. It is

by acting in the face of danger and habituating ourselves to

fear or courage that we become either cowardly or courageous.

It is much the same with our desires and angry passions. Some

people become temperate and gentle, others become licentious

and passionate, according as they conduct themselves in one way

or another way in particular circumstances." (Aristotle:

_Ethics_, pp. 35-36, Weldon translation.)]

The mere preaching of virtue will thus not produce its

practice. Those standards which reflection discovers, however

useful in the guidance of life, are not sufficient to improve

human conduct. They must, as noted above, be emotionally

sanctioned to become habitual, and, on the other

hand, only if they are early acquired habits, will the emotions

associated with them be pleasant rather than painful.

"Accordingly the difference between one training of habits

and another from early days is not a light matter, but is serious

or rather all-important."[1] Ideals of life, when they remain

mere closet-ideals, are interesting academic specimens,

but are hardly effective in the helpful amendment of the lives

of mankind. "Whoever contemplates the world in the light

of an ideal," writes Bertrand Russell, "whether what he seeks

be intellect or art, or love, or simple happiness, or all together,

must feel a great sorrow in the evils which men allow needlessly

to continue and--if he is a man of force and vital

energy--an urgent desire to lead men to the realization of

the good which inspires his creative vision." Great thinkers

upon morals have not been content to work out interesting

systems which were logically conclusive, abstract methods of

attaining happiness. They have worked out their ethical

systems as genuinely preferred ways of life, they have offered

them as solutions of the difficulties men experience in controlling

their own passions and in adapting their desires to the

conditions which limit their fulfillment.

[Footnote 1: Aristotle: _loc. cit._, p. 36.]

"Our present study," writes Aristotle, "is not, like other

studies, purely speculative in its intention; for the object

of our inquiry is not to know the nature of virtue, but to

become ourselves virtuous, as that is the sole benefit which

it conveys."[2] Reflection upon morals can map out the road;

it cannot make people travel it. For that, an early habituation

to the good is necessary.

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 36.]

But it should be noted further that the greatest ethical

reformers have not been those who have convinced men

through the impeccability of their logic. They have been

rather the supreme seers, the Hebrew prophets, Christ, Saint

Francis, who have won followers not so much by the conclusiveness

of their demonstration as through the persuasive

fervor and splendor of their vision.

THE DANGER OF INTELLECTUALISM IN MORALS. There has been

throughout the history of ethical theory a tendency to oversimplify

life by cramping it into the categories fixed by reason.

Reflection tends to set up certain standards which the infinite

variety of human experience tends to outrun. In the mere

fact of setting up generalizations, reflection is arbitrary. Any

generalization, by virtue of the very fact that it does apply

to a wide variety of situations, must forego concern with the

peculiar colors and qualities inhering in any specific experience.

Various ethical writers have set up general rules, which

they have attempted to apply to life with indiscriminate

ruthlessness. They have tried to shear down the endless rich

variety of human situations to fit the categories which they

assume to start with. Unsophisticated men have complained

with justice against the recurrent attempts of moralists to set

up absolute laws, standards, virtues, which were to be applied

regardless of the specific circumstances of specific situations.

It was such formalism that Aristotle protested against

throughout his _Ethics_.

There is the same sort of uncertainty with regard to good things,

as it often happens that injuries result from them; thus there have

been cases in which people were ruined by wealth, or again by courage.

As our subjects [moral inquiries] then and our premises are of

this nature, we must be content to indicate the truth roughly, and

in outline.[1]

[Footnote 1: Aristotle: _loc. cit._, pp. 3-4.]

He points out repeatedly that situations are specific, that

laws or generalization can only be tentatively made.

Questions of practice and expediency no more admit of invariable

rules than questions of health. But if this is true of general reasoning

upon Ethics, still more true is it that scientific exactitude is impossible

in reasoning upon particular ethical cases. They do not fall

under any art or any law, but the agents themselves are always

bound to pay regard to the circumstances of the moment, as much

as in medicine or navigation.[1]

[Footnote 1: Aristotle: _loc. cit._, p. 37.]

Instead of framing absolute general rules, Aristotle points

out those specific conditions which must be taken into account

in any act that can, without quibbling, be called good

or virtuous.

It is possible to go too far, or not to go far enough, in respect of

fear, courage, desire, anger, pity, and pleasure and pain generally,

and the excess and the deficiency are alike wrong; but to experience

these emotions at the right time, and on the right occasions and

towards the right persons, and for the right causes and in the right

manner is the mean or the supreme good, which is characteristic of

virtue.[2]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_. p. 46.]

Reflection thus unduly simplifies the moral problem by

setting up general standards which are not adequate to the

multiple variety of specific situations which constitute human

experience. But in reasoning upon the conduct of life, there

has been displayed, furthermore, by ethical writers an inveterate

tendency to identify the processes of life with the process

of reason. One may cite as a classic instance of this point

of view the ethical theory of Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians.

According to the Utilitarians human beings judged

acts in terms of their utility, as measured in the amount of

pleasure and pain produced by an action. The individual

figured out the pleasures and pains that would be the consequences

of his action. We shall in the next section examine

this point of view in more detail; we are referring to it here

simply as an illustration of intellectualizing of morals. Few

individuals go through anything remotely resembling the

"hedonic calculus" laid down by Bentham.[3] The individual

is not a static being, mathematically considering the amount

of pleasure and pain associated with the performance of specific

actions. We are, in the vast majority of cases, prompted

to specific responses, not by any mathematical considerations

of pleasures and pains, but by the immediate urgency of

instinctive and habitual desires. Reflection arises in the

process of adjustment of competing impulses, in the effecting of

a harmony between various desires that are much more primary

and fundamental than the reflection that arises upon

them. We may largely agree with McDougall when he writes:

[Footnote 3: The hedonic calculus of Bentham was, briefly, the

following: "Every proposed act is to be viewed with reference

to its probable consequences, in (1) intensity of pleasures and

pains, (2) their duration, (3) their certainty or uncertainty,

(4) their nearness or remoteness, (5) their fecundity, _i.e._,

the tendency of a pleasure to be followed by others, or a pain

by other pains; (6) their purity, _i.e._, the tendency of a

pleasure to be followed by pains and _vice versa_; (7) their extent,

that is, the number or range of persons whose happiness is

affected--with reference to whose pleasures and pains each one of

the first six items ought in strictness also to be calculated.

