Conformation

“ And, passing from this to conscious life, we are called on still for further uses and fresh applications of our standard. In the will of the individual, or of the community, so far as adequately carried out and expressing itself in outward fact, we have a new claim to harmonious and self-included reality. And we have to consider in each case the consistency, together with the range and area, of the principle, and the degree up to which it has mastered and passed into existence. ”

“ What, then, shall be, the common standard that shall decide which is the man that thinks with the greatest justice? What the scale by which to measure who has the best regulated imagination? What balance shall be found sufficiently exact to determine whose knowledge is most certain, when he agitates subjects, which experience cannot enable him to examine, that escape all his senses, that have no model, that are above reason? ”

“ The phenomena of mind, then, are the various feelings of our nature, both those improperly called physical and those peculiarly designated as mental; and by the laws of mind, I mean the laws according to which those feelings generate one another.
§ 2. All states of mind are immediately caused either by other states of mind, or by states of body. When a state of mind is produced by a state of mind, I call the law concerned in the case a law of Mind. When a state of mind is produced directly by a state of body, the law is a law of Body, and belongs to physical science. ”

“ But our power of judgment retains its full freedom to apply these laws or not, or to apply whatever law it chooses to any possible object; (for instance, to regard the human body as inorganic, or as organic, or as living matter.) ”

“ Neither of these is the nature we are taking a view of. But it is the inward frame of man considered as a system or constitution: whose several parts are united, not by a physical principle of individuation, but by the respects they have to each other; the chief of which is the subjection which the appetites, passions, and particular affections have to the one supreme principle of reflection or conscience. The system or constitution is formed by and consists in these respects and this subjection. Thus the body is a system or constitution: so is a tree: so is every machine. ”

“ This I have assigned for the reason, why, after considering several loose standards of equality, and correcting them by each other, we proceed to imagine so correct and exact a standard of that relation, as is not liable to the least error or variation. The same principle makes us easily entertain this opinion of the continued existence of body. Objects have a certain coherence even as they appear to our senses; but this coherence is much greater and more uniform, if we suppose the object.% to have a continued existence ”

“ Both conformity and nonconformity are alike impracticable. When the conformist can stay clean in his conformity, the nonconformist come clean out of his nonconformity, it will be time to plead self-consistency. ”

“ In the sacred fact of obligation you touch the immutable, and lay hold, as it were, on the eternities. At the very centre of your being, there is a fixed element, and that of a kind or degree essentially sovereign. A standard is set up in your very thought, by which a great part of your questions are determined, and about which your otherwise random thoughts may settle into order and law. ”

“ The rational attitude of the individual toward the question of conformity or non-conformity in his own life, would seem to be: assert your individuality in matters which you deem important; conform in those you deem unimportant. ”

“ By the very supposition which we make respecting these forces, they include all the relations by which the parts are combined into a whole, and therefore they, and they only, must determine all the attributes of the whole. The foundation of all our speculations respecting the intimate constitution of bodies must be this principle, that their composition determines their properties. ”

“ And what could be a more accurate expression of the law of conformity to type than this: 'Put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him?' Or this, 'we are changed into the same image from glory to glory?' And elsewhere we are expressly told by the same writer that this conformity is the end and goal of the Christian life. To work this type in us is the whole purpose of God for man. ”

“ Here is the beginning of the dawn, whose sun, however, in order to become visible and impart warmth, must rise still higher. The certainty afforded in the law of Identity in positive form, in the law of Contradiction in negative form, in the law of Excluded Middle in the form of an opposition, and in the law of Sufficient Reason in conditional form, is based upon Causality, Community of Species, or Totality. ”

“ Such a body, to the continuance and identity whereof we attach the continuance and identity of our personality, and which we posit as a complete articulated whole, and in which we posit ourselves as having causality immediately through our will, is what we call our body. ”

“ Why not view the Individual Whole as a whole of many related but not therefore mutually determined individuals? Why is not that at least possible? Do you say that one system of Thought, one ideal unity of universal Ideas, or Laws, is by our hypothesis to be fulfilled, and that therefore the individual fulfilment can only be such that it realises the very system of laws in this system of facts, where the Whole is contingent, but the parts are predetermined by the unity of the system? ”

“ What evidence is there that our codes and conformities which perform exactly the same rôle, and are mostly traditional survivals, are any the less outlandish and irrational? May they not be tainted with the same purposelessness? Is not the inference irresistible that they are? ”

“ And it is the presence of this law within us, and our own knowledge that we are conscious of it, that makes man without excuse. But conformity to that which is deepest in environment often, always, demands non-conformity to some of the most palpable of surrounding conditions. ”

“ Yet we understand one another when we speak of the shape of a human body; so likewise we do when we speak of the heart and inward principles, how far soever the standard is from being exact or precisely fixed. ”

“ There is a principle of conformity in nature or of something in common between a number of individuals of the same class, but there is also a principle of contrast, of discrimination and identity, which is equally essential in the system of the universe and in the structure of our ideas both of art and nature. ”

“ Let us see how, in these special classes of cases, we shall succeed in verifying the natural presupposition of common sense, which regards error as possible only when our object is not wholly present to mind, and which assumes that a judgment can have an object that is yet only partially present to mind. In choosing the classes of cases, we shall first follow common sense as to their definition. We shall take just the assumptions of daily life, and shall show that they lead us into difficulty. We are not for the first bound to explain why these assumptions are made. ”

