Regulars

“ In the sacred fact of obligation you touch the immutable, and lay hold, as it were, on the eternities. At the very centre of your being, there is a fixed element, and that of a kind or degree essentially sovereign. A standard is set up in your very thought, by which a great part of your questions are determined, and about which your otherwise random thoughts may settle into order and law. ”

“ And, finally, if the desire to please is the aim of good manners, the guide, or test, or norm is common usage or custom, which no less than reason furnishes the laws of courtesy, and which in a sense may be said to be the equivalent in manners of what duty is in morals. ”

“ The popular maxims of common life, whether sayings or counsels, he will know how to reconcile with the rules of the law. Whatever creatures of this triple universe are subject to the mundane whirl, in any of the six conditions of existence, he will know their thoughts, doings, and movements. ”

“ If our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit of ours, or for any other object, then our principle, and we with it, are sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as such. ”

“ All the doctrines which ascribe absolute goodness to particular forms of government, particular social arrangements, and even to particular modes of education, without reference to the state of civilization and the various distinguishing characters of the society for which they are intended, are open to the same objection—that of assuming one class of influencing circumstances to be the paramount rulers of phenomena which depend in an equal or greater degree on many others. ”

“ Now since every activity, whether of knowing or doing, aims at some good, it is for us to settle what the good is which the civic activity aims at,—what, in short, is the ultimate end of all 'goods' connected with conduct? ”

“ Those who have dispensed with the assumption of such a universal standard, have only been enabled to do so by supposing that a moral sense, or instinct, inherent in our constitution, informs us, both what principles of conduct we are bound to observe, and also in what order these should be subordinated to one another. ”

“ For instance, I read among other things this golden rule on such an ordinary printed paper stuck against a room door, "Make no comparisons;" and if you consider how many quarrels, and how much mischief arise in the world from odious comparisons of the merits of one with the merits of another, the most delightful lessons of morality are contained in the few words of the above-mentioned rule. ”

“ Wonder if our own highest things have not grown up out of equally simple things. The compulsion first—then the sense of duty become habit, automatic, the conviction expanding into knowledge of ethical habit,—then the habit creating conviction,—then relations,—then the capacity for general ideas. ”

“ In saying this, I mean only to designate the general spirit of human law. Every principle, on its application to practice, must be limited and modified by circumstances; our reason by our common sense. ”

“ What classes of things have a greater share of pure existence, in your judgment—those of which food and drink and condiments and all kinds of sustenance are examples, or the class which contains true opinion and knowledge and mind and all the different kinds of virtue? ”

“ Our deeds, judged in the light of a reasonable survey of life--a survey of life such as that to which, when we form our opinions, and when we act on our opinions, we intend to appeal--are, for a determinate purpose, either hits or misses. If the issues of life in question when we act are definite enough, our deeds, under the rules of the game of life, cannot avoid this character of being the right deeds or the wrong deeds for the purpose in question and in view of their actual place in real life. ”

“ In any one who had prescribed and established determinate laws and rules in his head for his own conduct, we should perceive an equality of manners, an order and an infallible relation of one thing or action to another, shine through his whole life ”

“ We shall make our division on the principle of proceeding from the most general, or those which relate to society in its most extensive sense, to those which are less general, relating to society in its more specific and determinate sense, and finally to those which are the most particular, relating to separate portions and members of society, to the family and to the individual. ”

“ So far as I commonly think and act, I do so precisely as do most other fairly sensible folk—that is to say, I think and act in accordance with the thoughts, traditions, and habits of my day and generation. ”

“ The nearest thing to an authoritative and universal rule which we get in the "Data of Ethics" is the assertion that "the life of the social organism must, as a rule, rank above the lives of its units." ”

“ All notions of propriety, decency, chastity, politeness, order, duty, right, rights, discipline, respect, reverence, coöperation, and fellowship, especially all things in regard to which good and ill depend entirely on the point at which the line is drawn, are in the mores. The mores can make things seem right and good to one group or one age which to another seem antagonistic to every instinct of human nature. ”

“ Therefore it is that perpetual difference, play, and change in groups of form are more essential to them even than their being subdued by some great gathering law: the law is needful to them for their perfection and their power, but the difference is needful to them for their life. ”

“ Without attempting in this place to justify my opinion, or even to define the kind of justification which it admits of, I merely declare my conviction, that the general principle to which all rules of practice ought to conform, and the test by which they should be tried, is that of conduciveness to the happiness of mankind, or rather, of all sentient beings ”

“ But before the crucial question of justice which divides modern society, namely, whether we shall lay emphasis upon adjustment of rewards to previous abilities, habits, possessions, character, or shall lay stress upon needs, and the possibility of bringing about a greater measure of equality, the doctrine which would find its standard in an a priori reason is helpless. ”

“ This common sense is a perception of all the conditions of our earthly existence, of laws that can be stated, and of laws that cannot be stated, or that are learned only by practice, in which allowance for friction is made. ”