Then sum up all the pleasures which stand to the credit side of

the account; add the pains which are the debit items, or liabilities,

on the other; then take their algebraic sum, and the balance of

it on the side of pleasure will be the good tendency of the act

upon the whole." (Dewey and Tufts: _Ethics_, pp. 275-76.)

We may say, then, that directly or indirectly, the instincts are the

prime movers of all human activity; by the conative or impulsive

force of some instinct (or of some habit derived from an instinct)

every train of thought, however cold and passionless it may seem,

is borne along towards its end, and every bodily activity is initiated

and sustained. The instinctive impulses determine the ends of all

activities and supply the driving power by which all mental activities

are sustained; and all the complex intellectual apparatus of the most

highly developed mind is but a means towards these ends, is but the

instrument by which these impulses seek their satisfactions, while

pleasure and pain do but serve to guide them in their choice of the

means.

Take away these instinctive dispositions with their powerful impulses,

and the organism would become incapable of activity of

any kind; it would lie inert and motionless, like a wonderful clockwork

whose mainspring had been removed, or a steam-engine whose

fires had been drawn.[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _Social Psychology_, p. 44.]

Reflection is last rather than first; it is provoked and sustained

by instinctive desires, and is the means whereby they

may be fulfilled.

TYPES OF MORAL THEORY. Reflection upon morals produces

certain characteristic types of moral theory. These may be

classified, although, because of the complexity of factors

involved in any moral theory, cross-division is inevitable. But

in the long history of human reflection upon a reasonable way

of life, certain divisions stand out clearly. The first great

contrast that may be mentioned is that existing between Absolutism

and Relativism, the contrast, namely, between theories

of morals that regard right and wrong as absolute and

_a priori_, unconditioned by time, place, and circumstance; and

theories of morals that judge the rightness and wrongness of

acts in terms of their consequences, in the happiness or welfare

of human beings, however that be conceived. These two

points of view represent radically different temperaments and

differ radically in their fruits. The contrast will stand out

more clearly after a brief discussion of each.

ABSOLUTISM. Absolutistic moralities are distinguished by

their maintenance of the fundamental moral idea of Duty,

Duty consisting in an obligation to conform to the Right.

Implied in this obligation of absolute conformity is the

conception that the Right is unalterable, universally binding, and

imperative. Good and evil are not discoverable in experience,

but are standards to which human beings must in experience

conform. The right is not simply the desirable--frequently

it is, from the standpoint of impulses and emotion,

the undesirable; but it is a universal, an _a priori_ standard to

which human beings must in experience conform. Morals

are "eternal and immutable" principles, absolutely irrefutable

and indefeasible in experience. We shall, in approaching

the problem from the standpoint of moral knowledge, see

that most absolutist moral philosophers have also supposed

that these eternal principles of right action are intuitively

perceived. What concerns us in this connection, however, is the

nature of this absolutistic conception, and its bearings on the

governance of human conduct.

According to the absolutist, the "goodness" of an act is

not at all affected by its immediate consequences. The value

of a good or a moral act does not consist in its results. The

moral value of an act consists in the "good-will" of the agent,

and the "good-will" of the agent consists in his willing and

conscious conformity to the absolute moral principle involved.

"Nothing is fundamentally good but the good-will." That is,

an act to be moral, must be the conscious conformity of a

rational agent to the moral law, which he recognizes to be

morally binding. To Kant, the classic exponent of this position,

an act performed out of mere inclination, if not immoral,

certainly was not moral. A moral act could only flow from

reason, and reason would dictate to an individual conformity

to the moral law, which was a law of reason. Conduct that

is determined by mere circumstance is not moral conduct.

Morality is above the domain of circumstance. And the

moral agent is above the defeats and compromises imposed

by time and place. He is a free agent, that is, morally free.

He accepts no commands, except those of reason. A man, in

following impulse or being dictated to by circumstance, is a

mere animal or a machine. He is only a reasonable, that is, a

moral being, when he conforms to the laws which are above

time and place and circumstance, and above the whirls and

eddies of personal inclination.

Concretely, one may take the absolutistic attitude toward

a specific virtue: honesty. The morality of telling the truth

consists in a conscious conformity to the moral standard of

honesty in the face of all deflections of inclination and

particular situations. It makes no iota of difference what the

result of telling the truth in a particular instance may be.

It makes no difference what urgent and plausible and practically

decent reason one has for not telling the truth. The

truth must be told, as justice must be done, though the

heavens fall. We have a case, let us suppose, where telling

bad news to a very sick man may kill him. That temporally

disastrous consequence is, from an absolutistic point of view,

a totally irrelevant consideration, as is also the pain we feel

in telling the truth under such conditions. But the single

moral course is clear; there is no alternative; in absolutistic

morals there are no extenuating circumstances. The truth

must be told, whatever be the consequences. For to tell

the truth is a universal moral law, and conformity to that law

a universal moral obligation.

The defects of this position, if they are not obvious from

its bare statement, will become clearer from the analysis of

the relativist or teleological positions. But its specific virtues

deserve attention. The Kantian or absolutistic position, by

its emphasis on the indefeasible and unwavering character of

moral action, suggests something that rouses admiration from

common sense, unsophisticated by moral theory. We do not

think highly of the man who is at the mercy of every chance

appetite, or every casual incident. Morality must be constituted

of more enduring stuff. We do not deeply admire the

caliber of a man who yields to every pressing exigency,

surrendering thereby every ideal, principle, or value, the

attainment of which demands some postponement or some privation

of the fulfillment of immediate desire. The man who compromises

his political ideals in the attainment of his personal

success, is a scornful figure morally. And we estimate more

highly the character of an individual who can persist in the

strenuous attainment of an ideal in the face of the counter-inclination

of passing pleasures. In its emphasis on the autonomy

and integrity of moral action, even its opponents credit

the Kantian or absolutistic position with having hit upon a

genuinely moral aspect of human action. It is, as we shall

see, in the rigidity and formalism of its conception, in its

fanatical allegiance to _a priori_ standards, and its absolute

sanctification of given ways of action, that the theory is

questionable.

