Moral struggle

“ Perhaps it is only those that are themselves engaged in the thick of the struggle and conflict that rightly can cheer on, or fitly can admonish, their fellows, or to any good purpose assume the high moral tone. ”

“ What do we behold indeed in society, but one universal struggle to acquire both? Moral and intellectual worth are but lightly esteemed in comparison with the possession of that sordid dross, which every brainless upstart or every corrupt adventurer may acquire. ”

“ It is a struggle, indeed, between unequal powers,—between the man, who is a conscious moral person, and nature, or events, or bodies of men, which either want personality or unity; and hence the man, after fearful and desolating war, sometimes rises on the ruins of all the necessities of nature and all the prescriptions of society. ”

“ Just as one cannot learn to swim on a parlor sofa, but must get in the water and struggle, so one must come in contact with, combat, struggle with, and overcome moral evil in order to develop the highest and strongest type of moral character. ”

“ The class of judgments which everyone considers as moral is perhaps limited to such as follow an exciting and somewhat protracted mental struggle, involving an imaginative weighing of conflicting personal ideas. ”

“ However, it could not have been all due to my health, for as my wise little notebook sententiously remarked, "In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life." ”

“ Further- more, the fact that the time when I must enter the struggle for existence on my own behalf has been postponed, has led me to think less and less of the mean dishonest methods which are so general ally adopted by some of our so-called successful! men and used as a means of reaching their petty 1 successes. The fact that these opinions had been forced upon me, may, it is true, prevent me from ever being what the world considers a successful man, but if the moral stamina is within me I hope they will enable me to realize the high ideal of my existence. ”

“ We hence see why it is that periods of difficulty, and oppression, and persecution, are favorable to the exhibition of the moral sublime. They test the amount of attachment to principle which there is among men, and the sacrifices which they are willing to make for it. ”

“ Caught as we are by the irresistible flux of existence, we find ourselves able so to steer our lives as to change the proportion of light and shade, to give greater value to a life that might have had less. This possibility makes our moral problem. What shall we choose and from what refrain? To what aims shall we give our allegiance? What shall we fight for and what against? ”

“ 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. ”

“ You will see men who, so far as theory is concerned, will discourse eloquently concerning human justice and morality, yet they utterly disregard and ignore all moral restraints in their private character and practices. ”

“ When such an one comes to his moral majority by standing for the first time upon his own careful conviction, against the popular cry, or against his own material interests or predaceous passions, and feels the constraint and joy of pure obligation which comes up from this deep source, a new, original force is brought into the world of wills. ”

“ Nothing fills or engrosses the mind—nothing seems of sufficient importance to interfere with our present inclination. Prejudices, as well as attachments, lose their hold upon us, and we palter with our duties as we please. Moral obligations, by being perpetually refined upon, and discussed, lose their force and efficacy, become mere dry distinctions of the understanding ”

“ Others, his commonplace companions, have been content to go with the world around them—to be kind slave-holders, honourable duellists, moderate oppressors—and they have felt no pangs of conscience. But by a few, a chosen few, there has been acquired a keener sense of the ideal of moral harmony, a keener eye for detecting moral disorder, and an abhorrence of it which will not permit them to live in peace amid such evils: they must either die or mend them. ”

“ By an analysis of the moral phenomena associated with the action of the human will, and, in particular, of the conflict which arises between "the tendency of all Will to make itself absolute," and the consciousness that, under the conditions of man's fallen state, nothing but misery could result both to the individual and the race from the fulfilment of this tendency, – Mr. ”

“ Through a great and profound pity for the suffering and the weak and the losers in the brutal struggle for life, one could oppose one’s self to the cruel order of things. In this sympathy and pity alone could we raise a foundation of ethics that could demand justice against the design—which opposed itself to the triumphant brutality of the life’s struggle. ”

“ In this blind and mistaken struggle—a struggle which in the present condition of society seems so unavoidable, even so meritorious, but which in a reformed society will be looked back upon as at something akin to lunacy—we do not even make to ourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness. ”

“ The whole of morality is based upon the fact that "there is a lower and a higher"; and wherever the two come plainly into conflict our feelings are more or less strongly engaged. Thus, if we see a man struggling with intemperance and enduring keen suffering in the attempt to conquer the vice, we commend him—even though he may have no wife and children to excite our interest as much as if we saw him performing, at great cost to himself, an act of social justice. And why? Because we feel so deeply that the struggle is one in the interest of higher, fuller life and happiness. ”

“ They saw great social evils, magnified their extent by the force of imagination, and, unaccustomed to any of the details of public business, perceived but one remedy for the sickness of the state, and imagined that remedy to be a panacea for all ills. Moral force was a good thing in their eyes, but physical force they thought a better. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The moment we attempt to search out the cause of any onward movement we at once encounter this principle of evil. The old-time aphorism that life is a perpetual struggle; the first maxim of social ethics 'the greatest happiness to the greatest number' ”

“ But they often survive when they have become an oppression and a hindrance which cannot be cast off decisively, but by an impulse—rising either from the absolute knowledge of good and great men,—or from the partial insight which is given to superior minds, though of a vitiated moral constitution,—or lastly from that blind energy and those habits of daring which are often found in men who, checked by no restraint of morality, suffer their evil passions to gain extraordinary strength in extraordinary circumstances. ”

