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Title: The Nature of Goodness
Author: George Herbert Palmer
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NATURE OF GOODNESS ***
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THE NATURE OF GOODNESS
BY
GEORGE HERBERT PALMER
Alford Professor of Philosophy
In Harvard University
[Illustration: Tout bien ou rien]
1903
A. F. P.
BONITATE SINGULARI MULTIS DILECTAE
VENUSTATE LITTERIS CONSILIIS PRAESTANTI
NUPER E DOMO ET GAUDIO MEO EREPTAE
PREFACE
The substance of these chapters was delivered as a course of lectures
at Harvard University, Dartmouth and Wellesley Colleges, Western
Reserve University, the University of California, and the Twentieth
Century Club of Boston. A part of the sixth chapter was used as an
address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard, and another
part before the Philosophical Union of Berkeley, California. Several
of these audiences have materially aided my work by their searching
criticisms, and all have helped to clear my thought and simplify its
expression. Since discussions necessarily so severe have been felt as
vital by companies so diverse, I venture to offer them here to a wider
audience.
Previously, in "The Field of Ethics," I marked out the place which
ethics occupies among the sciences. In this book the first problem of
ethics is examined. The two volumes will form, I hope, an easy yet
serious introduction to this gravest and most perpetual of studies.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE DOUBLE ASPECT OF GOODNESS
I. Difficulties of the investigation
II. Gains to be expected
III. Extrinsic goodness
IV. Imperfections of extrinsic goodness
V. Intrinsic goodness
VI. Relations of the two kinds
VII. Diagram
CHAPTER II
MISCONCEPTIONS OF GOODNESS
I. Enlargement of the diagram
II. Greater and lesser good
III. Higher and lower good
IV. Order and wealth
V. Satisfaction of desire
VI. Adaptation to environment
VII. Definitions
CHAPTER III
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
I. The four factors of personal goodness
II. Unconsciousness
III. Reflex action
IV. Conscious experience
V. Self-consciousness
VI. Its degrees
VII. Its acquisition
VIII. Its instability
CHAPTER IV
SELF-DIRECTION
I. Consciousness a factor
II. (A) The intention
III. (1) The end, aim, or ideal
IV. (2) Desire
V. (3) Decision
VI. (B) The volition
VII. (1) Deliberation
VIII. (2) Effort
IX. (3) Satisfaction
CHAPTER V
SELF-DEVELOPMENT
I. Reflex influence of self-direction
II. Varieties of change
III. Accidental change
IV. Destructive change
V. Transforming change
VI. Development
VII. Self-development
VIII. Method of self-development
IX. Test of self-development
X. Actual extent of personality
XI. Possible extent of personality
XII. Practical consequences
CHAPTER VI
SELF-SACRIFICE
I. Difficulties of the conception
II. It is impossible
III. It is a sign of degradation
IV. It is needless
V. It is irrational
VI. Its frequency
VII. Definition
VIII. Its rationality
IX. Distinguished from culture
X. Its self-assertion
XI. Its incalculability
XII. Its positive character
XIII. Conclusion
CHAPTER VII
NATURE AND SPIRIT
I. Summary of the preceding argument
II. Spirit superior to nature
III. Naturalistic tendency of the fine arts
IV. Naturalistic tendency of science and philosophy
V. Naturalism in social estimates
VI. Self-consciousness burdensome
VII. Impossibility of full conscious guidance
VIII. Advantages of unconscious action
CHAPTER VIII
THE THREE STAGES OF GOODNESS
I. Advantage of conscious guidance
II. Example of piano-playing
III. The mechanization of conduct
IV. Contrast of the first and third stages
V. The cure for self-consciousness
VI. The revision of habits
VII. The doctrine of praise
VIII. The propriety of praise
I
THE DOUBLE ASPECT OF GOODNESS
In undertaking the following discussion I foresee two grave
difficulties. My reader may well feel that goodness is already the
most familiar of all the thoughts we employ, and yet he may at the
same time suspect that there is something about it perplexingly
abstruse and remote. Familiar it certainly is. It attends all our
wishes, acts, and projects as nothing else does, so that no estimate
of its influence can be excessive. When we take a walk, read a book,
make a dress, hire a servant, visit a friend, attend a concert, choose
a wife, cast a vote, enter into business, we always do it in the hope
of attaining something good. The clue of goodness is accordingly a
veritable guide of life. On it depend actions far more minute than
those just mentioned. We never raise a hand, for example, unless with
a view to improve in some respect our condition. Motionless we should
remain forever, did we not believe that by placing the hand elsewhere
we might obtain something which we do not now possess. Consequently we
employ the word or some synonym of it during pretty much every waking
hour of our lives. Wishing some test of this frequency I turned to
Shakespeare, and found that he uses the word "good" fifteen hundred
times, and it's derivatives "goodness," "better," and "best," about as
many more. He could not make men and women talk right without
incessant reference to this directive conception.
But while thus familiar and influential when mixed with action, and
just because of that very fact, the notion of goodness is
bewilderingly abstruse and remote. People in general do not observe
this curious circumstance. Since they are so frequently encountering
goodness, both laymen and scholars are apt to assume that it is
altogether clear and requires no explanation. But the very reverse is
the truth. Familiarity obscures. It breeds instincts and not
understanding. So inwoven has goodness become with the very web of
life that it is hard to disentangle. We cannot easily detach it from
encompassing circumstance, look at it nakedly, and say what in itself
it really is. Never appearing in practical affairs except as an
element, and always intimately associated with something else, we are
puzzled how to break up that intimacy and give to goodness independent
meaning. It is as if oxygen were never found alone, but only in
connection with hydrogen, carbon, or some other of the eighty elements
which compose our globe. We might feel its wide influence, but we
should have difficulty in describing what the thing itself was. Just
so if any chance dozen persons should be called on to say what they
mean by goodness, probably not one could offer a definition which he
would be willing to hold to for fifteen minutes.
It is true, this strange state of things is not peculiar to goodness.
Other familiar conceptions show a similar tendency, and just about in
proportion, too, to their importance. Those which count for most in
our lives are least easy to understand. What, for example, do we mean
by love? Everybody has experienced it since the world began. For a
century or more, novelists have been fixing our attention on it as our
chief concern. Yet nobody has yet succeeded in making the matter quite
plain. What is the state? Socialists are trying to tell us, and we are
trying to tell them; but each, it must be owned, has about as much
difficulty in understanding himself as in understanding his opponent,
though the two sets of vague ideas still contain reality enough for
vigorous strife. Or take the very simplest of conceptions, the
conception of force--that which is presupposed in every species of
physical science; ages are likely to pass before it is satisfactorily
defined. Now the conception of goodness is something of this sort,
something so wrought into the total framework of existence that it is
hidden from view and not separately observable. We know so much about
it that we do not understand it.
For ordinary purposes probably it is well not to seek to understand
it. Acquaintance with the structure of the eye does not help seeing.
To determine beforehand just how polite we should be would not
facilitate human intercourse. And possibly a completed scheme of
goodness would rather confuse than ease our daily actions. Science
does not readily connect with life. For most of us all the time, and
for all of us most of the time, instinct is the better prompter. But
if we mean to be ethical students and to examine conduct
scientifically, we must evidently at the outset come face to face with
the meaning of goodness. I am consequently often surprised on looking
into a treatise on ethics to find no definition of goodness proposed.
The author assumes that everybody knows what goodness is, and that his
own business is merely to point out under what conditions it may be
had. But few readers do know what goodness is. One suspects that
frequently the authors of these treatises themselves do not, and that
a hazy condition of mind on this central subject is the cause of much
loose talk afterwards. At any rate, I feel sure that nothing can more
justly be demanded of a writer on ethics at the beginning of his
undertaking than that he should attempt to unravel the subtleties of
this all-important conception. Having already in a previous volume
marked out the Field of Ethics, I believe I cannot wisely go on
discussing the science that I love, until I have made clear what
meaning I everywhere attach to the obscure and familiar word _good_.
This word being the ethical writer's chief tool, both he and his
readers must learn its construction before they proceed to use
it. To the study of that curious nature I dedicate this volume.
II
To those who join in the investigation I cannot promise hours of ease.
The task is an arduous one, calling for critical discernment and a
kind of disinterested delight in studying the high intricacies of our
personal structure. My readers must follow me with care, and indeed do
much of the work themselves, I being but a guide. For my purpose is
not so much to impart as to reveal. Wishing merely to make people
aware of what has always been in their minds, I think at the end of my
book I shall be able to say, "These readers of mine know now no more
than they did at, the beginning." Yet if I say that, I hope to be able
to add, "but they see vastly more significance in it than they once
did, and henceforth will find the world interesting in a degree they
never knew before." In attaining this new interest they will have
experienced too that highest of human pleasures,--the joy of clear,
continuous, and energetic thinking. Few human beings are so inert that
they are not ready to look into the dark places of their minds if, by
doing so, they can throw light on obscurities there.
I ought, however, to say that I cannot promise one gain which some of
my readers may be seeking. In no large degree can I induce in them
that goodness of which we talk. Some may come to me in conscious
weakness, desiring to be made better. But this I do not undertake. My
aim is a scientific one. I am an ethical teacher. I want to lead men
to understand what goodness is, and I must leave the more important
work of attracting them to pursue it to preacher and moralist. Still,
indirectly there is moral gain to be had here. One cannot contemplate
long such exalted themes without receiving an impulse, and being
lifted into a region where doing wrong becomes a little strange. When,
too, we reflect how many human ills spring from misunderstanding and
intellectual obscurity, we see that whatever tends to illuminate
mental problems is of large consequence in the practical issues of
life.
In considering what we mean by goodness, we are apt to imagine that
the term applies especially, possibly entirely, to persons. It seems
as if persons alone are entitled to be called good. But a little
reflection shows that this is by no means the case. There are about as
many good things in the world as good persons, and we are obliged to
speak of them about as often. The goodness which we see in things is,
however, far simpler and more easily analyzed than that which appears
in persons. It may accordingly be well in these first two chapters to
say nothing whatever about such goodness as is peculiar to persons,
but to confine our attention to those phases of it which are shared
alike by persons and things.
III
How then do we employ the word "good"? I do not ask how we ought to
employ it, but how we do. For the present we shall be engaged in a
psychological inquiry, not an ethical one. We need to get at the plain
facts of usage. I will therefore ask each reader to look into his own
mind, see on what occasions he uses the word, and decide what meaning
he attaches to it. Taking up a few of the simplest possible examples,
we will through them inquire when and why we call things good.
Here is a knife. When is it a good knife? Why, a knife is made for
something, for cutting. Whenever the knife slides evenly through a
piece of wood, unimpeded by anything in its own structure, and with a
minimum of effort on the part of him who steers it, when there is no
disposition of its edge to bend or break, but only to do its appointed
work effectively, then we know that a good knife is at work. Or,
looking at the matter from another point of view, whenever the handle
of the knife neatly fits the hand, following its lines and presenting
no obstruction, so that it is a pleasure to use it, we may say that in
these respects also the knife is a good knife. That is, the knife
becomes good through adaptation to its work, an adaptation realized in
its cleavage of the wood and in its conformity to the hand. Its
goodness always has reference to something outside itself, and is
measured by its performance of an external task. A similar goodness is
also found in persons. When we call the President of the United States
good, we mean that he adapts himself easily and efficiently to the
needs of his people. He detects those needs before others fully feel
them, is sagacious in devices for meeting them, and powerful in
carrying out his patriotic purposes through whatever selfish
opposition. The President's goodness, like the knife's, refers to
qualities within him only so far as these are adjusted to that which
lies beyond.
Or take something not so palpable. What glorious weather! When we woke
this morning, drew aside our curtains and looked out, we said "It is a
good day!" And of what qualities of the day were we thinking? We
meant, I suppose, that the day was well fitted to its various
purposes. Intending to go to our office, we saw there was nothing to
hinder our doing so. We knew that the streets would be clear, people
in amiable mood, business and social duties would move forward easily.
Health itself is promoted by such sunshine. In fact, whatever our
plans, in calling the day a good day we meant to speak of it as
excellently adapted to something outside itself.
This signification of goodness is lucidly put in the remark of
Shakespeare's Portia, "Nothing I see is good without respect." We must
have some respect or end in mind in reference to which the goodness is
reckoned. Good always means good _for_. That little preposition cannot
be absent from our minds, though it need not audibly be uttered. The
knife is good for cutting, the day for business, the President for the
blind needs of his country. Omit the _for_, and goodness ceases. To be
bad or good implies external reference. To be good means to further
something, to be an efficient means; and the end to be furthered must
be already in mind before the word good is spoken.
The respects or ends in reference to which goodness is calculated are
often, it is true, obscure and difficult to seize if one is unfamiliar
with the currents of men's thoughts. I sometimes hear the question
asked about a merchant, "Is he good?"--a question natural enough in
churches and Sunday-schools, but one which sounds rather queer on
"'change." But those who ask it have a special respect in mind. I
believe they mean, "Will the man meet his notes?" In their mode of
thinking a merchant is of consequence only in financial life. When
they have learned whether he is capable of performing his functions
there, they go no farther. He may be the most vicious of men or a
veritable saint. It will make no difference in inducing commercial
associates to call him good. For them the word indicates solely
responsibility for business paper.
A usage more curious still occurs in the nursery. There when the
question is asked, "Has the baby been good?" one discovers by degrees
that the anxious mother wishes to know if it has been crying or quiet.
This elementary life has as yet not acquired positive standards of
measurement. It must be reckoned in negative terms, failure to
disturb. Heaven knows it does not always attain to this. But it is its
utmost virtue, quietude.
In short, whenever we inspect the usage of the word good, we always
find behind it an implication of some end to be reached. Good is a
relative term, signifying promotive of, conducive to. The good is the
useful, and it must be useful for something. Silent or spoken, it is
the mental reference to something else which puts all meaning into it.
So Hamlet says, "There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking
makes it so." If I have in mind A as an end sought, then X is good.
But if B is the end, X is bad. X has no goodness or badness of its
own. No new quality is added to an object or act when it becomes good.
IV
But this result is disappointing, not to say paradoxical. To call a
thing good only with reference to what lies outside itself would be
almost equivalent to saying that nothing is good. For if the moment
anything becomes good it refers all its goodness to something beyond
its own walls, should we ever be able to discover an object endowed
with goodness at all? The knife is good in reference to the stick of
wood; the wood, in reference to the table; the table, in reference to
the writing; the writing, in reference to a reader's eyes; his eyes,
in reference to supporting his family--where shall we ever stop? We
can never catch up with goodness. It is always promising to disclose
itself a little way beyond, and then evading us, slipping from under
our fingers just when we are about to touch it. This meaning of
goodness is self-contradictory.
And it is also too large. It includes more to goodness than properly
belongs there. If we call everything good which is good _for_,
everything which shows adaptation to an end, then we shall be obliged
to count a multitude of matters good which we are accustomed to think
of as evil. Filth will be good, for it promotes fevers as nothing else
does. Earthquakes are good, for shaking down houses. It is inapposite
to urge that we do not want fevers or shaken houses. Wishes are
provided no place in our meaning of good. Goodness merely assists,
promotes, is conducive to any result whatever. It marks the functional
character, without regard to the desirability of that which the
function effects. But this is unsatisfactory and may well set us on a
search for supplementary meanings.
V
When we ask if the Venus of Milo is a good statue, we have to confess
that it is good beyond almost any object on which our eyes have ever
rested. And yet it is not good _for_ anything; it is no means for
an outside end. Rather, it is good in itself. This possibility that
things may be good in themselves was once brought forcibly to my
attention by a trivial incident. Wandering over my fields with my
farmer in autumn, we were surveying the wrecks of summer. There on the
ploughed ground lay a great golden object. He pointed to it, saying,
"That is a good big pumpkin." I said, "Yes, but I don't care about
pumpkins." "No," he said, "nor do I." I said, "You care for them,
though, as they grow large. You called this a good big one." "No! On
the contrary, a pumpkin that is large is worth less. Growing makes it
coarser. But that is a good big pumpkin." I saw there was some meaning
in his mind, but I could not make out what it was. Soon after I heard
a schoolboy telling about having had a "good big thrashing." I knew
that he did not like such things. His phrase could not indicate
approval, and what did it signify? He coupled the two words _good_ and
_big_; and I asked myself if there was between them any natural
connection? On reflection I thought there was. If you wish to find the
full pumpkin nature, here you have it. All that a pumpkin can be is
set forth here as nowhere else. And for that matter, anybody who might
foolishly wish to explore a thrashing would find all he sought in this
one. In short, what seemed to be intended was that all the functions
constituting the things talked about were present in these instances
and hard at work, mutually assisting one another, and joining to make
up such a rounded whole that from it nothing was omitted which
possibly might render its organic wholeness complete. Here then is a
notion of goodness widely unlike the one previously developed.
Goodness now appears shut up within verifiable bounds where it is not
continually referred to something which lies beyond. An object is here
reckoned not as good _for_, but as good in itself. The Venus of Milo
is a good statue not through what it does, but through what it is. And
perhaps it may conduce to clearness if we now give technical names to
our two contrasted conceptions and call the former extrinsic goodness
and the latter intrinsic. Extrinsic goodness will then signify the
adjustment of an object to something which lies outside itself;
intrinsic will say that the many powers of an object are so adjusted
to one another that they cooperate to render the object a firm
totality. Both will indicate relationship; but in the one case the
relations considered are _extra se_, in the other _inter se_.
Goodness, however, will everywhere point to organic adjustment.
If this double aspect of goodness is as clear and important as I
believe it to be, it must have left its record in language. And in
fact we find that popular speech distinguishes worth and value in much
the same way as I have distinguished intrinsic and extrinsic goodness.
To say that an object has value is to declare it of consequence in
reference to something other than itself. To speak of its worth is to
call attention to what its own nature involves. In a somewhat similar
fashion Mr. Bradley distinguishes the extension and harmony of
goodness, and Mr. Alexander the right and the perfect.
VI
When, however, we have got the two sorts of goodness distinctly
parted, our next business is to get them together again. Are they in
fact altogether separate? Is the extrinsic goodness of an object
entirely detachable from its intrinsic? I think not. They are
invariably found together. Indeed, extrinsic goodness would be
impossible in an object which did not possess a fair degree of
intrinsic. How could a table, for example, be useful for holding a
glass of water if the table were not well made, if powers appropriate
to tables were not present and mutually cooperating? Unless equipped
with intrinsic goodness, the table can exhibit no extrinsic goodness
whatever. And, on the other hand, intrinsic goodness, coherence of
inner constitution, is always found attended by some degree of
extrinsic goodness, or influence over other things. Nothing exists
entirely by itself. Each object has its relationships, and through
these is knitted into the frame of the universe.