RELATIVISTIC OR TELEOLOGICAL MORALITY. Contrasted with the

theories of morals that maintain that right and wrong are

absolute and eternal principles unaffected by time, place, and

circumstance, are those moral philosophies which set out

explicitly to discover a way of life by which human happiness

in this world of time and place and circumstance may be

attained. To know what is the supreme good, and to discover

what are the means of its attainment, are, as Aristotle

long ago and justly observed, of great importance in the regulation

of life. It is this knowledge and discovery that constitute,

according to Aristotle, the business of ethics. Regarding

this "supreme good," we may quote his own expressions:

We speak of that which is sought after for its own sake, as more

final than that which is sought after as a means to something else;

we speak of that which is never desired as a means to something else

as more final than the things which are desired both in themselves

and as means to something else; and we speak of a thing as absolutely

final, if it is always desired in itself and never as a means to something

else.

It seems that happiness preëminently answers to this description,

as we always desire happiness for its own sake, and never as a means

to something else, whereas we desire honour, pleasure, intellect, and

every virtue, partly for their own sakes,... but partly also as being

means to happiness, because we suppose they will prove the instruments

of happiness. Happiness, on the other hand, nobody desires

for the sake of these things, nor indeed as a means to anything else

at all.[1]

[Footnote 1: Aristotle: _loc. cit._, pp. 13-14.]

Happiness may, as Aristotle observes, be differently conceived

by different people. To some it may mean a life of

sensual enjoyment; to some men a life of money-making.

But it is the attainment of _complete_ satisfaction and

self-realization by the individual that ethical theories should

promote; for such self-realization constitutes happiness. It is

sufficient here to point out that all so-called "teleological"

or "relativistic" moralities, insist that the morality of an

action is not determinable _a priori_, or absolutely. They are

_relativistic_ in the sense that they insist on taking into account

the specific circumstances of action in the determination of its

moral value. They are _teleological_ in that they insist on measuring

the moral value of an action in terms of its consequences

in human well-being or happiness, however those be conceived.

To revert to the illustration used in connection with the discussion

of Absolutism, to lie in order to save a life would, on

this basis, be construed as good rather than evil.

UTILITARIANISM. One of the classic statements of relativistic

and teleological morality is Utilitarianism. According to the

Utilitarians the criterion of the worth of a deed was to be

found in an estimation of the relative pleasures and pains produced

by it. The view is thus stated by John Stuart Mill:

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or

the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in

proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to

produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure,

and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of

pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the

theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it

includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this

is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do

not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality

is grounded--namely, that pleasure and freedom from pain are the

only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which

are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable

either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to

the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Utilitarianism_ (London, 1907), pp. 9-10.]

Simply stated, Utilitarianism says: "Add together all the

pleasures promised by a contemplated course of action, then

the pains, and note the difference; the nature of the difference

will determine whether the course is right or wrong." Pleasures

and pains are thus conceived as being open to quantitative

determination. Action is determined by mathematical

calculation in advance of the pleasure and pain produced by

any action. Bentham's name is particularly associated with

the dictum, "the greatest happiness for the greatest number."

But two implications of this doctrine must be taken into

account, at least as Bentham interpreted it. The greatest

happiness meant the maximum amount of pleasure. And

each individual could desire the greatest happiness, only in

so far as it contributed to his own happiness or pleasure.

And, for Bentham, as for all strict Utilitarians, there was no

qualitative distinction in the amounts of pleasure. "The

quantity being the same," said Bentham, "pushpin is as good

as poetry."

Utilitarianism is here considered as an instance of a type

of ethical theory that set human happiness as the end, and

made its judgments of actions depend on their consequences

in human welfare. It must be pointed out, however, that its

conception of happiness was dependent on a psychology now

almost unanimously recognized as false: Bentham's assumption

that the _reason_ human beings performed certain actions

was _because_ they desired certain pleasures, completely

reverses the actual situation. It puts, as it were, the cart

before the horse. Pleasure is psychologically the accompaniment,

what psychologists call the "feeling tone" of the satisfaction

of any instinctive or habitual impulse. Human beings

have certain native or habitual tendencies to action, and

pleasure attends the performance of these. It is not because

we want the pleasure of eating, that we decide to eat;

we want to eat, and eating is therefore pleasant.

If the good Samaritan cared about the present feelings or the

future welfare of the man fallen among thieves, it would no doubt give

him some pleasure to satisfy that desire for his welfare; if he had

desired his good as little as the priest and the Levite, there would

have been nothing to suggest the strange idea that to relieve him, to

bind up his nasty wounds, and to spend money upon him, would be

a source of more pleasure to himself than to pass by on the other side

and spend the money upon himself. In the case of the great majority

of our pleasures, it will probably be found that the desire is the

condition of the pleasure, not the pleasure of the desire.[1]

[Footnote 1: Rashdall: _Ethics_, p. 18.]

As has been previously pointed out in this and other chapters,

action does not start with reflection upon pleasures, or,

for that matter, upon anything else. Action is fundamentally

initiated by instinctive promptings, or the promptings of

habit. Satisfaction or pleasure attends the fulfillment of any

inborn or acquired impulse, and dissatisfaction or pain its

obstruction or frustration. Apart from the satisfactions

experienced in the fulfillment in action of such impulses,

pleasure does not exist. Actions, situations, persons, or ideas

can be pleasant to us, but "pleasure" as a separate objective

entity cannot be said to exist at all. The Utilitarians, again,

made the intellectualist error of supposing that men dispassionately

and mathematically weighed the consequences of

their actions, whereas their relative impulsions to action are

determined by the instincts they inherit and the habits they

have already acquired.

Despite its false psychology, Utilitarianism does stand out

as one of the great classic attempts to build an ethical theory

squarely designed to promote human happiness. An execution

of the same worthy intention, more acceptable to those

trained in the modern psychology of instinct, is that moral

conception variously known as Behaviorism, or Energism,

a point of view maintained by thinkers from Aristotle to

Professor Dewey in our own day. All behavioristic theories

take the position that in order to find out what is good for

man, we must begin by finding out what man is. In order to

discover what will give man satisfaction, we must discover

what his natural impulses and capacities are. In the utilization

and fulfillment of these will man find his most complete

realization and happiness. The standard of goodness, therefore,

is measured in terms of the extent to which action promotes

a complete and harmonious utilization of natural impulses

and natural capacities. Ethics, from such a viewpoint,

cannot set up arbitrary standards, but must form its standards

by inquiries into the fundamental and natural needs and

desires of men. Instead of laying down eternal principles to

which human beings must be made to conform, it must derive

its principles from observations of human experience, and test

them there. The good is what does good; the bad what does

harm. And what is good for men, and bad for men, depends

not on rigid _a priori_ intellectual standards, but on the original

nature which is each man's inheritance.

