Moral disorder

“ When the mind undergoes degeneration, the moral feeling is the first to show it, as it is the last to be restored when the disorder passes away; the latest and highest gain of mental evolution, it is the first to witness by its impairment to mental dissolution.... ”

“ Errors in moral life always resolve themselves into disorder of our moral nature, and, if traced to their source, will bring to light some fault of indolence, or selfishness, or pride, or carelessness, which was the real cause of our mistaken act. ”

“ Whether a self-inquisitorial habit, that he grew into, from jealousy of the sins to which men of thought are liable, he has acquired, in disentangling and demonstrating that particular form of moral disease, an acumen which no conscience can resist. ”

“ As in the defects of the intellectual development, so in the moral sphere, the condition varies from a complete arrest of moral development to all forms of moral perversion and even to an abnormal development of the moral and emotional susceptibility. ”

“ Yet, when you breathe the poisoned air, laden with everything noxious to health, and have the physical and moral senses alike met with everything that can disgust and offend, it ceases to be a matter of wonder that the fair tender plant of beautiful childhood refuses to grow in such a vitiated atmosphere. Here all distinctions between good and evil are speedily lost, if they were ever known; and men, women, and children become unnatural in vice, in irreligion, in manners and appearance. ”

“ Their eyes are forever open to human misery. They walk amid desecrated affections, insulted virtue, and blasted hopes. They have grown intimate with vice and blood; they gloat over the wildest illustrations of their soul-damning and earth-polluting business, and are moral pests. ”

“ But the despair and disgust of life, to which both these and her private letters give such uncompromising and eloquent expression, indubitably reflect her feelings at this moral crisis—the feelings of one who having openly braved the laws of society, to become henceforward a law unto herself, recognises that she has only found her way to fresh sources of misery. ”

“ All conditions of life which promote right living, ethical culture and moral growth, nourish and call forth emotions of truth and honesty, pure pleasure, adoration, worship, hope, affection, love and all the higher and nobler characteristics, build up life and increase its capacity for happiness. Through the action of an equally inexorable and unswerving law, the misery and crime which poverty breeds, with its bitterness of hate, grief and despair, and all the train of other evil emotions engendered thereby, are poisonous in their nature; they tear down and destroy life. ”

“ I have been told by my advisers, some of them wise, deeply instructed, and kind-hearted men, that such a life-destiny should be related by the subject of it for the instruction of others, and especially for the light it throws on certain peculiarities of human character often wrongly interpreted as due to moral perversion, when they are in reality the results of misdirected or reversed actions in some of the closely connected nervous centres. ”

“ There we see human nature in all its unvailed and degraded nakedness—the vile passions, the brutal coarseness, the corroding malice, the undisguised licentiousness. Oh, ye who look on and abhor, who pass like the Pharisee, and condemn the wretch by the wayside, pause, and look within: education, circumstances, have refined and elevated your thoughts and actions; but blessed are those who shall never know by fearful experience how want and degradation can blunt the finest sympathies, and change, nay, brutalize the moral being. ”

“ The craving for stimulants or drugs, sexual perversions, kleptomania, pyromania, and the other manias, bad temper, jealousy- there is a good deal of the old Adam in us which is just wholly bad and to be utterly done away with; rebellious impulses that are hopelessly at war with our own good and must go the way of cannibalism and polygamy. Morality is the stern exterminator of all such enemies of human welfare.
What factors are to be considered in estimating the worth of personal moral ideals? ”

“ And obversely, if a person acts in a manner from which we suffer, but which is such as we should expect from most other people in a parallel case, the associations which his acts create in our minds are associations with human life, or with mankind in general; but if the acts, besides being of a hurtful kind, betoken a disposition in the agent, more hurtful than we are accustomed to look for in average men, we associate the injury with that very man, and with that very disposition, and have the feeling of moral disapprobation and repugnance. ”

“ Social Disease and Its Causes.—Rural morals are a phase of the public health of the community. Immorality is a kind of social disease, for which the community needs to find a remedy. The amount of moral ill varies widely, but it can be increased by neglect or lessened by effort, as surely as can the amount of physical disease. Moral ill is due to the individual and to the community. The judgment of the individual may be warped, his moral consciousness defective, or his will weak. He may have low standards and ill-adjusted relationships. ”

“ But in this case, it is, to use another of his expressions, ‘defeated.’ Notwithstanding the moral disapprobation, which the idea of such intended consequences excites in me, I perform the act.
“Here, at all events, any one may see, that conscience, and the motive of the act, are not the same, but opposed to one another. The motive of the act, is the pleasure of having hares; not in itself a thing anywise bad. The only thing bad is the producing so much misery to others, for securing that pleasure to myself. ”

“ Nothing but a low, perverted and weak moral and ethical sense makes possible the need of an argument on this subject. It is self-evident the moment one stops to ask himself a few simple and primitive questions: "Am I willing to buy my own comfort and pleasure at the expense of those who are helpless? Am I willing to be a moral and physical pauper preying upon the rights of my children? Am I willing to be a thief and misappropriate their physical, mental and moral heritage? Am I willing to be a murderer and taint with slow poison their lives before they get them? ”

“ We recognize the physical expression of love as itself no way impure or unclean: but as a part of true passion. We know that sin means a state of mind or emotion, a false conception of moral values; and that virtue is not secured by legal sanction. We recognize, frankly, man's weakness and the complexity of social life ”

“ But such deterioration or degradation is not an isolated evil, or the mere negation of a better state; for it acts as a positive energy in developing moral evil, and brings in its train perverseness, destructiveness, loss of natural decency in habits, conversation and conduct, and many other ills which render their subjects painfully humiliating as human beings, and a source of trouble, annoyance, and expense to all those concerned with them. ”