Still, though the two forms of goodness are thus regularly united, we
may fix our attention on the one or the other. According as we do so,
we speak of an object as intrinsically or extrinsically good. For that
matter, one of the two may sometimes seem to be present in a
preponderating degree, and to determine by its presence the character
of the object. In judging ordinary physical things, I believe we
usually test them by their serviceability to us--by their extrinsic
goodness, that is--rather than bother our heads with asking what is
their inner structure, and how full of organization they may be.
Whereas, when we come to estimate human beings, we ordinarily regard
it as a kind of indignity to assess primarily their extrinsic
goodness, _i. e_., to ask chiefly how serviceable they may be and
to ignore their inner worth. To sum up a man in terms of his labor
value is the moral error of the slaveholder.
If, however, we seek the highest point to which either kind of
excellence may be carried, it will be found where each most fully
assists the other. But this is not easy to imagine. When I set a glass
of water on the table, the table is undoubtedly slightly shaken by the
strain. If I put a large book upon it, the strain of the table becomes
apparent. Putting a hundred pound weight upon it is an experiment that
is perilous. For the extrinsic goodness of the table is at war with
the intrinsic; that is, the employment of the table wears it out. In
doing its work and fitting into the large relationships for which
tables exist, its inner organization becomes disjointed. In time it
will go to pieces. We can, however, imagine a magic table, which might
be consolidated by all it does. At first it was a little weak, but by
upholding the glass of water it grew stronger. As I laid the book on
it, its joints acquired a tenacity which they lacked before; and only
after receiving the hundred pound weight did it acquire the full
strength of which it was capable. That would indeed be a marvelous
table, where use and inner construction continually helped each other.
Something like it we may hereafter find possible in certain regions of
personal goodness, but no such perpetual motion is possible to things.
For them employment is costly.
VII
I have already strained my readers' attention sufficiently by these
abstract statements of matters technical and minute. Let us stop
thinking for a while and observe. I will draw a picture of goodness
and teach the eye what sort of thing it is. We have only to follow in
our drawing the conditions already laid down. We agreed that when an
object was good it was good _for_ something; so that if A is good, it
must be good for B. This instrumental relation, of means to end, may
well be indicated by an arrow pointing out the direction in which the
influence moves. But if B is also to be good, it too must be connected
by an arrow with another object, C, and this in the same way with D.
The process might evidently be continued forever, but will be
sufficiently shown in the three stages of Figure 1. Here the arrow
always expresses the extrinsic goodness of the letter which lies
behind it, in reference to the letter which lies before.
[Fig. 1]
But drawing our diagram in this fashion and finding a little gap
between D and A, the completing mind of man longs to fill up that gap.
We have no warrant for doing anything of the sort; but let us try the
experiment and see what effect will follow. Under the new arrangement
we find that not only is D good for A, but that A, being good for B
and for C, is also good for D. To express these facts in full it would
be necessary to put a point on each end of the arrow connecting A and
D.
[Fig. 2]
But the same would be true of the relation between A and B; that is,
B, being good for C and for D, is also good for A. Or, as similar
reasoning would hold throughout the figure, all the arrows appearing
there should be supplied with heads at both ends. And there is one
further correction. A is good for B and for C; that is, A is good for
C. The same relation should also be indicated between B and D. So that
to render our diagram complete it would be necessary to supply it with
two diagonal arrows having double heads. It would then assume the
following form.
[Fig. 3]
Here is a picture of intrinsic goodness. In this figure we have a
whole represented in which every part is good for every other part.
But this is merely a pictorial statement of the definition which Kant
once gave of an organism. By an organism he says, we mean that
assemblage of active and differing parts in which each part is both
means and end. Extrinsic goodness, the relation of means to end, we
have expressed in our diagram by the pointed arrow. But as soon as we
filled in the gap between D and A each arrow was obliged to point in
two directions. We had an organic whole instead of a lot of external
adjustments. In such a whole each part has its own function to
perform, is active; and all must differ from one another, or there
would be mere repetition and aggregation instead of organic
supplementation of end by means. An organism has been more briefly
defined, and the curious mutuality of its support expressed, by saying
that it is a unit made up of cooperant parts. And each of these
definitions expresses the notion of intrinsic goodness which we have
already reached. Intrinsic goodness is the expression of the fullness
of function in the construction of an organism.
I have elsewhere (The Field of Ethics) explained the epoch-making
character in any life of this conception of an organism. Until one has
come in sight of it, he is a child. When once he begins to view things
organically, he is--at least in outline--a scientific, an artistic, a
moral man. Experience then becomes coherent and rational, and the
disjointed modes of immaturity, ugliness, and sin no longer attract.
At no period of the world's history has this truly formative
conception exercised a wider influence than today. It is accordingly
worth while to depict it with distinctness, and to show how fully it
is wrought into the very nature of goodness.
REFERENCES ON THE DOUBLE ASPECT OF GOODNESS
Alexander's Moral Order and Progress, bk. ii. ch. ii.
Bradley's Appearance and Reality, ch. xxv.
Sidgwick's Methods, bk. i. ch. ix.
Spencer's Principles of Ethics, pt. i. ch. iii.
Muirhead's Elements of Ethics, bk. iv. ch. ii.
Ladd's Philosophy of Conduct, ch. iii.
Kant's Practical Reason, bk. i. ch. ii.
The Meaning of Good, by G.L. Dickinson.
II
MISCONCEPTIONS OF GOODNESS
I
Our diagram of goodness, as drawn in the last chapter, has its special
imperfections, and through these cannot fail to suggest certain
erroneous notions of goodness. To these I now turn. The first of them
is connected with its own method of construction. It will be
remembered that we arbitrarily threw an arrow from D to A, thus making
what was hitherto an end become a means to its own means. Was this
legitimate? Does any such closed circle exist?
It certainly does not. Our universe contains nothing that can be
represented by that figure. Indeed if anywhere such a self-sufficing
organism did exist, we could never know it. For, by the hypothesis, it
would be altogether adequate to itself and without relations beyond
its own bounds. And if it were thus cut off from connection with
everything except itself, it could not even affect our knowledge. It
would be a closed universe within our universe, and be for us as good
as zero. We must own, then, that we have no acquaintance with any such
perfect organism, while the facts of life reveal conditions widely
unlike those here represented.
What these conditions are becomes apparent when we put significance
into the letters hitherto employed. Let our diagram become a picture
of the organic life of John. Then A might represent his physical life,
B his business life, C his civil, D his domestic; and we should have
asserted that each of these several functions in the life of John
assists all the rest. His physical health favors his commercial and
political success, while at the same time making him more valuable in
the domestic circle. But home life, civic eminence, and business
prosperity also tend to confirm his health. In short, every one of
these factors in the life of John mutually affects and is affected by
all the others.
But when thus supplied with meaning, Figure 3 evidently fails to
express all it should say. B is intended to exhibit the business life
of John. But this is surely not lived alone. Though called a function
of John, it is rather a function of the community, and he merely
shares it. I had no right to confine to John himself that which
plainly stretches beyond him. Let us correct the figure, then, by
laying off another beside it to represent Peter, one of those who
shares in the business experience of John. This common business life
[Fig. 4]
of theirs, B, we may say, enables Peter to gratify his own adventurous
disposition, E; and this again stimulates his scientific tastes, F.
But Peter's eminence in science commends him so to his townsmen that
he comes to share again C, the civic life of John. Yet as before in
the case of John, each of Peter's powers works forward, backward, and
across, constructing in Peter an organic whole which still is
interlocked with the life of John. Each, while having functions of his
own, has also functions which are shared with his neighbor.
Nor would this involvement of functions pause with Peter. To make our
diagram really representative, each of the two individuals thus far
drawn would need to be surrounded by a multitude of others, all
sharing in some degree the functions of their neighbors. Or rather
each individual, once connected with his neighbors, would find all his
functions affected by all those possessed by his entire group. For
fear of making my figure unintelligible
[Fig 5.]
through its fullness of relations, I have sent out arrows in all
directions from the letter A only; but in reality they would run from
all to all. And I have also thought that we persons affect one another
quite as decidedly through the wholeness of our characters as we do
through any interlocking of single traits. Such totality of
relationship I have tried to suggest by connecting the centres of each
little square with the centres of adjacent ones. John as a whole is
thus shown to be good for Peter as a whole.
We have successively found ourselves obliged to broaden our conception
until the goodness of a single object has come to imply that of a
group. The two phases of goodness are thus seen to be mutually
dependent. Extrinsic goodness or serviceability, that where an object
employs an already constituted wholeness to further the wholeness of
another, cannot proceed except through intrinsic goodness, or that
where fullness and adjustment of functions are expressed in the
construction of an organism. Nor can intrinsic goodness be supposed to
exist shut up to itself and parted from extrinsic influence. The two
are merely different modes or points of view for assessing goodness
everywhere. Goodness in its most elementary form appears where one
object is connected with another as means to end. But the more
elaborately complicated the relation becomes, and the richer the
entanglement of means and ends--internal and external--in the
adjustment of object or person, so much ampler is the goodness. Each
object, in order to possess any good, must share in that of the
universe.
II
But the diagram suggests a second question. Are all the functions here
represented equally influential in forming the organism? Our figure
implies that they are, and I see no way of drawing it so as to avoid
the implication. But it is an error. In nature our powers have
different degrees of influence. We cannot suppose that John's
physical, commercial, domestic, and political life will have precisely
equal weight in the formation of his being. One or the other of them
will play a larger part. Accordingly we very properly speak of greater
goods and lesser goods, meaning by the former those which are more
largely contributory to the organism. In our physical being, for
example, we may inquire whether sight or digestion is the greater
good; and our only means of arriving at an answer would be to stop
each function and then note the comparative consequence to the
organism. Without digestion, life ceases; without sight, it is
rendered uncomfortable. If we are considering merely the relative
amounts of bodily gain from the two functions, we must call digestion
the greater good. In a table, excellence of make is apt to be a
greater good than excellence of material, the character of the
carpentry having more effect on its durability than does the special
kind of wood employed. The very doubts about such results which arise
in certain cases confirm the truth of the definition here proposed;
for when we hesitate, it is on account of the difficulty we find in
determining how far maintenance of the organism depends on the one or
the other of the qualities compared. The meaning of the terms greater
and lesser is clearer than their application. A function or quality is
counted a greater good in proportion as it is believed to be more
completely of the nature of a means.
III
Another question unsettled by the diagram is so closely connected with
the one just examined as often to be confused with it. It is this: Are
all functions of the same kind, rank, or grade? They are not; and this
qualitative difference is indicated by the terms higher and lower, as
the quantitative difference was by greater and less. But differences
of rank are more slippery matters than difference of amount, and
easily lend themselves to arbitrary and capricious treatment. In
ordinary speech we are apt to employ the words high and low as mere
signs of approval or disapproval. We talk of one occupation,
enjoyment, work of art, as superior to another, and mean hardly more
than that we like it better. Probably there is not another pair of
terms current in ethics where the laudatory usage is so liable to slip
into the place of the descriptive. Our opponent's ethics always seem
to embody low ideals, our own to be of a higher type. Accordingly the
terms should not be used in controversy unless we have in mind for
them a precise meaning other than eulogy or disparagement.
And such a meaning they certainly may possess. As the term greater
good is employed to indicate the degree in which a quality serves as a
means, so may the higher good show the degree in which it is an end.
Digestion, which was just now counted a greater good than sight, might
still be rightly reckoned a lower; for while it contributes more
largely to the constitution of the human organism, it on that very
account expresses less the purposes to which that organism will be
put. It is true we have seen how in any organism every power is both
means and end. It would be impossible, then, to part out its powers,
and call some altogether great and others altogether high. But though
there is purpose in all, and construction in all, certain are more
markedly the one than the other. Some express the superintending
functions; others, the subservient. Some condition, others are
conditioned by. In man, for example, the intellectual powers certainly
serve our bodily needs. But that is not their principal office;
rather, in them the aims of the entire human being receive expression.
To abolish the distinction of high and low would be to try to
obliterate from our understanding of the world all estimates of the
comparative worth of its parts; and with these estimates its rational
order would also disappear. Such attempts have often been made. In
extreme polytheism there are no superiors among the gods and no
inferiors, and chaos consequently reigns. A similar chaos is projected
into life when, as in the poetry of Walt Whitman, all grades of
importance are stripped from the powers of man and each is ranked as
of equal dignity with every other.
That there is difficulty in applying the distinction, and determining
which function is high and which low, is evident. To fix the purposes
of an object would often be presumptuous. With such perplexities I am
not concerned. I merely wish to point out a perfectly legitimate and
even important signification of the terms high and low, quite apart
from their popular employment as laudatory or depreciative epithets.
It surely is not amiss to call the legibility of a book a higher good
than its shape, size, or weight, though in each of these some quality
of the book is expressed.
IV
A further point of possible misconception in our diagram is the number
of factors represented. As here shown, these are but four. They might
better be forty. The more richly functional a thing or person is, the
greater its goodness. Poverty of powers is everywhere a form of evil.
For how can there be largeness of organization where there is little
to organize? Or what is the use of organization except as a mode of
furnishing the smoothest and most compact expression to powers? Wealth
and order are accordingly everywhere the double traits of goodness,
and a chief test of the worth of any organism will be the diversity of
the powers it includes. Throughout my discussion I have tried to help
the reader to keep this twofold goodness in mind by the use of such
phrases as "fullness of organization."
Yet it must be confessed that between the two elements of goodness
there is a kind of opposition, needful though both are for each other.
Order has in it much that is repressive; and wealth--in the sense of
fecundity of powers--is, especially at its beginning, apt to be
disorderly. When a new power springs into being, it is usually chaotic
or rebellious. It has something else to attend to besides bringing
itself into accord with what already exists. There is violence in it,
a lack of sobriety, and only by degrees does it find its place in the
scheme of things. This is most observable in living beings, because it
is chiefly they who acquire new powers. But there are traces of it
even among things. A chemical acid and base meeting, are pretty
careless of everything except the attainment of their own action.
Human beings are born, and for some time remain, clamorous, obliging
the world around to attend more to them than they to it. There is ever
a confusion in exuberant life which bewilders the onlooker, even while
he admits that life had better be.
The deep opposition between these contrasted sides of goodness is
mirrored in the conflicting moral ideals of conservatism and
radicalism, of socialism and individualism, which have never been
absent from the societies of men, nor even, I believe, from those of
animals. Conservatism insists on unity and order; radicalism on
wealthy life, diversified powers, particular independence. Either,
left to itself, would crush society, one by emptying it of initiative,
the other by splitting it into a company of warring atoms. Ordinarily
each is dimly aware of its need of an opponent, yet does not on that
account denounce him the less, or less eagerly struggle to expel him
from provinces asserted to be its own.
By temperament certain classes of the community are naturally disposed
to become champions of the one or the other of these supplemental
ideals. Artists, for the most part, incline to the ideal of abounding
life, exult in each novel manifestation which it can be made to
assume, and scoff at order as Philistinism.
Moralists, on the other hand, lay grievous stress on order, as if it
had any value apart from its promotion of life. Assuming that
sufficient exuberance will come, unfostered by morality, they shut it
out from their charge, make duty to consist in checking instinct, and
devote themselves to pruning the sprouting man. But this is absurdly
to narrow ethics, whose true aim is to trace the laws involved in the
construction of a good person. In such construction the supply of
moral material, and the fostering of a wide diversity of vigorous
powers, is as necessary as bringing these powers into proper working
form. Richness of character is as important as correctness. The
world's benefactors have often been one-sided and faulty men. None of
us can be complete; and we had better not be much disturbed over the
fact, but rather set ourselves to grow strong enough to carry off our
defects.
Because ethics has not always kept its eyes open to this obvious
duality of goodness it has often incurred the contempt of practical
men. The ethical writers of our time have done better. They have come
to see that the goodness of a person or thing consists in its being as
richly diversified as is possible up to the limit of harmonious,
working, and also in being orderly up to the limit of repression of
powers. Beyond either of these limits evil begins. What I have
expressed in my diagram as the fullest organization is intended to lie
within them.
V
It remains to compare the view of goodness here presented with two
others which have met with wide approval. The competence of my own
will be tested by seeing whether it can explain these, or they it.
Goodness is sometimes defined as that which satisfies desire. Things
are not good in themselves, but only as they respond to human wishes.
A certain combination of colors or sounds is good, because I like it.
A republic we Americans consider the best form of government because
we believe that this more completely than any other meets the
legitimate desires of its people. I know a little boy who after
tasting with gusto his morning's oatmeal would turn for sympathy to
each other person at table with the assertive inquiry, "Good? Good?
Good?" He knew no good but enjoyment, and this was so keen that he
expected to find it repeated in each of his friends. It is true we
often call actions good which are not immediately pleasing; for
example, the cutting off of a leg which is crushed past the
possibility of cure. But the leg, if left, will cause still more
distress or even death. In the last analysis the word good will be
found everywhere to refer to some satisfaction of human desire. If we
count afflictions good, it is because we believe that through them
permanent peace may best be reached. And rightly do those name the
Bible the Good Book who think that it more than any other has helped
to alleviate the woes of man.
With this definition I shall not quarrel. So far as it goes, it seems
to me not incorrect. In all good I too find satisfaction of desire.
Only, though true, the definition is in my judgment vague and
inadequate. For we shall still need some standard to test the goodness
of desires. They themselves may be good, and some of them are better
than others. It is good to eat candy, to love a friend, to hate a foe,
to hear the sound of running water, to practice medicine, to gather
wealth, learning, or postage stamps. But though each of these
represents a natural desire, they cannot all be counted equally good.
They must be tried by some standard other than themselves. For desires
are not detachable facts. Each is significant only as a piece of a
life. In connection with that life it must be judged. And when we ask
if any desire is good or bad, we really inquire how far it may play a
part in company with other desires in making up a harmonious
existence. By its organic quality, accordingly, we must ultimately
determine the goodness of whatever we desire. If it is organic, it
certainly will satisfy desire. But we cannot reverse this statement
and assert that whatever satisfies desire will be organically good. My
own mode of statement is, therefore, clearer and more adequate than
the one here examined, because it brings out fully important
considerations which in this are only implied. Whatever contributes to
the solidity and wealth of an organism is, from the point of view of
that organism, good.
