(5) While the older racial and national barriers between peoples are breaking down, so that the possibilities of human brotherhood and cooperation are laterally increasing, and the wretched fratricidal wars between peoples coming toward an end, [Footnote: As I read the proof sheets of this book (August, 1914), news comes of the outbreak of what may prove the costliest and one of the least excusable wars of history. Nevertheless, the end of international wars draws near.] Other barriers, between upper and lower classes, are thickening, new antagonisms and antipathies that threaten yet much friction and unhappiness and a retardation of moral progress. Rich are becoming farther and farther consciousness is on the increase, class-wars in the form of strikes, riots, and sabotage, are ominous symptoms. Masses of the laboring class believe that a great class-war is not only inevitable but desirable. Such conflicts, however, besides their material losses, engender hatred, cruelty, lust, greed, and all sorts of other forms of immorality. No one can predict how far such struggles may go in the future toward undoing the socializing process which at best has so many obstacles to meet and moves so slowly. Many forces are at work, however, for moral uplift. The spread of education, teaching men to think, to discern evils, and to comprehend the reasons for right conduct, the increasing influence of public opinion through newspapers and magazines, the growing number of organizations working to eradicate evils, the gradual increase of wise legislation, the reviving moral pressure of the Christian Church such signs of the times should give us courage as well as show us where we can take hold to help. Morality is not static, a cut-and-dried system to be obeyed or neglected, but a set of experiments, being gradually worked out by mankind, a dynamic, progressive instrument which we can help ourselves to forge. There is room yet for moral genius; we are yet in the early and formative stage of human morality. We should not be content with past achievement, with the contemporary standards of our fellows. If we give our keenest thought and our earnest effort, there is no knowing what noble heights of morality we may be helping the future to attain.
Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap. IV. Hobhouse, op. cit, part II, chaps. II, VIII. Westermarck, op. cit, chap. VII. Sutherland, op. cit, vol. II, chaps. XIX-XXI. W. G. Sumner, Folkways, chaps. I, II, XI. Sir H. Maine, Village Communities. C. Darwin, Descent of Man, part I, chap. v. J. G. Schurman, Ethical Import of Darwinism. W. I. Thomas, Source Book for Social Origins, part VII. C. Read, Natural and Social Morals, chap. VI. I. King, Development of Religion, chap. XI. On the question of moral progress: Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, pp. 187-92. W. Bagehot, Physics and Politics, chap. VI. H. G. Wells, New Worlds for Old, chap.I, secs. 2-4. J. Bryce, in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. 100, p. 145. E. Root, The Citizen's Part in Government, pp. 96-123. J. S. Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics (2d ed.), chap. XV. A. R. Wallace, Social Environment and Moral Progress.
What are the stages in the history of moral guidance?
THERE may be said to be five stages in the history of moral guidance: guidance by instinct, by custom, by law and precept, by conscience, and by insight. No one of these guides is discarded with the development of the others; we rely today upon all of them in varying degree. Their evolution overlaps; the alteration of instinct still goes on, changing laws and customs still bring their pressure to bear from without upon the individual; while our conscience and our insight have their roots far back in the past. Yet the prominence of each of these factors in turn marks a successive stage in the evolution of moral control. Inherited instinct, and then custom, unconsciously passed on by imitation and to some extent taught with a dimly conscious purpose, shape the crude morality of the animals though the other means of guidance are not wholly absent even in them. Among savages legal codes, unwritten and perhaps not even clearly formulated, yet exacting and strictly enforced by penalties, come to form an important supplement to instinct, custom, and proverbial wisdom. But quite as important is the gradual development of an inward guide—those very various secondary impulses and inhibitions which we hump together because of their common function and call the moral sense or conscience. We shall now consider briefly the origin of this internal steering-apparatus. The latest and most mature guide of all, reflective insight, arises in marked degree only when abstraction and analysis. There is no problem connected with its origin except the general problems of the development of human reason. How moral insight may be trained and brought to bear upon conduct will, it is hoped, be clear to the student who patiently studies this volume.
Out of what has conscience developed?
The "conscience" of our moralizing and religious literature figures as a sharply defined and easily recognizable "faculty," like "will" or "reason." But this classification, though useful, is misleading by its simplicity. If we observe by introspection what goes on in our minds when we "will" or "reason" or "listen to conscience," we shall find all sorts of emotions, ideas, impulses, surging back and forth, altering from moment to moment, never twice the same. At another period of our lives, or in another man's mind, the psychological stuff pigeonholed under these names may be almost entirely different. A great many diverse mental elements have at one time or other taken the role of, or formed an ingredient in, the function we label "conscience." We will enumerate the more important:
(1) Experience quickly teaches her pupils that certain acts to which they feel a strong impulse will lead to an aftermath of pain or weariness, or will stand in the way of other goods which they more lastingly desire or more deeply need. The memory of these consequences of acts remains as a guide for future conduct, not so often in the form of a clearly recognized memory as in a dim realization that the dangerous act must be avoided, a vague pressure against the pull of momentary inclination, or an uncomprehended feeling of impulsion toward the less inviting path. This residuum of the moral experience of the individual is one ingredient in what we call his conscience.
(2) But there is much more than this. The individual is a member of a group. The customs and expectations of this group not only bear upon him from without but find a reflection in his own motor mechanism. He hears the voice of the community in his heart, an echo of the general condemnation and approval. This acquired response, the reverberation of the group judgment, may easily supplant his personal inclinations. Primitive man is sensitive to the judgments and emotional reactions of his fellows; the tribal point of view is unquestioned and authoritative over him. So important is this pressure in his mental life, though not understood or recognized for what it is, that conscience is denned by many moralists as the pressure of the judgment of the tribe in the mental life of its members, or in similar terms. Paulsen calls it "the existence of custom in the consciousness of the individual." This is to neglect unjustly the other sources of the sense of duty; but certainly the pulls and pushes arising from these two sources, which we may call the inner aspect of individual moral experience and of loyalty to the community-morals, reinforcing one another as they generally do, produce a very powerful form of conscience.
(3) A number of primitive emotions join forces with them. Sympathy is generally on their side, and the instinctive glow of patriotism or pride in the tribe's success. The shrinking from disapproval, the craving for esteem, the very early emotions of shame and vanity, help to pull away from the self-indulgent or selfish impulse. The spontaneous admiration of others for their virtues and anger at them for their sins is applied involuntarily by a man to himself; contempt for his own weakness and joy in his superiority according to the generally accepted code are powerful deterrents. The consciousness of the resentment that others will feel if he does evil, the instinctive application to himself of a trace of the resentment he would feel toward him or toward these fellow tribesmen of is-such complex states of mind complicate his mental processes and help check his primary instincts.
(4) To these ingredients we must early add the more or less conscious fear of the penalties of the tribal law, of the vengeance of chiefs or powerful members of the tribe, of the tribal gods and their jealous priests. These fears may be but dimly felt and not clearly discriminated; but however subconscious they may be in a given case of moral conflict, they play a large part. The peace of mind that accompanies a sense of conformity to the will of rulers or of gods, contrasted with the anxiety that follows infraction, gives a greatly increased weight to that growing pressure of counter instincts which comes so largely to override a man's animal nature. Most of the sources of conscience thus date far back beyond the dawn of history. But they can be pretty safely inferred from the earliest records, from a study of existing savage races, and from the study of childhood. The definite conception of "conscience" is very late, scarcely appearing until very modern times. And the fact that conscience itself, even in its rudimentary forms, was much later in growth than the underlying animal instincts which it developed to control and guide, is shown by its late development in the child-not, normally, until the beginning of the third year. The early life of the individual parallels the evolution of the race; and the later-developed faculties in the child are those which arose in the later stages of human progress. But the existence of our well-defined moral sense, with its significant role in modern life, needs no supernatural explanation. It has grown up and come to be what it is as naturally as have our language, our customs, and our physical organs.