To base ethics upon an analysis of the conditions of human

nature, as scientific inquiry reveals it, carries with it two

implications. It means that nothing that is shown to be a part of

man's inevitable original equipment can with justice to man's

welfare be ruled out. Every instinct taken by itself is as good

as any other. It is only when one instinct competes with

another, so that excessive indulgence of one, as, for example,

that of sex or pugnacity, interferes with all a man's other

instincts or interests (or with those of other men), that an

instinct becomes evil. It means, secondly, that since individuals

differ, and since situations are infinitely various and

individual, no arbitrary and fixed laws can be laid down as

fundamental eternal principles.

MORAL KNOWLEDGE. The contrast between the two types

of morality that have been historically current may be

approached from the standpoint of moral knowledge. That is,

moral theories may be classified on the basis of their answer

to the question: How do moral judgments arise? The chief

contrast to be drawn is that between Intuitionalism on the

one hand, and Empiricism on the other. Intuitionalism holds

briefly that the moral quality of an act is intuitively perceived,

and is recognized apart from experience of its consequences.

The empirical theory holds that moral judgments come to be

attached to acts as a result of experience, and particularly

experiences of the approval and disapproval of other people.

The contrast will again become clearer by a discussion of each

theory separately.

INTUITIONALISM. Intuitionalism takes two chief forms. The

first, Perceptual Intuitionalism, as Sidgwick calls it, holds that

the rightness of each particular act is immediately known.

The second, called by the same author Dogmatic Intuitionalism,

holds that the general laws of common-sense morality

are immediately perceived. The popular view of "conscience,"

well illustrates the first-mentioned position of the

Intuitionalist.

We commonly think of the dictates of conscience as relating to

particular actions, and when a man is bidden in a particular case to

"trust to his conscience," it commonly seems to be meant that he

should exercise a faculty of judging morally this particular case

without reference to general rules, and even in opposition to

conclusions obtained by systematic deduction from such rules.[1]

[Footnote 1: Sidgwick: _Methods of Ethics_ (4th edition), p. 99.]

Conscience, this organ of immediate moral perception, is

frequently taken to be divinely given at birth. There is no

one so certain or immovable as the man whose actions are

dictated by his "conscience." He does not have to think

about his actions; he knows immediately what is right and

what is wrong. The intuitionalist does not go into the natural

history of scruples for or against the performance of

certain actions. He takes these immediate aversions or

promptings to act as the revelations of immediate and unquestionable

knowledge, frequently presumed to be divinely implanted.

Most Intuitionalists hold not that we experience an

immediate intuition of the rightness or wrongness of action

in every single situation, but that the common rules of morality,

such common rules as good faith and veracity, are immediately

recognized and assented to as moral. They insist

that these are not determined by experience or by reflection,

since stealing, lying, and murder are _known_ to be wrong by

everyone, though most men could not tell way.

Intuitionalism carried out to logical extremes is represented

by such men as Tclstoy, and, in general, those who genuinely

and persistently act according to the dictates of their conscience,

"who hold, and so far as they can, act upon the principle

that we must never resist force by force, never arrest a

thief, must literally give to him that asketh, up to one's last

penny, and so on."

EMPIRICISM. To explain the grounds of the Empirical

position is to exhibit the arguments in refutation of Intuitionalism.

The most obvious and frequent line of attack

that empirical moralists make upon Intuitionalism is to

examine and compare the various "intuitions" of right conduct

which have been held by men in different ages and places.

The traditional method of combating intuitionalism from the time

of John Locke to that of Herbert Spencer has been to present the

reader with a list of cruel and abominable savage customs, ridiculous

superstitions, acts of religious fanaticism and intolerance, which

have all alike seemed self-evidently good and right to the peoples or

individuals who have practised them. There is hardly a vice or a

crime (according to our own moral standard) which has not at some

time or other in some circumstances been looked upon as a moral

and religious duty. Stealing was accounted virtuous for the young

Spartan, and among the Indian caste of Thugs. In the ancient

world, piracy, that is, robbery and murder, was a respectable

profession. To the mediæval Christian, religious persecution was the

highest of duties, and so on.[1]

[Footnote 1: Rashdall: _loc. cit._, p. 59.]

The Empiricist asks: If all these intuitions are absolute;

if men at various times and at various places, indeed, if,

as is the case, men of different social classes and situations at

the present time, differ so profoundly in their "intuitions" of

the just, the noble, and the base, which of the conflicting

intuitions, all equally absolute, is _the_ absolute? The Intuitionalist

continually appeals to the universal intuition and assent of

Mankind. But there is scarcely a single moral law for which

universal assent in even a single generation can be found.

One has but to survey the heterogeneous collection of customs

and prohibitions collected in such a work as Frazer's _Golden

Bough_, to see how little unanimity there is in the moral

intuitions of mankind.

The Empiricist finds the origin of these divergent moral

convictions in the divergent environments to which individuals

in different places, times, and social situations are exposed.

The intensity and apparent irrefutability of these

convictions, which the Intuitionalist ascribes to their innateness,

the Empiricist ascribes to their early acquisition, and

the deep emotional hold which early acquired habits have

over the individual. Those moral beliefs which we hold with

the utmost conviction and intensity are, instead of being

thereby guaranteed as most reasonable and genuinely moral,

thereby rendered, says the Empiricist, the more suspect.

They are evidences of the effectiveness of our early education,

or of our high degree of sensitiveness to our fellows. Conscience

is thus reduced to habitual emotional reactions produced

by the contact of a given individual temperament with

a given environment.

Thus acts come by the individual to be recognized as right

or wrong, according to the tradition to which he has been

educated and the contacts with other people to which he is

continually exposed. The Empiricist does not deny that

there are intuitions, or apparent intuitions. He denies their

ultimacy, their unquestionable validity.

When ... we find ourselves entertaining an opinion about the

basis of which there is a quality of feeling which tells us that to

inquire into it would be absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable,

undesirable, bad form, or wicked, we may know that that opinion is

a non-rational one, and probably, therefore, founded upon inadequate

evidence.[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter: _Instincts of the Herd_, p. 44.]

These so powerful convictions are the immediate promptings

of instincts, or of the habits into which they have been modified.