VI
A second inadequate definition of goodness is that it is adaptation to
environment. This is a far more important conception than the
preceding; but again, while not untrue, is still, in my judgment,
partial and ambiguous. When its meaning is made clear and exact, it
seems to coincide with my own; for it points out that nothing can be
separately good, but becomes so through fulfillment of relations. Each
thing or person is surrounded by many others. To them it must fit
itself. Being but a part, its goodness is found in serving that whole
with which it is connected. That is a good oar which suits well the
hands of the rower, the row-lock of the boat, and the resisting water.
The white fur of the polar bear, the tawny hide of the lion, the
camel's hump, giraffe's neck, and the light feet of the antelope, are
all alike good because they adapt these creatures to their special
conditions of existence and thus favor their survival. Nor is there a
different standard for moral man. His actions which are accounted good
are called so because they are those through which he is adapted to
his surroundings, fitted for the society of his fellows, and adjusted
with the best chance of survival to his encompassing physical world.
While I have warm approval for much that appears in such a doctrine, I
think those who accept it may easily overlook certain important
elements of goodness. At best it is a description of extrinsic
goodness, for it separates the object from its environment and makes
the response of the former to an external call the measure of its
worth. Of that inner worth, or intrinsic goodness, where fullness and
adjustment of relations go on within and not without, it says nothing.
Yet I have shown how impossible it is to conceive one of these kinds
of goodness without the other.
But a graver objection still--or rather the same objection pressed
more closely--is this. The present definition naturally brings up the
picture of certain constant and stable surroundings enclosing an
environed object which is to be changed at their demand. No such state
of things exists. There is no fixed environment. It is always fixable.
Every environment is plastic and derives its character, at least
partially, from the environed object. Each stone sends out its little
gravitative and chemical influence upon surrounding stones, and they
are different through being in its neighborhood. The two become
mutually affected, and it is no more suitable to say that the object
must adapt itself to its environment than that the environment must be
adapted to its object.
Indeed, in persons this second form of statement is the more
important; for the forcing of circumstances into accordance with human
needs may be said to be the chief business of human life. The man who
adapts himself to his ignorant, licentious, or malarial surroundings,
is not a type of the good man. Of course disregard of environment is
not good either. Circumstances have their honorable powers, and these
require to be studied, respected, and employed. Sometimes they are so
strong as to leave a person no other course than to adapt himself to
them. He cannot adapt them to himself. Plato has a good story of how a
native of the little village of Seriphus tried to explain Themistocles
by means of environment. "You would not," he said to the great man,
"have been eminent if you had been born in Seriphus." "Probably not,"
answered Themistocles, "nor you, if you had been born in Athens."
The definition we are discussing, then, is not true--indeed it is
hardly intelligible--if we take it in the one-sided way in which it is
usually announced. The demand for adaptation does not proceed
exclusively from environment, surroundings, circumstance. The stone,
the tree, the man, conforms these to itself as truly as it is
conformed to them. There is mutual adaptation. Undoubtedly this is
implied in the definition, and the petty employment of it which I have
been attacking would be rejected also by its wiser defenders. But when
its meaning is thus filled out, its vagueness rendered clear, and the
mutual influence which is implied becomes clearly announced, the
definition turns into the one which I have offered. Goodness is the
expression of the largest organization. Its aim is everywhere to bring
object and environment into fullest cooperation. We have seen how in
any organic relationship every part is both means and end. Goodness
tends toward organism; and so far as it obtains, each member of the
universe receives its own appropriate expansion and dignity. The
present definition merely states the great truth of organization with
too objective an emphasis; as that which found the satisfaction of
desire to be the ground of goodness over-emphasized the subjective
side. The one is too legal, the other too aesthetic. Yet each calls
attention to an important and supplementary factor in the formation of
goodness.
VII
In closing these dull defining chapters, in which I have tried to sum
up the notion of goodness in general--a conception so thin and empty
that it is equally applicable to things and persons--it may be well to
gather together in a single group the several definitions we have
reached.
Intrinsic goodness expresses the fulfillment of function in the
construction of an organism.
By an organism is meant such an assemblage of active and differing
parts that in it each part both aids and is aided by all the others.
Extrinsic goodness is found when an object employs an already
constituted wholeness to further the wholeness of others.
A part is good when it furnishes that and that only which may add
value to other parts.
A greater good is one more largely contributory to the organism as its
end.
A higher good is one more fully expressive of that end.
Probably, too, it will be found convenient to set down here a couple
of other definitions which will hereafter be explained and employed. A
good act is the expression of selfhood as service. By an ideal we mean
a mental picture of a better state of existence than we feel has
actually been reached.
REFERENCES ON MISCONCEPTIONS OF GOODNESS
Alexander's Moral Order and Progress, bk. iii. ch. i. Section 10.
Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii. bk. i. ch. i. Section 2.
Mackenzie's Manual of Ethics, ch. v. Section 13 & ch. vii. Section 2.
Janet's Theory of Morals, ch. iii.
Dewey's Outlines of Ethics, Section lxvii.
Spencer's Principles of Ethics, pt. i. ch. 3.
III
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
I
In the preceding chapters I have examined only those features of
goodness which are common alike to persons and to things. Goodness was
there seen to be the expression of function in the construction of an
organism. That is, when we ask if any being, object, or quality is
good, we are really inquiring how organic it is, how much it
contributes of riches or solidity to some whole or other. There must,
then, be as many varieties of goodness as there are modes of
constructing organisms. A special set of functions will produce one
kind of organism, a different set another; and each of these will
express a peculiar variety of goodness. If, then, into the
construction of a person conditions enter which are not found in the
making of things, these conditions will render personal goodness to
some extent unlike the goodness of everything else.
Now I suppose that in the contacts of life we all feel a marked
difference between persons and things. We know a person when we see
him, and are quite sure he is not a thing. Yet if we were called on to
say precisely what it is we know, and how we know it, we should find
ourselves in some difficulty. No doubt we usually recognize a human
being by his form and motions, but we assume that certain inner traits
regularly attend these outward matters, and that in these traits the
real ground of difference between person and thing is to be found. How
many such distinguishing differences exist? Obviously a multitude; but
these are, I believe, merely various manifestations of a few
fundamental characteristics. Probably all can be reduced to four,--
they are self-consciousness, self-direction, self-development, and
self-sacrifice. Wherever these four traits are found, we feel at once
that the being who has them is a person. Whatever creature lacks them
is but a thing, and requires no personal attention. I might say more.
These four are so likely to go together that the appearance of one
gives confidence of the rest. If, for example, we discover a being
sacrificing itself for another, even though we have not previously
thought of it as a person, it will so stir sympathy that we shall see
in it a likeness to our own kind. Or, finding a creature capable of
steering itself, of deciding what its ends shall be, and adjusting its
many powers to reach them, we cannot help feeling that there is much
in such a being like ourselves, and we are consequently indisposed to
refer its movements to mechanic adjustment.
If, then, these are the four conditions of personality, the
distinctive functions by which it becomes organically good, they will
evidently need to be examined somewhat minutely before we can rightly
comprehend the nature of personal goodness, and detect its separation
from goodness in general. Such an examination will occupy this and the
three succeeding chapters. But I shall devote myself exclusively to
such features of the four functions as connect them with ethics. Many
interesting metaphysical and psychological questions connected with
them I pass by.
II
There is no need of elaborating the assertion that a person is a
conscious being. To this all will at once agree. More important is it
to inspect the stages through which we rise to consciousness, for
these are often overlooked. People imagine that they are self-
conscious through and through, and that they always have been. They
assume that the entire life of a person is the expression of
consciousness alone. But this is erroneous. To a large degree we are
allied with things. While self-consciousness is our distinctive
prerogative, it is far from being our only possession. Rather we might
say that all which belongs to the under world is ours too, while self-
consciousness appears in us as a kind of surplusage. No doubt it is by
the distinctive traits, those which are not shared with other
creatures, that we define our special character; but these are not our
sole endowment. Our life is grounded in unconsciousness, and with
this, as students of personal goodness, we must first make
acquaintance.
Yet how can we become acquainted with it? How grow conscious of the
unconscious? We can but mark it in a negative way and call it the
absence of consciousness. That is all. We cannot be directly aware of
ourselves as unconscious. Indeed, we cannot be quite sure that the
physical things about us, even organic objects, are unconscious. If
somebody should declare that the covers of this book are conscious,
and respond to everything wise or foolish which the writer puts
between them, there would be no way of confuting him. All I could say
would be, "I see no signs of it." My readers occasionally give a
response and show that they do or do not agree with what I say. But
the volume itself lies in stolid passivity, offering no resistance to
whatever I record in it. Since, then, there is no evidence in behalf
of consciousness, I do not unwarrantably assume its presence. I save
my belief for objects where it is indicated, and indicate its absence
elsewhere by calling such objects unconscious.
But if in human beings consciousness appears, what are its marks, and
how is it known? Ought we not to define it at starting? I believe it
cannot be defined. Definition is taking an idea to pieces. But there
are no pieces in the idea of consciousness. It is elementary,
something in which all other pieces begin. That is, in attempting to
define consciousness, I must in every definition employed really
assume that my hearer is acquainted with it already. I cannot then
define it without covert reference to experience. I might vary the
term and call it awaredness, internal observation, psychic response. I
might say it is that which accompanies all experience and makes it to
be experience. But these are not definitions. A simple way to fix
attention on it is to say that it is what we feel less and less as we
sink into a swoon. What this is, I cannot more precisely state. But in
swoon or sleep we are all familiar with its diminution or increase,
and we recognize in it the very color of our being. After my friend's
remark I am in a different state from that in which I was before.
Something has affected me which may abide. This is not the case with a
stone post, or at least there are no signs of it there. The post,
then, is unconscious. We call ourselves conscious.
In unconsciousness our lives began, and from it they have not
altogether emerged. Yet unconsciousness is a matter of degree. We may
be very much aware, aware but slightly, vanishingly, not at all. Even
though we never existed unconsciously, we may fairly assume such a
blank terminus in order the better to figure the present condition of
our minds. They show sinking degrees moving off in that direction;
when we think out the series, we come logically to a point where there
is no consciousness at all.
Such a point analogy also inclines us to concede. In our body we come
upon unconscious sections. This body seems to have some connection
with myself; yet of its large results only, and not of its minuter
operations, can I be distinctly aware. In like manner it is held that
within the mind processes cumulate and rise to a certain height before
they cross the threshold of consciousness. Below that threshold,
though actual processes, they are unknown to us. The teaching of
modern psychology is that all mental action is at the start
unconscious, requiring a certain bulk of stimulus in order to emerge
into conditions where we become aware of it. The cumulated result we
know; the minute factors which must be gathered together to form that
result, we do not know. I do not pronounce judgment on this
psychological question. I state the belief merely in order to show how
probable it is that our conscious life is superposed upon unconscious
conditions.
In conduct itself I believe every one will acknowledge that his
moments of consciousness are like vivid peaks, while the great mass of
his acts--even those with which he is most familiar--occur
unconsciously. When we read a word on the printed page, how much of it
do we consciously observe? Modern teachers of reading often declare
that detailed consciousness is here unnecessary or even injurious.
Better, they say, take the word, not the letter, as the unit of
consciousness. But taking merely the letter, how minutely are we
conscious of its curvatures? Somewhere consciousness must stop,
resting on the support of unconscious experiences. Matthew Arnold has
declared conduct to be three fourths of life. If we mean by conduct
consciously directed action, it is not one fourth. Yet however
fragmentary, it is that which renders all the rest significant.
III
Just above our unconscious mental modifications appear the reflex
actions, or instincts. Here experience is translated into action
before it reaches consciousness; that is, though the actions
accomplish intelligent ends, there is no previous knowledge of the
ends to be accomplished. A flash of light falls on my eye, and the lid
closes. It seems a wise act. The brilliant light is too fierce. It
might damage the delicate organ. Prudently, therefore, I draw the
small curtain until the light has gone, then raise it and resume
communication with the outer world. My action seems planned for
protection. In reality there was no plan. Probably enough I did not
perceive the flash; the lid, at any rate, would close equally well if
I did not. In falling from a height I do not decide to sacrifice my
arms rather than my body, and accordingly stretch them out. They
stretch themselves, without intention on my part. How anything so
blind yet so sagacious can occur will become clearer if we take an
illustration from a widely different field.
To-day we are all a good deal dependent on the telephone; though, not
being a patient man, I can seldom bring myself to use it. It has one
irritating feature, the central office, or perhaps I might more
accurately say, the central office girl. Whenever I try to communicate
with my friend, I must first call up the central office, as it is
briefly called and longly executed. Not until attention there has been
with difficulty obtained can I come into connection with my friend;
for through a human consciousness at that mediating point every
message must pass. In that central office are accordingly three
necessary things; viz., an incoming wire, a consciousness, and an
outgoing wire; and I am helpless till all these three have been
brought into cooperation. Really I have often thought life too short
for the performance of such tasks. And apparently our Creator thought
so at the beginning, when in contriving machinery for us he dispensed
with the hindering factor of a central office operator. For applied to
our previous example of a flash of light, the incoming message
corresponds to the sensuous report of the flash, the outgoing message
to the closure of the eye, and the unfortunate central office girl has
disappeared. The afferent nerve reports directly to the efferent,
without passing the message through consciousness. A fortune awaits
him who will contrive a similar improvement for the telephone. A
special sound sent into the switch-box must automatically, and without
human intervention, oblige an indicated wire to take up the uttered
words. The continuous arc thus established, without employment of the
at present necessary girl, will exactly represent the exquisite
machinery of reflex action which each of us bears about in his own
brain. Here, as in our improved telephone, the announcement itself
establishes the connections needful for farther transmission, without
employing the judgment of any operating official.
By such means power is economized and action becomes extremely swift
and sure. Promptness, too, being of the utmost importance for
protective purposes, creatures which are rich in such instincts have a
large practical advantage over those who lack them. It is often
assumed that brutes alone are instinctive, and that man must
deliberate over each occasion. But this is far from the fact. Probably
at birth man has as many instincts as any other animal. And though as
consciousness awakes and takes control, some of these become
unnecessary and fall away, new ones--as will hereafter be shown--are
continually established, and by them the heavy work of life is for the
most part performed. Personal goodness cannot be rightly understood
till we perceive how it is superposed on a broad reflex mechanism.
IV
But higher in the personal life than unconsciousness, higher than the
reflex instincts, are the conscious experiences. By these, we for the
first time became aware of what is going on within us and without.
Messages sent from the outer world are stopped at a central office
established in consciousness, looked over, and deciphered. We judge
whether they require to be sent in one direction or another, or
whether we may not rest in their simple cognizance. Every moment we
receive a multitude of such messages. They are not always called for,
but they come of themselves. My hand carelessly falling on the table
reports in terms of touch. A person near me laughs, and I must hear. I
see the flowers on the table; smell reports them too; while taste
declares their leaves to be bitter and pungent. All this time the
inner organs, with the processes of breathing, blood circulation, and
nervous action, are announcing their acute or massive experiences.
Continually, and not by our own choice, our minds are affected by the
transactions around. Sensations occur--
"The eye, it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will."
These itemized experiences thus pouring in upon our passive selves are
found to vary endlessly also in degree, time, and locality. Through
such variations indeed they become itemized. "Therefore is space and
therefore time," says Emerson, "that men may know that things are not
huddled and lumped, but sundered and divisible."
V
Have we not, then, here reached the highest point of personal life,
self-consciousness? No, that is a peak higher still, for this is but
consciousness. Undoubtedly from consciousness self-consciousness
grows, often appearing by degrees and being extremely difficult to
discriminate. Yet the two are not the same. Possibly in marking the
contrast between them I may be able to gain the collateral advantage
of ridding myself of those disturbers of ethical discussion, the
brutes. Whenever I am nearing an explanation of some moral intricacy
one of my students is sure to come forward with a dog and to ask
whether what I have said shows that dog to be a moral and responsible
being. So I like to watch afar and banish the brutes betimes. Perhaps
if I bestow a little attention on them at present, I may keep the
creatures out of my pages for the future.
Many writers maintain that brutes differ from us precisely in this
particular, that while they possess consciousness they have not self-
consciousness. A brute, they say, has just such experiences as I have
been describing: he tastes, smells, hears, sees, touches. All this he
may do with greater intensity and precision than we. But he is
entirely wrapped up in these separate sensations. The single
experience holds his attention. He knows no other self than that; or,
strictly speaking, he knows no self at all. It is the experience he
knows, and not himself the experiencer. We say, "The cat feels herself
warm;" but is it quite so? Does she feel herself, or does she feel
warm? Which? If we may trust the writers to whom I have referred, we
ought rather to say, "The cat feels warm" than that "she feels herself
warm;" for this latter statement implies a distinction of which she is
in no way aware. She does not set off her passing moods in contrast to
a self who might be warm or cold, active or idle, hungry or satiated.
The experience of the instant occupies her so entirely that in reality
the cat ceases to be a cat and becomes for the moment just warm. So it
is in all her seeming activities. When she chases a mouse we rightly
say, "She _is_ chasing a mouse," for then she is nothing else. Such a
state of things is at least conceivable. We can imagine momentary
experiences to be so engrossing that the animal is exclusively
occupied with them, unable to note connections with past and future,
or even with herself, their perceiver. Through very fullness of
Consciousness brutes may be lacking in self-consciousness.
Whether this is the case with the brutes or not, something quite
different occurs in us. No particular experience can satisfy us; we
accordingly say, not "I am an experience," but "I have an experience."
To be able to throw off the bondage of the moment is the distinctive
characteristic of a person. When Shelley watches the skylark, he
envies him his power of whole-heartedly seizing a momentary joy. Then
turning to himself, and feeling that his own condition, if broader, is
on that very account more liable to sorrow, he cries,--
"We look before and after,
And pine for what is not."
That is the mark of man. He looks before and after. The outlook of the
brute, if the questionable account which I have given of him is
correct, is different. He looks to the present exclusively. The
momentary experience takes all his attention. If it does not, he too
in his little degree is a person. Could we determine this simple point
in the brute's psychology, he would at once become available for
ethical material. At present we cannot use him for such purposes, nor
say whether he is selfish or self-sacrificing, possessed of moral
standards and accountable, or driven by subtle yet automatic reflexes.