What is conscience now? It is a valuable exercise in introspection to observe a case of "conscience" in one's own life and note of what mental stuff it is made. When a number write down their findings without mutual suggestion, the results are usually widely divergent. Any of the original ingredients hitherto mentioned may be discovered, or other personal factors. There may be present to consciousness only a vague uneasiness or restlessness, or there may be a sophisticated recurrence of the concepts of "conscience," "duty," etc. The one universal fact is that there is a conflict between some primitive impulse or passion and some maturer mental checks. Any sort of mental stuff that serves the purpose of controlling desire will do; we must define conscience in terms not of content but of function. There is no such unity in the material as the single name seems to imply; and whether or not that name shall be given to a given psychological state is a matter of usage in which there is considerable variation.
In general, we reserve the name "conscience" for the vaguer and more elusive restraints and leadings, the sense of reluctant necessity whose purpose we do not clearly see although we feel its pressure, the accumulated residuum of long inner experience and many influences from without. Our minds retain many creases whose origin we have forgotten; we veer away from many a pleasant inclination without knowing why. These unanalyzed and residual inhibitions that grip us and will not let us go, form a contrasting background to our more explicit motives and often count for more in our conduct. The very lack of comprehension serves in less rational minds to enhance their prestige with an atmosphere of awe and mystery. These strange checks and promptings that well up in a man's heart are which he must not dare to disobey. The voice of God in our hearts we may, indeed, well conceive them to be. The attempt to analyze into its psychological elements and trace the natural genesis of conscience, as of morality in general must not be taken as an attempt to discredit it or to read God out of the world. For God works usually, if not universally, through natural laws; and the historical viewpoint, that sees everything in our developed life as the outcome of ages of natural evolution, is not only rich in fruitful insight, but entirely consistent with a deep religious feeling. For hortatory or inspirational purposes we do not need to make this analysis; it has, indeed, its practical dangers. It tends to rob the glory from anything to analyze it into its parts and study the natural causes that produced it. The loveliest painting is but a mess of pigments to the microscope, the loveliest face but a mess of cells and hairs and blood vessels. There is something gruesome and inhuman about embryology and all other studies of origins.
While we are analyzing an object, or tracing its genesis, we are not responding to it as a whole or feeling its beauty and power. The mystery, the spell, vanishes; we cease to thrill when we dissect. But knowledge proceeds by analysis, and gains by a study of origins and causes. And the temporary emotional loss should be more than balanced by the value of the insight won. We need not linger too long at our dissecting. The discovery that conscience is an explicable and natural development does not preclude a realization of the awfulness of obligation, the sacredness of duty, any more than a geologist must cease to thrill at the grandeur and beauty of the Grand Canyon because he has studied the composition of the rocks and understands the causes that have slowly, through the ages, wrought this miracle. So we need feel no sense of duty is not something imposed upon human nature from without; it is of its very substance, it has developed step by step with our other faculties, slowly crystallizing through millenniums of human and pre-human experience. In the abstract, then, we may say that conscience is a name for ANY SECONDARY IMPULSES OR INHIBITIONS WHICH CHECK AND REDIRECT MAN'S PRIMARY IMPULSES, FOR A GREATER GOOD; any later developed aversions or inclinations, judgments of value or feelings of constraint, which guide a man in the teeth of his animal nature toward a better way of life PROVIDED THAT THESE SUPERIMPOSED IMPULSES ARE NOT EXPLICIT ENOUGH TO BE CLASSIFIED UNDER SOME OTHER HEAD. For example, we may be pulled up sharply from a course of self-indulgence by a conscious realization of the harm we are doing to others thereby; this bridling state of mind, whether chiefly emotional or more intellectual, we may call sympathy, or an altruistic instinct, or love. But when we feel the pressure from these same mental states incipiently aroused, when our motor-mechanism half automatically steers us away from the selfish act, without our consciously formulating a specific name for the new impulse or recognizing any articulate motive, we are apt to give this mental push the more general name of conscience. So if we consciously reckon up, balance advantages, and decide on the less inviting act in recognition of its really greater worth to us, we say we act from prudence or insight, we are reasonable about it; while if the grumbling of the prudential motives remain subterranean, subconscious, they play the role of conscience. Conscience is, on such occasions, but inarticulate common sense. Usually, however, prudential and altruistic motives would both be discovered if the dumb driving of conscience were to be made articulate. The reverberation of parental teachings, of sermons heard and books read, of the opinions and emotions of our fellows, might be found, all bent and fused into a combined "suggestion," a mental push, a "must" or "ought," from whose influence we find it difficult to escape.
The detailed psychological analysis of cases of conscience and the study of its genesis are of no essential ethical interest, except as they show us that the sense of duty is not an ultimate, irreducible element in our consciousness, or make clearer to us its function and value. Conscience is the general name for coercion upon conduct from within the mind. The important thing to note is the useful purpose, which, in its so widely varying forms, it serves. Whatever its sources or its exact nature in contemporary man, it is one of the most valuable of our assets. To a more explicit statement of its value we must now turn. What is the value of conscience?
It would seem, at first glance, as if the development of reason should make conscience unnecessary. When we are able to discern the consequences of our acts, formulate and weigh our motives and aims, what need of these vague pre-rational promptings and inhibitions? Why not train men to supplant a blind sense of duty by a conscious insight, a rational valuation of ends and means? Is not reason, as it has been recently called, "the ultimate conscience"? [Footnote: G. Santayana, Reason in Science, p. 232; where also the following: "So soon as conscience summons its own dicta for revision in the light of experience and of universal sympathy, it is no longer called conscience, but reason."]
(1) Conscience is valuable on account of our ignorance. Individually we have not had experience enough to guide us in our crises; conscience is the representative in us of the wisdom of the race. In many cases we should never reason out the right solution of a problem; we lack the data. But we can lean upon the racial experience. Many past experiences, now forgotten, have gone to the molding of this faculty. The need of action is often imminent, there is no time for the long study of the situation which alone could form a sure insight into the conduct it demands. We need readymade morals. Moreover, we are subject to bias, to individual one sidedness, and to the distortion of passion; in the stress of temptation we are not in a mood to reason judicially, even if we have the necessary data. Altogether, insight, though in the long run the critic of conscience, is not a practical substitute. What conscience tells us is more apt to be true than what at the moment seems a rational judgment.
