A. K. Rogers.

“ But, it may be said, is there not, in fact, a value in achievement even apart from whether it makes the man who does the work happy in the doing? To be sure there may be—for other people. But a theory which starts to find the clue to a successful life in its social effects can hardly universalize itself. What of these others who enjoy the fruits of a man's unenjoying toils? why should they have more enjoyment than he? And if they too are to sacrifice happiness in work to the creation of commodities for their neighbors, in the end everybody alike fails of satisfaction. ”

“ But because we can still retain our interest in this sense, it would be absurd to say that there has been no sacrifice in the sense the principle deprecates. The interest of mental participation is not the interest of active participation. I may retain a fondness for concerts, and still regret that I was unable to carry on my music; a sympathy for literary, or political, or benevolent enterprises no more fully satisfies my suppressed ambitions along such lines, than a sympathy for lovers is a substitute for marriage. ”

“ The first way of putting the matter which this suggests, is that we stick to the fact in its lowest terms, and interpret life in accordance with the scientific notion of 'self-preservation.' And as a matter of fact such a formula has had a very considerable vogue. It is too simple, however, and too bare of content, to stand any chance of justifying itself to impartial inspection. To hold with Hobbes that men actually regard the preservation of themselves in existence as the one self-evident goal never to be lost sight of, is to be blind to the greater part of human experience ”

“ The feeling of 'unworthiness' sometimes becomes so abnormally acute as to spoil the most innocent forms of personal realization, and to sting its victim into a constant crucifixion of his natural desires. But that such a thing is generally so of mankind is not in the least true. Indeed one of the things that ethical wisdom is constantly called upon to combat, is this belief that mere attainment, work done, going after results, is the true way of life, even though in themselves the results are what we commonly approve as good. ”

“ But to get anything we can call a principle, we have to go beyond this. A principle always implies as well a connection with human practice; it is a general truth which can be used to suggest to us what it is we ought to do. Accordingly, if we are to be sure what we are after in the search for ethical principles, it is well to translate the problem into these specific terms: Granting the existence of human nature and its wants, can we point out anything as in general necessary to the attainment of those ends which man will find himself permanently approving? ”

“ And when an interest in things and issues holds us, we can afford such a large indifference. If I do not see to my own cultivation, no one will attend to it for me, and the end remains unattained. But causes may still be achieved apart from me, and probably even better achieved. It would be the height of self-conceit to suppose that because I am not there to look after things they will not be done; and so without self-condemnation I can usually make my option for the special interests that are mine, and still feel that the world is safe. ”

“ And when I ask, Does the life which, in spite of achievement, fails of permanent content and satisfaction in the career which it has chosen, really justify itself to me as a good life, one that is successful and that has achieved its end? ”

“ Nor does science overlook this; and if biological preservation is its watchword, it at least is not self-preservation, but the preservation of the race. But this only brings into relief the fact that life is more than biology. It may be so that, keeping to the purely animal plane, 'nature' is only interested in keeping the species alive—though the statement seems more poetic than scientific. It may even be that for themselves men ought to make this their sole aim. But it is quite clear that men do not make it their comprehensive definition of living. ”

“ The general experience of mankind bears out the claim that the average person at least is more likely to find satisfaction through self-limitation, than by spreading himself out too thin. We should doubtless like, if we could, to develop all our tastes; but the limitations of action have to be recognized. Our powers are not capable indefinitely of being extended, and the outer world takes no apparent interest in rendering successful compromises always easy; sacrifice is a plain necessity. ”

“ But when we have once allowed that 'vocation' is something which ought of itself to be determined from within, and that social arrangements should be directed to this end, there still remains a large field within which, if I am to be able to retain my self-respect, duty must help to shape my life as well as inclination; since a vocation once assumed can only be carried on in a world constantly presenting me with unwelcome alternatives, which however I can ignore only at the risk of feeling degraded in my own eyes. ”

“ Of course it is so that by taking the matter firmly in hand, and making it the one business of his life to secure for himself a fully rounded development, a man may come indefinitely closer to the goal, even if it remains in strictness unattainable. This stands as one of the accredited human ideals. But it very certainly would not be generally accepted as the one ideal by which all others are to be tested. Indeed it has plain deficiencies of its own. It can be lived most successfully, to speak in terms of paradox, when the full life is itself the expression of a narrow and special interest. ”

“ A man of conscience, born to high rank or vast wealth, and so made responsible for large interests in terms of possible human welfare, or one whom chance has shouldered with an enterprise which it then seems cowardly to desert, or who is conscious in himself of powers to meet some crisis for which no one else seems to have the ability or the will—such an one may find it his duty to sacrifice those ends which he really is eager for, and endure, in his vocation, the exactions of an uncongenial taskmaster. ”

“ Now these last present themselves not seldom to our natural moral feeling as exceptions to the general principle of 'living one's own life.' In so far as a man can plan his life for himself,—and more and more this is coming to represent one of the necessary requirements of a tolerable social order,—then it ought not in the normal mind to give rise to the least sense of unworthiness when he deliberately seeks to know his own wants and interests, and to shape his career so as to the fullest extent possible to give play to these, and evoke thereby the greatest satisfaction open to his nature. ”

“ It might perhaps be claimed that the principle of 'inclusiveness' is satisfied to accept objective interests; but in point of fact its logic lends itself almost inevitably to the self-realization formula. If the 'complete life' is our goal, then it is bound to be a matter of regret if any part of ourselves fails of development, and our eyes will need constantly to be directed inward to guard against a loss of opportunity through inadvertence. A disinterested interest in things, on the other hand, is more than likely to supplant and interfere with the compromising instinct ”