The obvious facts of him may be interpreted plausibly in either way,
and he cannot speak. Till he can give us a clearer account of this
central fact of his being, we shall not know whether he is a poor
relation of ours or is rather akin to rocks, and clouds, and trees. I
incline to the former guess, and am ready to believe that between him
and us there is only a difference of degree. But since in any case he
stands at an extreme distance from ourselves, we may for purposes of
explanation assume that distance to be absolute, and talk of him as
having no share in the prerogative announced by Shelley. So regarded,
we shall say of him that he does not compare or adjust. He does not
organize experiences and know a single self running through them all.
Whenever an experience takes him, it swallows his self--a self, it is
true, which he never had.
It is sometimes assumed that Shelley was the first to announce this
weighty distinction. Philosophers of course were familiar with it long
ago, but the poets too had noticed it before the skylark told Shelley.
Burns says to the mouse:--
"Still thou art blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But, ooh! I backward cast my e'e
On prospects drear!
An' forward tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear."
This looking backward and forward which is the ground of man's
grandeur, is also, Burns thinks, the ground of his misery; for in it
is rooted his self-consciousness, something widely unlike the itemized
consciousness of the brute. Shakespeare, too, found in us the same
distinctive trait. Hamlet reflects how God has made us "with such
discourse, looking before and after." We possess discourse, can move
about intellectually, and are not shut up to the moment. But ages
before Shakespeare the fact had been observed. Homer knew all about
it, and in the last book of the Odyssey extols Halitherses, the son of
Mastor, as one "able to look before and after." [Greek text omitted.]
This is the mark of the wise man, not merely marking off person from
brute, but person from person according to the degree of personality
attained. It is characteristic of the child to show little foresight,
little hindsight. He takes the present as it comes, and lives in it.
We who are more mature and rational contemplate him with the same envy
we feel for the skylark and the mouse, and often say, "Would I too
could so suck the joys of the present, without reflecting that
something else is coming and something else is gone."
VI
Yet after becoming possessed of self-consciousness, we do not steadily
retain it. States of mind occur where the self slips out, though vivid
consciousness remains. As I sit in my chair and fix my eye on the
distance, a daydream or reverie comes over me. I see a picture,
another, another. Somebody speaks and I am recalled. "Why, here I am!
This is I." I find myself once more. I had lost myself--paradoxical
yet accurate expression. We have many such to indicate the
disappearance of self-consciousness at moments of elation. "I was
absorbed in thought," we say; the I was sucked out by strenuous
attention elsewhere. "I was swept away with grief," i.e., I vanished,
while grief held sway. "I was transported with delight," "I was
overwhelmed with shame," and--perhaps most beautiful of all these
fragments of poetic psychology,--"I was beside myself with terror," I
felt myself, to be near, but was still parted; through the fear I
could merely catch glimpses of the one who was terrified.
These and similar phrases suggest the instability of self-
consciousness. It is not fixed, once and forever, but varies
continually and within a wide range of degree. We like to think that
man possesses full self-consciousness, while other creatures have
none. Our minds are disposed to part off things with sharpness, but
nature cares less about sharp divisions and seems on the whole to
prefer subtle gradations and unstable varieties. So the self has all
degrees of vividness. Of it we never have an experience barely. It is
always in some condition, colored by what it is mixed with. I know
myself speaking or angry or hearing; I know myself, that is, in some
special mood. But never am I able to sunder this self from the special
mass of consciousness in which it is immersed and to gaze upon it pure
and simple. At times that mass of consciousness is so engrossing that
hardly a trace of the self remains. At times the sense of being shut
up to one's self is positively oppressive. Between the two extremes
there is endless variation. When we call self-consciousness the
prerogative of man we do not mean that he fully possesses it, but only
that he may possess it, may possess it more and more; and that in it,
rather than in the merely conscious life, the significance of his
being is found.
VII
Probably we are born without it. We know how gradually the infant
acquires a mastery of its sensuous experience; and it is likely that
for a long time after it has obtained command of its single
experiences it remains unaware of its selfhood. In a classic passage
of "In Memoriam" Tennyson has stated the case with that blending of
witchery and scientific precision of which he alone among the poets
seems capable:--
"The baby, new to earth and sky,
What time his tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that 'this is I.'
"But as he grows he gathers much,
And learns the use of 'I' and 'me,'
And finds 'I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch.'
"So rounds he to a separate mind,
From whence clear memory may begin,
As thro' the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined."
Until he has separated his mind from the objects around, and even from
his own conscious states, he cannot perceive himself and obtain clear
memory. No child recalls his first year, for the simple reason that
during that year he was not there. Of course there was experience
during that year, there was consciousness; but the child could not
discriminate himself from the crowding experiences and so reach self-
consciousness. At what precise time this momentous possibility occurs
cannot be told. Probably the time varies widely in different children.
In any single child it announces itself by degrees, and usually so
subtly that its early manifestations are hardly perceptible.
Occasionally, especially when long deferred, it breaks with the
suddenness of an epoch, and the child is aware of a new existence. A
little girl of my acquaintance turned from play to her mother with the
cry, "Why, mamma, little girls don't know that they are." She had just
discovered it. In a famous passage of his autobiography, Jean Paul
Richter has recorded the great change in himself: "Never shall I
forget the inward experience of the birth of self-consciousness. I
well remember the time and place. I stood one afternoon, a very young
child, at the house-door, and looked at the logs of wood piled on the
left. Suddenly an inward consciousness, 'I am a Me,' came like a flash
of lightning from heaven, and has remained ever since. At that moment
my existence became conscious of itself, and forever."
The knowledge that I am an I cannot be conveyed to me by another human
being, nor can I perceive anything similar in him. Each must ascertain
it for himself. Accordingly there is only one word in every language
which is absolutely unique, bearing a different meaning for every one
who employs it. That is the word I. For me to use it in the sense that
you do would prove that I had lost my wits. Whatever enters into my
usage is out of it in yours. Obviously, then, the meaning of this word
cannot be taught. Everything else may be. What the table is, what is a
triangle, what virtue, heaven, or a spherodactyl, you can teach me.
What I am, you cannot; for no one has ever had an experience
corresponding to this except myself. People in speaking to me call me
John, Baby, or Ned, an externally descriptive name which has
substantially a common meaning for all who see me. When I begin to
talk I repeat this name imitatively, and thinking of myself as others
do. I speak of myself in the third person. Yet how early that
reference to a third person begins to be saturated with self-
consciousness, who can say? Before the word "I" is employed, "Johnny"
or "Baby" may have been diverted into an egoistic significance. All we
can say is that "I" cannot be rightly employed until consciousness has
risen to self-consciousness.
VIII
And when it has so risen, its unity and coherence are by no means
secure. I have already pointed out how often it is lost in moments
when the conscious element becomes particularly intense. But in morbid
conditions too it sometimes undergoes a disruption still more
peculiar. Just as disintegration may attack any other organic unit, so
may it appear in the personal life. The records of hypnotism and other
related phenomena show cases where self-consciousness appears to be
distributed among several selves. These curious experiences have
received more attention in recent years than ever before. They do not,
however, belong to my field, and to consider them at any length would
only divert attention from my proper topic. But they deserve mention
in passing in order to make plain how wayward is self-consciousness,--
how far from an assured possession of its unity.
This unity seems temporarily suspended on occasion of swoon or nervous
shock. An interesting case of its loss occurred in my own experience.
Many years ago I was fond of horseback riding; and having a horse that
was unusually easy in the saddle, I persisted in riding him long after
my groom had warned me of danger. He had grown weak in the knees and
was inclined to stumble. Riding one evening, I came to a little
bridge. I remember watching the rays of the sunset as I approached it.
Something too of my college work was in my mind, associated with the
evening colors. And then--well, there was no "then." The next I knew a
voice was calling, "Is that you?" And I was surprised to find that it
was. I was entering my own gateway, leading my horse. I answered
blindly, "Something has happened. I must have been riding. Perhaps I
have fallen." I put my hand to my face and found it bloody. I led my
horse to his post, entered the house, and relapsed again into
unconsciousness. When I came to myself, and was questioned about my
last remembrance, I recalled the little bridge. We went to it the next
day. There lay my riding whip. There in the sand were the marks of a
body which had been dragged. Plainly it was there that the accident
had occurred, yet it was three quarters of a mile from my house. When
thrown, I had struck on my forehead, making an ugly hole in it. Two or
three gashes were on other parts of the head. But I had apparently
still held the rein, had risen with the horse, had walked by his side
till I came to four corners in the road, had there taken the proper
turn, passed three houses, and entering my own gate then for the first
time became aware of what was happening.
What had been happening? About twenty minutes would be required to
perform this elaborate series of actions, and they had been performed
exactly as if I had been guiding them, while in reality I knew nothing
about them. Shall we call my conduct unconscious cerebration? Yes, if
we like large words which cover ignorance. I do not see how we can
certainly say what was going on. Perhaps during all this time I had
neither consciousness nor self-consciousness. I may have been a mere
automaton, under the control of a series of reflex actions. The
feeling of the reins in my hands may have set me erect. The feeling of
the ground beneath my feet may have projected these along their way;
and all this with no more consciousness than the falling man has in
stretching out his hands. Or, on the contrary, I may have been
separately conscious in each little instant; but in the shaken
condition of the brain may not have had power to spare for gluing
together these instants and knitting them into a whole. It may be it
was only memory which failed. I cite the case to show the precarious
character of self-consciousness. It appears and disappears. Our life
is glorified by its presence, and from it obtains its whole
significance. Whatever we are convinced possesses it we certainly
declare to be a person. Yet it is a gradual acquisition, and must be
counted rather a goal than a possession. Under it, as the height of
our being, are ranged the three other stages,--consciousness, reflex
action, and unconsciousness.
REFERENCES ON SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
James's Psychology, ch. x.
Royce's Studies of Good and Evil, ch. vi.-ix.
Ferrier's Philosophy of Consciousness, in his Philosophical Remains.
Calkins's Introduction to Psychology, bk. ii.
Wundt's Human and Animal Psychology, lect. xxvii.
IV
SELF-DIRECTION
I
In the last chapter I began to discuss the nature of goodness
distinctively personal. This has its origin in the differing
constitutions of persons and things. Into the making of a person four
characteristics enter which are not needed in the formation of a
thing. The most fundamental of these I examined. Persons and things
are unlike in this, that each force which stirs within a self-
conscious person is correlated with all his other forces. So great and
central is this correlation that a person can say, "I have an
experience," not--as, possibly, the brutes--"I am an experience." Yet
although a person tends thus to be an organic whole, he did not begin
his existence in conscious unity. Probably the early stages of our
life are to be sought rather in the regions of unconsciousness. Rising
out of unconscious conditions into reflex actions--those ingenious
provisions for our security at times when we have no directing powers
of our own--we gradually pass into conditions of consciousness, where
we are able to seize the single experience and to be absorbed in it.
Out of this emerges by degrees an apprehension of ourselves contrasted
with our experiences. Even, however, when this self-consciousness is
once established, it may on vivacious or morbid occasions be
overthrown. It by no means attends all the events of our lives. Yet it
marks all conduct that can be called good. Goodness which is
distinctively personal must in some way express the formation and
maintenance of a self-conscious life.
But more is needed. A person fashioned in the way described would be
aware of himself, aware of his mental changes, perhaps aware of an
objective order of things producing these changes, and still might
have no real share himself in what was going on. We can at least
imagine a being merely contemplative. He sits as a spectator at his
own drama. Trains of associated ideas pass before his interested gaze;
a multitude of transactions occur in his contemplated surroundings;
but he is powerless to intervene. He passively beholds, and does
nothing. If such a state of things can be imagined, and if something
like it occasionally occurs in our experience, it does not represent
our normal condition. Our life is no mere affair of vision. Self-
consciousness counts as a factor. Through it changes arise both
without and within. I accordingly entitle this fourth chapter Self-
direction. In it I propose to consider how our life goes forth in
action; for in fact wherever self-consciousness appears, there is
developed also a centre of activity, and an activity of an altogether
peculiar kind.
It is well known that in interpreting these facts of action the
judgment of ethical writers is divided. Libertarians and determinists
are here at issue. Into their controversy I do not desire to enter. I
mean to attempt a brief summary of those facts relating to human
action which are tolerably well agreed upon by writers of both
schools. In these there are intricacies enough. To raise the hand, to
wave it in the air, to lay it on the table again, would ordinarily be
reckoned simple matters. Yet operations so simple as these I shall
show pass through half a dozen steps, though they are ordinarily
performed so swiftly that we do not notice their several parts. In
life much is knitted together which cannot be understood without
dissection. In such dissection I must now engage. As a good pedagogue
I must discuss operations separately which in reality get all their
meaning through being found together. Against the necessary
distortions of such a method the reader must be on his guard.
II
In the total process of self-direction there are evidently two main
divisions,--a mental purpose must be formed, and then this purpose
must be sent forth into the outer world. It is there accepted by those
agencies of a physical sort which wait to do our bidding. The
formation of the mental purpose I will, for the sake of brevity, call
the intention, and to the sending of it forth I will give the name
volition. That these terms are not always confined within these limits
is plain. But I shall not force their meaning unduly by employing them
so, and I need a pair of terms to mark the great contrasted sides of
self-direction. The intention (A) shall designate the subjective side.
But those objective adjustments which fit it to emerge and seek in an
outer world its full expression I shall call the volition (B).
For the present, then, regarding entirely the former, let us see how
an intention arises,--how self-consciousness sets to work in stirring
up activity. To gain clearness I shall distinguish three subordinate
stages, designating them by special names and numerals.
III
At the start we are guided by an end or ideal of what we would bring
about. To a being destitute of self-consciousness only a single sort
of action is at any moment possible. When a certain force falls upon
it, it meets with a fixed response. Or, if the causative forces are
many, what happens is but the well-established resultant of these
forces operating upon a being as definite in nature as they. Such a
being contemplates no future to be reached through motions set up
within it. Its motions do not occur for the sake of realizing in
coming time powers as yet but half-existent. It is not guided by
ideals. Its actions set forth merely what it steadily is, not what it
might be. Something like the opposite of all this shapes personal
acts. A person has imagination. He contemplates future events as
possible before they occur, and this contemplation is one of the very
factors which bring them about. For example: while writing here, I can
emancipate my thought from this present act and set myself to
imagining my situation an hour hence. At that time I perceive I may be
still at my writing-desk, I may be walking the streets, I may be at
the theatre, or calling on my friend. A dozen, a hundred, future
possibilities are depicted as open to me. On one or another of these I
fix my attention, thereby giving it a causal force over other present
ideas, and rendering its future realization likely.
So enormously important is imagination. By it we effect our
emancipation from the present. Without this power to summon pictures
of situations which at present are not, we should be exactly like the
things or brutes already described. For in the thing a determined
sequence follows every impulse. There is no ambiguous future
disclosed, no variety of possibilities, no alternatives. Present
things under definite causes have but a single issue; and if the
account given of the brute is correct, his condition is unlike that of
things only in this respect, that in him curious automatic springs are
provided which set him in appropriate motion whenever he is exposed to
harm, so enabling him suitably to face a future of which, however, he
forms no image. In both brutes and things there is entire limitation
to the present. This is not the case with a person. He takes the
future into his reckoning, and over him it is at least as influential
as the past. A person, through imagination laying hold of future
possibilities, has innumerable auxiliary forces at his command. Choice
appears. A depicted future thus held by attention for causal purposes
is no longer a mere idea; it becomes an ideal.
But in order to transform the depicted future from an idea to an
ideal, I must conceive it as rooted in my nature, and in some degree
dependent on my power. Attracted by the brilliancy of the crescent
moon, I think what sport it would be to hang on one of its horns and
kick my heels in the air. But no, that remains a mere picture. It will
not become an ideal, for it has no relation to my structure and
powers. But there are other imaginable futures,--going to Europe,
becoming a physician, writing a book, buying a house, which, though
not fully compatible with one another, still represent, each one of
them, some capacity of mine. Attention to one or the other of these
will make it a reality in my life. They are competing ideals, and
because of such competition my future is uncertain. The ambiguous
future is accordingly a central characteristic of a person. He can
imagine all sorts of states of himself which as yet have no existence,
and one of these selected as an ideal may become efficient. This first
stage, then, in the formation of the purpose, where various depicted
future possibilities are summoned for assessment, may be called our
fashioning of an ideal.
IV
But a second stage succeeds, the stage of desire. Indeed, though I
call it a second, it is really but a special aspect of the first; for
the ideal which I form always represents some improvement in myself.
An ideal which did not promise to better me in some way would be no
ideal at all. It would be quite inoperative. I never rise from my
chair except with the hope of being better off. Without this, I should
sit forever. But I feel uneasiness in my present position, and
conceive the possibility of not being constrained; or I think of some
needful work which remains unexecuted as long as I sit here, and that
work undone I perceive will leave my life less satisfactory than it
might be. And this imagined betterment must always be in some sense my
own. If it is a picture of the gains of some one else quite
unconnected with myself, it will not start my action.
But it will be objected that we do often act unselfishly and in behalf
of other persons. Indeed we do. Perhaps our impulses are more largely
derived from others than from ourselves, yet from desire our own share
is never quite eliminated. I give to the poor. But it is because I
hate poverty; or because I am attracted by the face, the story, or the
supposed character of him who receives; or because I am unable to
separate my interests from those of humanity everywhere. In some
subtle form the I-element enters. Leave it out, and the action would
lose its value and become mechanical. What I did would be no
expression of self-conscious me. And such undoubtedly is the case with
much of our conduct. The reflex actions, described in the last
chapter, and many of our habits too, contain no precise reference to
our self. Intelligent, purposeful, moral conduct, however, is
everywhere shaped by the hope of improving the condition of him who
acts. We do not act till we find something within or about us
unsatisfactory. If contemplating myself in my actual conditions I
could pronounce them all good, creation would for me be at an end. To
start it, some sense of need is required. Accordingly I have named
desire as the second state in the formation of a purpose, for desire
is precisely this sense of disparity between our actual self and that
possible bettered self depicted in the ideal.
Popular speech, however, does not here state the matter quite fully.
We often talk as if our desires were for other things than ourselves.
We say, for example, "I want a glass of water." In reality it is not
the water I want. That is but a fragment of my desire. It is water
plus self. Only so is the desire fully uttered. Beholding my present
self, my thirsty and defective self, I perceive a side of myself
requiring to be bettered. Accordingly, among imagined pictures of
possible futures I identify myself with that one which represents me
supplied with water. But it is not water that is the object of my
desire, it is myself as bettered by water. Since, however, this
betterment of self is a constant factor of all desire, we do not
ordinarily name it. We say, "I desire wealth, I desire the success of
my friend, or the freedom of my country," omitting the important and
never absent portion of the desire, the betterment of self.