(2) Conscience is also valuable in view of our rebelliousness. Conventional morality is external, and would continually arouse revolt, were it not reinforced by an inward prompting. If external motives and penalties alone bore upon us we should chafe under them, and under the stress of passion or longing throw them aside. Even if these external sanctions were reinforced by insight into the rationality of morality, that insight might still leave us rebellious and unpersuaded. Knowledge alone is feeble, marginal in our lives. We often sin in the full knowledge of the penalties awaiting us. We need something more dynamic, pressure as well as information. Conscience is such a driver. Its commands weigh upon us, and will not be stilled. Reason plays but a weak part in the best of us; and to counteract our incurable waywardness, our recurrent longings for what cannot be had without too great a cost, we need not only the presence of law and convention, not only the weak voice of knowledge, but the stern summons of this powerful psychological response. Nature was wise when she evolved this function as a bulwark against our weakness, a bit between our because of our forgetfulness. Over and over again we say, "I didn't stop to think." If our conscience had been properly acute, it would have made us stop. Insight, however comprehensive and clear, is apt to remain somewhere in a locked drawer in our minds when the hot blooded impulse appears. If we were but to pause and reflect, we should be sensible and kind. But our intellect is dulled by our emotions, it does not get working. We need a more instinctive, a deeper-rooted mechanism, an imperious "Halt!" at the brief moment between the thought of sin and the act. Conscience is not only a teacher and a driver, it is a sentinel. Its red flag stops us at the brink of many a disaster, and we have it to thank for many an otherwise forgotten duty performed.
To sum up: Instinct and desire are lacking in proper adjustment to the needs of life. Society seeks to control them by the pressure of law and custom. These powerful forces, however, are external, and, savoring more or less of tyranny, tend at times to awaken a rebellious spirit in the hotheaded. So a perpetual antinomy would exist between internal impulse and external constraint, were it not that that external constraint is reflected within the individual mind by a secondary and overlying set of inhibitions and promptings which we call variously the "moral sense," the "sense of duty," or "conscience." We often do not know or remember consciously at the moment of decision what the law ordains or the wisdom of the race teaches. But we have an inward monitor. We often hang back from a recognized duty. But we feel an inward push. When the wrong impulse is pungent and enticing, and the right one insipid and tame, when we would forget if we could the perils of sin, conscience surges up in us and saves us from ourselves. It is a mechanism of extreme value, which nature has evolved in us for imposing on our weak and vacillating wills action that makes for a truer good than we should otherwise choose. No wonder, then, if we reverence this saving power within us, and crown it with a halo as the divine spark in the midst of our grosser nature. The more we revere it, the brighter the glamour it has for us, the stronger it grows and the more it helps us. The apotheosis of conscience has been of immense use in leading men to heed its voice and obey its leading. Yet this blind allegiance has its dangers; conscience has often been a cruel tyrant. It is by no means an always-safe guide, as we shall presently note. And as men grow more and more adjusted by instinct and training to their real needs, they will have less and less need of this helmsman. After all, there is something wrong with a life that needs conscience; it is a transition help for the long period of man's maladjustment. Spencer looks forward, a little too hopefully, perhaps, to a time in the measurable future when we shall have outgrown the need of it, when we shall wish to do right and need no compulsion, outer or inner. And Emerson, in a well known passage, writes: "We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say, 'Crump is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.'" A Chinese proverb says, "He who finds pleasure in vice and pain in virtue is still a novice in both." The saint is he who has learned really to love virtue, in its concrete duties, better than all the allurements of sin; to him we may say, as Virgil said to Dante, "Take thine own pleasure for thy guide henceforth." But until we are saints it is wise for us to cultivate conscientiousness, the habit of obedience, even when it costs, to that inward urging which is, on the whole, for most of us, our safest guide.
F. Paulsen, System of Ethics, book II, chap. V, secs. 1, 2, 5. H.Spencer, DATA OF ETHICS, chap. VII, secs. 44-46. S. E. Mezes,ETHICS, DESCRIPTIVE AND EXPLANATORY, chaps. V, VIII.Sutherland, op. cit, chap. XV. F. Thilly, INTRODUCTION TOETHICS, chap. III. Westermarck, op. cit, chap. V. Darwin,DESCENT OF MAN, partt. I, chap. III. J. H. Hyslop, ELEMENTSOF ETHICS, chaps. VI, VII. J. S. Mill, UTILITARIANISM, chap.v. H. W. Wright, SELF-REALIZATION, part. I, chap. IV.
Conscience as we have seen, is the result of a fusion of elements coming from personal experience and tribal judgment. In its early phases the latter elements predominate; conscience may be fairly called the inner side of custom. Primitive men have little individuality and involuntarily reflect the general attitude. But with widening experience and growing mental maturity, conscience, like man's other faculties, tends to become more individual and divergent, until we find, in civilized life, a man standing out for conscience' sake against the opinion of the world. The individualization of conscience, with the consequent clash of ideals, gives the study of morality much of its interest and difficulty; it will be worthwhile to note some of its causes. Why did not the individualizing of conscience occur earlier?
(1) In primitive man there is not much opportunity for the development of individuality. There are few personal possessions, there is little scope for the exercise of peculiar talents, there is little power of reflection, to develop strongly individual ideas. The self-assertive instincts are to considerable extent still dormant for lack of stimulus to call them forth. The individual is content to take his place in the group life, and it seldom occurs to him to question the group- judgment.
(2) In primitive life there is a drastic repression of any incipient rebelliousness, through the enforcement of custom or explicit law in the ways we have indicated; the fear of a heavy discouragement to any innovator. If men dared to defy the community morals, they were very likely to be put to death before the habit of free judgment had much time to spread. There was thus a sort of artificial selection for survival of the conventional type, and weeding-out of the freethinker and moral genius. Even in historic times this process has continued and been an enormous clog on human progress. The man of revolutionary moral insight has had to pay the penalty, if not of death as in the case of Socrates or of Jesus-at least of ridicule and ostracism, of excommunication and isolation as, in our own day, with Tolstoy. Many and many a saint who might have been a beacon-light to mankind has lived under the curses or sneers of his fellows and died in loneliness, to be soon forgotten. A few have, after years of opposition, obtained a following and accomplished great reforms, as did Buddha, Mohammed, St. Francis, and Luther. But none can count the potential reformers, the men of new insight, of individual moral judgment, who have been crushed by the weight of group-opposition. Man has been the worst enemy of his own progress.
(3) There is another aspect to this selective process, noted before in another context- the struggle for existence between groups. So intense are these tribal struggles in early society that harmony within a group is absolutely necessary. Individualization means disorganization; and whatever communities developed free thought and divergent ideas were at a disadvantage when it came to action. Many such groups, ahead of their rivals in individual moral development, were wiped out by barbaric armies that gave unquestioning obedience to the tribal will and worked together like a machine. Up to a certain stage in human development individuality was an undesirable variation and was ruthlessly repressed, sometimes by the execution of the particular offenders, sometimes by the destruction of the group to which they belonged and which they by their divergence weakened. What forces made against custom-morality? Against these repressive forces, however, other forces were from early times urging men on to reject the tyranny of custom. Those inward promptings that we call conscience were continually tending to become less the echo of the group conventions and more the expression of the individual's needs and deepest desires.
(1) At bottom, of course, lay the natural restlessness and passions of men, the impatience of control, the longing for liberty, and the craving for self-expression. The combative instinct, pride, obstinacy, and notably the sex-instinct, were from earliest times spurring men on to a disregard of the conventional and the formation of individual standards.
(2) We may make special mention of the love of power over others, which has been one of the deep roots of the perpetual internecine struggles of man. There is a need of leadership in every group; and this need is felt more and more keenly as the groups increase in size. At first the authority of the elders suffices, or of strong men who push to the fore at times of crisis, as in the case of the so called judges, the military dictators, as we might better call them, of early Israel. But as Israel, grown in numbers, and feeling the need of greater unity and readiness, clamored for a king, so generally, at a certain stage of culture, permanent chiefs of some sort become necessary. Now the chief, enjoying his sense of power, usually imposed his will upon the people; his individuality, at least, had more or less free play. And thus, through the changing decrees of successive rulers, all sorts of varying standards became realized, and the rigidity of early custom was steadily loosened.
