Moral weakness

“ As I have repeatedly declared, the worst evil with which the world is afflicted is not the power of the wicked but the weakness of the good. Now this weakness is largely due to the inertia of the will, to the dread of independent judgment, to moral cowardice. The boldest, directly they have shaken off their chains, are only too ready to assume fresh bonds. ”

“ It is an unfailing sign of moral weakness to be constantly giving way to fitful outbreaks of ill-temper. Fools, lunarians, the weak-minded, and the ignorant are irascible, impatient, and possess an ungovernable disposition; great hearts and wise are calm, forgiving, and serene. To hear one perpetual round of complaint and murmuring, to have every {327} pleasant thought scared away by this evil spirit, is a sore trial. ”

“ We may have an overpowering sense of our moral weakness, of the precariousness of our life, health, wealth, position, and good fortune. We may have a clear view of the weak points of our physical constitution, of what food or medicine is good for us, and what does us harm. ”

“ I admit that this condition which adds to the interest of the problem, and perhaps makes it more amenable to rapid solution, is an indication of a weakness of moral fibre to which must be largely attributed our failure to be master of our circumstances. ”

“ The failure to realize these impulses in practice is, of course, due in part to moral weakness of a personal character, to the fact that our higher nature has but an imperfect and transient mastery of our lower, so that we never [Pg 53] live up to our ideals. ”

“ In the language of contemporary youth, it will not be decent. [1] That substitution of the word decency for the word virtue gives, methinks, the clue to the future revaluation of our moral standards. It implies, as I have suggested, a more intelligent and, in some ways, more indulgent, morality; but a morality on the whole more austere, a stark notion of duty armed with the relentless imperative which nowadays makes us abashed at the revelation in ourself of physical cowardice or bodily dirtiness. ”

“ It may be that they are wicked, and it is certain that they are weak, but whether wicked or weak, they have descended by the law of moral gravitation and have found their level in the lowest depths of civilised life. ”

“ But the inner reason of the failure is often that there has been a moral degeneracy going on, and a weakening of the fibre of character on one side, or on both sides. The particular dispute, whether it be about money or about anything else, is only the occasion which reveals the slackening of the morale. ”

“ This is all to be done, and indeed only can be done, without the least taint to the purity of your moral character; for those mistaken young fellows, who think to shine by an impious or immoral licentiousness, shine only from their stinking, like corrupted flesh, in the dark. Without this purity, you can have no dignity of character; and without dignity of character it is impossible to rise in the world. ”

“ When this progress had gone on for a century or two, it might begin to dawn on people that there was something wrong with their moral principle. What is wrong with their moral principle is that it is immoral. ”

“ But must not the nature and the disposition suffer from the depression, and will the moral vigour take no scathe? Ah! What if one were to give way to the pressure—to settle down into a hypocrite—to become an object of contempt to one's self and the rest of mankind. ”

“ If thou hast genius and poverty to thy lot, dwell on the foolish, perplexing, imprudent, dangerous, and even immoral, conduct of promise-breach in small things, of want of punctuality, of procrastination in all its shapes and disguises. Force men to reverence the dignity of thy moral strength in and for itself, ­ seeking no excuses or palliations from fortune, or sickness, or a too full mind that, in opulence of conception, overrated its powers of application. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ His action in this case, viewed by itself, will be perfectly indifferent; for what moral evil is there in one’s stepping into a field, taking a stroll in expectation of meeting a person, and defending one’s self in the event of being attacked? ”

“ 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. ”

“ While such are the prominent vices and defects of the poor, vices and defects of a different kind, but no less offensive to morality, are found among the rich. Sensuality and excess, selfishness, evil speaking, want of charity and kindness abound. All these are obstacles to moral and philosophical progress. Upon what can we rely to counteract them? Upon the force of civilization? ”

“ 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. ”

“ They first destroy the conscience—blunt the moral sense—harden the heart, and wither up all the social and kindly affections, and then their votaries are ripe for any deed of wickedness within the possibility of accomplishment by human agency. ”