Of course a stage in the formation of the purpose so important as
desire receives a multitude of names. Perhaps the simplest is
appetite. In appetite I do not know what I want. I am blindly impelled
in a certain direction. I do not perceive that I have a suffering
self, nor know that this particular suffering would be bettered by
that particular supply. Appetite is a mere instinct. In the mechanic
structure of my being it is planned that without comprehension of the
want I shall be impelled to the source of supply. But when appetite is
permeated with a consciousness of what is lacking, I apprehend it as a
need. Through needs we become persons. The capacity for
dissatisfaction is the sublime thing in man. We can know our poor
estate. We can say, That which I am I would not be. Passing the blind
point of appetite, we come into the region of want or need; if we then
can discern what is requisite to supply this need, we may be said to
have a desire. That desire, if specific and urgent, we call a wish.
All these varieties of desire include the same two factors: on the one
hand a recognition of present defect in ourselves, on the other
imagination of possible bettered conditions. Diminish either, and
personal power is narrowed. The richer a man's imagination, and the
more abundant his pictures of possible futures, the more resourceful
he becomes. Pondering on desire as rooted in the sense of defect, we
may feel less regret that our age is one not easily satisfied. Never
were there so many discontents, because there were never so many
aspirations. It is true there may be a devilish discontent or a divine
one. There is a discontent without definite aims, one which merely
rejects what is now possessed; and there is one which seeks what is
wisely attainable. Yet after all, it is a small price to pay for
aspiration that it is often attended by vagueness and unwisdom.
V
But before the formation of the purpose is complete it must pass
through a third stage, the stage of decision. Ideals and desires are
not enough, or rather they are too many; for there may be a multitude
of them. Certain ideals are desired for supplying certain of my wants,
others for supplying others. But on examination these many desirable
ideals will often prove conflicting; all cannot be attained, or at
least not all at once. Among them I must pick and choose, reducing and
ordering their number. This process is decision. Starting with my
ambiguous future, imagination brings multifold possibilities of good
before me. But before these can be allowed to issue miscellaneously
into action, comparison and selection reduce them to a single best. I
accordingly assess the many desirable but competing ideals and see
which of them will on the whole most harmoniously supplement my
imperfections. On that I fasten, and the intention is complete.
All this is obvious. But one part of the process, and perhaps the most
important part, is apt to receive less attention than it deserves. In
decision we easily become engrossed with the single selected ideal,
and do not so fully perceive that our choice implies a rejection of
all else. Yet this it is--this cutting off--which rightly gives a name
to the whole operation. The best is arrived at only by a process of
exclusion in which we successively cut off such ideals as do not tend
to the largest supply of our contemplated defects. Walking by the
candy-shop, and seeing the tempting chocolates, I feel a strong desire
for them. My mouth waters. I hurry into the shop and deposit my five-
cent piece. In the evening I find that by spending five cents for the
chocolates I am cut off from obtaining my newspaper, a loss
unconsidered at the time. But to decide for anything is to decide
against a multitude of other things. Taking is still more largely
leaving. The full extent of this negative decision often escapes our
notice, and through the very fact of choosing a good we blindly
neglect a best.
VI
Here, then, are the three steps in the formation of the purpose,--the
ideal, the desire, and the decision,--each earlier one preparing the
way for that which is to follow. But an intention is altogether
useless if it pauses here. It was formed to be sent forth, to he
entrusted to forces stretching beyond the intending mind. The laws of
nature are to take it in charge. The Germans have a good proverb: "A
stone once thrown belongs to the devil." When once it parts from our
hands, it is no longer ours. It is taken up, for evil or for good, by
agencies other than our own. If we mistake the agency to which we
intrust it, enormous mischief may ensue, and we shall he helpless.
These agencies, accordingly, need careful scrutiny before being called
on to work their will. The business of scrutinizing them and of
turning over the purpose to their keeping, forms the second half (B)
of self-direction. In contrast with (A), the formation of the purpose
or the intention, this may be called the realization of the purpose,
or volition. Volition, it is true, is often employed more
comprehensively, but we shall do the term no violence if we confine
its meaning to the discharge of our subjective purpose into the
objective world. Volition then will also, under our scheme, have three
subordinate stages.
VII
The first of them I will call deliberation, in order to approximate it
as closely as possible to the preceding decision. Having now my
purpose decisively formed, I have to ask myself what physical means
will best carry it out. I summon before my mind as complete a list as
possible of nature's conveyances, and judge which of them will with
the greatest efficiency and economy execute my intention. Here I am at
a friend's house, but I have decided to go to my own. I must compare,
then, the different modes of getting there, so as to pick out just
that one which involves the least expenditure and the most certain
result. One way occurs to me which I have never tried before, a swift
and interesting way. I might go by balloon. In that balloon I could
sail at my ease over the tops of the houses and across the beautiful
river. When the tower of Memorial Hall comes in sight, I could pull a
cord and drop gently down at my own door, having meanwhile had the
seclusion and exaltation of an unusual ride. What a delightful
experience! But there is one disadvantage. Balloons are not always at
hand. I might be obliged to wait here for hours, for days, before
getting one. I dismiss the thought of a balloon. It does not
altogether suit my purpose.
Or, I might call a carriage. So I should secure solitude and a certain
speed, but should pay for these with noise, jolting, and more money
than I can well spare. There would be waiting, too, before the
carriage comes. Perhaps I had better ask my friend to lend me his arm
and to escort me home. In this there would be dignity and a saving of
my strength. We could talk by the way, and I always find him
interesting. But should I be willing to be so much beholden to him,
and would not the wind to-day make our walk and talk difficult? Better
postpone till summer weather. And after all there is Boston's most
common mode of locomotion right at hand, the electric car. Strange it
was not thought of before! The five-cent piece saved from the
chocolates will carry me, swiftly, safely, and with independence.
It is in this way that we go through the process of deliberation. All
the possible means of effecting our purpose are summoned for judgment.
The feasibility of each is examined, and the cost involved in its
employment. Comparison is made between the advantages offered by
different agencies; and oftentimes at the close we are in a sad
puzzle, finding these advantages and disadvantages so nearly balanced.
One, however, is finally judged superior in fitness. To this we tie
ourselves, making it the channel for our out-go. The whole process,
then, in its detailed comparison and final fixation, is identical with
that to which I have given the name of decision, except that the
comparisons of decision refer to inner facts, those of deliberation to
outer.
VIII
We now reach the climax of the whole process, effort, the actual
sending forth through the deliberately chosen channel of the ideal
desired and decided on. To it all the rest is merely preliminary, and
in it the final move is made which commits us to the deed. About it,
therefore, we may well desire the completest information. To tell the
truth, I have none to give, and nobody else has. The nature of the
operation is substantially unknown. Though something which we have
been performing all day long, we and all our ancestors, no one of us
has succeeded in getting a good sight of what actually takes place.
Our purposes are prepared as I have described, and then those
purposes--something altogether mental--change on a sudden to material
motions. How is the transmutation accomplished? How do we pass from a
mental picture to a set of motions in the physical world? What is the
bridge connecting the two? The bridge is always down when we direct
our gaze upon it, though firm when any act would cross.
Nor can we trace our passage any more easily in the opposite
direction. When my eyes are turned on my watch, for example, the
vibrations of light striking its face are reflected on the pupil of my
eye. There the little motions, previously existing only in the
surrounding ether, are communicated to my optic nerve. This vibrates
too, and by its motion excites the matter of my brain, and then--well,
I have a sensation of the white face of my watch. But what was
contained in that _then_ is precisely what we do not understand.
Incoming motions may be transmuted into thought; or, as in effort,
outgoing thought may be transmuted into motion. But alike in both
cases, on the nature of that transmutation, the very thing we most
desire to know, we get no light. In regard to this crucial point no
one, materialist or idealist, can offer a suggestion. We may of
course, in fault of explanation, restate the facts in clumsy
circumlocution. Calling thought a kind of motion, we may say that in
action it propagates itself from the mind through the brain into the
outer world; while in the apprehension of an idea motions of the outer
world pass into the brain, and there set up those motions which we
know as thought. But after such explanations the mystery remains
exactly where it was before. How does a "mental motion" come out of a
bodily motion, or a bodily from a mental? It is wiser to acknowledge a
mystery and to mark the spot where it occurs.
This marking of the spot may, however, illuminate the surrounding
territory. If we cannot explain the nature of the crucial act, it may
still be well to study its range. How widely is effort exercised? We
should naturally answer, as widely as the habitable globe. I can sit
in my office in Boston and carry on business in China. When I touch a
button, great ships are loaded on the opposite side of the earth and
cross the intervening oceans to work the bidding of a person they have
never seen. Perhaps some day we may send our volition beyond the globe
and enter into communication with the inhabitants of Mars. It would
seem idle, then, to talk about the limitations of volition and a
restricted range of will. But in fact that will is restricted, and its
range is much narrower than the globe. For when we consider the
matter, with precision, it is not exactly I who have operated in
China. I operate only where I am. In touching the button my direct
agency ceases. It is true that connected with that button are wires
conducting to a wide variety of consequences. But about the details of
that conduction I need know nothing. The wire will work equally well
whether I understand or do not understand electricity. Its working is
not mine, but its own. The pressure of my finger ends my act, which is
then taken up and carried forward by automatic and mechanical
adjustments requiring neither supervision nor consciousness on my
part. We might then more accurately say that my direct volition is
circumscribed by my own body. My finger tips, my lips, my nodding head
are the points where I part with full control, though indefinitely
beyond these I can forecast changes which the automatic agencies, once
set astir, will induce.
Am I niggardly in thus confining the action of each of us within his
own body? Is the range of volition thus marked out too narrow? On the
contrary, it is probably still too wide. We are as powerless to direct
our bodies as we are to manage affairs in China. This, at least, is
the modern psychological doctrine of effort. It is now believed that
volition is entirely a mental affair, and is confined to the single
act of attention. It is alleged that when I attend to an ideal, fixing
my mind fully upon it, the results are altogether similar to what
occurred on my touching the button. Every idea tends to pass
automatically into action through agencies about which I know as
little as I do about ocean telegraphs. This physical frame of mine is
a curious organic mechanism, in which reflex actions and instincts do
their blind work at a hint from me. I am said to raise my arm. But
never having been a student of anatomy and physiology, I have not the
least idea how the rise was effected; and if I am told that nerves
excite muscles, and these in turn contract like cords and pull the arm
this way or that, the rise will not be accomplished a bit better for
the information. For, as in electric transmission, it is not I who do
the work. My part is attention. The rest is adapted automatism. When I
have driven everything else out of my mind except the picture of the
rising arm, it rises of itself, the after-effects on nerves and
muscles being apprehended by me as the sense of effort.
We cannot, then, exercise our will with a wandering mind. So long as
several ideas are conflictingly attended to, they hinder each other.
This we verify in regrettable experiences every day. On waking this
morning, for example, I saw it was time to get up. But the bed was
comfortable, and there were interesting matters to think of. I meant
to get up, for breakfast was waiting, and there was that new book to
be examined, and that letter to be written. How long would this
require, and how should the letter be planned? But I must get up.
Possibly those callers may come. And shall I want to see them? It is
really time to get up. What a curious figure the pattern of the paper
makes, viewed in this light! The breakfast bell! Out of my head go all
vagrant reflections, and suddenly, before I can notice the process, I
find myself in the middle of the floor. That is the way. From wavering
thoughts nothing comes. But suddenly some sound, some sight, some
significant interest, raises the depicted act into exclusive vividness
of attention, and our part is done. The spring has been touched, and
the physical machinery, of which we may know little or nothing, does
its work. There it stands ready, the automatic machinery of this
exquisite frame of ours, waiting for the unconfused signal,--our only
part in the performance,--then automatically it springs to action and
pushes our purpose into the outer world. Such at least is the
fashionable teaching of psychologists to-day. Volition is full
attention. It has no wider scope. With bodily adjustments it does not
meddle. These move by their own mechanic law. Of real connection
between body and mind we know nothing. We can only say that such
parallelism exists that physical action occurs on occasion of complete
mental vision.
No doubt this theory leaves much to be desired in the way of
clearness. What is meant by fixing the attention exclusively? Is
unrelated singleness possible among our mental pictures? Or how
narrowly must the field of attention be occupied before these strange
springs are set in motion? At the end of the explanation do not most
of the puzzling problems of scope, freedom, and selection remain,
existing now as problems about the nature and working of attention
instead of, as formerly, problems about the emergence of the intention
into outward nature? No doubt these classical problems puzzle us
still. But a genuine advance toward clarity is made when we confine
them within a small area by identifying volition with mental
attention. Nor will it be anything to the point to say, "But I know
myself as a physical creature to be involved in effort. The strain of
volition is felt in my head, in my arm, throughout my entire body."
Nobody denies it. After we have attended, and the machinery is set in
motion, we feel its results. The physical changes involved in action
are as apprehensible in our experience as are any other natural facts,
and are remembered and anticipated in each new act.
IX
Only one stage more remains, and that is an invariable one, the stage
of satisfaction. It is fortunately provided that pleasure shall attend
every act. Pleasure probably is nothing else but the sense that some
one of our functions has been appropriately exercised. Every time,
then, that an intention has been taken, up in the way just described,
carried forth into the complex world, and there conducted to its mark,
a gratified feeling arises. "Yes, I have accomplished it. That is
good. I felt a defect, I desired to remove it, and betterment is
here." We cannot speak a word, or raise a hand, perhaps even draw a
breath, without something of this glad sense of life. It may be
intense, it may be slight or middling; but in some degree it is always
there. For through action we realize our powers. This seemingly fixed
world is found to be plastic in our hands. We modify it. We direct
something, mean something. No longer idle drifters on the tide,
through our desires we bring that tide our way. And in the sense of
self-directed power we find a satisfaction, great or small according
to the magnitude of our undertaking.
In such a catalogue of the elements of action as has just been given
there is something uncanny. Can we not pick up a pin without going
through all six stages? Should we ever do anything, if to do even the
simplest we were obliged to do six things? Have I not made matters
needlessly elaborate? No, I have not unduly elaborated. We are made
just so complex. Yet as a good teacher I have falsified. For the sake
of clearness I have been treating separately matters which go
together. There are not six operations, there is but one. In this one
there are six stages; that is, there are six points of view from which
the single operation may advantageously be surveyed. But these do not
exist apart. They are all intimately blended, each affecting all the
rest. Because of our dull faculties we cannot understand, though we
can work, them _en bloc_. He who would render them comprehensible
must commit the violence of plucking them asunder, holding them up
detachedly, and saying, "Of such diverse stuff is our active life
composed." But in reality each gets its meaning through connection
with all the others. Life need not terrify because for purposes of
verification it must be represented as so intricate an affair. It is I
who have broken up its simplicity, and it belongs to my reader to put
it together again.
REFERENCE ON SELF-DIRECTION
James's Psychology, ch. xxvi.
Sigwart's Der Begriff des Wollen's, in his Kleine Schriften.
A. Alexander's Theories of the Will.
Munsterberg's Die Willenshandlung.
Hoffding's Psychology, ch. vii.
V
SELF-DEVELOPMENT
I
Conceivably a being such, as has been described might advance no
farther. Conscious he might be, observant of everything going on
within him and without; occupied too with inducing the very changes he
observes, and yet with no aim to enlarge himself or improve the world
through any of the changes so induced. Complete within himself at the
beginning, he might be equally so at the close, his activity being
undertaken for the mere sake of action, and not for any beneficial
results following in its train. Still, even such a being would be
better off while acting than if quiet, and by his readiness to act
would show that he felt the need of at least temporary betterment. In
actual cases the need goes deeper.
A being capable of self-direction ordinarily has capacities
imperfectly realized. Changing other things, he also changes himself;
and it becomes a part of his aim in action to make these changes
advantageous, and each act helpfully reactive. Accordingly the aim at
self-development regularly attends self-direction. I could not,
therefore, properly discuss my last topic without in some measure
anticipating this. Every ideal of action, I was obliged to say,
includes within it an aim at some sort of betterment of the actor. Our
business, then, in the present chapter is not to announce a new theme,
but simply to render explicit what before was implied. We must detach
from action the influence which it throws back upon us, the actors. We
must make this influence plain, exhibit its method, and show wherein
it differs from other processes in some respects similar.
II
The most obvious fact about self-development is that it is a species
of change, and that change is associated with sadness. Heraclitus, the
weeping philosopher of the Greeks, discovered this fact five hundred
years before Christ. "Nothing abides," he said, "all is fleeting." We
stand in a moving tide, unable to bathe twice in the same stream;
before we can stoop a second time the flood is gone. In every age this
is the common theme of lamentation for poet, moralist, common man and
woman. All other causes of sadness are secondary to it. As soon as we
have comprehended anything, have fitted it to our lives and learned to
love it, it is gone.
Such is the aspect which change ordinarily presents. It is tied up
with grief. We regard what is precious as stable; and yet we are
obliged to confess that nothing on earth is stable--nothing among
physical things, and just as little among mental and spiritual things.
But there are many kinds of change. We are apt to confuse them with
one another, and in so doing to carry over to the nobler sorts
thoughts applicable only to the lower. In beginning, then, the
discussion of self-development, I think it will conduce to clearness
if I offer a conspectus of all imaginable changes. I will set them in
groups and show their different kinds, exhibiting first those which
are most elementary, then those more complex, and finally those so
dark and important that they pass over into a region of mystery and
paradox.
III
Probably all will agree that the simplest possible change is the
accidental sort, that where only relations of space are altered. My
watch, now lying in the middle of the desk, is shifted to the right
side, is laid in its case, or is lost in the street. I call these
changes accidental, because they in no way affect the nature of the
watch. They are not really changes in it, but in its surroundings. The
watch still remains what it was before. To the same group we might
refer a large number of other changes where no inner alteration is
wrought. The watch is now in a brilliant light; I lay my hand on it,
and it is in darkness. Its place has not been changed, but that of the
light has been. Many of the commonest changes in life are of this
sort. They are accidental or extraneous changes. In them, through all
its change, the thing abides. There is no necessary alteration of its
nature.