(3) In the hunting stage of primitive life, and even in the pastoral stage, there was little private property, and hence little opportunity for the development of the acquisitive instinct. But with the transition to an agricultural life, and still more with the growth of commerce and the arts, private accumulation became possible. Individual initiative began to pay; the smarter and more ingenious could outstrip their fellows by breaking through the crust of custom, while those who were hidebound by a conventional conscience were at a disadvantage. To a large extent this lawlessness or innovation in conduct came into conflict with the individual's conscience. But the question "Why not?" would at once arise; if possible, a man would justify his act to himself. And to some degree those new ways of acting would swing conscience over to their side.
(4) In earliest times each tribe lived, very, much to itself and developed its own morals, under the stress of similar forces, but without much influence from the experience of other groups. It was thus exceedingly difficult for it to conceive of any other ways of doing things; the ancestral customs were accepted as inevitable, like the sun and the rain. Inter-tribal conflicts first gave, perhaps, a vantage point for mutual criticism. A clan that by some custom had an obvious advantage over its neighbors would naturally be imitated as soon as men became quick-witted enough to understand its superiority. The taking of prisoners, the exchange of hostages or envoys, friendly missions and journeys, would give insight into one another's life. With the development of commerce, this mutual criticism of morals would be greatly accelerated. So the authority of local conventions and standards would be discredited, custom would become more fluid, and individual judgment find freer play. Especially would the more observant, the more traveled, the more reflective, tend to vary from the ideals of their neighbors.
(5) In various other ways, apart from the mutual influence of divergent group-customs, the progress of civilization tends to produce variations in ideals. The increase of knowledge, the development of science and philosophy, bring floods of new ideas to burst the old dams; deepening insight reveals the irrationality of old ideas to the leaders of thought. The progress of the arts gives new interests and valuations. The spiritual seers and prophets see visions of a better order and proclaim new gospels. The development of classes and castes allows to the aristocracy more leisure to think and criticize; the institution of slavery, in particular, produced a class of slave-owners with ample time to dissect their inherited conceptions.
(6) Finally, where, under favoring conditions, the danger of war in which man has for the most part lived became less acute, custom generally grew laxer. It is the imperious necessity of selfpreservation that has been the greatest conservative force; warlike states have demanded strict allegiance and looked with suspicion upon deviations from the group ideals. But peoples that, whether from a fortunate geographical situation or because of their marked superiority in numbers and power over their neighbors have escaped this need of perpetual self-defense could afford to relax their vigilance for conformity. And the very notable increase in individual variations in conduct and ideal during the past century has been largely owing to the era of comparative peace. We seem to be reaching the age when the advantage is to lie not with the nation that has the most rigid customs, but with the nation that shows the most individual initiative and progress.
Conservatism vs. radicalism
We have become forever emancipated from the tyranny of custom morality under which the majority of men have lived. Legislation is, to be sure, continually on the increase, shutting men out from the ever-new ways they discover to prey upon their fellows. But nevertheless, the freedom with which men may now live their own lives according to their own ideas is almost a new phenomenon upon the earth. When we compare the free range that our individuality has with the tyranny of public opinion even so recently as the lifetime of our Puritan grandparents, when we see the new experiments in personal life and social legislation which are being tried on every hand, when we read a few of the thousands of books and magazines and newspapers that are pouring a continual flood of new ideas into the world, we must realize the immense change from the stereotyped customs of nearly all past epochs. In each of our forty eight States different codes are showing their relative advantages; here woman's suffrage is on trial, there the initiative and referendum, there the recall. Almost every sort of possible marriage law, it would seem, is being tried somewhere. It is a time of moral confusion, of the unsettling of old conceptions and a groping, stumbling progress toward the new.
In such a situation it is no wonder that we have two types of thought, two sets of forces, at work. On the one hand we have the conservatives, the "stand-patters," the maintainers of the existing order; on the other hand are the progressives, the radicals, the reformers of the existing order. For the former the moral standards of their particular age and country tend to have an absolute and unconditional worth, which must not be criticized or questioned. The necessity of allegiance to morality has been so deeply stamped upon their minds that it has become a loyalty to the particular brand of morality they have grown up in, however flagrantly inadequate or tyrannous it may be. For the latter a commendable impatience with the imperfect is apt to foster a blindness to the value that almost always lies in ancient customs and a lack of regard for the need of stability and common agreement on some plane. These iconoclasts, vociferous in condemnation, are often most empty handed, giving us nothing wiser or more advantageous wherewith to replace the conventions they discard. So it is difficult to say whether humanity is more in danger from the red-handed radicalism which destroys the precious fruit of long experience, or from the obstinate obstructionists who by the dead weight of their apathy or the positive pull-back of their antagonism delay the remedying of existing evils. The ideal lies in keeping morality plastic while giving its approved forms our hearty allegiance. Widely different ideals are theoretically conceivable; but we live in a specific time and place and must defer to the code of our fellows; it is along these lines, and by gradual steps, that progress must be made. We must be on the alert for new suggestions, but slow to tear down till we can build better. The greatest of prophets, keenly as he saw the flaws in existing standards, proclaimed that he came not to destroy but to fulfill. It is evident enough to the impartial observer that our present chaos and mutual antagonism of conflicting view-points is not ideal; we need to work out of this disorder into some sane and stable order; when we can find the best way of life we must discard these manifold variations, most of which are foolish and ill-advised. The undesirability of this contemporary disagreement, which in some matters amounts to almost a complete moral anarchy, is enough to explain the pull back of the conservatives. And it is precisely the purpose of such a volume as this to help in the crystallizing of definite and universally accepted moral principles for personal and social life. But, on the other hand, this temporary chaos is more pregnant with promise than the older blind acquiescence in full light of criticism and experiment to bear upon the laws and customs of the past.
"New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth."
We should reverence the great seers and lawmakers of the past; but their true disciples are not those who slavishly accept their dicta, they are rather those who think for themselves, as they did, and contribute, as they did, toward the slow progress of man.
What are the dangers of conventional morality?
The reasons why we cannot be content with our fathers' conservatism in morals, and our fathers' custom-bound conscience, may be summarized as follows:
(1) Conventional morality is almost necessarily too general; it is not elastic enough to fit the infinite variations in specific cases, not detailed enough to fit all needs. It therefore often causes needless and cruel repression; the most sensitive and aspiring spirits have often revolted from the morality of their times because of its harshness. It is well for the marriage-tie to be binding; divorce has generally been deemed unchristian. But if this judgment is rigidly enforced, special cases arise, very piteous, very pathetic, crying out for a more discriminating rule. Our forebears, with their grave realization of the dangers of frivolousness, forbade by law and a stern public opinion many innocent and wholesome diversions. Such injustices are inevitable where custom has unchecked sway. The general aim and result may be very salutary, but the application is too sweeping, and brings suffering to many unfortunate individuals, or to the community as a whole, by its indiscrimination.
(2) But even in its general result custom may be harmful. Morals have developed blindly, as we have seen, through all sorts of irrational influences, swayed this way by class interest, by rulers or priests, veered that way by superstition, passion, and stupidity. Morality has not understood itself; and the natural forces which have developed it into its enormous usefulness have not always weeded out the baneful elements. The persecution of heretics was sheer mistake, but it was acceded to by practically the entire Church in the Middle Ages, and practiced with utter conscientiousness. The hostility of the Puritans to music and art was pure folly, though it seemed to them their grim duty.
