Part 3 — Chapter III.—REALIZED MORALITY OR THE VIRTUES.

LXIX.

Goodness as Found in Character.

We have treated of the forming of moral ideals, and of the attempt to realize them against the counter attractions of sensible desire. We have now to treat these ideas as actual ends of conduct and thus reacting upon the agent. The good character, considered in relation to the moral struggle, is the one which chooses the right end, which endeavors to be better. The good character in itself is that made by this choice. It is good for the self to choose a due end in an effort caused by contrary allurements. But the very fact of the struggle witnesses that morality is not yet the natural and spontaneous manifestation of character. A wholly [228] good man would feel such satisfaction in the contemplation of the ideal good that contrary desires would not affect him. He would take pleasure only in the right. Every accomplished moral deed tends to bring this about. Moral realization brings satisfaction. The satisfaction becomes one with the right act. Duty and desire grow into harmony. Interest and virtue tend toward unity.

This is the truth aimed at, but not attained, by the hedonistic school. In complete moral action, happiness and rightness know no divorce. And this is true, even though the act, in some of its aspects, involves pain. The act, so far as its quality of rightness is concerned, calls forth unalloyed satisfaction, however bound up with pain to self and to others in some respects. The error of hedonism is not in insisting that right action is pleasurable, but in its failure to supply content to the idea of happiness, in its failure to define what happiness is. In the failure to show those active relations of man to nature and to man involved in human satisfaction, it reduces happiness to the abstraction of agreeable sensation.

A virtue then, in the full sense, that is as the expression of virtuous character, and not of the struggle of character to be virtuous against the allurements of passive goods, is an interest. The system of virtues includes the various forms which [229] interest assumes. Truthfulness, for example, is interest in the media of human exchange; generosity is interest in sharing any form of superior endowment with others less rich by nature or training, etc. It is distinguished from natural generosity, which may be mere impulse, by its being an interest in the activity or social relation itself, instead of in some accidental accompaniment of the relation.

Another way of getting at the nature of the virtues is to consider them as forms of freedom. Positive freedom is the good, it is realized activity, the full and unhindered performance of function. A virtue is any one aspect which the free performance of function may take. Meekness is one form of the adjustment of capacity to surroundings; honesty another; indignation another; scientific excellence another, and so on. In each of these virtues, the agent realizes his freedom: Freedom from subjection to caprice and blind appetite, freedom in the full play of activity.

LXX.

Two Kinds of Virtues.

We may recognize two types of virtuous action. These are:

1. The Special Virtues. These arise from special capacities or special opportunities. The Greek sense of virtue was almost that of "excellence", some special fitness or power of an agent. [230] There is the virtue of a painter, of a scientific investigator, of a philanthropist, of a comedian, of a statesman, and so on. The special act may be manifested in view of some special occasion, some special demand of the environment—charity, thankfulness, patriotism, chastity, etc. Goodness, as the realization of the moral end, is a system, and the special virtues are the particular members of the system.

2. Cardinal Virtues. Besides these special members of a system, however, the whole system itself may present various aspects. That is to say, even in a special act the whole spirit of the man may be called out, and this expression of the whole character is a cardinal virtue. While the special virtues differ in content, as humility from bravery, earnestness from compassion, the cardinal virtues have the same content, showing only different sides of it. Conscientiousness, for example, is a cardinal virtue. It does not have to do with an act belonging to some particular capacity, or evoked by some special circumstance, but with the spirit of the whole self as manifested in the will to recognize duty—both its obligatoriness in general and the concrete forms which it takes. Truthfulness as a special virtue would be the desire to make word correspond to fact in some instance of speech. As a cardinal virtue, it is the constant will to clarify [231] and render true to their ideal all human relations—those of man to man, and man to nature.

LXXI.

The Cardinal Virtues.

The cardinal virtues are marked by

1. Wholeness. This or that virtue, not calling the whole character into play, but only some special power, is partial. But a cardinal virtue is not a virtue, but the spirit in which all acts are performed. It lies in the attitude which the agent takes towards duty; his obedience to recognized forms, his readiness to respond to new duties, his enthusiasm in moving forward to new relations. It is a common remark that moral codes change from 'Do not' to 'Do', and from this to 'Be'. A Mosaic code may attempt to regulate the specific acts of life. Christianity says, 'Be ye perfect'. The effort to exhaust the various special right acts is futile. They are not the same for any two men, and they change constantly with the same man. The very words which denote virtues come less and less to mean specific acts, and more the spirit in which conduct occurs. Purity, for example, does not mean freedom from certain limited outward forms of defilement; but comes to signify rightness of natures as a whole, their freedom from all self-seeking or exclusive desire for private pleasure, etc. Thus purity of heart comes to mean perfect goodness.

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2. Disinterestedness. Any act, to be virtuous, must of course be disinterested, but we may now connect this disinterestedness with the integral nature of moral action just spoken of. Immoral action never takes account of the whole nature of an end; it deflects the end to some ulterior purpose; it bends it to the private satisfaction of the agent; it takes a part of it by making exceptions in favor of self. Bad action is never 'objective'. It is 'abstract'; it takes into account only such portion of the act as satisfies some existing need of the private self. The immoral man shows his partial character again by being full of casuistries, devices by which he can get the act removed from its natural placing and considered in some other light:—this act, for example, would be dishonest, of course, if done under certain circumstances, but since I have certain praiseworthy feelings, certain remote intentions, it may now be considered otherwise. It is a large part of the badness of 'good' people that instead of taking the whole act just as it is, they endeavor to make the natural feelings in their own mind—feelings of charity, or benevolence—do substitute duty for the end aimed at; they excuse wrong acts on the ground that their 'intentions' were good, meaning by intentions the prevailing mood of their mind. It is in this sense that 'hell is paved with good intentions.'

