Human faculty

“ The question involved is not the right of one merely subjective faculty to impose obligation on another faculty or on all the human capacities and powers—one part of the personal self playing the role of sovereign over the other parts. ”

“ The reality of a faculty is not disproved by its fallibility. Finiteness, limitation and consequent incompetence to exclude mistake or only partial discernment, are no reason for denying the existence of any faculty within the range of its given action and real discriminations. The very errors that appear in its action are at once evidence of its existence and proof of limitations which harmonize it with the aggregate human psychology. ”

“ This lower faculty works night and day, for the security and preservation of the others. For such is the constitution of human bodies, that if the lower faculties be out of order, or cease to operate, the superior, which depend upon them, cannot subsist. ”

“ The moral faculty is what the school men call the “regular raglans;” the conscience is their “regular regulate;” or, to speak in more modern terms, the moral faculty performs the office of a law-giver, while the business of conscience is to perform the duty of a judge. ”

“ But the juryman who, above all, judges as a man, and often recoils from responsibility, should fear the excess of lenity: the judge, on the contrary, accustomed to repression, and above all preoccupied with the interests of society, should rather defend himself against excess of rigor and severity.
4. Knowledge.—What is for most men but a luxury, becomes in such or such a profession a strict duty. The knowledge of the laws, for example, is, for the magistrate, as the knowledge of the human body for the physician, a strict obligation. ”

“ But when we pass beyond the mere power of acting, to the additional power of surveying or inspecting an act, and of forming an estimate of its relations to moral law, we find a faculty in man that makes him differ in kind from the brute. ”

“ As we learn through our appetites that we are intended to eat and drink, so a higher faculty informs us that we are to govern our appetites, and the whole of our being, by the supreme principles we call duty. Every time we have a consciousness that our conduct is right or wrong, every time we condemn or applaud the vice and virtue of our fellow men, every time the law enforces justice and punishes injustice, we confess that duty is in accordance with nature. ”

“ This is still more impressive when we consider that we have a moral faculty; for it is the very object and business of this faculty to deal with right and wrong, good and evil; the facts and magnitudes of which are obvious in the course of nature. ”

“ They would appear as various expressions of the fact that the moral order acts not capriciously or like a human being, but from the necessity of its nature, or, if we prefer the phrase, by general laws,—a necessity or law which of course knows no exception and is as ‘ruthless’ as fate. ”

“ If, indeed, the conscience reported entirely different codes throughout, from bottom to top and from center to circumference, or codes with contradictions as to the cardinal virtues and vices, then we might well50 question the existence and action of a real, original and normal faculty as actually perceiving a real moral distinction and principle of duty. ”

“ Perceiving in ourselves a will, and a crowd of intellectual and emotional phenomena that seem wholly different from the properties of matter, we infer the existence of an immaterial substance which wills, thinks, and feels, and can classify its own operations with considerable precision. The term faculty is simply an expression of classification. If we say that the moral faculty differs from the æsthetic faculty, we can only mean that the mind forms certain judgments of moral excellence, and also certain judgments of beauty, and that these two mental processes are clearly distinct. ”

“ But there is in man a faculty which takes into consideration all the springs of action, including self-love, and passes judgment upon them, approving some and condemning others. From its very nature this faculty is supreme in authority, if not in power; it reflects upon all the other active powers, and pronounces absolutely upon their moral quality. Superintendency and authority are constituent parts of its very idea. We are under obligation to obey the law revealed in the judgments of this faculty, for it is the law of our nature. ”

“ Still less can you take the report of the Moral Faculty from the confessions of the cradle, or from the quarrels and affections of the apes; the conditions being not yet present for the bare conception of a moral problem. The most that can be asked of an intuition is, that it shall keep pace with the cases as they arise, and be on the spot when it is wanted; and if you would know what provision our nature holds for dealing with its Duty and interpreting its guilt, you must go into the thick of its moral life, and bid it tell you what it sees from the swaying tides of temptation and of victory. ”

“ These facts which compel obedience are declared to be 'the part which is played in the general human lot by hereditary conditions in the largest sense and the fact that what we call duty is entirely made up of such conditions.' The scientific conception of law in human nature was combined by her with the moral or religious fact of duty. ”

“ But we may observe that the existence and universality of the conception of duty and right cannot be doubted, however men may differ as to its original or derivative nature. All men are perpetually led to form judgments concerning actions, and emotions which lead to action, as right or wrong; as what they ought or ought not to do or feel. There is a faculty which approves and disapproves, acquits or condemns the workings of our other faculties. ”

“ The requisite allowance being made for the natural impulses, we must now adduce the facts, showing that the characteristic of the Moral Sense is an education under Law, or Authority, through the instrumentality of Punishment.
(1) It is a fact that human beings living in society are placed under discipline, accompanied by punishment. Certain actions are forbidden, and the doers of them are subjected to some painful infliction; which is increased in severity if they are persisted in. ”

“ As far back as I can remember, I find that my dominant faculty, the one that has been present in every crisis of my life, great or small, and which is present to-day, has been the faculty, I mean the power and the need of duplication. There have always been in me, as it were, two distinct persons; one who went, came, acted, felt, and another who looked at the first go, come, act, and feel with an impassable curiosity. ”