(3) New situations are continually arising, new sins appearing. Conventional morality, while sometimes over-severe against old and well-recognized sins, lags far behind in its branding of the newer forms. The evils arising from the modern congestion of population, the unscrupulousness of modern business, the selfishness of politicians, the servility of newspapers to the "interests" and to advertisers, for example, find too little reprobation in our established moral codes. "Business is business" has been said by respectable church-members. A successful American boss, when asked if he was not in politics for his pocketbook, said, "Of course! Aren't you?" with no sense of shame. Probably he was very "moral" along the old lines, an excellent father, a kind husband, an agreeable neighbor; but his conventional code, shared by most of his contemporaries, did not include the reprobation of the practice of politics for private gain. In the upper classes are many people who are "good" by the old standards, but who are unhelpful and trivial-minded, mere parasites devoted to sport or society, with never a qualm of conscience for their selfishness. The old standards need the constant infusion of new blood; our consciences need to be adjusted to our new relations and deeper insight. [Footnote: Cf. Rosa, Sin and Society, p. 14: "One might suppose that an exasperated public would sternly castigate these modern sins. But the fact is, the very qualities that lull the conscience of the sinner blind the eyes of the onlookers. People are sentimental; and bastinado wrongdoing not according to its harmfulness, but according to the infamy that has come to attach to it. Undiscerning, they chastise with scorpions the old authentic sins, but spare the new. They do not see that blackmail is piracy, that embezzlement is theft, that speculation is gambling that deleterious adulteration is murder. The cloven hoof hides in patent leather; and today, as in Hosea's time, the people 'are destroyed for lack of knowledge.'"]
(4) Custom-morality tends to literalism, a mere formal observance of law or custom without the true spirit of service, without any inward sweetness or power. Christ's condemnation of the Pharisees will occur to every one; the parable of the Pharisee and publican, and that of the widow's mite, among others, are classic illustrations of a cut-and dried formalism in morality. Such a legalism Paul found could not save him. And forever the prophets and spiritual leaders of men have had to burst the bonds of tradition to awaken a real love of and devotion to the good. The letter killeth, and a punctilious observance of rules may choke out the aspirations of the soul.
(5) Finally, conflicts between customs inevitably arise. Which shall a man obey? The moral perplexity thus caused gives a great deal of its poignancy to the tragedy of life. When one accepted ideal pulls us one way, and another standard, to which we have given allegiance, calls us the other, when we cry out with Desdemona, "I do perceive here a divided duty," the only solution lies in the development of insight and a recognition of the transition-nature of much of our accepted code. If for no other reason, to avoid these conflicts of ideals we must comprehend the ultimate aims of morality and take existing standards with a sort of tentative allegiance. It should be clear, then, that the individualizing of conscience, which has been going on observably in recent times, is, in spite of its dangers, a necessary and desirable process. Dewey and Tufts, ETHICS, chaps, V. IX. W. Bagehot, PHYSICS AND POLITICS, chaps. II, VI. F. Paulsen, SYSTEM OF ETHICS, part II, chap. V, sec. 6. S. E. Mezes, ETHICS, chap, VII, pp. 164-83. J. H. Coffin, THE SOCIALIZED CONSCIENCE, pp. 12-23.
What is the meaning of "moral intuitionism"?
With the growth of individualism in morals, the relaxing of the constraint of publicly accepted standards, there is, of course, a dangerous drift toward self-indulgence and moral nihilism. It becomes all the more necessary that conscience be strong and sensitive, that inner restraints take the place of outer. In the lack of a mature moral insight, which is one of the latest of mental developments, and indeed, where it exists, to reinforce its pale affirmations with greater impulsive power, a stern sense of duty is a veritable rock of salvation. Many a people have perished, many a brilliant hope of civilization been lost, because of its lack. So we cannot wonder when moralists put it forward as the foundation- stone of all morality and seek to build their systems upon it. To a man who has been bred to obey the inner voice, it seems the very source and basis of the right; it is so inescapable, so authoritative, that it cannot be deemed derived, or evolved by a mechanical process of selection. It figures as something ultimate and unanalyzable, if not frankly supernatural; that it is a mere instrument in the attainment of an ulterior end, to be used or rejected according to its observed usefulness is an abhorrent thought.
There has thus arisen a school of philosophers who base their justification of morality entirely upon the deliverances of conscience. Their theories vary in detail and have received sundry names; we will group them here for convenience under the general caption "moral intuitionism." As a rule they steer clear of the historic point of view; they refuse to believe that conscience has a natural history. Nor are they usually keen at psychological analysis; the numberless variations in form which conscience assumes in different individuals are, for their purposes, better ignored. Instead of analyzing the moral sense into its components and describing the mental stuff of which it is composed, instead of tracing its genesis and studying the forces that have produced it, they wax eloquent over its importance and universality. As preachers they are admirable. But the foundation they provide for morality is slippery. It amounts to saying, "We ought to do right because we know we ought!" When we ask how we can be sure, in view of the general fallibility of human conviction, that we are not mistaken in our assurance, and following a false light, they can but reiterate in altered phraseology that we know because we know.
To these intuitionists, and to the popular mind very often, the approval or disapproval of conscience is immediate, intuitive, and unerring. Its authority is absolute and not to be questioned. We have this faculty within us that tells us as surely what is right and what wrong as our color-sense tells us what is red and what green. Some people may, to be sure, be color-blind, or have defective consciences; but the great mass of unsophisticated people possess this innate guide and commandment, a quite sufficient warrant for all our distinctions of good and evil. Honest men do not really differ in their moral judgments. They may misunderstand one another's concepts and engage in verbal disputes; but at bottom their moral sense approves and disapproves the same acts. Our moral differences come mainly from the deluding effects of passion and the sophisticated ingenuities of the intellect. We should "return to nature," go by ourselves alone, and listen to the inner voice. If we sincerely listen and obey we shall always do right. [Footnote: "But truth and right, founded in the eternal and, is what every man can judge of, when laid before him. 'T is necessarily one and the same to every man's understanding, just as light is the same, to every man's eyes." (S. Clarke, Discourse upon Natural Religion, 1706.)]
We cannot but recognize a certain amount of practical truth in this picture. But it is over-simplified, and it is fundamentally unsatisfactory to the intellect. We shall now pass in review its most obvious inadequacies.
Do the deliverances of different people's consciences agree?
Nothing is more notorious to an unbiased observer than the conscientious differences between men. Even among members of a single community, with closely similar inheritance and environment, we find marked divergence in moral judgment. And when we compare widely different times and places we are apt to wonder if there is any common ground. It is only a very smug provincialism that can attribute the alien standards of other races and nations to a disregard of the light. Mohammedans and Buddhists have believed as firmly in, and fought as passionately for, their moral convictions as Christians have for theirs. When we survey the vast amount of material amassed by anthropologists, we find that, as has been often said, there is hardly a vice that has not somewhere been deemed a virtue, and hardly a virtue but has been branded as a vice. History is full of the pathos of havoc wrought by conscientious men, of foolish and ruinous acts which they have braced themselves to do for conscience' sake. One has but to think of the earnest and prayerful inquisitors and persecutors in the mediaeval Church, of the Puritans destroying the stained-glass windows and paintings of the Madonna, of the caliph who destroyed the great Alexandrian library, bereaving the world at one blow of that priceless culture-inheritance. Written biography, fiction which truly represents life, and individual memory are full of conscience have sundered those who truly loved and wrought irremediable pain and loss. Lately the newspapers told us of the heroic suicide of General Nogi and his wife, who felt it their duty not to survive their emperor. To a Catholic Christian this imperious dictate of the Japanese conscience would be a deadly sin. And so it goes. There is no need to multiply instances of what can be observed on every hand. Conscience reflects the traditions and influences amid which a man grows up.