“ That they may be one!—If, like an individual soul, the state has attained its normal differentiation of parts, as with that also its vitality and effectiveness will be proportionate to the unity of those parts in their various single operations. The productive, the executive, the contemplative orders, respectively, like their psychological analogues, the senses, the will, and the intelligence, will be susceptible each of its own proper virtue or excellence, temperance, bravery, spiritual illumination. ”

“ For the average lawyer’s habit of thought is perhaps the most typical example of the average intelligent secular view of things. Is it not the final fruit of what is called common-sense, that is to say of the sense of common people? ”

“ Now that, after tens of thousands of years of discipline, the lives of men in society have become so harmonious—now that character and conditions have little by little grown into adjustment, we are apt to suppose that congruity of institutions, conduct, sentiments, and beliefs, is necessary. ”

“ It appears necessary, however, that we attend to the universal qualities of our nature, before we regard its varieties, or attempt to explain differences consisting in the unequal possession or application of dispositions and powers that are in some measure common to all mankind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A little higher than the habitual actions are those which are so complicated, or occur so rarely, or depend upon such delicate combinations of conditions, that they never become habitual—that is, they are never performed without thought, although we may be able to group them into classes, and to guide our conduct by general rules or principles, either established by experience or accepted upon the authority of others. ”

“ The primary question now discussed, as of the most vital importance, is, What is the ultimate standard by which, amid all the diversities of human conduct and opinion, we may determine what is right and good in individual and social life? ”

“ In this way, then, it may be possible to prove the general utility, for the present, of those actions, which in our society are both generally recognized as duties and generally practised; but it seems very doubtful whether a conclusive case can be established for any proposed change in social custom, without an independent investigation of what things are good or bad in themselves. ”

“ What is common-sense but the power of seeing the fundamentals of any practical question, and of disengaging them from the accidental and transient features that may overlie these fundamentals—the power, to use a familiar expression, of getting down to bed rock? ”

“ It is, however, evident that, in the present state of our knowledge, all ideas respecting nature must refer either to the normal or to the abnormal; that is to say, they must be concerned either with what is regular, uniform, and obedient to recognized principles, or else with what is irregular, perturbed, and disobedient. ”

“ Wherefore the main and primitive division of moral knowledge seemeth to be into the exemplar or platform of good, and the regiment or culture of the mind: the one describing the nature of good, the other prescribing rules how to subdue, apply, and accommodate the will of man thereunto. ”

“ The ever more and more common form of the ideal: first men, then institutions, finally tendencies, purposes, or the want of them. The highest form: the conquest of the ideal by a backward movement from tendencies to institutions, and from institutions to men. ”

“ And I would ask, in turn, if my old friend had studied history with reference to the principle that, as a rule, human beings do not rise above the standard implied in society’s general estimate of the class to which they belong. ”

“ But as custom or practice has brought to light all these principles, and has settled the just value of every thing; this must certainly contribute to the easy production of the passions, and guide us, by means of general established rules, in the proportions, which we ought to observe in prefering one object to another. ”

“ In the moral sphere, with which alone we are concerned, right means always the relation of the universal to the particular will. The emphasis is on the universal. Possibility of discrepancy with a conscious subject makes law here command. ”

“ That Law, Religion, and Manners are thus related—that their respective kinds of operation come under one generalization—that they have in certain contrasted characteristics of men a common support and a common danger—will, however, be most clearly seen on discovering that they have a common origin. ”

“ For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature p. 28the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves; which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing, or else excusing one another. ”

“ All propositions which can be framed respecting the actions of human beings as ordinarily classified, or as classified according to any kind of outward indications, are merely approximate. We can only say, Most persons of a particular age, profession, country, or rank in society, have such and such qualities; or, Most persons, when placed in certain circumstances, act in such and such a way. ”

“ It is upon that discipline chiefly that those qualities which I have called the moral qualities of the personal order, and which have their root in truthfulness and courage, depend for their evolution. ”

“ Here all the rules of polite society may be observed, and yet the inner convictions, whether political, religious, or moral, of the circle, may find welcome expression and fair hearing. The growth of ideas and the progress of ideals in such a society is rapid and along the right lines. ”

“ What are the claims of the system, to which the attention of the public is invited in this Work, can be understood fully, only by a careful and reflecting examination of its principles in connection with the conscious wants of our own inward being—the requirements of our own reason and consciences. ”

“ Thus at every point we meet the evidence that the great principles, which now govern society, were elaborated step by step, proceeding in sequences, and tending invariably in the same upward direction. ”

“ But the scale on which he represents them is increased or diminished, not according to the dignity of the persons concerned in them, but according to the degree in which they elucidate the condition of society and the nature of man. ”

“ One had to fill one’s place in the whole, the great scheme of man’s elaborate civilization, that was all. The Whole mattered—but the unit, the person, had no importance, except as he represented the Whole. ”