I can best show you what I mean by next very briefly reviewing the
motives upon which the idea of duty itself rests, and by then showing
to what, upon the noblest level of human effort, these motives lead.
Our moral interests have a development which, in all its higher
phases, runs at least parallel to the development of our religious
interests, even in cases where the two sorts of interests seem to
clash. The moral problems arise through certain interactions that take
place between our individual and our social experience. The reason
reviews these interactions and takes interest in unifying our plan of
life. The will is always, from the very nature of the case, concerned
in the questions that here arise. For whatever else morality is, it is
certain that your morality has to do with your conduct, and that {183}
moral goodness cannot be yours unless your will itself is good. Wealth
might come to you as a mere gift of fortune. Pleasure might be brought
to you from without, so far as you have the mere capacity for
pleasure. The same might appear to be true even in case of salvation,
if, indeed, salvation is wholly due to saving grace. But moral
goodness, if you can get it at all, requires your active cooperation.
You can earn it only in case you do something to possess it. Its motto
reads: _"Erwirb es um es zu besitzen."_
Therefore the moral question always takes the form of asking: What am
I to do? The first contribution to the answer is furnished, upon all
levels of our self-consciousness, by our individual experience. And
one apparently simple teaching that we get from this source may be
stated in a maxim which wayward people often insist upon, but which
only the very highest type of morality can rationally interpret: "I am
to do what I choose, in case only I know what I choose and am able to
do it." From this point of view, my only limitations, at first sight,
seem to be those set for me by my physical weakness. There are many
things that, if I had the power, I should or might choose to do. But
since I frequently cannot accomplish my will, I must learn to limit
myself to what I can carry out. So far, I say, our individual
experience, if taken as our sole moral guide, seems at first to point
out the way.
{184}
But this first teaching of our individual experience is by no means so
simple as it seems. For the question arises: What is it, on the whole,
that I choose to do? And, as we saw very early in these discussions,
each of us is by nature so full of caprices and of various aims, that,
left to ourselves, we live not only narrowly but inconsistently. Hence
we spend much of our lives in finding out, after the fact, that what
we chose to do at one moment of our lives has hopelessly thwarted what
we intended to do at some other moment. Self-will then, left to
itself, means self-defeat. That is the lesson of life. And the
question: What is it that, on the whole, I would choose to do if I had
the power? is a question that individual experience, taken by itself,
never answers in any steadily consistent way. Therefore, as we all
sooner or later come to see, one of our most persistent limitations is
not our physical weakness to accomplish what we choose, but our
incapacity, when left to ourselves, to find out what it is that we
propose and really choose to do. Therefore, just because individual
experience, taken by itself, never gives steady guidance, we have to
look elsewhere for a rule.
The question: What am I to do? is never in practice answered without
consulting, more or less persistently, our social experience. Being
what we are, naturally gregarious, imitative, and, when trained,
conventional creatures, who, indeed, often fight with our kind, but
who also love our kind, who not only {185} cannot bear to be too much
alone, but are simply helpless when wholly isolated from our fellows
(unless we have already learned in their company the very arts that we
may be able to use while we are alone), we can give no answer to the
question: What is to be my choice? without pretty constantly
consulting our social interests. And these interests are indeed
plentiful and absorbing. But they too are naturally conflicting. And
so, taken as they come, they give us no rule of life.
To be sure, the social will in general says to us: "Live with your
fellows, for you cannot do without them. Learn from them how to live;
for you have to live more or less in their way. Imitate them,
co-operate with them, at least enough to win such ideas as will help
you to know what you want and such skill as will make you best able to
accomplish whatever, in view of your social training, you are led to
choose. Do not oppose them too much, for they are many, and, if
stirred up against you, can easily destroy you. Conform, then, to
their will enough to get power to have your own way." And so far our
ordinary social will gives us more or less consistent counsel. But
beyond such really rather barren advice (the counsel of an inane
worldly prudence), our social experience, as it daily comes to us, has
no single ideal to furnish, no actually universal rules to lay down.
For, as I go about in social relations, sometimes I love my fellows
and sometimes I feel antipathy for them. Sometimes {186} I am full of
pity for their woes and long to help them. Sometimes they are my
rivals; and I then naturally try to crush them. There is thus no one
social tendency that, as it comes to us in the course of our ordinary
social experience, gives us sufficient guidance to tell us how to
escape self-defeat. For my love and pity war with my social greed and
with my rivalries. I am so far left to my chaos.
Thus, then, if I sum up my position, I indeed propose to do what I
choose, in so far as I am able, and in so far as I can find out what
it is that I choose and can avoid thwarting myself by my own choices.
And the art of learning how to choose, and what to choose, and how to
carry out my will, is for me, since I am gregarious, imitative, and
conventionalised, a social art. But, on the other hand, no social art
that I ordinarily learn is sufficient either to teach me my whole
purpose in life, or to make a consistent self of me, or to lead me out
of that chaos of self-thwarting efforts wherein so many men pass their
lives.