But if the deliverances of different men's consciences conflict, how shall we know which to trust? If any particular command of the inner voice may be morally wrong, how can we trust it at all? There are obviously morbid and perverted consciences; but if conscience itself is the ultimate authority, and is not to be justified and criticized by some deeper test, what right have we to call any of its manifestations morbid or perverted? Is it not a species of egotism to hold one's own moral discernment as superior to another's; and if so, do we not need some criterion by which to judge between them? Surely the diversity of its judgments makes conscience an impossible foundation for morality; we should have as many codes as consciences and fall into a hopeless confusion. If conscience everywhere agreed in its dictates, could we base morality upon it? Even, however, if conscience led us all in the same direction, would that prove its authority? Perhaps we should all be following a will o' the wisp, and foolishly sacrificing our desires to an idol of the tribe, a universal superstition. Must it not show its credentials before it can legitimately command our allegiance? It is but one specific type of impulse among many; why should it be given the reins, the control over all? Do we say, because conscience makes for our best welfare? The answer would, in general, be true; but we should then be putting as our test and ultimate authority the attainment of our welfare, which would be to abandon the point of view we are discussing. Conscience claims authority. But that might conceivably be mere impudence and tyranny. Moreover, there are those who feel no call to follow conscience; how could we prove to them that they ought? Is it not the height of irrationality to bow down before an unexplained and mysterious impulse and allow it to sway our conduct without knowing why? If the "ought" is really shot out of the blue at us, if there is no justification, no imperious demand for morality but the existence of this inner push, why might we not raise our heads, refuse to be dominated by it, and live the life of free men, following the happy breezes of our desires? That is precisely what many have done, men who have reached maturity enough of mind to see the emptiness of following an ingrained impulse simply because it exists, but not a full enough maturity to see beyond to the real justification and significance of conscience.
A further realization of the inadequacy of the intuitive theory comes when we observe that conscience is by no means always clear in its dictates. It often leaves us in the lurch. Developed in us as it has been by circumstance and suggestion, it helps us usually only in certain recognized types of situation. When new cases arise, it is hopelessly at sea. As a practical working principle, conscientiousness is not only apt to be a perverted and provincial guide, it is insufficient for the solving of fresh and difficult problems. The science casnistry has been developed in great detail to supply this lack, to apply the well-recognized deliverances of a certain accepted type of conscience to the various possibilities of situation. These systems, however, reflect the idiosyncrasies of their makers, and have never won wide approbation. Morality must remain largely experimental, individual. Conscience will play a very useful role in spurring us to our recognized duty in the commoner situations, but for all the more delicate decisions we need a more ultimate touchstone. We must grasp the underlying principles of right conduct, and weigh the relative goods attainable by each possible act. A well-balanced and normal conscience will save us the recurrent reasoning out of typical perplexities, but it must be supplemented by an insight into the ends to be aimed for and kept rather strictly in its place.
What is the plausibility of moral intuitionism?
It is never wholly satisfactory merely to refute a theory; we must see its plausibility and understand its appeal if we are to be sure of doing it justice. In the case of the intuition-theory it is easy to discern the reasons that have kept it alive? though it has never been at all widespread among thinking men? in spite of the obvious objections that can be raised to it.
(1) Perhaps the original source of the doctrine was a certain sort of religious faith; it follows easily as a corollary to the belief in God. If God commands us to do right, it is felt, He must have given us some way to know what is right. The inner voice of conscience may be just such a God-given guide; therefore it is such a guide; therefore it is infallible. A natural piece of a priori reasoning, on a par with the Christian Scientist's syllogism: God is good; a good God would not permit evil to exist; therefore there is no evil. Unfortunately a priori reasoning has to yield to actual experience. Since we see that conscience is not infallible and evil does exist, there must be some fallacy in the arguments.
(2) Another source of the doctrine's strength lies in its simplicity. It is a great mental relief to drop the tangle of confusing considerations, to stop trying to reason out one's course of action, and follow a supposedly reliable guide. The intuition-theory goes naturally with a moral conservatism which dreads the chaos and uncertainty that follow upon the doubt of established moral habits. It is so much more comfortable to feel that one has already the one divine and ultimate code, that one has always done right because one has steadily obeyed the inner light! It is reassuring to divide the world into the sheep and the goats? if one can believe one's self a sheep. But what O dismay! what if one were after all a goat! A great deal of mental anguish has been caused by the pseudo-simplicity of this dichotomy. There is no such clean-cut and clearly visible line between right and wrong; there is instead a bewildering maze of goods. Hardly any choice but involves a sacrifice, hardly any ideal but has its disadvantages. One learns with experience to be wary of these simple theories, these closet theories which collapse when they are brought out into the light of day.
(3) We must, however, be just. The fact of the reliability of conscience, and the wisdom of following its guidance, holds over a wide range of human experience and the experience which is most apparent upon the surface. For all ordinary cases we of Christendom agree without hesitation that murder is wrong, and lying, and stealing. It seems a waste of time to try to justify our instinctive verdict, and the attempt would only be bewildering to most men. It is only when brought face to face with some alien code that we see the need of digging below intuition. A missionary to the South Seas may be confronted with men to whom the killing of other tribesmen and the accumulation of skulls is a glorious and honorable feat, or to whom skillful lying is an enviable and proud accomplishment. But most of us live among neighbors whose conscience is comfortably like our own, and only occasionally become seriously perplexed. In the great mass of everyday occasions we do know our duty intuitively, and we do agree with one another. We recognize a duty at sight without realizing its teleology. It is not, indeed, an innate faculty; it was acquired during our formative years; it is not infallible. But the forces which have gone to the making of it are similar in all our lives, and the products are more alike than unlike.
(4) Finally, it is true that to obey conscience is, in a sense, to do right, to be moral, no matter how distorted conscience may be. Conscientiousness is in itself a virtue. To this point we shall later return. We need only say here that conscientiousness is not enough. Life is not so simple a matter as that. We need judgment, sanity, insight, as well as a strong sense of duty. We need to correct and train conscience, to adjust it to our real needs, to recognize that it is a means, not an end.
Our discussion, though rapid, should show that we cannot start with the "ought" of our conscience, or moral sense, and erect our moral theory upon that. Conscience itself needs to be explained. Its commands need to be justified by reference to some more ultimate criterion. It needs to be pruned of its fanaticism, developed where it is weak, and kept in line with our growing insight into what is best in conduct. Ruskin once summed the matter up by saying, "Obey thy conscience! But first be sure it is not the conscience of an ass!" Conscience may be a very dangerous guide. And even where it is normal and useful it must not be invested with any absolute and irrational authority.
Historical study, then, reveals the growth of personal and social morality through the action of forces, which tend to drive men into conduct that makes for their welfare more surely than did their primitive animal impulses. Conscience arises through these same forces. Though subject to perversion and infinitely variant in detail, community-morals and individual conscience have been the chief means of making man's life safe and wisely directed. The criterion that emerges from such a study is not, however, the bald existence of codes of morals, or of conscience, but the human welfare which those codes and that conscience exist to serve. To an exposition of the ways in which morality serves and should increasingly serve human welfare, we now turn.