“ Of course if by good we mean 'morally good,' or that which 'ought to be,' we can hardly escape the conviction that that which has the greater claim on our duty we ought to do. But this is to empty the supposed principle of any practical meaning. As a practical guide what it needs to maintain is, that 'natural' good, in its widest and most comprehensive sense, is capable of summation, and that our sense of duty arises only after we have completed the summation, and found on what side the maximum of natural good lies. ”

“ Thus even if it were the case that what every human being really is after is to secure his own pleasure, we should still have the ethical problem on our hands: what kinds of pleasure are we to select if the end is to be successfully attained? ”

“ But when we translate this into concrete situations, we discover empirically that at least it cannot be followed blindly. Purely as a matter of expediency and fact, it may often seem the wiser course to sacrifice some impulses to others. To combine them in anything like the form in which they actually lay hold upon desire, will inevitably in many instances be possible only through a compromise which abates something of their full pretensions; and quite conceivably the sum of losses may be greater than if we had frankly thrown overboard the weaker interest. ”

“ How in the world are we ever going to find in the concrete an answer to the problem, Where lies the greatest amount of absolute good? It would be bad enough even were we all agreed on the comparison of various goods, and knew just how much weight ought to attach in our calculation to the creation of an object of beauty, say, as over against an equal effort spent in health-producing exercise, or in giving good advice to our friends—all of them supposedly goods of a sort. The mere quantitative complexity is itself enough to destroy any real chance of ever coming to a rational conclusion. ”

“ Now here we have a real principle of subordination; other things are good in proportion as they lend themselves to the accomplishment of this main design, or at least do not actively impede it. Sub-ordination to the 'self,' on the contrary, has no plain meaning, unless we fall back on the outworn notion of 'faculties' standing to one another in some inherent relationship of worth. As a working tool, the 'whole' is thus no standard fact of human nature. Neither the whole, nor what is meant in the concrete by subordination to the whole, is determinable until the particular task is chosen ”

“ One of the most serious failings of ethical thought has been its imperfect vision of the multiplicity of human ideals. In its sense for the urgent need of introducing unity and harmony into the ethical experience, it has tended to ignore the individual aspect which ideals must take on before they are fit to stand for anything that real human beings actually want. In this tendency it has been backed and abetted by one of the most universal of human failings. The principle, Live and let live, seldom has played any but a very modest rôle in history. ”

“ I propose then to ask in what general form reason can be applied to the ethical life, as a source of principles to guide us in the search for our best good. A principle, we should note, is something more than a mere generalization, fact, or truth. Every principle rests indeed upon a foundation of fact ”

“ As the first formal principle, or set of principles, attaches to the intellect as a tool of the good life, so the second attaches to the will. If no man can reasonably expect success unless he puts his mind to the business, so no man can look to getting what he wants apart from certain qualities of will. The world is not a place where feebleness, vacillation, laziness, are tolerated ”

“ If we translate into less literal terms that assertion of oneself, in the form of superiority over one's surroundings, which self-preservation seems to imply, we might be led to think of experience as a striving after power—the consciousness of dominating the conditions of one's life. Such a mode of expression, congenial alike to a popularized theory of evolution and to the natural human fondness for self-glorification, has been taken up and given vogue by a number of philosophic and semi-philosophic writers. ”

“ If we injure others they will be resentful and try to hurt us in turn; if we are proud and disdainful they will dislike and speak ill of us; if we treat them with a show of consideration we shall be more likely to get what we want out of them. Such facts are familiar to everyone. And in view of them we are often able to lay down with practical universality various principles of conduct; so long as men live in society, they cannot go to work to attain their ends along lines which ignore the wishes and opinions of other men, and expect to reach their goal. ”

“ The only way to escape distraction, dissipation of energy, constant hesitation and vacillation through the need of canvassing over again at each new crisis the relative value to be placed on competing claims, is that a man commit himself definitely, and make up his mind that here rather than there the interest lies which is capable of gripping him, and keeping him steadily and pleasantly at his work, without a constant unsettling of the conditions of effective and forward-moving action. ”

“ Goodness is hardly separable from a certain moral tact, a sympathetic sensitiveness to niceties of quality and conduct; and progress lies not so much in strengthening the feelings—these may already be strong enough where they are actually evoked, as is shown by the ease with which even a hardened audience can be worked up over some fictitious case presented vividly on the stage—as in cultivating a capacity to see the occasion of sympathy in a wider range of situations, and a superior responsiveness to those shades of a situation calculated to evoke the inhibitive impulses and feelings. ”

“ All men, at one time or another, set pleasure among their aims of conduct; some men, it may be, make it the one rule of life. But that the normal mind reckons life only as a means to the gratification of its private feelings, is simply not the case. In instructed circles, a different type of formula is now therefore chiefly current, pointing back in one form or another to that scientific fact which traditional hedonism failed sufficiently to take into account—the biological life with its predisposed mechanism. ”

“ It is evident to begin with that, considering the sort of being man is, a successful life must be a rational life. It must not, that is, be merely impulsive and haphazard, but must submit impulse to rational reflection, and act only after an impartial scrutiny alike of the outer facts, and of the relative value of aims and ideals such as comes from deliberate self-knowledge. It is well to note once more that the maxim, 'Be rational,' does not of itself tell us in the least what is rational ”

“ There are innumerable ways of accomplishing good in the world, with wide differences of quantitative result; and it is not reasonable to call upon any man to adjust his own life to these objective possibilities independently of the sort of thing for which he is himself particularly fitted, his fitness being evidenced to himself in the end by the call he feels, and the assured content that comes to him in the process. ”