The humane Christian, had he been brought up in the

Eskimo tradition, would with the most tender solicitude

slaughter his aged parents, just as the humane Christian in

the Middle Ages thought it his duty to slay heretics. There

is no limit to the excesses to which men have gone on the

dictates of conscience. To put actions on the basis of conscience

is to put them beyond the control of reflection or the check

of inquiry. It is to reduce conduct to caprice; to exalt

impulse into a moral command. And the results of accepting

blind intuitions as rational knowledge have been in many

cases catastrophic.

If reason has slain its thousands, the acceptance of instinct as

evidence has slain its tens of thousands. Day by day, in the ordinary

direction of their lives, men have learned during hundreds of

generations how untrustworthy is the interpretation of fact which

Instinct offers, and how bitter is the truth contained in such proverbs

as "Anger is a bad counsellor," or "Love is blind." ... Wars

are often started and maintained, neither from mere blind anger,

nor because those on either side find that they desire the results

which a cool calculation of the conditions makes them regard as

probable, but largely because men insist on treating their feelings as

evidence of fact and refuse to believe that they can be so angry

without sufficient cause.[1]

[Footnote 1: Graham Wallas: _The Great Society_, pp. 224-25.]

The Empiricist insists that the morality of an act cannot

be told from the intensity of approval or disapproval which

it arouses in the individual. Actions are not moral or

immoral in themselves, but in their consequences or relations,

which are only discoverable in experience. The goodness or

badness of an act is measurable in terms of its consequences,

and the consequences of action are discoverable only in experience.

This does not imply that we calculate the results of

every action before performing it, or measure the consequences

of the acts of other persons before judging them.

Our immediate reactions are frequently not the result of reflection

at all, but are responses prompted by previously formed

habits, or by instinctive caprice. These immediate intuitions

are not to be relied upon as moral standards, precisely because

reflection frequently comes to an estimate of an act, directly

at variance with our instinctive reaction to it. We come,

upon reflection, to approve acts that we are, by instinct,

moved to condemn. And the reverse holds true.

When we see that a child's clothes have caught fire, we do not

need to reflect on any consequences for universal well-being before

we make up our minds that it is a duty to extinguish the flames, even

at the cost of some risk to ourselves. It is clear that the act will

conduce to pleasure and to the avoidance of pain. We should feel

an equally instinctive desire to kick out of the room a man whom we

saw making incisions in the flesh of a human being if we did not know

that he was a surgeon, and that the making of incisions will tend to

save the man's life. Were a competent physician to suggest that

the burning of the child's clothes upon its back would cure it of a

fever, every reasonable person would consider it his duty to reconsider

his _prima-facie_ view of the situation.[1]

[Footnote 1: Rashdall: _Ethics_, pp, 51-52.]

The Empiricist insists that moral standards are matters of

discovery; that the laws of conduct must be derived from

experience, just as must the laws of the physical sciences.

To condemn an act as evil means that the performance of that

act has in experience been found to produce harmful results.

Those moral laws which at the present stage of civilized society

seem to have attained universal assent, _have_ attained it

because they are rules whose practice has, in the history of

the race, repeatedly been found to produce desirable results.

Even the conception of justice, which has by so many thinkers

been held to be absolute, to inhere somehow in the nature

of things, is by Mill demonstrated at length to be merely a

particularly highly regarded utility:

It appears ... that justice is a name for certain moral requirements,

which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the scale of

social utility, and are therefore of more paramount obligation than

any others; though particular cases may occur where some other

social duty is so important as to overrule any one of the general

maxims of justice. Thus, to save a life, it may not only be allowable,

but a duty, to steal, or take by force, the necessary food or medicine,

or to kidnap, and compel to officiate, the only qualified medical

practitioner.[2]

[Footnote 2: Mill: _Utilitarianism_ (London, 1907), p. 95.]

Indeed it is clear, that in the processes of natural selection

those tribes would survive whose rules of morality did in

general promote welfare. And it is the business of reflection,

says the Empiricist, not to accept either his own conviction

or those of others on ethical questions, but in cases of ambiguity

to establish, after inquiry, a standard the practice of

which promises the widest benefits in human happiness.

ETHICS AND LIFE. All ethical theories are more or less

deliberately intended as definitions of the good, and as instruments

for its attainment. They must, therefore, be immediately

tested by their fruits in life. An ethical theory

that is only verbally concerned with the good, but does not

in practice promote human welfare, is futile pedantry or worse.

Reflection upon conduct arises in man's attempt to control

the nature which is his inheritance in the interests of his

happiness. Men have learned through experience that to

follow each impulse without forethought brings them pain,

misery, and sometimes destruction. They have found that

to achieve happiness some harmony must be established

between competing desires, and that only by balances,

adjustment, and control, can they make the most of the nature

which is theirs inescapably. This nature consists, as we have

seen, in certain specific tendencies to action. Men are natively

endowed with instincts to love, to fight, to be curious,

to long for and enjoy the companionship of their fellows, to

wish privacy and solitude, to follow a lead and to take it,

to fear and hate, and sympathize with others. The satisfaction

of any one of these impulses gives pleasure. Any one

of these may become a dominant passion. But it is not

through yielding to a single imperious impulse that men attain

genuine happiness. To be excessively pugnacious or amorous

or fearful is to court unhappiness, both for the individual

and his fellows. It is only by giving each instinct its

proportionate chance in the total context of all the instincts, that

happiness is to be found.

It is for this reason that, as Aristotle first pointed out, a

study of what is good for man must start with a study of

what man himself is. The study of ethics must consequently

fall back for its data upon psychology. It must note with

precision the things that men can do, before it tells them what

they ought to do. For the things they ought to do, are

dependent on the conditions which limit and determine their

ideals. Any ethical system that deliberately excludes from

its formulation natural human desires and capacities, is

denying the very sources of all morality. For every ideal

has its root back in some unlearned human impulse, and an

ideal that has no basis in the nature of man, is not an ideal,

but a negation. The ideal "way of life" is one that provides

for the harmonious utilization of all those possibilities which

lie in man's original nature. To deny a place to the sex

impulse is to deny a place to ideal love. To deny the moral

legitimacy of the fighting instinct is to take away the basis

of that immense energy which goes to sustain great moral

reformers. The place of ethical theory is not to deny human

impulses, but to turn them to uses in which they will not

hinder other impulses either of the individual or of others.

Through physical science, men have sought to make the most

of their physical environment; through moral science, they

can try to make the most of the human equipment which is

theirs for better or for worse. This human equipment is an

opportunity; and the utilization of this opportunity constitutes

happiness. It is in the realization of the possibilities

offered by our original human nature that reflection upon

morals is justified. It is in the effective fulfillment of this

opportunity that its success must be measured.