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Now it is against this deflection, perversion and mutilating of the act that disinterestedness takes its stand. Disinterested does not mean without interest, but without interest in anything except the act itself. The interest is not in the wonderful moods or sentiments with which we do the act; it is not in some ulterior end to be gained by it, or in some private advantage which it will bring, but in the act itself—in the real and concrete relations involved. There is a vague French saying that 'morality is the nature of things.' If this phrase has a meaning it is that moral conduct is not a manifestation of private feelings nor a search for some unattainable ideal, but observance and reproduction of actual relations. And this is the mark of a disinterested character.

CONCLUSION.

LXXII.

The Practical End of Morality.

Virtues, then, are cardinal, and character is integral, just in the degree in which every want is a want of the whole man. So far as this occurs, the burden of the moral struggle is transformed into freedom of movement. There is no longer effort to bring the particular desire into conformity with [234] a law, or a universal, outside itself. The fitting in of each special desire, as it arises, to the organism of character takes place without friction, as a natural re-adjustment. There is not constraint, but growth. On the other side, the attained character does not tend to petrify into a fixed possession which resists the response to needs that grow out of the enlarged environment. It is plastic to new wants and demands; it does not require to be wrenched and wracked into agreement with the required act, but moves into it, of itself. The law is not an external ideal, but the principle of the movement. There is the identity of freedom and law in the good.

This union of inclination and duty in act is the practical end. All the world's great reformers have set as their goal this ideal, which may be termed either the freeing of wants, or the humanizing of the moral law. It will help summarize our whole discussion, if we see how the theories of hedonism and of Kant have endeavored to express this same goal. Hedonism, indeed, has this identity for its fundamental principle. It holds strongly to the idea of moral law immanent in human wants themselves. But its error lies in taking this identity of desire and the good, as a direct or immediate unity, while, in reality, it exists only in and through activity; it is a unity which [235] can be attained only as the result of a process. It mistakes an ideal which is realized only in action for bare fact which exists of itself.

Hedonism, as represented by Spencer, recognizes, it is true, that the unity of desire and duty is not an immediate or natural one; but only to fall into the error of holding that the separation is due to some external causes, and that when these are removed we shall have a fixed millenium. As against this doctrine, we must recognize that the difference between want and duty is always removed so far as conduct is moral; that it is not an ideal in the sense of something to be attained at some remote period, but an ideal in the sense of being the very meaning of moral activity whenever and wherever it occurs. The realizing of this ideal is not something to be sometime reached once for all, but progress is itself the ideal. Wants are ever growing larger, and thus freedom ever comes to have a wider scope (Sec. LXV).

Kant recognizes that the identity of duty and inclination is not a natural fact, but is the ideal. However, he understands by ideal something which ought to be, but is not. Morality is ever a struggle to get desire into unity with law, but a struggle doomed, by its very conditions, not to succeed. The law is the straight line of duty, which the asymptotic curve of desire may approximate, [236] but never touch. An earthly taint of pleasure-seeking always clings to our wants, and makes of morality a striving which defeats itself.

The theory that morality lies in the realization of individuality recognizes that there is no direct, or natural, identity of desire and law, but also recognizes that their identification is not an impossible task. The problem is solved in the exercise of function, where the desires, however, are not unclothed, but clothed upon. Flowing in the channel of response to the demands of the moral environment, they unite, at once, social service and individual freedom.

LXXIII.

The Means of Moralization.

This practical end of the unification of desire and duty, in the play of moral interests, is reached, therefore, so far as the desires are socialized. A want is socialized when it is not a want for its own isolated and fixed satisfaction, but reflects the needs of the environment. This implies, of course, that it is bound by countless ties to the whole body of desires and capacities. The eye, in seeing for itself, sees for the whole body, because it is not isolated but, through its connections, an organ of a system. In this same way, the satisfaction of a want for food, or for commercial activity, may necessitate a satisfaction of the whole social system.

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But how shall this socialization of wants be secured? It is in answering this question that we are brought again to a point already discussed at length: the moral bearings of intelligence. It is intelligence that is the sole sure means of taking a want out of the isolation of merely impulsive action. It is the passing of the desire through the alembic of ideas that, in rationalizing and spiritualizing it, makes it an expression of the want of the whole man, and thus of social needs.

To know one's self was declared by Socrates, who first brought to conscious birth the spirit of the moral life, to be the very core of moral endeavor. This knowledge of self has taken, indeed, a more circuitous and a more painful path, than Socrates anticipated. Man has had, during two thousand years of science, to go around through nature to find himself, and as yet he has not wholly come back to himself—he oftentimes seems still lost in the wilderness of an outer world. But when man does get back to himself it will be as a victor laden with the spoils of subdued nature. Having secured, in theory and invention, his unity with nature, his knowledge of himself will rest on a wide and certain basis.

This is the final justification of the moral value of science and art. It is because through them wants are inter-connected, unified and socialized, [238] that they are, when all is said and done, the preëminent moral means. And if we do not readily recognize them in this garb, it is because we have made of them such fixed things, that is, such abstractions, by placing them outside the movement of human life.

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