“ That which gives but a transient pain to ordinary men who never themselves meditate on that which they seek to banish from their minds, was, by the better order, acutely observed, regarded, and recorded in books, letters, and diaries. But now men united the strictest moral requisitions on themselves and others with an excessive negligence in action ”

“ And so, through all the relations of society, wherever a sacred trust is abused, and a confidence outraged, and obligations rent recklessly asunder, there this self-incurred species of suffering, in a greater or less degree, exists accordingly as the moral sensibilities are blunted, or the contrary. ”

“ As the moral element—the emotions and propensities—is the base of determination, it follows that these brilliant faculties are at the service of a bad cause, of the instincts and appetites which, thanks to the defects of the will, lead to very extravagant or very dangerous acts. ”

“ He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients, the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good and bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct—of acts and omissions; there being no feeling which may not lead, and does not frequently lead, either to good or to bad actions: conscience itself, the very desire to act right, often leading people to act wrong. ”

“ The contrary instincts and inclinations now attain to moral honour, the gregarious instinct gradually draws its conclusions. How much or how little dangerousness to the community or to equality is contained in an opinion, a condition, an emotion, a disposition, or an endowment-- that is now the moral perspective, here again fear is the mother of morals. ”

“ Fire his conscience, and he blushes; check his circulation, and he thinks tardily or not at all; impair his secretions, and the moral sense is dulled, discolored, or depraved, his aspirations flag, his hope and love both reel; impair them still more, and he becomes a brute. ”

“ Were it not vain and absurd to muse on supposable new principles in the constitution of the moral system, there is one that we might have been tempted to wish for, namely, that, of all suffering unnecessarily and wilfully inflicted by man on any class of sentient existence, a bitter intimation and participation might be conveyed to him through a mysterious law of nature, enforcing an avenging sympathy in severe proportion to that suffering, on all the men who are really accountable for its being inflicted. ”

“ While demonstrating my madness do you know what I have perceived? That I am not mad—that is what I have perceived. I will explain.
The leading fact behind my hereditary impulses and my fits is degeneracy. I am of the degenerate, whose like can be found in large numbers if only sought for more diligently, even amongst you, gentlemen experts. This gives a substantial key to the rest. My moral views you may attribute not to conscious reflection, but to degeneracy. Truly, moral instincts are lodged so deeply that only in some deviation from the normal type is complete freedom from them possible. ”

“ At the same time, if there be any evil propensities, such as a quarrelsome, irritable temper, a love of turbulence and cruelty, selfishness, avarice, jealousy, etc., all of which lie at the base of the brain, they may be for the time entirely suppressed by gentle dispersive manipulations from the organs of such propensities either down toward the chest or upward.
What I state thus of the moral and selfish tendencies or faculties is equally applicable to all the faculties and their organs. ”

“ By this mental bondage morbid sympathy is clearly and definitely distinguished from all subordinate degrees of this instinct, however closely allied the imitation of a disorder may seem to be to that of a mere folly, of an absurd fashion, of an awkward habit in speech and manner, or even of a confusion of ideas. Even these latter imitations, however, directed as they are to foolish and pernicious objects, place the self-independence of the greater portion of mankind in a very doubtful light, and account for their union into a social whole. ”

“ And the force of obvious analogy teaches us not to expect all the qualities which please the general taste in those whose instincts lead them to attack the moral nuisances which poison the atmosphere of society. But whether they please us in all their aspects or not, is not the question. Like them or not, they must and will perform their office, and we cannot stop them. They may be unwise, violent, abusive, extravagant, impracticable, but they are alive, at any rate, and it is their business to remove abuses as soon as they are dead, and often to help them to die. ”

“ Only after political, religious and social restraints have produced a stable community can there be sufficient experience of the pains, positive and negative, sensational and emotional, which crimes of aggression cause, as to145 generate that moral aversion to them constituted by consciousness of their intrinsically evil results. ”

“ The moral possibility is wanting, and the generous occasion finds an unsusceptible rule.
Man paints himself in his actions, and what is the form depicted in the drama of the present time? On the one hand, he is seen running wild, on the other, in a state of lethargy; the two extremest stages of human degeneracy, and both seen in one and the same period. ”

“ The Fable of Discretionary Freedom.—The history of the feelings, on the basis of which we make everyone responsible, hence, the so-called moral feelings, is traceable in the following leading phases. At first single actions are termed good or bad without any reference to their motive, but solely because of the utilitarian or prejudicial consequences they have for the community. ”

“ A second fact of observation may be set down as worthy of consideration, if not of immediate acceptation, namely, that an absence of moral feeling in one generation, as shown by a mean, selfish, and persistent disregard of moral action in the conduct of life, may be the cause of mental derangement in the next generation. In fact, a person may succeed in manufacturing insanity in his progeny by a persistent disuse of moral feeling, and a persistent exercise throughout his life, of those selfish, mean, and anti-social tendencies which are a negation of the highest moral relations of mankind. ”

“ The moral derangement of an ego-maniac, with or without perverted moral instincts, will naturally manifest itself in ways varying according to the social class to which he belongs, as well as according to his personal idiosyncrasies. ”

“ He does not obey the motive. Why? He obeys other motives which are stronger. Though pleasures are associated with the immoral act, pains are 259 associated with it also; the pains of the injured husband; the pains of the injured wife; the moral indignation of mankind; the future reproaches of his own mind. Some men obey the first, rather than the second motive. The reason is obvious. In them, the association of the act with the pleasure, is, from habit, unduly strong; the association of the act with the pains, is, from want of habit, unduly weak. ”