“ Whatever else there may be of distinguishable moral qualities appearing to be incident to the direct relations of human fellowship, I am sure that they will be found reducible to the two radicals of benevolence and justice, or to their combination with those other radicals—courage and truthfulness—which we found to have an intrinsic source in the constitution of man, as qualitative factors in human conduct. ”

“ Or, again, how can the three mental functions, memory, reason, and will, be severally analogous, the first to counsellors, who are a class of public officers, and the other two to equity and laws, which are not classes of officers, but abstractions? Or, once more, if magistrates are the artificial joints of society, how can reward and punishment be its nerves? Its nerves must surely be some class of persons. Reward and punishment must in societies, as in individuals, be conditions of the nerves, and not the nerves themselves. ”

“ Their operations alone discover them; when unapplied, they lie hid even from the person to whom they pertain; and their action is so much a part of their nature, that the faculty itself, in many cases, is scarcely to be distinguished from a habit acquired in its frequent exertion. ”

“ First, that the conscience, being a complex faculty or power, its particular judgments of duty in particular cases, being judgments of application of the principle of rightness, are reached often through very complex processes, in which the obscuration of imperfect information, or misconception of the relations involved, or the misleading effect of prejudice created by wrong training, or some falsely imagined divine authority, may leave not only a state of doubt as to duty, but throw the decision into error. ”

“ In the complicated relations of human life, various rules for the moral conduct of men have been devised, some of them in the form of statute laws, some in the form of customs, and, in virtue of these rules, certain artificial demands are made of men, which have no foundation in the moral nature of man; these demands are thought to represent duties. We have the same word to describe what I ought to do as subject to the law of God, and what is demanded of me by custom, or the statute. We call each a duty. ”

“ When you charge the neglect of any duty as a crime, or account its fulfilment a virtue, you suppose the existence of a power to neglect or fulfil; and it is the exercise of this power, in the one way or the other, which constitutes the merit or demerit. ”

“ And it will be long before social discipline has so far modified human character that reverence for law, as rooted in the moral order of things, will serve in place of reverence for the power which enforces law. ”

“ The faculty takes various forms, and is not to be refused to a man because it finds a harsh vent and issues contorted. I prefer to put it that tradition, which is our religion, has put obedience to the Laws of Life above everything else. ”

“ Shall I say, ‘Yes, gentlemen,’ and sit down here to spend my days in a kind of comfortable privacy, or shall I relinquish these prospects, and enter into a profession where my feelings will be constantly harrowed by objects either of dishonesty or misfortune; where my living must be squeezed from penury (for rich folks seldom go to law) , and my moral principle be continually at hazard? I agree with you that the law is well calculated to draw forth the powers of the mind, but what are its effects on the heart? ”

“ When we are considering conduct, however, in its general aspects and not exclusively in its relations to law, we appear to need a word to express any inducement, whether of a pleasureable or painful nature, which may influence a man's actions, and such a word the term 'sanction' seems conveniently to supply. Taking the word in this extended sense, the sanctions of conduct may be enumerated as the physical, the legal, the social, the religious, and the moral. ”

“ Of these moral rules or laws, to which men generally refer, and by which they judge of the rectitude or pravity of their actions, there seem to me to be three sorts, with their three different enforcements, or rewards and punishments. ”

“ They examine for themselves. They have ceased to be the prisoners of society—the satisfied serfs of husbands or the echoes of priests. They demand the rights that naturally belong to intelligent human beings. ”

“ Such considerations should be kept in mind, in our judgments on such cases, and it should not be presumed, either in argument or judgment, that such classes of men have not a sense of truth fully up to their perception of moral obligation in its bearing upon those who do, from necessity, the rougher out-door work of life. ”

“ Let us rather draw from it the following conclusion, that it is for us an obligation to satisfy at the very least the physical order by the object of our acts, even when we do not satisfy the exigencies of the moral order by the form of these acts; to pay, at least, as perfect instruments the aims of nature, that which we owe as imperfect persons to reason, in order not to appear shamefaced before both tribunals. ”

“ The words Responsibility, Guilt, Accountability, are taken, like so many other ethical expressions, from Jurisprudence, or rather they come to us from a time when the distinction between the province of Jurisprudence and that of Ethics had not yet been recognized. That I am made accountable for my action means that I stand as the one to whom reward or punishment for the deed is meted out. For what reason the action is rewarded or punished is a question by itself. ”

“ That is, these eternal and necessary differences of things make it fit and reasonable for creatures so to act; they cause it to be their duty, or lay an obligation on them so to do; even separate from the consideration of these Rules being the positive Will or Command of God, and also antecedent to any respect or regard, expectation or apprehension of any particular private and personal Advantage or Disadvantage, Reward or Punishment, either present or future, annexed either by natural consequence, or by positive appointment, to the practising or neglecting of these rules. ”

“ Again: "What can be more complete than our submission to the orders of our superiors in everything that concerns our state of life, the places we are to dwell in, the employments, the offices we are to be engaged in." [20] And again, this submission to the will and judgment of the superior, or general, is called "renouncing our own judgment," "the annihilation of self," "complete obedience, entire dependence upon the will of others, perfect abandonment of personal reputation." ”

“ And tho' nothing can be more evident to those who reflect thereupon, than that Mens Actions should be regulated, and directed by that Faculty in them which shows them the different properties, relations, and dependencies of things, and not by their Appetite, which only can tell what will at the present please, or offend them; not what will, upon the whole, procure to them the most pleasure, or uneasiness ”