IV
But unhappily this is not the only species of change. It is not that
which has brought a wail from the ages, when men have seen what they
prize slip away. The common root of sorrow has been destructive
change. Holding the watch in my hand, I may drop it on the floor; and
at once the crystal, which has been so transparently protective, is
gone. If the floor is of stone, the back of the watch may be wrenched
away, the wheels of its delicate machinery jarred asunder. Destruction
has come upon it, and not merely an extraneous accident. In
consequence of altered surroundings, dissolution is wrought within.
Change of a lamentable sort has come. What before was a beautiful
whole, organically constituted in the way described in my first two
chapters, has been torn asunder. What we formerly beheld with delight
has disappeared.
And let us not accept false comfort. We often hear it said that, after
all, destruction is an illusion. There is no such thing. What is once
in the world is here forever. No particle of the watch can by any
possibility be lost. And what is true of the watch is true of things
far higher, of persons even. When persons decay and die, may not their
destruction be only in outward seeming? We cannot imagine absolute
cessation. As well imagine an absolute beginning. There is no loss.
Everything abides. Only to our apprehension do destructive changes
occur. We are all familiar with consolation of this sort, and how
inwardly unsatisfactory it is! For while it is true that no particle
of the watch is destroyed, it is precisely those particles which were
in our minds of little consequence. Almost equally well they might
have been of gold, silver, or steel. The precious part of the, watch
was the organization of its particles, and that is gone. The face and
form of my friend can indeed be blotted out in no single item. But I
care nothing for its material items, The totality may be wrecked, and
it is that totality to which my affections cling. And so it is in the
world around--material remains, organic wholeness goes. It is almost a
sarcasm of nature that she counts our precious things so cheap, while
the bricks and mortar of which these are made--matters on which no
human affection can fasten--she holds for everlasting. The
lamentations of the ages, then, have not erred. Something tragic is
involved in the framework of the universe. In order to abide,
divulsion must occur. Destruction of organism is going on all around
us, and ever will go on. Things must unceasingly be torn apart. One
might call this destructive and lamentable change the only steadfast
feature of the world.
V
Yet after all, and often in this very process of divulsion, we catch
glimpses of a nobler sort of change, For there is a third species to
which I might perhaps give the name of transforming: change. When, for
example, a certain portion of oxygen and a certain portion of
hydrogen, each having its own distinctive qualities, are brought into
contact with one another, they utterly change. The qualities of both
disappear, and a new set of qualities takes their place. The old ones
are gone,--gone, but not lost; for they have been transformed into new
ones of a predetermined and constant kind. Only a single sort of
change is open to these elements when in each other's presence, and in
precisely that way they will always change. In so changing they do
not, it is true, fully keep their past; but a fixed relation to it
they do keep, and under certain conditions may return to it again. The
transforming changes of chemistry, then, are of a different nature
from those of the mechanic destruction just described. In those the
ruined organism leaves not a wrack behind. In chemic change something
definite is held, something that originally was planned and can he
prophesied. An end is attained: the fixed combination of just so much
oxygen with just so much hydrogen for the making of the new substance,
water. Here change is productive, and is not mere waste, as in organic
destruction. Something, however, is lost--the old qualities; for these
cannot be restored except through the disruption of the new substance,
the water in which they are combined.
VI
But there is a more peculiar change of a higher order still, that
which we speak of as development, evolution, growth. This sort of
change might be described as movement toward a mark. When the seed
begins to be transformed in the earth, it is adapted not merely to the
next stage; but that stage has reference to one farther on, and that
to still others. It would hardly be a metaphor to declare that the
whole elm is already prophesied when its seed is laid in the earth.
For though the entire tree is not there, though in order that the seed
may become an elm it must have a helpful environment, still a certain
plan of movement elmwards is, we may say, already schemed in the seed.
Here accordingly, change--far from being a loss--is a continual
increment and revelation. And since the later stages successively
disclose the meaning of those which went before, these later stages
might with accuracy he styled the truth of their predecessors, and
those be accounted in comparison trivial and meaningless until thus
changed. This sort of change carries its past along with it. In the
destructive changes which we were lamenting a moment ago, the past was
lost and the new began as an independent affair. Even in chemic change
this was true to a certain extent. Yet there, though the past was
lost, a future was prophesied. In the case of development the future,
so far from annihilating the past, is its exhibition on a larger
scale. The full significance of any single stage is not manifest until
the final one is reached.
I suppose when we arrive at this thought of change as expressing
development, our lamentation may well turn to rejoicing. Possibly this
may be the reason why the gloom which is a noticeable feature of the
thought of many preceding centuries has in our time somewhat
disappeared. While our ambitions are generally wider, and we might
seem, therefore, more exposed to disappointment, I think the last half
of the century which has closed has been a time of large hopefulness.
Perhaps it has not yet gone so far as rejoicing, for failure and
sorrow are still by no means extirpated. But at least the thoughts of
our day have become turned rather to the future than the past, a
result which has attended the wider comprehension of development. To
call development the discovery of our century would, however, be
absurd. Aristotle bases his whole philosophy upon it, and it was
already venerable in his time. Yet the many writers who have expounded
the doctrine during the last fifty years have brought the thought of
it home to the common man. It has entered into daily life as never
before, and has done much to protect us against the sadness of
destructive change. Perceiving that changes, apparently destructive,
repeatedly bring to light meaning previously undisclosed, we more
willingly than our ancestors part with the imperfect that a path to
the perfect may be opened.
Is not this, then, the great conception of change which we now need to
study as self-development? I believe not. One essential feature is
omitted. In the typical example which I have just reviewed, the growth
of an elm from its seed, we cannot say that the seed expands itself
with a view to becoming a tree. That would be to carry over into the
tree's existence notions borrowed from an alien sphere. Indeed, to
assert that there has been any genuine development from the seed up to
the finished tree is to use terms in an accommodated, metaphoric, and
hypothetical way. Development there certainly has been as estimated by
an outsider, an onlooker, but not as perceived by the tree itself. It
has not known where it was going. Out of the unknown earth the seed
pushes its way into the still less known air. But in doing so it is
devoid of purpose. Nor, if we endow it with consciousness, can we
suppose it would behold its end and seek it. The forces driving it
toward that end are not conscious forces; they are mechanic forces.
Through every stage it is pushed from behind, not drawn from before.
There is no causative goal set up, alluring the seed onward. In
speaking as if there were, we employ language which can have
significance only for rational beings. We may hold that there is a
rational plan of the universe which that seed is fulfilling. But if
so, the plan does not belong to the seed. It is imposed from without,
and the seed does its bidding unawares.
VII
But we may imagine a different state of affairs. Let us assume that
when the seed sprouted it foreknew the elm that was to be. Every time
it sucked in its slight moisture it was gently adapting this
nourishment to the fulfillment of its ultimate end, asking itself
whether the small material had better be bestowed on the left bough or
the right, whether certain leaves should curve more obliquely toward
the sun, and whether it had better wave its branches and catch the
passing breeze or leave them quiet. If we could rightly imagine such a
state of things, our tree would be much unlike its brothers of the
forest; for, superintending its own development, it would be not a
thing at all but a person. We persons are in this very way entrusted
with our growth. A plan there is, a normal mode of growth, a
significance to which we may attain. But that significance is not
imposed on us from without, as an inevitable event, already settled
through our past. On the contrary, we detect it afar as a possibility,
are thus put in charge of it, and so become in large degree our own
upbuilders. Development is movement toward a mark. In self-development
the mark to be reached is in the conscious keeping of him who is to
reach it. Toward it he may more or less fully direct his course.
And what an astonishing state of things then appears! Self-development
involves a kind of contradiction in terms. How can I build if at
present there is no I? Why should I build if at present there is an I?
Whichever alternative we take, we fall into what looks like absurdity.
Yet on that absurdity personal life is based. There is no avoiding it.
Wordsworth has daringly stated the paradox: "So build we up the being
that we are." On coming into the world we are only sketched out. Of
each of us there is a ground plan of which we progressively become
aware. Hidden from us in our early years, it resides in the minds of
our parents, just as the plan of the tree's structure is in the
keeping of nature. Gradually through our advancing years and the care
of those around us we catch sight of what we might be. Detecting in
ourselves possibilities, we make out their relation to a plan not yet
realized. We accordingly take ourselves in hand and say, "If any
personal good is to come to me, it must be of my making. I cannot own
myself till I am largely the author of myself. From day to day I must
construct, and whenever I act study how the action will affect my
betterment,--whether by performing it I am likely to degrade or to
consolidate myself." And to this process there must be no end.
Obviously, nothing like this could occur if our actual condition were
our ideal condition. Self-development is open only to a being in whom
there are possibilities as yet unfulfilled. The things around us have
their definite constitution. They can do exactly thus and no more.
What shall be the effect of any impulse falling on them is already
assured. If the condition of the brutes is anything like that which we
disrespectfully attributed to them, then they are in the same case;
they too are shut up to fixed responses, and have in them no
unfulfilled capacities. It is the possession of such empty capacities
which makes us personal. Well has it been said that he who can
declare, "I am that I am," is either God or a brute. No human being
can say it. To describe myself as if I were a settled fact is to make
myself a thing. My life is in that which may be. The ideals of
existence are my realities, and "ought" is my peculiar verb. "Is" has
no other application to a person than to mark how far he has advanced
along his ideal line. Were he to pause at any point as if complete, he
would cease to be a person.
VIII
But it is necessary to trace somewhat carefully the method of such
self-development. How do we proceed? Before the architect built the
State House, he drew up a plan of the finished building, and there was
no moving of stone, mortar, or tool, till everything was complete on
paper. Each workman who did anything subsequently did it in deference
to that perfected design. Each stone brought for the great structure
was numbered for its place and had its jointing cut in adaptation to
the remaining stones. If, then, each one of us is to become an
architect of himself, it might seem necessary to lay out a plan of our
complete existence before setting out in life, or at whatever moment
we become aware that henceforth our construction is to be in our own
charge. Only with such a plan in hand would orderly building seem
possible. This is a common belief, but in my judgment an erroneous
one. Indeed the whole analogy of the architect and his mechanisms is
misleading. We rarely have in mind the total plan of our unrealized
being and rarely ought we to have. Our work begins at a different
point. We do not, like the architect, usually begin with a thought of
completion. Bather we are first stirred by a sense of weakness.
In my own education I find this to be true. After some years as a boy
in a Boston public school, I went to Phillips Academy in Andover, then
to Harvard College, and subsequently to a German university, and why
did I do all this? Did I have in mind the picture of myself as a
learned man? I will not deny that such a fancy drifted through my
brain. But it was indistinct and occasional. I did not even know what
it was to be a learned man. I do not know now. The driving force that
was on me was something quite different. I found myself disagreeably
ignorant. Reading books and newspapers, I continually found matters
referred to of which I knew nothing. Looking out on the universe, I
did not understand it; and looking into the yet more marvelous
universe within, I was still more grievously perplexed. I thought life
not worth living on such terms. I determined to get rid of my
ignorance and to endure such limitations of knowledge no longer. Is
there, I asked, any place where at least a portion of my stupidity may
be set aside? I removed a little fraction at school, but revealed also
enormous expanses which I had not suspected before. I therefore
pressed on farther, and to-day am still engaged in the almost hopeless
attempt to extirpate my ignorance. What incites me continually is the
sense of how small I am, not that which a few moments ago seemed my
best incentive--the picture of myself as large. That on the whole has
had comparatively little influence. Of course I do not assert that we
are altogether without visions of a larger life. That is far from
being the case. Were it so, desire would cease. We must contrast the
poverty of the present with the fullness of a possible future, or we
should not incline to turn from that present. Yet our grand driving
force is that sense of limitation, of want or need, which was
discussed in the last chapter. And our aim is rather at a better than
at a best, at the removal of some small distinct hindrance than at
arrival at a completed goal. We come upon excellence piecemeal, and do
not, like the architect, look upon it in its entirety at the outset.
Yet in the pursuit of this "better," the more vividly we can figure
the coming stages, the more easily will they be attained. For this
purpose the careers of those who have gone before us are helpful,--
reports about the great ones of the past, and the revelations of
themselves which they have left us in literature and institutions.
Example is a powerful agent in making our footsteps quick and true.
But it has its dangers, and may be a means of terrifying unless we
feel that even in our low estate there are capacities allying us with
our exemplar. The first vision of excellence is overwhelming. We draw
back, knowing that we do not look like that, and we cannot bear to
behold what is so superior. But by degrees, feeling our kinship with
excellence, we are befriended.
I would not, then, make rigid statements in regard to this point of
method. Grateful as I believe we should be for every sense of need,
this is obviously not enough. To some extent we must have in mind the
betterment which we may obtain through supplying that need. Yet I do
not think a full plan of our ultimate goal is usually desirable. In
small matters it is often possible and convenient. I plan my stay in
Europe before going there. I figure my business prospects before
forming a partnership. But in profounder affairs, I more wisely set
out from the thought of the present, and the patent need of improving
it, than from the future with its ideal perfection. Goethe's rule is a
good one:--
"Willst du ins Unendliebe schreiten?
So sucht das Endliche, nach allen Seiten."
Would you reach the infinite? Then enter into finite things, working
out all that they contain.
IX
If in working them out a test is wanted to enable us to decide whether
we are working wisely or to our harm, I believe such a test may be
found in the congruity of the new with the old. Shall I by adding a
fresh power to myself strengthen those I already possess? By taking
this path, rich in a certain sort of good as it undoubtedly is, shall
I be diverted from paths where my special goods lie? Here I am, a
student of ethics. A friend calls and tells me of the charms of
astronomy, a study undoubtedly majestic and delightful. Since I desire
to take all knowledge for my province, why not hurry off at once to
study astronomy? No indeed. No astronomy for me. I draw a ring about
that subject and say, "Precious subject, fundamentally valuable for
all men. But I will remain ignorant of it, because it is not quite
congruous with the studies I already have on hand." That must be my
test: not how important is the study itself, but how important is it
for me? How far will it help me to accept and develop those
limitations to which I am now pledged?
In this acceptance of limitation, therefore, which seems at first so
humiliating, I believe we have the starting point of all self-
development. Our very imperfections, once accepted, prove our best
means of discerning more. That is a profound remark of Hegel's that
knowledge of a limit is a knowledge beyond that limit. Let us consider
for a moment what it means. Suppose I should come upon Kaspar Hauser,
shut in his little room. "And how long have you been here," I ask.
"Ever since I was born," he answers. "Indeed! How much, then, do you
know?" "Nothing beyond the walls of this room." Might I not fairly
reply, "You contradict yourself. How can you know anything about walls
of a room unless you also know of much beyond them?" We cannot
conceive a limit except as a limit from something. Accordingly, when
we detect our ignorance we become by that very fact not ignorant. We
have gone beyond ourselves and have seen that we are not what we
should be. And this is the way of self-development. Becoming aware of
our imperfections, we by that very fact continually lay hold on
whatever perfect is within our reach.
X
When then we ask whether at any moment we are fully persons, we must
answer, No. The actual extent of personality is at any time small. It
is rather a goal than something ever attained. We have seen that it is
not to be described in terms of the verb "to be." We cannot say "I am
a person," but, only "I ought to be a person. I am seeking to be." The
great body of our life is, we know, a purely natural affair. Our
instincts, our wayward impulses, our unconnected disorderly purposes--
these, which fill the larger portion of our existence, do not express
our personal nature. Each of them goes on its own way, neglectful of
the whole. Therefore we must confess that at no time can we account
ourselves completed persons. Justly we use such strange expressions as
"He is much of a person," "He is very little of a person." Personality
is an affair of degree. We are moving toward it, but have not yet
arrived. "Man partly is and wholly hopes to be." And can we ever
arrive? I do not see how. We are chasing a flying goal. The nearer we
approach, the farther it removes. Shall we call this fact
discouraging, then, or even say that self-development is a useless
process, since it never can be fulfilled? I think not. I should rather
specify this feature of it as our chief source of encouragement; for I
hold that only those aims which do thus contain an infinite element
and are, strictly speaking, unattainable, move mankind to passionate
pursuit. Probably all will agree that riches, fame, and wisdom are
ideals which predominantly move us, and they are all unattainable.
Suppose, some morning, when I see a merchant setting off for his
office quite too early, I ask him why he is hastening so. He answers,
"Why, there is money to be made. And as I intend to be a rich man some
day, I must leave home comforts and be prompt at my desk." But I
persist, "You have forgotten something. It occurs to me that you never
can be rich. No rich man was ever seen. Whoever has obtained a million
dollars can get a million more, and the man of two millions can become
one of three. Obviously, then, neither you nor any one can become a
completely rich man." Should I stay that merchant from his exit by
remarks of this kind? If he answered at all, he would merely say,
"Don't read too much. You had better mix more with men."
And I should get no better treatment from the scholar, the man who is
seeking wisdom. It is true no really wise man ever was on earth, or
ever will be. But that is the very reason why we are all so
impassioned for wisdom, because every bit we seize only opens the door
to more. If we could get it in full, if some time or other, knowing
that we are now wise, we could sit down in our armchairs with nothing
further to do, it would be a death blow to our colleges. Nobody would
attend them or care for wisdom longer. An aim which one can reach, and
discover to be finally ended, moves only children. They will make
collections of birds' eggs, though conceivably they might obtain every
species in the neighborhood. But these are not the things which excite
earnest men. They run after fame, because they can never be quite
famous. They may become known to every person on their street, but
there is the street beyond. Or to every one in their town, but there
are other towns. Or if to every person on earth, there are still the
after ages. Entire fame cannot be had; and exactly on that account it
stirs every impulse of our nature in pursuit.
Now the aim at personal perfection is precisely of this sort. As
servants of righteousness we cannot accept any other precept than "Be
ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." But we know
such perfection to be unattainable, Yet I sometimes doubt whether we
state the matter truly so. Would it not be juster to say that
perfection can always be attained, and that it is about the only thing
which can be? We might well say of all the infinite ideals that they
differ from the finite ones simply in this, that the finite can be
attained but once, and then are ended, while the infinite are
continually attained. At no moment of his life shall the merchant be
cut off from becoming richer, or the scholar from growing wiser, or
the public benefactor from acquiring further fame. These aims, then,
are always attainable; for in them what we think of as the goal is
not, as in other cases, a single point which, once reached, renders
the rest of life useless and listless. The goal here is the line of
increase. To be moving along that line should be our daily endeavor.
Our proper utterance should be, "I was never so good as to-day, and I
hope never to be so bad again."