Classic intuitional theories will be found developed in: Price, Review of the Chief Questions and Difficulties of Morals (1757), Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699). F. Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil (1725). Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons upon Human Nature, II, III (1726). J. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory (1885).
Criticisms of the intuitional theories will be found in: S. E. Mezes, Ethics, chap. III; Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap. XVI, sec. 3; F. Paulsen, System of Ethics, part II, chap. V, sec. 4; H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, chap. II, sec. 14; chap. IV, sec. 20; Muirhead, Elements of Ethics, secs. 32-35. H. Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, book I, chap. IV. W. Fite, Introductory Study of Ethics,
HISTORICAL knowledge without critical insight leads to moral nihilism, the conviction of the pre-Socratic Sophists that, since every time and people has its own standards, there is no real objective right and wrong. Morality is seen to be not a fixed code sent readymade from heaven, but a set of habits and intuitions that have had a natural origin and development. Our particular moral code is perceived to be but one out of many, our type of conscience psychologically on the same level with the strange, and to us perverted, sense of duty of alien races. How can we judge impartially between our standards and those of the Fiji Islanders? What warrant have we for saying that our code is a better one than theirs? Or how do we know that the whole thing is not superstition?
What is the nature of that intrinsic goodness upon which ultimately all valuations rest?
As a matter of fact, underneath the manifold disagreements as to good and bad, there is a deep stratum of absolute certainty. It is only in the more complex and delicate matters that doubt arises; all men share in those elementary perceptions of good and bad that make up the bulk of human valuation. To men everywhere it is an evil to be in severe physical pain or to be maimed in body, to be shut away from air, from food, from other people. It is a good to taste an appetizing dish, to exercise when well and rested, to hear harmonious music, to feel the sweet emotion of love. The fact that men agree upon judgments does not prove them true; but these are not judgments, they are perceptions. [Footnote: Or affections. Let no one quarrel about the psychological terms used; the only important matter is to note the fact, however it be phrased, that "good" and "bad" in their basic usage are DESCRIPTIVE terms. A toothache is bad just as indisputably as the sky is blue. The word "bad" has a definite meaning, just as the word "blue" has; and the toothache is, among other things, precisely what we mean by "bad," just as the look of the cloudless sky by daylight is what we mean by "blue."] To call love good is not to give an opinion, it is to describe a fact. It is a matter of direct first-hand feeling, whose reality consists in its being felt. To say that these experiences are good or bad is equivalent to saying that they FEEL good or bad; there can be no dispute about it. This is the bottom fact of ethics. Different experiences have different intrinsic worth as they pass. There is a chiaroscuro of consciousness, a light and shade of immediate goodness and badness over all our variegated moments. The good moments are their own excuse for being, a part of the brightness and worth of life. They need nothing ulterior to justify them. The bad moments feel bad, and that is the end of it; they are bad-feeling moments, and no sophistication can deny it. Conscious life looked at from this point of view, and abstracted from all its other aspects, is a flux of plus and minus values. Certain of its moments have a greater felt worth than others; some experiences are intrinsically undesirable, the shadows of life; others, intrinsically sweet, a part of its sunshine. In the last analysis, all differences in value, including all moral distinctions, rest upon this disparity in the immediate worth of conscious states. [Footnote: Cf. G. Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 104: "All worth leads us back to actual feeling somewhere, or else evaporates into nothing-into a word and a superstition." I cannot but feel that contemporary definitions of value that omit reference to hedonic differences e.g. that of Professor Brown (Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. II, p. 32): "Value is degree of adequacy of a potentiality to the realization of the effect by virtue of which it is a potentiality"-miss the real meaning of "value." We do, indeed, speak occasionally of x as having value as a means to y, when y is not good or a means to a good. But that seems to me a misuse of the word.] We may say absolutely that if it were not for this fundamental difference in feeling there would be no such thing as morality. There might conceivably be a world in which consciousness should exist without any agreeable or disagreeable qualities; in such a world nothing would matter; all acts would be equally indifferent. Or there might be a world in which all experiences were equally pleasurable or painful; in such a case all acts would be equally good or equally sad; there would be no ground for choice. One might in any of these hypothetical worlds be driven by mechanical impulse or fitful whim to do this or that, but there would be no rational basis for preference. Such, however, is not the case. Comparative valuation is possible; all secondary goods and evils arise, all morality, all art and religion and science have their wellspring in this brute fact, this primordial parting of the ways between the more and the less desirable phases of possible conscious life. Morality of an elementary type would exist on this level even without the further complications of actual life. At least a very important art would arise; whether or not we should call it morality is a mere matter of definition. For a choice between alternatives immediately felt goods would arise, and the problem of how to get the better kinds of experience and avoid the worse would demand solution. Every bit of plus value added to experience would make the world so much the brighter, as would every bit of pain avoided. There are, to be sure, the mystical optimisms and pessimisms to be reckoned with, the sweeping assertions of certain schools and individuals that everything is equally good or equally bad. Such undiscriminating formulas are either the mere objectification of a mood, of some unusual period of ecstasy or sorrow, a blind outcry of thanksgiving or of bitterness, or they are the clumsy expression of some practical truth, as, the wisdom of acquiescence, and the futility of preoccupation with evil. But taken seriously and literally such statements are simply untrue to the facts and blur our fundamental perceptions. If actually accredited, either would lead to quiescence; if everything were equally good or evil all striving would be meaningless, one might as well jump from a housetop or walk into the fire. But as a matter of fact such mystical assertions are indulged in only in the inactive moments of life, and mean no more than a lyric poem or a burst of music. Every one in his practical moments acknowledges tacitly, at least, the difference between the intrinsic goodness and badness of experiences. A life of even delight or even wretchedness, or of colorless indifference, is not inconceivable, but it is not the lot of any actual human beings.
The larger quarrel between optimists and pessimists need not, for our purposes, be settled. Life may be a very good thing, on the whole, or a very bad thing. The only point we need to note is that it is at any rate a varying thing. Some experiences are more worth having than others. Moral theory needs no further admission to find its foothold. Nor do we need to discuss the problem of evil. It may be that all pain has its ultimate uses that nothing is "really" bad, if we take that to mean that all evil has a necessary existence as a means to a good otherwise unattainable and worth the cost. But however useful as a means evil may be, it is nonetheless evil and regrettable. It is not good qua pain. If the same amount of good could be obtained without the preliminary evil, it were better to skip it. In short, the existence of different values in immediate experience is indisputable; we may call them for convenience intrinsic goodness and badness.
What is extrinsic goodness?