“ Those who have dispensed with the assumption of such a universal standard, have only been enabled to do so by supposing that a moral sense, or instinct, inherent in our constitution, informs us, both what principles of conduct we are bound to observe, and also in what order these should be subordinated to one another. ”

“ We reach a higher stage where some existence embodies, or in any way presents in itself, a law and a principle. However, in the mere example and instance of an universal truth, the fact and the law are still essentially alien to each other, and the defective character of their union is plainly visible. Our standard moves us on towards an individual with laws of its own, and to laws which form the vital substance of a single existence. ”

“ There are certain observed laws of our thoughts and of our feelings, which rest upon experimental evidence, and, once seized, are a clue to the interpretation of much that we are conscious of in ourselves, and observe in one another. Such, for example, are the laws of association. Psychology, so far as it consists of such laws—I speak of the laws them selves, not of their disputed applications is as positive and certain a science as chemistry, and fit to be taught as such. ”

“ Thus Phenomenalism, when it has banished the notion of a substantial unity in things, has to identify the world of things, as we have already seen, with qualities in relation to one another. But now the question arises, How are we to understand the conception of qualities in relation? Can we, on the one hand, reduce all qualities to relations or all relations to qualities, or, on the other, can we form an intelligible idea of the way in which a single whole or system can be formed by the union of the two? ”

“ My conscience, your conscience, is like the standard measures which we at present possess, which by their very names—foot, handbreadth, nail, and the like, tell us that they were originally but the length of one man's limb. And so your measure of right and wrong, and another man's measure, though they may substantially correspond, yet differ according to your differences of education, character, and a thousand other things. So that the individual man's standard needs to be rectified. ”

“ There is nothing fixed about the objects to which society demands conformity. It is only the quantity that seems to be constant. So much conformity, like the conservation of physical energy in the universe, but the manners in which people shall think alike, or behave, or what objects they shall consider sacred, differ in myriad ways throughout different social groupings and in different eras. ”

“ Or, if we look at it from the individual's standpoint, we may say his consciousness awakes to find the world parcelled out under certain rules and divisions, which have objective validity, and govern him with the same absolute authority as do the circumstances of physical nature. Under their influence every rank and individual is alike forced to bow: to each his place and function is assigned by an order or system which claims an inviolable and eternal supremacy. ”

“ There are in the world, in fact, two different laws of conduct each valid on its own plane, the rale principally dependent on external status and the rule independent of status and entirely dependent on the thought and conscience. ”

“ Beginning with modes of conduct which are seen to be bad, society gradually perceives that the ultimate principle of classification must be by the primary feelings, that rules of conduct must be expressed in terms of character, and other rules which concern the application of these to more special cases must take a subordinate position and be regarded as only of conditional value. All these rules must necessarily correspond, within very narrow limits, to a statement of the conditions of vitality of the tissue which they characterize. ”

“ Because, though absolute conformity running throughout the whole of a life is not possible here on earth, we know that in each individual instance in which we came short of conformity the fault was ours, and it might have been otherwise. ”

“ In the other case we have a conformity to outer truth, — a conformity that no inner clearness, no well-wrought network of cunning ideal contrivance, can secure, unless the idea first submits to the authority of external existence. ”

“ Let us now apply the general laws we have scrutinized, to those beings of Nature who interest us the most. Let us see in what man differs from the other beings by which he is surrounded. Let us examine if he has not certain points in conformity with them, that oblige him, notwithstanding the different properties they respectively possess, to act in certain respects according to the universal laws to which every thing is submitted. Finally, let us enquire if the ideas he has formed of himself in meditating on his own peculiar mode of existence, be chimerical, or founded in reason. ”

“ I regard our ethical common sense as meaning precisely the very fact that our present will, as the will of an individual, is unique. By our activity, then, I mean just the unique significance of the present expression of our will. If a general law, — a merely universal type, — if our characters or temperaments, or some other such universal nature of things, are expressed in our present experience, then, in so far, we are indeed mere cases of types. ”

“ In their stead we have craftily devised conventions, such as that becoming shall mean being, and that for our purposes relative identity may, under the proper precautions, serve as well as absolute. But we stand unalterably committed to the postulate that identity there shall be, though everywhere we have to make it and by force to fit it on the facts. ”

“ Some [137] observations common to both, and a more distinct consideration of each, will more distinctly show the extent and force of the analogy between them; and the credibility, which arises from hence, as well as from the nature of the thing, that the present life was intended to be a state of discipline for a future one.
I. Every species of creatures is, we see, designed for a particular way of life; to which, the nature, the capacities, temper, and qualifications, of each species, are as necessary as their external circumstances. ”

“ But there is enough to be said on the different points of view from which conformity may be regarded, to hinder a ready judgment against those who continue to conform after ceasing to believe in the ordinary sense. ”

“ But the degree of perfection to which any power or individual is to be developed is determined, morally, by the principle of equilibrium. Moreover, we may recognize degrees of perfection in individuals who are, nevertheless, not to be classified as of less or greater moral value. ”