MORALITY AND HUMAN NATURE. A moral theory that is

merely coercive and arbitrary, therefore, is not in a genuine

sense moral. A morality, to justify itself, must appeal to

the heart of man. The good which it recommends must be

a good which man can without sophistry approve. And the

good for which man can whole-heartedly strive is not determined

by logic, but, in the last analysis, by biology. Human

beings cannot freely call good that to which they have no

spontaneous prompting. Those ascetics who have denied

the flesh may have displayed a certain degree of heroism, but

they displayed an equal lack of insight. For it is out of

physical impulses alone that any ideal values can arise.

It is only when one instinct interferes with its neighbors,

or one individual with his fellows, that instincts or activities

can be called evil. They are called evil in relation, in

context, with reference to their consequences. In itself no

natural impulse is subject to condemnation. It is just as

natural as thunder or sunshine, and is to be taken as a point

of departure, as a basis for action, rather than as a chance

for censure. Impulses demand control simply because, left

to themselves, they collide with each other, just as individuals

uncontrolled by custom, law, and education, collide

with each other in the pursuit of satisfaction. The ideal is

a way of life, which will allow as much spontaneity as the

conditions of nature and life allow, and provide as much control

as they make necessary. To be thus in control of one's

desires is to be free. It is to utilize one's interests and capacities

in the light of a harmony both of one's own desires, and

in so far as this harmony is universal, of the desires of all men.

It is to lead the Life of Reason:

Every one leads the Life of Reason in so far as he finds a steady

light behind the world's glitter, and a clear residuum of joy beneath

pleasure and success. No experience not to be repented of falls

without its sphere. Every solution to a doubt, in so far as it is not

a new error, every practical achievement not neutralized by a second

maladjustment consequent upon it, every consolation not the seed

of another, greater sorrow, may be gathered together and built into

this edifice. The Life of Reason is the happy marriage of two

elements--impulse and ideation--which if wholly divorced would

reduce man to a brute or to a maniac. The rational animal is

generated by the union of these two monsters. He is constituted by

ideas which have ceased to be visionary and actions which have

ceased to be vain.[1]

[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Reason in Common Sense_, p. 6.]

Nor does the leading of a moral life, as Kant and other

moralists said or implied, demand a stern and lugubrious

countenance and a sad, resigned determination to be good.

A moral system should promote rather a hallelujah than a

halo. One may suspect the adequacy to human happiness of

those moral systems which promote in their holders or

practitioners a virtuous somberness and a moral melancholy. A

morality that demands such unwholesome outward evidences

is inwardly not beautiful. As art is an attempt to give perfection

and fulfillment to matter, so is morals an attempt to

give perfect and complete fulfillment to human possibility.

A genuine morality will, in consequence, be spontaneous and

free. In Matthew Arnold's well-known lines:

"Then, when the clouds are off the soul,

When thou dost bask in Nature's eye,

Ask, how _she_ view'd thy self-control,

Thy struggling task'd morality.

Nature, whose free, light, cheerful air

Oft made thee, in thy gloom, despair.

* * * * *

"There is no effort on _my_ brow--

I do not strive, I do not weep.

I rush with the swift spheres, and glow

In joy, and when I will, I sleep."[1]

[Footnote 1: From _Morality_.]

MORALS, LAW, AND EDUCATION. No moral code, however

adequate in its theoretical formulation or the means of its

attainment, is socially effective merely as theory. No matter

how completely it takes into account all the natural desires

and possibilities which demand fulfillment, it remains merely

an academic yearning. It becomes an instrument of happiness

only when it has been made the habitual mode of life of

the individual and the group, through the long continuous

processes of education and law. There is a familiar discrepancy

between theory and practice, even when the discrepancy

is not due to insincerity. Philosophy cannot make a man

virtuous, however much it may convince him of the path to

virtue. Socrates thought that if men only knew the good

they would follow it. But modern psychologists and ordinary

laymen know better. The good must become a habitual

practice if men are to follow it, and it can only become a

habitual practice if education and social conditions in general

provide for the early habituation of the individual to conduct

that is socially useful. Aristotle, who himself framed a

theory of morals that was built on the firm foundation of

human possibility, was aware of the inadequacy of theory

by itself to make men good:

Some people think that men are made good by nature, others by

habit, others again by teaching.

Now it is clear that the gift of Nature is not in our own power,

but is bestowed through some divine power upon those who are

truly fortunate. It is probably true also that reason and teaching

are not universally efficacious; the soul of the pupil must first have

been cultivated by habit to a right spirit of pleasure and aversion,

like the earth that is to nourish the seed.[1]

[Footnote 1: Aristotle: Ethics, book X, chap. X, p. 344 (Weldon translation).

It is only when people find pleasure in the right actions,

that they can be depended upon to perform them. And it

is by their early and habitual performance that they will

become pleasant. In the formation of such socially and

individually useful habits, education is the incomparable

instrument. The conduct of individuals is, as we have

repeatedly seen, largely fixed by the customary recognition of

certain acts as approved, and others as disapproved. These

approvals and disapprovals are transmitted through education.

Education is used here to refer not simply to the formal

institutions of teaching, but to the complete social environment,

the approvals and disapprovals with which an individual

comes in contact. Formal education is, however, the

chief means by which society inculcates into younger members

those values, traditions, and customs which its controlling

elements regard as of the most pivotal importance.

Social customs which are transmitted in education, become

fixed in law. So that, as Aristotle points out in this same

connection, laws are symptomatic of the moral values which

the group regards as of the highest importance. Laws are

customs given all the sanction, support, and significance that

the group can put into them. Education transmits the values,

ideals, and traditions cherished by the group, but the

laws and customs already current largely control the scope

and methods of education. "Education proceeds ultimately

from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and

laws. Only in a just state will these be such as to give the

right education."[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey: _Democracy and Education_, p. 103.]

The state of law and education which is exhibited by a

society, thus accurately mirrors the degree of moral progress

of the group. And what is, perhaps, more significant, the

kind of law and education current determines the moral

ideals and conditions the moral achievements of the maturing

generation. Education, more especially, is the instrument

through which the young can be educated not only to ideals

and customs already current, but to their reflective modification

in the light of our ever-growing knowledge of the conditions

of human welfare.

INDEX

Ability, education and native.

Absolutism in morality.

Acquisitive instinct.