XI
But when we have seen how slender is our actual perfection, how slight
must be reckoned the attainment of personality at any moment, we are
brought face to face with the profound problem of its possible extent.
How far can the self be developed? Infinitely? Is each one of us an
infinite being? I will not say so. I do not like to make a statement
which runs beyond my own experience. But confining myself to this, let
us see what it will show.
When at any time I seek to perfect myself, does my attainment of any
grade of improvement prevent or further another step? All will agree
that it simply opens a new door. Perhaps I am seeking to withdraw from
habits of mendacity, and beginning to tell the truth. Then every time
I tell the truth I shall discover more truth to tell. And will this
process ever come to an end? I have nothing to do with "evers." I can
only say that each time I try it, advance is more possible, not less
possible. In the personal life there is, if I may say so, no provision
for checkage. As I understand it, in the animal life there is such
provision. In my first chapter I was pointing out the difference
between extrinsic and intrinsic goodness; and I said that the table's
entering into use and holding objects on its top tended to destroy it,
though we might imagine a magic table in which every exercise of
function would be preservative. Now in the personal nature we find
just such a magical provision. Each time a person normally exerts
himself he makes further exertion in those normal ways more possible.
And if this is true of all personal action within our experience, what
right have we to set a limit to it anywhere? It may not be suitable to
say that I know myself infinite, but it is certainly true that I
cannot conceive myself as finite. I can readily see that this body of
mine has in it what I have called a provision for checkage. Every time
the blood moves in my veins it leaves its little deposit. Further
motion of that blood is slightly impeded. But every time a moral
purpose moves my life, it makes the next move surer. It is impossible
to draw lines of limitation in moral development.
XII
Such, then, is the vast conception with which we have been dealing.
Goodness, to be personal, must express perpetual self-development. All
the moral aims of life may be summed up in the single word, "self-
realization." Could I fully realize myself, I should have fulfilled
all righteousness, and this view is sanctioned by the Great Teacher
when he asks, "What shall a man give in exchange for his life?"--his
life, his soul, his self. If any one fully believed this, and lived as
if all his desires were fulfilled so long as he had opportunities of
self-development, he might be said to have insured himself against
every catastrophe. Little could harm him. Whatever occurred, instead
of exclaiming, "How calamitous!" he would simply ask, "What fresh
opportunities do these strange circumstances present for enlarged
living? Let me add this new discipline to what I had before. Seeking
as I am to become expanded into the infinite, this experience
discloses a new avenue thither. All things work together for good to
them that love the Lord."
REFERENCES ON SELF-DEVELOPMENT
Bradley's Ethical Studies, essay vi.
Green's Prolegomena of Ethics, bk. iii. ch. ii.
Alexander's Moral Order and Progress, bk. iii. ch. iv.
Muirhead's Elements of Ethics, bk. iii. ch. iii.
Mackenzie's Manual of Ethics, pt. i. ch. vii.
Dewey in Philos. Journal, Dec., 1893.
VI
SELF-SACRIFICE
I
The view of human goodness presented in the preceding chapter is one
which is at present finding remarkably wide acceptance. Philosophers
are often reproached with an indisposition to agree, and naturally
where inquiry is active diversity will obtain. But to-day there
appears a strange unanimity as regards the ultimate formula of ethics.
The empirical schools state this as the highest form of the struggle
for existence; the idealistic, as self-realization. The two are the
same so far as they both regard morality as having to do with the
development of life in persons. These curious beings, both also
acknowledge, can never rest till they attain a completeness now
incalculable.
Of course there is abundant diversity in the application of such
formulae. In interpreting them we come upon problems no less urgent
and tangled than those which vexed our fathers. Who and what is a
person? How far is he detachable from nature? How far from his fellow
men? Is his individuality an illusion, and each of us only an
imperfect phase of a single universal being, so that in strictness we
must own that there is none good but one, that is God? These and
kindred questions naturally oppress the thought of our time. Yet all
are but so many attempts to push the formula of self-realization into
entire clearness. The considerable agreement in ethical formulae
everywhere noticeable shows that at least so much advance has been
made: morality has ceased to be primarily repressive, and is now
regarded as the amplest exhibit of human nature, free from every
external precept, however sacred. Man is the measure of the moral
universe, and the development of himself his single duty.
But when we thus accept self-realization as our supreme aim, we bring
ourselves into seeming conflict with one of our profoundest moral
instincts. It is self-sacrifice that calls forth from all mankind, as
nothing else does, the distinctively moral response of reverence.
Intelligence, skill, beauty, learning--we admire them all; but when we
see an act of self-sacrifice, however small, an awe falls on us; we
bow our heads, fearful that we might not have been capable of anything
so glorious. We thus acknowledge self-sacrifice to be the very
culmination of the moral life. He who understand it has comprehended
all righteousness, human and divine. But how does self-sacrifice
accord with self-development? Will he who is busy cultivating himself
sacrifice himself? Is there not a kind of conflict between the two?
Yet can we abandon either? And if not, must not the formula of self-
realization accept modification?
This, then, is the problem to which I must now turn: the possible
adjustment of these two imperative claims,--the claim to realize one's
self and the claim to sacrifice one's self. And I shall most easily
set my theme before my readers if I state at once the four historic
objections to the reality of self-sacrifice. I call them historic, for
they have appeared and reappeared in the history of ethics, and have
been worked out there on a great scale. While not altogether
consistent with one another, no one of them is unimportant. Together
they compactly present those conflicting considerations which must be
borne in mind when we attempt to comprehend the subtleties of self-
sacrifice. I will endeavor to state them briefly and sympathetically.
First, self-sacrifice is psychologically impossible. No man ever
performs a strictly disinterested act, as has been shown in my chapter
on self-direction. Before desire will start, his own interest must be
engaged. In action we seek to accomplish something, and between that
something and ourselves some sort of valued connection must be felt.
Every wish indicates that the wisher experiences a need which he
thinks might be supplied by the object wished for. It is true that
wishes and wills are often directed upon external objects, but only
because we believe that our own well-being is involved in their union
with us. I devote myself to my friend as _my_ friend, counting his
happiness and my own inseparable. Were he so entirely a foreigner
that I had no interest in him, my sacrifices for him--even if
conceivable--would be meaningless. They acquire meaning only through
my sense of a tie between him and me. My service of him may be
regarded as my escape from petty selfishness into broad selfishness,
from immediate gain to remote gain. But the prospect of gain in some
form, proximate or ultimate, gain often of an impalpable and spiritual
sort, always attends my wish and will. The aim at self-realization,
however hidden, is everywhere the root of action. No belittlement of
ourselves can appear desirable except as a step toward ultimate
enlargement. Self-sacrifice in any true and thorough-going sense never
occurs.
So cogent is this objection, and so frequently does it appear, not
only in ethical discussion but in the minds of the struggling
multitude, that he who has not faced it, and taken its truth well to
heart, can have little comprehension of self-sacrifice. But it is a
blessed fact that thousands who comprehend self-sacrifice little
practise it largely.
III
A second objection strips off the glory of self-sacrifice and regards
it as a sad necessity. While there is nothing in it to attract or be
approved, the lamentable fact is that we are so crowded together and
disposed to trample on one another that, partially to escape, we must
each agree to abate something of our own in behalf of a neighbor's
gain. We cannot each be all we would. It is a sign of our mean estate
that again and again we need to cut off sections of what we count
valuable in order to save any portion. Only by such compromises are we
able to get along with one another. He who refuses them finds himself
exposed to still greater loss. The hard conditions under which we live
appear in the fact that such restraint is inevitable. I call self-
sacrifice, therefore, a sad necessity.
This theory of sacrifice is urged by Hobbes and by the later moralists
who follow his daring lead. It should be counted among the objections
because, while it admits the fact of self-sacrifice, it denies its
dignity.
IV
A third objection declares sacrifice to be needless. Its very
appearance rests on a misconception. We mistakenly suppose that in
abating our own for the sake of our neighbor's good, we lose. In
reality this is our true mode of enlargement. The interests of the
individual and society are not hostile or alien, but supplemental.
Society is nothing but the larger individual; so that he alone
realizes himself who enters most fully into social relations, making
the well-being of society his own. This is plain enough when we study
the working of a small and comprehensible portion of society. The
child does not lose through identification with family life. That is
his great means of realizing himself. To assume contrast and
antagonism between family interest and the interest of the child is
palpably unwarranted and untrue. Equally unwarranted is a similar
assumption in the broader ranges of society. When we talk of
sacrifice, we refer merely to the first stage and outer aspect of the
act. Underneath, self-interest is guarded, the individual giving up
his individuality only through obtaining a larger individuality still.
Such identity of interest between society and the individual the
moralists of the eighteenth century are never tired of pointing out.
If they are right, and the identity is complete, then sacrifice is
abolished or is only a generous illusion. But these men never quite
succeeded in persuading the English people of their doctrine, at least
they never carried their thought fully over into the common mind.
V
That common mind has always thought of sacrifice in a widely different
way, but in one which renders it still more incomprehensible. Self-
sacrifice it regards as a glorious madness. Though the only act which
ever forces us to bow in reverent awe, it is insolubly mysterious,
irrational, crazy perhaps, but superb. For in it we do not deliberate.
We hear a call, we shut our ears to prudence, and with courageous
blindness as regards damage of our own, we hasten headlong to meet the
needs of others. To reckon heroism, to count, up opposing gains and
losses, balancing them one against another in order clear-sightedly to
act, is to render heroism impossible. Into it there enters an element
of insanity. The sacrificer must feel that he cares nothing for what
is rational, but only for what is holy, for his duty. The rational and
the holy,--in the mind of him who has not been disturbed by theoretic
controversy these two stand in harsh antithesis, and the antithesis
has been approved by important ethical writers of our time. The
rational man is, of course, needed in the humdrum work of life. His
assertive and sagacious spirit clears many a tangled pathway. But he
gets no reverence, the characteristic response of self-sacrifice. This
is reserved for him who says, "No prudence for me! I will he admirably
crazy. Let me fling myself away, so only there come salvation to
others."
Such, then, are the four massive objections: self-sacrifice is unreal
psychologically, aesthetically, morally, or rationally: But negative
considerations are not enough. No amount of demonstration of what a
thing is not will ever reveal what it is. Objections are merely of
value for clearing a field and marking the spots on which a structure
cannot be reared. The serious task of erecting that structure
somewhere still remains. To it I now address myself.
VI
What we need to consider first is the reality and wide range of self-
sacrifice. The moment the term is mentioned there spring up before our
minds certain typical examples of it. We see the soldier advancing
toward the battlefield, to stake his life for a country in whose
prosperity he may never share. We see the infant falling into the
water, and the full-grown man flinging in after it his own assured and
valued life in hopes of rescuing that incipient and uncertain thing, a
little child. Yes, I myself came on a case of heroism hardly less
striking. I was riding my bicycle along the public street when there
dashed past me a runaway horse with a carriage at his heels, both
moving so madly that I thought all the city was in danger. I pursued
as rapidly as I could, and as I neared my home, saw horse and carriage
standing by the sidewalk. By the horse's head stood a negro. I went up
to him and said, "Did you catch that horse?" "Yes, sir," he answered.
"But," I said, "he was going at a furious pace." "Yes, sir." "And he
might have run you down." "Yes, sir, but I know horses, and I was
afraid he would hurt some of these children." There he stood, the big
brown hero, unexalted, soothing the still restive horse and unaware of
having done anything out of the ordinary. I entered my house ashamed.
Had I possessed such skill, would I have ventured my life in such a
fashion?
Such are some of the shining examples of self-sacrifice which occur to
us at the first mention of the word. But we shall mislead ourselves if
we confine our thoughts to cases so climactic, triumphant, and
spectacular. Deeds like these dazzle and do not invite to full
analysis of their nature. Let us turn to affairs more usual.
I have happened to know intimately members of three professions--
ministers, nurses, teachers-and I find self-sacrifice a matter of
daily practice with them all. To it the minister is dedicated. He must
not look for gain. He has a salary, of course; but it is much in the
nature of a fee, a means of insuring him a certain kind of living. And
while it is common enough to find a minister studying how he may make
money in his parish, it is commoner far to find one bent on seeing how
he can make righteousness prevail there, though it overwhelm him. The
other professions do not so manifestly aim at self-sacrifice. They are
distinctly money-making. They exact a given sum for a given service.
Still, in them too how constantly do we see that that which is given
far outruns that which is paid for. I have watched pretty closely the
work of a dozen or more trained nurses, and I believe it Would be hard
to find any class in the community showing a higher average of
estimable character. How quiet they are under the most irritating
circumstances! How fully they pour themselves into the lives of their
patients! How prompt is the deft hand! How considerate the swift
intelligence! Their hearts are aglow over what can be given, not over
what can be got. A similar temper is widely observable among teachers,
especially among those of the lower grades. Paid though they are for a
certain task, how indisposed they are to limit themselves to that task
or to confine their care of their children to the schoolroom! The
hard-worked creatures acquire an intimate interest in the little lives
and, heedless of themselves, are continually ready to spend and be
spent for those who cannot know what they receive. Among such teachers
I find self-sacrifice as broad, as deep, as genuine, if not so
striking, as that of the soldier in the field.
Evidently, then, self-sacrifice may be wide-spread and may permeate
the institutions of ordinary life; being found even in occupations
primarily ordered by principles of give and take, where it expresses
itself in a kind of surplusage of giving above what is prescribed in
the contract. In this form it enters into trade. The high-minded
merchant is not concerned merely with getting his money back from an
article sold. He interests himself in the thoroughly excellent quality
of that article, in the accommodation of his customers, the soundness
of his business methods, and the honorable standing of his firm. And
when we turn to our public officials, how frequent it is--how frequent
in spite of what the newspapers say--to find men eager for the public
good, men ready to take labor on themselves if only the state may be
saved from cost and damage!
But I still underestimate the prevalence of the principle. Our
instances must be homelier yet. Each day come petty citations to self-
sacrifice which are accepted as a matter of course. As I walk to my
lecture-room somebody stops me and says, "What is the way to Berkeley
Street?" Do I reprovingly answer, "You must have made a mistake. I
have no interest in Berkeley Street. I think it is you who are going
there, and why are you putting me to inconvenience merely that you may
the more easily find your way?" Should I answer so, he would think and
possibly say, "There are strange people in Cambridge, remoter from
human kind than any known elsewhere." Every one would feel
astonishment at the man who declined to bear his little portion of a
neighbor's burden. Our commonest acceptance of society involves self-
sacrifice, and in all our trivial intercourse we expect to put
ourselves to unrewarded inconvenience for the sake of others.
VII
What I have set myself to make plain in this series of graded examples
is simply this: self-sacrifice is not something exceptional, something
occurring at crises of our lives, something for which we need
perpetually to be preparing ourselves, so that when the great occasion
comes we may be ready to lay ourselves upon its altar. Such
romanticism distorts and obscures. Self-sacrifice is an everyday
affair. By it we live. It is the very air of our moral lungs. Without
it society could not go on for an hour. And that is precisely why we
reverence it so--not for its rarity, but for its importance. Nothing
else, I suppose, so instantly calls on the beholder for a bowing of
the head. Even a slight exhibit of it sends through the sensitive
observer a thrill of reverent abasement. Other acts we may admire;
others we may envy; this we adore.
Perhaps we are now prepared to sum up our descriptive account and
throw what we have observed into a sort of definition. I mean by self-
sacrifice any diminution of my own possessions, pleasures, or powers,
in order to increase those of others. Naturally what we first think of
is the parting with possessions. That is what the word charity most
readily suggests, the giving up of some physical object owned by us
which, even at the moment of giving, we ourselves desire. But the gift
may be other than a physical object. When I would gladly sit, I may
stand in the car for the sake of giving another ease. But the greatest
conceivable self-sacrifice is when I give myself: when, that is, I in
some way allow my own powers to be narrowed in order that those of
some one else may be enlarged. Parents are familiar with such
exquisite charity, parents who put themselves to daily hardship
because they want education for their boys. But they have no monopoly
in this kind. I who stand in the guardianship of youth have frequent
occasion to miss a favorite pupil, boy or girl, who throws up a
college training and goes home--often, in my judgment, mistakenly--to
support, or merely to cheer, the family there. Of course such gifts
are incomparable. No parting with one's goods, no abandonment of one's
pleasures, can be measured against them. Yet this is what is going on
all over the country where devoted mother, gallant son, loyal husband,
are limiting their own range of existence for the sake of broadening
that of certain whom they hold dear.
VIII
But when we have thus assembled our omnipresent facts and set them in
order for cool assessment, the enigma of self-sacrifice only appears
the more clearly. Why _should_ a man sacrifice himself? Why
voluntarily accept loss? Each of us has but a single life. Each feels
the pressure of his own needs and desires. These point the way to
enlargement. How, then, can I disinterestedly prefer another's gain?
Each of us is penned within the range of his solitary consciousness,
which may be broadened or narrowed but cannot be passed. It is
incumbent on us, therefore, to study our own enrichment. Anticipating
whatever might confirm or crumble our being, we should strenuously
seize the one and reject the other. Deliberately to turn toward loss
would seem to be crazy. What should a man accept in exchange for his
life?
Here is the difficulty, a difficulty of the profoundest and most
instructive sort. If we could see our way clearly through it, little
in ethics would remain obscure. The common mode of meeting it is to
leave it thus paradoxical. Self-sacrifice banishes rationality and is
a glorious madness. But such a conclusion is a repellent one. How can
it be? Reason is man's distinctive characteristic. While brutes act
blindly, while the punctual physical universe minutely obeys laws of
which it knows nothing, usually it is open to man to judge the path he
will pursue. Shall we then say that, though reason is a convenience in
all the lower stretches of life, when we reach self-sacrifice, our
single awesome height, it ceases? I cannot think so. On the contrary,
I hold that in self-sacrifice we have a case not of glorious madness,
but of somewhat extreme rationality. How, then, is rational contrasted
with irrational guidance? As we here approach the central and most
difficult part of our discussion, clearness will oblige me to enter
into some detail.