“ After all, whatever we may think about the cruelty and treachery of the social world, it does great things in the end. It quickens judgment, deepens intelligence, enforces the acquisition of self-control, creates forms of mental and moral strength that can not fail to be sometimes of vast importance to mankind. ”

“ The leading idea which is worked out through the whole of this complicated tale, full of trying moral situations, is to represent the conflict between good and evil, between the coarse and selfish passions of the common herd of mankind, and the higher and nobler aspirations of what may aptly be termed the aristocracy of the mind and heart. ”

“ The man to meet the crisis, to join the cleft, to reduce to moral harmony this discord of right and wrong, the man who could resolve and morally unify this moral disagreement must have a soul and an understanding whose insight and moral comprehension were complete. ”

“ Whatever was imperfect, defective, and hurtful, belonged not to that moral principle which animated society, and which was itself the best, the noblest, and the soundest; but was in the character of men, we might almost say, in the character of the age itself, which, though perhaps not originally and purposely selfish, had yet become so in the violence of the conflict. ”

“ Be sure, then, that there is an unchangeable moral order, and this is the first law of it, ‘Qui fait du mal fait du malheur.’ The most noticeable fact in connection with this moral order which our time is bringing out is the solidarité of the human race. ”

“ Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of man, a beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the iterately inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. ”

“ I take it for granted that one of every two individuals in this most moral community in the world has been, will be, or deserves or fears to be, in the house of correction. Give every man his deserts, and who shall escape whipping? ”

“ It will readily be understood how a mind like mine, so keenly alive to all impulses, and so unsupported by any moral convictions, would suffer in so keen a contest waged under such unequal and cruel conditions. ”

“ Through the fascinating power thus wielded over others a great influence may be exerted to elevate the moral tone of society by presenting pictures of domestic life that shall array the merits and demerits of virtues and vices, delineating those delicate threadings among the counter currents of passions and emotions that control the individual, which escape the observation in actual life. ”

“ Such difficulties of thought regarding moral distinctions, motives good and bad, conflicts of conscience, the justice and expediency of laws and governments, as usually arise as people begin to reflect seriously upon the ways of the better social life, have been considered, besides many practical questions regarding self-control, elevation of feeling and thought, and the part of wisdom in every-day affairs. ”

“ The great truths which had affected many of these poor people to tears, were exactly those which, during the last eighteen hundred years, have been active in effecting so many moral revolutions in the world, and which must ultimately triumph over all error and all oppression. ”

“ They concerned the powers and possibilities of man in the crowning endowments of his nature, and in the highest ascent of their evident intention and adaptation. They touched the great problems of personal and social welfare in the most vital relations and decisive interests. So the old sages became moralists and their great themes were the themes of virtue and duty. Not very deeply, however, did they, for centuries, succeed in penetrating the rational principles of the moral life and the authority of the moral judgments. ”

“ These agitations are the opportunities and the means God offers us to refine the taste, mould the character, lift the purpose, and educate the moral sense of the [Pg 212] masses, on whose intelligence and self-respect rests the State. ”

“ If the moral insight be concerned with conflicting general aims, such as could express themselves in systems of conduct, then the moral insight involves the will to act, so far as may be, as if one included in one’s own being the life of all those whose conflicting aims one realizes. ”

“ But if all this direful rage and havoc of human passion, this goading purpose of mastery by the strong and privileged over the weak and incompetent, were merely a huge struggle of might against right, it is simple trifling to refer it to any principle rooted in the nature of things. ”

“ But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind. ”

“ As moral agents, for whom alone exist all the predicaments of merit and demerit, praise and blame, effort and failure, vice and virtue, we are impotent and lost;—we are saved through that in us which is passive and involuntary; we are saved through our affections, it is as beings acted upon and influenced that we are saved! ”

“ Human society: it is an attempt- so I teach- a long seeking: it seeks however the ruler!-
-An attempt, my brothers! And no "contract"! Destroy, I pray you, destroy that word of the soft-hearted and half-and-half!
26. O my brothers! With whom lies the greatest danger to the whole human future? Is it not with the good and just?-
-As those who say and feel in their hearts: "We already know what is good and just, we possess it also; woe to those who still seek thereafter!
And whatever harm the wicked may do, the harm of the good is the harmfulest harm! ”

“ Go, work for the realization of your ideals; work for the future; work for the good of thousands who are bent beneath the yoke of unjust laws, who have a false conception of good and evil. Go suffer and fight. ”

“ There are those who hunger and thirst after higher values which they feel wanting in their humdrum lives. They live in mental confusion or moral anarchy and seek vaguely for truth and beauty and moral support. ”

“ Ah, only a little while, and that struggle will be upon us—and they will do their best to bend us to their will and cut us to their pattern, to exercise us, to lengthen us, to shorten us, to corrupt us.... ”

“ There are not a few instances of that conflict, known also to the fathers, of the spirit with the flesh, the inner with the outer man, of the freedom of the will with the necessity of nature, the pleasure of the individual with the conventions of society, of the emergency of the ease with the despotism of the rule. It is this, which, while it makes the interest of life, makes the difficulty of living. ”