Activity, creative (see Creative activity); mental; physical; social.

Æsthetic experience; and form; in industry; in science; sense satisfaction

basis of; standards, effect of custom on; value of science; values; _vs._

moral values; _vs._ practical values. _See also_ Art.

Affection. _See_ Love.

Age, influence of on learning.

Altruism.

Ambition.

Animal, instincts compared with human; man as an; man a social.

Appreciation. _See_ Æsthetic.

Aristocracy.

Aristotle.

Arnold, Matthew.

Art, and emotion; and morals; and nature; appreciation of; as an industry;

as propaganda; as realization of ideals; as recreation; as vicarious

experience; expression of ideas by; fine; for art's sake; imagination in;

industrial; origin of; standards in. _See also_ Æsthetic.

Attention in habit formation.

Awe.

Bacon, Francis.

Bagehot.

Bain.

Beauty. _See_ Art, and Æsthetic.

Behavior, habitual; instinctive; types of human.

Behaviorism.

Belief, gregariousness in; individuality in.

Bentham.

Bergson.

Bible.

Blame. _See_ Praise.

Bloomfield, Leonard.

Boas.

Bryce.

Burke, Edmund.

Burns, C. Delisle.

Bury.

Butler.

Cannon.

Career of reason.

Carlyle.

Carnegie.

Cattell.

Change, in customs; in habits; in language; opposition to.

Character. _See_ Personality, and Self, development of.

Christ.

Christianity.

Church, the, as a social institution; educational functions of; political

functions of.

Civilization, and acquisitive instinct; control of instincts in; factors

in development of. _See also_ Society.

Classification in science.

Coefficient of correlation.

Common sense and science.

Communication. _See_ Language.

Companionship. _See_ Gregariousness.

Comte, Auguste.

Conduct, cultivation of socially desirable; social standards of.

Confession.

Conscience.

Conservatism, place of fear in; of habit.

Continuity, cultural.

Cooley.

Courage.

Creative activity, and eccentricity; as sublimation of sex instinct; in

art; in industry; in society. _See also_ Imagination.

Culture, continuity of; dependent on environment.

Curiosity, instinct of; and scientific inquiry.

Custom, attitudes toward; and art; and morals; changes in; effects of on

progress; preservation of; social value of.

Dante.

Darwin.

Deduction.

Democracy.

Dewey.

Dickens.

Dickinson, G. Lowes.

Differences, individual, and education; causes of; in industry; in leadership;

in reflection: influence of environment on; of heredity; of race; of sex.

Discontent, due to repression of instincts.

Dislike. _See_ Hate.

Divine, as the human ideal; description of.

Dogmatism.

Dow.

Dowson, Ernest.

Eccentrics.

Education, and individual differences; and morals; as transmitter of the

past; by the church; instrument for social betterment and control; made

possible by prolonged period of infancy; and by language. _See also_

Learning.

Egoism.

Emerson.

Emotion, accompanies satisfaction or frustration of instincts or habits;

and art; and language; aroused in maintenance of self; as driving power;

difficulty of classifying; in morals; impedes reflection; James-Lange

theory of; of dislike or hate; of fear; of pity; of love; physical

indications of.

Empirical morality.

Enthusiasm; religious.

Environment, control of by science; influence of on æsthetic appreciation;

on individual differences; on racial differences; on instincts;

maladjustment between individual and; possibility of choice of.

Ethics, and life; contrast between professed and practiced. _See also_

Morality.

Euripedes.

Evolution.

Experience, art as vicarious; modifies man's instincts.

Experiment, to determine learning process in animals; number of instincts

in animals; in children.

Experimental moral standards.

Experimentation in science.

Expression, art as means of. _See also_ Æsthetic, and Religion.

Fatigue, influence of on learning; in relation to industry; mental; nervous;

physical.

Fear, and religious experience; instinct of; of the new.

Field, Eugene.

Fighting instinct. _See_ Pugnacity.

Fiske.

Folkways.

Food, instinct of.

Form, and æsthetic experience.

Freedom of speech.

Freudian psychology.

Friendship. _See_ Love.

Frost, Robert.

Galton, Francis.

Garibaldi.

Generalization in reflection.

Genius.

God.

Goethe.

Goff.

Goldmark.

Gregariousness, effect of on innovation; importance of for social solidarity;

in action; in belief; instinct of.

Group-feeling; influence of on language. _See also_ Society.

Habit, as time-saver; importance of in morals; language as a; of reflection,

importance of; strength of in individual; in society.

Habits, and emotion; and instincts; disserviceable; education a deliberate

acquisition of; formation of, influence of on thinking; modification of

by reflection; of mind; specific not general; transference of.

Hard, William.

Harrison, Jane.

Hart.

Hate.

Health, influence of on learning.

Hegel.

Henley.

Heraclitus.

Herd instinct. _See_ Gregariousness.

Heredity.

Hinks.

History, and religion.

Hobhouse.

Housman.

Hunger, instinct of.

Huxley.

Ideals, created by reflection; devotion to; foundation of; realization of

in art; in morals; in religion.

Ideas, expressed in art; fear of the novel in; man alone reacts to.

Imagination, as form of mental activity; in art; in science. _See also_

Creative activity.

Impotence. _See_ Need.

Impulses. _See_ Instincts.

Individual, and education; differences (_see_ Differences, individual);

maladjustment between environment and.

Individualism.

Individuality, and progress; consciousness of unique in man; in opinion

and belief.

Induction.

Industry, art as an; individual differences in; need of

creative activity in.

Infancy, prolonged period of in man.

Inquisition.

Instinct, and habit; acquisitive; definition of; of curiosity; fear;

gregariousness; hunger; leadership; mental activity; parental; physical

activity; pity; play; pugnacity; self-preservation; sex; shelter;

submission; sympathy.

Instincts, and education; and emotion; basis of morals; conflict of;

control of; happiness comes from satisfaction of; interpenetration of;

modification of; number and variety of; repression of; specific not

general; unchanged since prehistoric times.

Intelligence, a conscious adjustment of habits; influence of heredity on,

of race, of sex; makes possible control of nature; measurement of; types of.

Interests, conflict of in society.

Intolerance.

Intuition.

Intuitionalism.

Invention of tools.

James, William.

Jennings.

Jevons.

Job.

Jones, A. L..

Joy, religious expression of.

Kant.

Kelvin.

Kerr-Lawson.

Keyser.

Kropotkin.