But there is a radically different sense of the words "good" and "bad"; namely, that in which we say that a thing is good FOR this or that. This is the kind of goodness the THINGS about us have; they are good for the production of intrinsic goodness (as we are using that phrase), which is always (so far as we know) something produced in living organisms. [Footnote: We also occasionally speak of things as being "good for" something else when that something else is not a good or a means to a good (see preceding footnote); as, "sunshine is good for weeds." But as applied to evils, the phrase "good for" more often means "good to abolish"; as, "hellebore is good for weeds." These usages illustrate the ambiguity of all our common ethical terms. To consider them here would be, however, needlessly confusing. The two senses of the term "good" mentioned in the text are the only senses we need to bear in mind for the purposes of ethics.] To put the same truth in other terms, things are good or bad only with respect to their effect upon our conscious experience. [Footnote: I am fully aware of the widespread current distaste for the word "consciousness," with its idealistic associations. The term seems to me too useful to discard; but I wish to point out that, as I use it, it involves no metaphysical viewpoint, but is equally consonant with idealism or realism of any sort.] Primitive man, indeed, imagines inanimate things as having intrinsic goodness or badness, i.e., as feeling happy or unhappy, benevolent or malignant. We still speak of a serene sky, an angry storm cloud, a caressing breeze, and in a hundred ways read our affective life into material objects. But we now recognize all these ascriptions as cases of the pathetic fallacy, poetically significant but literally untrue. Animism, which looms so large in primitive religion, consists in thus objectifying into things the emotions they arouse in us. In reality all of these affective qualities exist in us, not in the outer objects; so far as our epithets have an objective truth they describe not the content of the objects, but their function in our lives. When we speak of delicious food, beautiful pictures, ugly colors, we mean strictly that these objects are such as to arouse in us certain peculiar pleasant or unpleasant feelings. So that apart from the existence of consciousness there would be no goodness or badness at all. [Footnote: The neo-realists would prefer to say, perhaps, "apart from the existence of organisms,"] and this may be an exacter phrase; we from previous page [Footnote: pleasures and pains that remain out of connection with that interrelated stream of experience to which we usually limit the term "consciousness." On the other hand, MAY it not be that God, and angels, or other disembodied beings, have consciousness, and intrinsic goodness, without having organisms? Of course, for all we know, the world about us may be chock full of pleasures and pains. But for practical purposes, and so far as our morality is concerned, either the statement in the text or the suggested equivalent is true. The point is, that the foundation of morality is in US—whether you call US in the last analysis consciousnesses or organisms]
It is the existence of felt goodness, intrinsic goodness, and its opposite, that allows us to attribute to objects another kind of goodness or badness, according as they are calculated to produce in us the former kind. This kind of goodness and badness we may call extrinsic. It is only by thus attributing a sort of goodness and badness to senseless objects that we can aim for and avoid the good and bad phases of conscious life. In themselves these conscious moments are largely unnamable and inexpressible. There are, as it is, dumb objectless ecstasies that are of transcendent sweetness; but we do not usually know how to reproduce them, and for the most part we have to overlook these goods in our ideals and aim only for those that we can associate with recognized outer stimuli. For practical purposes we think rather in terms of outer objects than of our states of experience; nature has had need to make men but very slightly introspective. And so it is that this derived use of our eulogistic and disparaging terms plays a larger part than its primary application. But the essential point to note is that "goodness" and "badness" in the first instance refer to the fundamental cleavage between the affective qualities of experience, and only secondarily and by metonymy apply to objects in the physical world which affect our conscious states. The next point to note is that our conscious experiences and activities themselves have not only their intrinsic value, as they pass, but an extrinsic value, as means toward future intrinsic values. Each phase of experience has its own worth, while it lasts, and also has its results in determining future phases with their varying degrees of worth. Our reveries, our debauches, our sacrifices are good or bad in their effects as well as in themselves. Thus all experience has a double rating; acts are not only pleasant, agreeable, intrinsically desirable, but also wise, prudent, useful, virtuous, i.e., extrinsically desirable. These extrinsic values usually bulk much larger in the end than the first transitory intrinsic value; but our natural tendency is to forget them and guide our action by immediate values. Hence the need of a continual disparagement of the latter, and the many means men have adopted of emphasizing the importance of the former. Yet, after all, our concern for the extrinsic value of acts has to do only with means to ends; and unless acts tend to produce intrinsic goodness somewhere they are not extrinsically good. There is no sense in sacrificing an immediate good unless the alternative act will tend in its ultimate effects to produce a greater good, or unless the act sacrificed would have brought, after its present intrinsic good, some greater intrinsic evil. The sacrifice of a good for no greater good is asceticism or fanaticism. From this there is no ultimate salvation but by referring all acts to the final touchstone—asking which will produce in the end the greatest amount of intrinsic good and the least intrinsic evil. What sort of conduct, then, is good? And how shall we define virtue? We are brought thus to the conception of an art which shall not only teach us which of two immediate, intrinsic, goods is the better, but shall consider all the near and remote consequences of acts, and direct us to that conduct which will produce most good in the end. [Footnote: The impossibility of finding any other ultimate basis for our conception of moral "good" or "bad" is well expressed by Socrates in Plato's Protagoras (p. 354): "Then you think that pain is an evil and pleasure is a good, and even pleasure you deem an evil, when it robs you of greater pleasure than it gives, or causes pain greater than the pleasure. If, however, you call pleasure an evil in regard to some other end or standard, you will be able to show us that standard. BUT YOU HAVE NONE TO SHOW… And have you not a similar way of speaking about pain? You call pain a good when it takes away greater pains than those which it has, or gives pleasures greater than the pains." He then goes on to explain the need of morality,-to guide us, in the face of the foreshortening effects of our particular situation, to what will make for the greatest happiness in the long run (p. 356): "Do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your sight when near, and smaller when at a distance? Now suppose happiness to consist in doing or choosing the greater, and in not doing or avoiding the less, what would be the saving principle of human life? Would not the ACT OF MEASURING be the saving principle?"] is best which will in the long run bring into being the greatest possible amount of intrinsic goodness and the least intrinsic evil. For goodness of conduct we commonly use the term "virtue"; and for intrinsic good the most widely accepted name-though one which is misleading to many is "happiness." So we may say, in sum, that virtue is that manner of life that tends to happiness. Objection is occasionally made that happiness is too vague a term, too elusive a concept, to be set forth as the ultimate aim of conduct. "Alas!" says Bradley, "the one question which no one can answer is, what is happiness?" But this is a palpable confusion of thought. If we mean by the question, "Wherein is happiness to be found, by doing what can we attain it?" then the answer is, indeed, uncertain in its completeness; it is precisely to answer it that we study ethics. Or if we mean, "What is the psychology of happiness?" the answer is as yet dubious; but it is irrelevant. Whatever its psychological conditions and the means to attain it, we know happiness when we have it. The puzzle is not to recognize it, but to get it. By happiness we mean the steady presence of what we have called intrinsic goodness and the absence of intrinsic badness; it is as indefinable as any ultimate element of experience, but as well known to us as blackness and whiteness or light and dark. Take, as a typical moral situation, a case in which a thirsty man drinks polluted water. In the diagram the arrow represents the direction of the flow of time, and each of the ribbons below represents the stream of consciousness of an individual concerned-the uppermost being that of the thirsty man himself, the others those of his wife, children, or friends. The plus sign early in the drinker's stream of experience stands for the plus value which drinking the water effects-the gratifying taste of the water and the allaying of the discomfort of thirst-real values, whose worth cannot be gainsaid. Following, in his own stream of experience, are a row of minus signs, indicating the undesirable penalties in his own life which follow-disease, pain, deprivation of other goods. No good accrues to others, unless the slight pleasure of seeing his thirst allayed. But evils follow in their experience: worry, sympathetic pain at his suffering, expense of doctor's bills, perhaps (which means deprivation of other possible goods), etc. It is clear at a glance that the positive good attained is not worth the lingering and widespread evils; and the act of drinking the polluted water, though to a very thirsty man a keen temptation, is immoral. Morality is thus an acting upon a right perspective of life. Personal morality considers the goods and evils in the one stream of consciousness, social morality the goods and evils in other conscious lives concerned. Between them they sum up the law and the prophets.