Moral fiber

“ 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 objective organism, the systematized moral world, is the reality of the moral will; my duties on the inside answer to due functions on the outside. There is no need here for a pre-established or a postulated harmony, for the moral whole is the identity of both sides; my private choice, so far as I am moral, is the mere form of bestowing myself on and identifying myself with the will of the moral organism, which realizes in its process both itself and myself. ”

“ The organ of morality, the author concludes, is the entire, undivided, sensuous-mental (sinnlich-geistig) human personality, in its interaction with the external world. But what is the principle by which we measure the content of the territory thus marked off? Now, inasmuch as a moral act is a combination of natural excitations and reactions of the personality, ethics must be teleological. ”

“ Moral sentiments, thus defined, being equivalent to conduct, it follows that the mere possession of sentiments cannot constitute the difference between intrinsic or internal, and customary morality; customs are themselves a matter of sentiment. Thus "conduct as a concrete whole has an inward element of sentiment and an outward element of action, and these are different, on the one hand from mere given feelings, on the other from mere action." ”

“ We discover in the nervous system no provision for the consciousness of duty; indeed, put in this bald way, no materialist would look there for any such consciousness. Duty as something to be done for its own sake, apart from creed, or sect, or party, or consequences, is properly considered an evidence of culture in thought and action. It is futile to attempt to resist the application of evolution to ethics by any appeal to the transcendent beauty of the moral ideal. ”

“ But the question, 'Why should I be moral?' means, most naturally and usually, What inducements are there to me to do right?" The answer is that motives differ for different individuals. With some, outer social inducements, with others, the approbation and disapprobation of conscience are stronger. ”

“ The essential element in the problem is that we are contemplating, not physical movement only, like spasms or waves, but personal deeds, as acts of moral agents.185 Of course, moral quality does not attach to the action of non-moral beings, as the striking of clocks or the barking of dogs, but to deeds of self-directing personality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the same way no one will wish to deny that the moral feeling, as the natural expression of the inner voice of conscience, constitutes in social life the fundamental condition and the surest foundation for all lofty and noble sentiments. ”

“ This much we ought to have learnt from the history of civilisation, that the forms of morality belong to the category of transitory things. The finest psychological tact is required with these critical natures, so that the dangerous corners of infantile irresponsibility, indolence and uncontrolledness may be turned, and a pure, untroubled vision of the possibility of a moral autonomous activity made possible. Five per cent. on money lent is fair interest, twenty per cent. ”

“ As I consider virtue and vice to consist in action, and not in opinion, and as this action has its seat in the will, and not in the conscience, I shall confine my inquiries chiefly to the influence of physical causes upon that moral power of the mind, which is connected with volition, although many of these causes act likewise upon the conscience, as I shall show hereafter. The state of the moral faculty is visible in actions, which affect the well-being of society. ”

“ As to moral philosophy, they have the same disputes among them as we have here. They examine what are properly good, both for the body and the mind; and whether any outward thing can be called truly good, or if that term belong only to the endowments of the soul. ”

“ So it comes about that there are many neurotics whose innermost delicacy of feeling prevents their being at one with present-day morality, and they cannot adapt themselves to civilisation as long as their moral code has gaps in it, the filling up of which is a crying need of the age. ”

“ But the traditional acceptation of the terms sufficiently fixes their meaning to enable them to serve as a guide to moral conduct and moral feeling, especially when modified by the experience and reflexion of men who have given habitual attention to the working of their own motives and the results of their own practice. As I shall shew in the next chapter, any terms which we employ to designate the test of moral action and the objects of the moral feeling are indefinite, and must depend, to some extent, on the subjective interpretation of the individual. ”

“ But the sensuous instinct does not recognize the moral law; it wishes to enjoy its object and to induce the will to realize it also, notwithstanding what the reason may advance. This tendency of the faculty of our appetites, of immediately directing the will without troubling itself about superior laws, is perpetually in conflict with our moral destination, and it is the most powerful adversary that man has to combat in his moral conduct. ”

“ It is, first, an error to suppose that in what is called human life there remains any region which has not been moralized. Whatever has been brought under the control of the will, it is not too much to say, has been brought into the sphere of morality; in our eating, our drinking, our sleeping, we from childhood have not been left to ourselves; and the habits, formed in us by the morality outside of us, now hold of the moral will which in a manner has been their issue. ”

“ We are aware of the attempts which have been made to invest our emotions with the stamp and attribute of morality: but, in addition to the testimony of our own experience, we have the highest authority for holding that none of the natural feelings or modifications of the human heart partake in any degree of a moral character. ”

“ In the same ratio that the senses are vividly roused in us, the influence of morality will be proportionately diminished; and reciprocally, as the sensuous loses, morality gains ground. Therefore that which in our hearts gives a preponderance to the sensuous faculty, must of necessity, by placing restrictions on the moral faculty, diminish the pleasure that we take in tragic emotions, a pleasure which emanates exclusively from this moral faculty. ”