Ladd.

Lang.

Lange.

Language, and emotion; and logic; and thought; as a social habit; changes

in; importance of for civilization; man alone possesses; origin of;

primitive; uniformities in.

Law, and morals; and society; scientific.

Leadership, instinct of; submission to.

Learning, affected by age, fatigue, and health; capacity for in men and

animals; drill and attention in; importance of habit of; process of

(_see also_ Education, and Reflection); trial-and-error.

Le Bon.

Lee, Frederick S..

Lincoln.

Logic, and language.

Love.

Lowell.

Loyalty.

Lucretius.

McDougall.

Malthus.

Man, as social being; primitive; study of, basis of ethics; unique

characteristics of.

Marett.

Markham, Edwin.

Marot, Helen.

Marx, Karl.

Masefield.

Mayo-Smith.

Mendelian laws of heredity.

Mental activity.

Meyer, Eduard.

Mill, John Stuart.

Mills.

Milton.

Moral action; knowledge; standards; theory, types of; values.

Morality, absolutistic; and art; and education; and emotion; and habit;

and human nature; and intellectualism; and law; based on instincts;

customary; empirical; inadequacy of theory in; intuitional; reflective;

relativistic and teleological; spontaneous.

Morley, John.

Mysticism.

Napoleon.

Nature, and art; man's control of; science as explanation of;

unchangeability of.

Need, and religious experience.

New, progress and the; distrust of; idealization of. _See also_ Originality.

Newton.

Nietzsche.

Northcliffe, Lord.

Noyes, Alfred.

Observation in science.

Opinion, individuality in; suppression of.

Originality in thinking, causes of; encouragement of; fear of, in society.

_See also_ New.

Orosius.

O'Shaughnessy.

Other-worldliness.

Parental instinct.

Pascal.

Past, critical examination of; disparagement of; education as transmitter

of; idealization of; limitations of; our heritage from; veneration of.

Pasteur.

Pater, Walter.

Pearson, Karl.

Penance.

Personality. _See also_ Self.

Physical activity, instinct of; fatigue.

Pity, instinct of.

Plato.

Play. _See_ Physical activity, and Recreation.

Pleasure.

Poe.

Poincaré.

Pope.

Population; restriction of.

Possession. _See_ Acquisitive.

Praise and blame, as instruments of social control; determine professed

standards; in development of self; indifference to; man responsive to.

Prayer.

Prejudice, influences thinking.

Primitive and civilized races; language; man's manufacture of tools;

morality; religion; science.

Principles.

Privacy, instinctive demand for.

Probability.

Progress, and custom; and pugnacity; and reflection; and variation from

normal; science as an instrument of.

Propaganda, art as; emotional value of words in.

Psychological tests. _See_ Intelligence, measurement of.

Psychology, and ethics; behavioristic; "faculty"; Freudian; of Utilitarianism.

Public opinion; opposition to.

Pugnacity, instinct of.

Quiescence.

Race, continuity of human; influence of on individual differences.

Rashdall.

Reason, and religion; as director of life; career of; in absolutistic

morality. _See also_ Reflection, and Thinking.

Recreation; art as; form dependent on work and habits.

Reflection, and individual differences; and morality; creates moral standards;

in art; in science; inadequacy of in morals; limited by instinct and habit;

modifier of instinct and habit; process of; value of for society. _See also_

Learning, Scientific method, and Thinking.

Reflex.

Relativistic morality.

Religion, and history; and science; experiences giving rise to expression

of; institutionalized; offers solace; realization of ideals in; primitive;

rationalization of personal.

Remorse and religion.

Repentance.

Repetition in habit formation.

Repression of instincts.

Ribot.

Robinson, James Harvey.

Robinson, Edwin Arlington.

Roosevelt.

Ross.

Russell, Bertrand.

Sabatier.

Sacrifice.

Santayana.

Schopenhauer.

Science, æsthetic aspect of; and common sense; and progress; and religion;

as explanation of natural phenomena, classification in; definition of;

experimentation in; imagination in; innovation in; observation in;

practical; primitive; pure; social.

Scientific inquiry, curiosity and; law; method.

Self-assertion; consciousness of the; development of; display; preservation;

sufficiency; surrender; satisfaction and dissatisfaction; the divided;

the negative; the permanent; the social; types of the.

Sense satisfaction basis of æsthetic experience.

Sex, and creative activity; and racial continuity; influence of on

individual differences; instinct of.

Shakespeare.

Shelley.

Sidgwick.

Smith, Adam.

Social activity; being, man as a; consequences of fear; of leadership; of

opposition to public opinion; of pity; of submission; inertia; institution,

the church as a; motive; sciences; self; solidarity; standards of conduct;

value of consciousness of self; of custom; of individuality in opinion; of

praise and blame; of prolonged period of infancy; of pugnacity; of reflection.

Socialism.

Society, and education; and individual happiness; and law; based on instinct

of gregariousness; conflict of interests in; control of instincts in.

Socrates.

Solitude.

Sorel, Georges.

Specificity of instincts; of habits.

Speech (_see also_ Language); freedom of.

Standards, æsthetic; _a priori_; experimental; ideal; language; moral; social.

Statistics.

Stirner, Max.

Stork, Charles Wharton.

Submissive instinct.

Suggestion, in thinking.

Sutherland.

Swinburne.

Sympathy.

Tabu.

Tarde.

Taylor, Henry Osborn.

Teleology in morals.

Tender emotion.

Tennyson.

Theology.

Theory, inadequacy of in morals.

Thilly.

Thinking, common sense _vs._ scientific; influence of habit on; analyzes

experience; begins with a problem. _See also_ Reflection, and Scientific

method.

Thompson, Sylvanus P..

Thomson.

Thorndike, Edward L.

Thought, and language; originality in.

Tolstoy.

Tools, man only maker and user of.

Tradition. _See_ Custom.

Trial-and-error, learning; reflection as mental.

Trotter.

Tufts.

Tylor, Edward B.

Tyndall.

Types of self; of intelligence.

Utilitarianism.

Values, æsthetic; ideal; moral.

Veblen.

Verification in scientific procedure.

Wallas, Graham.

War, and acquisitive instinct; and hate; and pugnacity.

Ward, Lester.

Watson.

Wharton, Edith.

Wilde, Oscar.

Will.

Wilson, Woodrow.

Wolff, Christian.

Woodbridge.

Woodworth.

Wordsworth.

Work determines form of recreation.