“ You talk and dream so much of self-dependence; where is it?"
" Is there question of principles? The loosest are those of the majority; they are favored. Honor, revenge, dueling, suicide, are permissible, or at least excusable, acts. As to morality, if one only avoid the most flagrant crimes, if he but escape talk and publicity - for the rest, human weakness deserves some indulgence; we are not angels. ”

“ It is only when the human period begins that we are startled and [Pg 263] perplexed by the problem of a lowness not innocent,—an inferiority tantamount to moral deformity. In the period of responsibility, to be low means to be evil; and how, we ask, could a lowness and inferiority resolvable into moral evil have had any place in the decrees of that Judge who ever does what is right, and in whom moral evil can have no place? The subject is one which it seems not given to man thoroughly to comprehend. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Part of the attack is sincere, no doubt, but if you assumed that all the abuse heaped upon conspicuous men came from moral conviction, you would utterly misread the situation.
On the other hand, men of moral excellence make us ashamed. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Men, from causes too intricate to be here discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will had become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud, characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of CREATING in form, language, or institution. The moral anomalies of such a state of society are not justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and those events are most entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most expeditiously. ”

“ Whether from 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Restrain yourself, therefore, from all iniquity, and do that which is good." "What, sir," say I, "are the evil deeds from which we must restrain ourselves?" "Hear," says he: "from adultery and fornication, from unlawful revelling, from wicked luxury, from indulgence in many kinds of food and the extravagance of riches, and from boastfulness, and haughtiness, and insolence, and lies, and backbiting, and hypocrisy, from the remembrance of wrong, and from all slander. These are the deeds that are most wicked in the life of men. ”

“ Certainly, no one can deny that the present misery and degradation in society is a moral wrong, and [Pg 542] that it is our duty to seek some method by which it may be removed as speedily as possible. ”

“ The continual spectacle of woe blunts the finer feelings, and the necessity of bearing with the sight, renders it familiar. In like manner, are many of the moral obligations of society weakened, till the custom of acting by necessity becomes an apology, where it is truly a crime. ”

“ One becomes Moral—but not because one is moral! Submission to morals may be due to slavishness or vanity, egoism or resignation, dismal fanaticism or thoughtlessness. It may, again, be an act of despair, such as submission to the authority of a ruler ”

“ Thus those courses, which, if men would fairly attend to the dictates of their own consciences, they would see to be corruption, excess, oppression, uncharitableness; these are refined upon—things were so and so circumstantiated—great difficulties are raised about fixing bounds and degrees, and thus every moral obligation whatever may be evaded. Here is scope, I say, for an unfair mind to explain away every moral obligation to itself. Whether men reflect again upon this internal management and artifice, and how explicit they are with themselves, is another question. ”

“ The argument, in the foregoing part of our discussion (in which we showed that morality is grounded in an antagonism carried on between our nature and our consciousness,) is obviously founded on the assumption that man is born in weakness and depravity. We need hardly, now-a-days, insist on the natural sinfulness of the human heart, which we are told by our own, and by all recorded experience, as well as by a higher authority than that of man, is desperately wicked, and runneth to evil continually. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And when this is done we shall not be astonished to see the moral brute exhibiting the instinct natural to the brute condition. How vain must it always be, [397] when we shall have reduced humanity to its ultimate capability of degradation, to expect any embellishment of mind to adorn the wretched existence. If the relation require that the slave be disrobed of the essential features which distinguish him from the brute, the relation must adapt itself to the consequences and leave its subject the instinctive privileges of a brute. ”

“ Every wrong act we perform inflicts an injury upon our moral consciousness, and a wound upon our sense of right, and inflicts a lasting injury upon our moral dignity, if it does not create a painful sense of wrong. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And so it degrades a soul to bow down where it ought [p. 715] to stand erect and firm, and a man who will from cowardice or any other cause cringe before a moral fool is a man who is of no use in the world from a moral point of view. (See on this subject, on verse 26 of the preceding chapter, page 711.) 2. It injures the man who receives it. It makes him feel as if there was no difference between vice and virtue, when he finds himself receiving that which ought to be given to a good man only, and so he is confirmed in his wickedness. ”