“ The internal side of conduct is represented by the moral sentiments. These are to be distinguished from the mere motives, which, defined as something that has propulsive force, whether a feeling or a passion, does not enter into moral action except as absorbed into volition. No emotion is, in itself, right or wrong, but is only indirectly judged as such as it makes a difference to the action—as an aptitude of mind which tends to this or that predominating form of conduct. Moral sentiments, on the other hand, as moral aptitudes effective for particular conduct, contain an additional element. ”

“ But, may it not be said, that every system of ethics must, or ought, to terminate, in plain and general maxims for the use of life? and, though in such axioms no discovery is made, does not the beauty of the moral theory consist in the premises, and the chain of reasoning that leads to the conclusion? ”

“ But with a knowledge both more extensive and more minute of the nature, relations, and fitnesses of beings and objects, we find an increasing number of instances in which acts that seemed indifferent have a clearly perceptible fitness or unfitness, and thus acquire a distinct moral character as right or wrong. ”

“ For not only is theoretical morality the outcome in consciousness of realized practices embodied in the general life of the community, but, having thus become conscious, it reacts on those practices and tends to support them or, by its own spontaneous growth, to modify them. This action is diverse, according as we are dealing with one or the other of the strongly marked divisions of theoretical morality: traditional and posterior morality, retarding the vital growth of moral practice, or ideal and anterior morality, stimulating the vital growth of moral practice. ”

“ In moral culture it is not less important to acquire the power of discarding the demoralising thoughts and imaginations that haunt so many, and meeting temptation by calling up purer, higher and restraining thoughts. The faculty we possess of alternating and intensifying our own motives by bringing certain thoughts, or images, or subjects into the foreground [Pg 256] and throwing others into the background, is one of our chief means of moral progress. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The clearness or dimness of the perception will depend upon the habits of thought and the organization of motives—or lack of it—which result from the native tendencies and development of the subjective mind. The norm of valuation which we apply to moral conduct is conditioned by many conscious and unconscious factors which determine our idea of "desirableness," and the standard will approximate to the conventional and common standard of the community in so far as we are influenced by our environment—or in proportion to our amenability to cosmic suggestion. ”

“ It is a grim enough charge against our generation. Dare we pronounce it untrue? Upon what theories of private morality are the young now fed?
Morals are, obviously, influenced in most cases by example and the atmosphere of the home; but are not these themselves mainly produced, whether consciously or not, by the teaching and tone of these who profess to think? In these latter days most thought reaches us through fiction, most emotion through drama. ”

“ What practical conclusion, if any, follows from this interpretation of the moral consciousness and its categories? Moral progress involves both the formation of better ideals and the adoption of such ideals as actual standards and guides of life. If our view is correct we can construct better ideals neither by logical deduction nor solely by insight into the nature of things—if by this we mean things as they are. We must rather take as our starting-point the conviction that moral life is a process involving physical life, social intercourse, measuring and constructive intelligence. ”

“ There is a wonderful connection between the physical and the moral in our curious composition; and the latter is so much modified by the former, that the variety of temperaments and dispositions may be attributed to the reciprocal influences of these two constituents of our being. The origin of good and evil is then embodied in our own hearts, in the structure of the human frame, in our natural susceptibilities to pleasure and pain. ”

“ It may be that our moral instincts are made to work in this way, because any ambition of conscience, any pride or ostentation of virtue, any air of moral vanity or conceit, any wearing of rectitude on the outside, as if put on for effect, or "to be seen of men," if it be not essentially fictitious and false, is certainly in the most direct course of becoming so. ”

“ The Moral Fashion of a Commercial Community.—Behind the principle of the present moral fashion: “Moral actions are actions performed out of sympathy for others,” I see the social instinct of fear, which thus assumes an intellectual disguise: this instinct sets forth as its supreme, most important, and most immediate principle that life shall be relieved of all the dangerous characteristics which it possessed in former times, and that every one must help with all his strength towards the attainment of this end. ”

“ It is truer, I think, to say that the aesthetic interest is quiescent, tending to perpetuate experience in any form that is found pleasant, and without respect either to practical exigencies or to the order of truth. {194} Hence this interest on account of its very self-sufficiency offers a passive resistance to the formal principles of moral organization—to prudence, purpose, justice, and good-will. ”

“ But if seen under strong light and with their supreme import, the intuition impresses with greater force. So, too, the state of the whole moral75 nature is a reason of higher or lower moral sensibility. The more unblighted is the condition of personal life, the more is it responsive to the ethical discernment. Habitual refusal of duty, easy and indifferent familiarity with wrong-doing, or any continued enslavement of the higher nature to the lower, necessarily blunts the delicateness of the sensibilities and lowers the strength of the moral feelings. ”