When a child looks at a watch, he sees a single object. It is
something there, a something altogether detached from his
consciousness, from the table, from other objects around. It is a
brute fact, one single thing, complete in itself. Such is the child's
perception. But a man of understanding looks at it differently. Its
detached singleness is not to him the most important truth in regard
to it. Its meaning must rather be found in the relations in which it
stands, relations which, seeming at first to lie outside it, really
enter into it and make it what it is. The rational man would
accordingly see it all alive with the qualities of gold, brass, steel,
the metals of which it is composed. He would find it incomprehensible
apart from the mind of its maker, and would not regard that mind and
watch as two things, but as matters essentially related. Indeed, these
relations would run wider still, and reason would not rest satisfied
until the watch was united to time itself, to the very framework of
the universe. Apart from this it would be meaningless. In short, if a
man comprehends the watch in a rational way he must comprehend it in
what may he called a conjunct way. The child might picture it as
abstract and single, but it could really be known only in connection
with all that exists. Of course we pause far short of such full
knowledge. Our reason cannot stretch to the infinity of things. But
just so far as relations can be traced between this object and all
other objects, so much the more rational does the knowledge of the
watch become. Rationality is the comprehending of anything in its
relations. The perceptive, isolated view is irrational.
But if this is true of so simple a matter as a watch, it is doubly
true of a complex human being. The child imagines he can comprehend a
person too in isolation, but rational proverb-makers long ago told us,
"One person, no person." Each person must be conceived as tied in with
all his fellows. We have seen how in the case of the watch we were
almost obliged to abandon the thought of a single object and to speak
of it as a kind of centre of constitutive relations. A plexus of ties
runs in every direction, and where these cross there is the watch. So
it is among human beings. If we try for a moment to conceive a person
as single and detached, we shall find he would have no powers to
exercise. No emotions would be his, whether of love or hate, for they
imply objects to arouse them, no occupations of civilized life, for
these involve mutual dependency. From speech he would be cut off, if
there were nobody to speak to; nor would any such instrument as
language be ready for his use, if ancestors had not cooperated in its
construction. His very thoughts would become a meaningless series of
impressions if they indicated no reality beside themselves. So empty
would be that fiction, the single and isolated individual. The real
creature, rational and conjunct man, is he who stands in living
relationship with his fellows, they being a veritable part of him and
he of them. Man is essentially a social being, not a being who happens
to be living in society. Society enters into his inmost fibre, and
apart from society he is not. Yet this does not mean that society, any
more than the individual, has an independent existence, prior,
complete, and authoritative. What would society be, parted from the
individuals who compose it? No more than an individual who does not
embody social relationships. The two are mutual conceptions, different
aspects of the same thing. We may view a person abstractly, fixing
attention on his single centre of consciousness; or we may view him
conjunctly, attending to his multifarious ties.
Now what is distinctive of self-sacrifice is that it insists in a
somewhat extreme way on this second and rational mode of regard. It is
a frank confession of interlocking lives. It says, "I have nothing to
do with the abstract, isolated, and finite self. That is a matter of
no consequence. What I care about is the conjunct, social, and
infinite self--that self which is inseparable from others. Where that
calls, I serve." The self-sacrificing person knows no interest of his
own separate from those of his father and mother, his wife and
children. He cannot ask what is good for himself and set it in
contrast with what is good for them. For his own broader existence is
presented in these dear members of his family. And such a man, so far
from being mad, is wise as few of us are. Glorious indeed is the self-
sacrificer, because he is so sane, because in him all pettiness and
detachment are swept away. He appears mad only to those who stand at
the opposite point of view, but in his eyes it is they who are
ridiculous. In fact, each must be counted crazy or wise according to
the view we take of what constitutes the real person.
I remember a story current in our newspapers during the Civil War.
Just before a battle, an officer of our army, knowing of what
consequence it was that his regiment should hold its ground, hastened
to the rear to see that none of his men were straggling. He met a
cowardly fellow trying to regain the camp. Turning upon him in a
passion of disgust, he said, "What! Do you count your miserable little
life worth more than that of this great army?" "Worth more to me,
sir," the man replied. How sensible! How entirely just from his own
point of view, that of the isolated self! Taking only this into
account, he was but a moral child, incapable of comprehending anything
so difficult as a conjunct self. He imagined that could he but save
this eating, breathing, feeling self, no matter if the country were
lost, he would be a gainer. What folly! What would existence be worth
outside the total inter-relationship of human beings called his land?
But this fact he could not perceive. To risk his separate self in such
a cause seemed absurd. Turn for a moment and see how absurd the
separate self appears from the point of view of the conjunct. When our
Lord hung upon the cross, the jeering soldiers shouted, "He saved
others, himself he cannot save." No, he could not; and his inability
seemed to them ridiculous, while it was in reality his glory. His true
self he was saving--himself and all mankind--the only self he valued.
IX
Now it is this strange complexity of our being, compelling us to view
ourselves in both a separate and a conjunct way, which creates all the
difficulty in the problem of self-sacrifice. But I dare say that when
I have thus shown the reality and worth of the conjunct self, it will
be felt that self-sacrifice is altogether illusory; for while it seems
to produce loss, it is in fact the avoidance of what entails
littleness. So says Emerson:--
"Let love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply:
'T is man's perdition to be safe
When for the truth he ought to die."
Have we not, then, by explaining the rationality of self-sacrifice,
explained away the whole matter and practically identified it with
self-culture? There is plausibility in this view--and it has often
been maintained--but not complete truth. For evidently the emotions
excited by culture and sacrifice are directly antagonistic. Toward a
man pursuing the aim of culture we experience a feeling of approval,
not unmixed with suspicion, but we give him none of that reverent
adoration which is the proper response to sacrifice. And if the
feelings of the beholder are contrasted, so also are the psychological
processes of the performer. The man of culture starts with a sense of
defect which he seeks to supplement; the sacrificer, with a sense of
fullness which he seeks to empty. He who turns to self-culture says,
"I have progressed thus far. I have gained thus much of what I would
acquire. But still I am poor. I need more. Let me gather as abundantly
as possible on every side." But the thought of him who turns to self-
sacrifice is, "I have been gaining, but I only gained to give. Here is
my opportunity. Let me pour out as largely as I may." He contemplates
final impoverishment. Accordingly I was obliged to say in my
definition that the self-sacrificer seeks to heighten another's
possessions, pleasures, or powers at the cost of his own. Undoubtedly
at the end of the process he often finds himself richer than at the
beginning. Perhaps this is the normal result; but it is not
contemplated. Psychologically the sacrificer is facing in a different
direction.
X
Yet, though the motive agencies of the two are thus contrasted, I
think we must acknowledge that sacrifice no less than culture is a
powerful form of self-assertion. To miss this is to miss its essential
character, and at the same time to miss the safeguards which should
protect it against waste. For to say, "I will sacrifice myself" is to
leave the important part of the business unexpressed. The weighty
matter is in the covert preposition _for_.--"I will sacrifice myself
_for_," An approved object is aimed at. We are not primarily
interested in negating ourselves. Only our estimate of the importance
of the object justifies our intended loss. This object should
accordingly be scrutinized. Self-sacrifice is noble if its end is
noble, but become reprehensible when its object is petty or
undeserving. Omit or overlook that word _for_, and self-sacrifice
loses its exalted character. It sinks into asceticism, one often most
degrading of moral aberrations. In asceticism we prize self-sacrifice
for its own sake. We hunt out what we value most; we judge what would
most completely fulfill our needs; and then we abolish it. Abolish it
for what? For nothing but the mere sake of abolishing. This is to turn
morality upside down; and in place of the Christian ideal of abounding
life, to set up the pessimistic aim of impoverishment. There is
nothing of this kind in self-sacrifice. Here we assert ourselves, our
conjunct selves. We estimate what will be best for the community of
man and seek to further this at whatever cost to our isolated
individuality. By this dedication to a deserving object sacrifice is
purified, ennobled, and made strong. We speak of the glorious deed of
him who plunges into the water to save a child. But it is a foolish
and immoral thing to risk one's life for a stone, a coin, or nothing
at all. "Is the object deserving?" we must ask, "or shall I reserve
myself for greater need?"
Too easily does our sympathetic and sentimental age, recklessly
eulogistic of altruism, hurry into self-sacrifice. Altruism in itself
is worthless. That an act is unselfish can never justify its
performance. He who would be a great giver must first be a great
person. Our men, and still more our women, need as urgently the gospel
of self-development as that of self-sacrifice; though the two are
naturally supplemental. Our only means of estimating the propriety and
dignity of sacrifice is to inquire how closely connected with
ourselves is its object. Until we can justify this connection, we have
no right to incur it, for genuine sacrifice is always an act of self-
assertion. In saving his regiment and contributing his share toward
saving his country, the soldier asserts his own interests. He is a
good soldier in proportion as he feels these interests to be his;
while the deserter is condemned, not for refusing to give his life to
an alien country and regiment, but because he was small enough to
imagine that these great constituents of himself were alien. I tell
the man on the street the way home because I cannot part his
bewilderment from my own. The problem always is, What may I suitably
regard as mine? And in solving it, we should study as carefully that
for which we propose to sacrifice ourselves as anything which we might
seek to obtain. Triviality or lack of permanent consequence is as
objectionable in the one case as in the other. The only safe rule is
that self-sacrifice is self-assertion, is a judgment as regards what
we would welcome to be a portion of our conjunct self.
Perhaps an extreme case will show this most clearly. Jesus prayed,
"Not my will, but thine, be done." He did not then lose his will. He
asserted and obtained it. For his will was that the divine will should
be fulfilled, and fulfilled it was. He set aside one form of his will,
his private and isolated will, knowing it to be delusive. But his true
or conjunct will--and he knew it to be his true one--he abundantly
obtained. It is no wonder, then, that in explaining these things to
his disciples he says, "My meat it is to do the will of my Father."
That is always the language of genuine self-sacrifice. The act is not
complete until the sense of loss has disappeared.
XI
Yet while I hold that self-sacrifice is thus the very extreme of
rationality, grounding as it does all worth in the relational or
conjunct selfhood, I cannot disguise from myself that it contains an
element of tragedy too. This my readers will already have felt and
will have begun to rebel against my insistence that self-sacrifice is
the fulfillment of our being. For though it is true that when
opposition arises between the conjunct and separate selves our largest
safety is with the former, the very fact that such opposition is
possible involves tragedy. One part of the nature becomes arrayed
against another. We must die to live. Our lower goods are found
incompatible with our higher. Pleasure, comfort, property, friends,
possibly life itself, have become hostile to our more inclusive aims
and must be cast aside. It is true that when the tragic antithesis is
presented and we can reach our higher goods only by loss of the lower,
hesitation is ruin. It is true too that on account of that element of
self-assertion to which I have drawn, attention, the genuine
sacrificer is ordinarily unaware of any such tragedy. But none the
less tragedy is there. To suppose it absent would strip sacrifice of
what we regard as most characteristic.
Nor can we pause here. Those who would call self-sacrifice a glorious
madness have still further justification. A leap into the dark we must
at least admit it to be, For trace it rationally as far as we may,
there always remains uncertainty at the close. There is, for example,
uncertainty about ultimate results. The mother toiling for her child,
and neglecting for its sake most of what would render her own life
rich, can never know that this child will grow up to power. The day
may come when she will wish it had died in childhood. The glory of her
action is bound up with this darkness. Were the soldier, marching to
the field, sure that his side would be victorious, he would be only
half a hero. The consequences of self-sacrifice can never be certain,
foreseen, calculable. There must be risk. Omit it, and the sacrifice
disappears. Indeed nothing in life which calls forth high admiration
is free from this touch of faith and courage, this movement into the
unknown. It is at the very heart of self-sacrifice.
But besides the unknown character of the result there is usually
uncertainty as regards the cost. The sacrificer does not give
according to measure. I do not say I will attend to this sick person
up to such and such a point, but when that point is reached I shall
have done enough. This would hardly be self-sacrifice. I rather say,
"Here I am. Take me, use me to the full, spend of me whatever you
need. How much that will be, I do not know." So there is an element of
darkness in ourselves.
And possibly I ought to mention a third variety of these
incalculabilities of sacrifice. We do not plan the case. A while ago,
meeting a literary man whose product is of much consequence to the
community and himself, I asked him how his book was coming on.
"Badly," he answered. "Just now an aged relative has fallen ill. There
is no other place where she can be properly disposed, and so she has
been brought to my house. I must care for her, my home will be much
broken up, and my work must be set aside." I said, "Is that your duty?
Have you not a more important obligation to your book?" But he
answered, "One cannot choose a duty." I did not fully agree. I think
we should carefully weigh duties, even if we do not choose them.
Morality would otherwise become the sport of accident. But I perceive
that in the last analysis no duty is made by ourselves. It is given us
by something more authoritative than we, something which we cannot
alter, fully estimate, or without damage evade. Necessity is laid upon
us, sometimes an invading necessity. We are walking our well-ordered
path, pursuing some dear aims, when harsh before us stands a waiting
duty, bidding us lay aside that in which we are engaged and take it. I
have said I believe a degree of scrutiny is needful here. We should
ask, what for? We should correlate the new duty with those already
pledged. And probably an interrupting duty is less often the one it is
well to follow than one which has had something of our time and care.
Few fresh calls can have the weighty claim of loyalty to obligation
already incurred. But, after all, that on which we finally decide has
not sprung from our own wishes. It subjects those wishes to itself.
Standing over against us, it summons us to do its bidding, and allows
us no more to be our own self-directed masters.
XII
Summing up, then, the jarring characteristics of self-sacrifice,--its
frequency, rationality, assertiveness, nearness to self--culture; yes,
and its darker traits of risk, immeasurability, and authoritativeness,
--does it not begin to appear that I have been calling it by a wrong
name? Self-sacrifice is a negative term. It lays stress on the thought
that I set myself aside, become in some way less than I was before. And
no doubt through all this intricate discussion certain belittlements
have been acknowledged, though these have also been shown to lie along
the path of largeness. There are, therefore, in self-sacrifice both
negative and positive elements. But why select its name from the
subordinate part? Why turn to the front its incidental negations? This
is topsy-turvy nomenclature. Better blot the word self-sacrifice from
our dictionaries. Devotion, service, love, dedication to a cause,
--these words mark its real nature and are the only descriptions of it
which its practicers will recognize. That damage to the abstract self
which chiefly impresses the outsider is something of which the
sacrificer is hardly aware. How exquisitely astonished are the men in
the parable when called to receive reward for their generous gifts!
"Lord, when saw we thee an hungered and fed thee, or thirsty and gave
thee drink? When saw we thee sick or in prison and came unto thee?"
They thought they had only been following their own desires.
Perhaps the most admirable case of self-sacrifice is that in which no
single person appears who is profited by our loss. The scholar, the
artist, the scientific man dedicate themselves to the interests of
undifferentiated humanity. They serve their undecipherable race, not
knowing who will obtain gains through their toils. In their sublime
benefactions they study the wants of no individual person, not even of
themselves. Yet, turn to a man of this type and try to call his
attention to the privations he endures, and what will be his answer?
"I have no coat? I have no dinner? I have little money? People do not
honor me as they honor others? Yes, I believe I lack these trifles.
But think what I possess! This great subject; or rather, it possesses
me. And it shall have of me whatever it requires."
In such service of the absolute is found the highest expression of
self-sacrifice, of social service, of self-realization. The doctrine
that though union with a reason and righteousness not exclusively our
own each of us may hourly be renewed is the very heart of ethics.
XIII
I have attempted to cut out a clear path through an ethical jungle
overgrown with the exuberance of human life. I have not succeeded, and
it is probably impossible to succeed. In the subject itself there is
paradox. Conflicting elements enter into the very constitution of a
person. To trace them even imperfectly one must be patient of
refinements, accessible to qualifications, and ever ready to admit the
opposite of what has been laboriously established. We all desire
through study to win a swift simplicity. But nature abhors simplicity:
she complicates; she forces those who would know to take pains, to
proceed cautiously, and to feel their way along from point to point.
This I have tried to do; and I believe that the inquiry, though
intricate, primarily scientific, and only partially successful, need
not altogether lack practical consequence. Our age is bewildered
between heroism and greed. To each it is drawn more powerfully than
any age preceding. Neither of the two does it quite comprehend. If we
can render the nobler somewhat more intelligible, we may increase the
confidence of those who now, half-ashamed, follow its glorious but
blindly compulsive call.
REFERENCES ON SELF-SACRIFICE
Spencer's Principles of Ethics, pt. i. ch. xi., xii.
Bradley's Appearance and Reality, p. 414-429.
Paulsen's Ethics, bk. ii. ch. 6.
Wundt's Facts of the Moral Life, ch. iii., Section 4 (g).
Sidgwick's Methods, concluding chapter.
Kidd's Social Evolution, ch. 5.
S. Bryant in Journal of Ethics, Apr. 1893.
Bradley in Journal of Ethics, Oct. 1894.
Mackenzie, in Journal of Ethics, Apr. 1895.
VII
NATURE AND SPIRIT
I
At this culmination of our long discussion, a discussion much confused
by its necessary mass of details, it may be well to pause a moment, to
fix attention on the great lines along which we have been moving, and
to mark the points on which they appear to converge. We have regarded
goodness as divided into two very unequal parts. The first two
chapters treated of goodness in general, a species which being shared
alike by persons and things is in no sense distinctive of persons. The
last four chapters have been given to the more complex task of
exploring the goodness of persons.
In things we found that goodness consists in having their manifold
parts drawn into integral wholeness. And this is true also of persons.
But the modes of organization in the two cases were so unlike as to
require long elucidation. Our conclusion would seem to be that while
goodness is everywhere expressive of organization, personal conduct is
good only when consciously organized, guided, and aimed at the
development of a social self. We have seen how self-consciousness lies
at the foundation of personality, sharply discriminating persons from
things. We have seen too that wherever it is present, the person
curiously directs himself, passing through all the varieties of
purposive activity which were catalogued in the chapter on self-
direction. But such activity implies a being of variable, not of fixed
powers, a being accordingly capable of enlargement, and with
possibilities in him which every moment renders real. This progressive
realization of himself, this development, he--so far as he is good--
consciously conducts. And finally we found in the person the strange
fact that he conceives of his good self as essentially in conjunction
with his fellow man, and recognizes that parted off and in separate
abstractness he is no person at all. Accordingly personal
organization, direction, enlargement, conjunction. Under our analysis
two antithetic worlds emerge, a world of nature and of spirit, the
former guided by blind forces, the latter self-managed. Unlike
spiritual beings, natural objects are under alien control; have not
the power of development, and when brought into close conjunction with
others are liable to disruption.
II
Accepting this vital distinction, we see that the work of spiritual
man will consist in progressively subjugating whatever natural powers
he finds within him and without, rendering them all expressive of
self-conscious purpose. for we men are not altogether spiritual; in us
two elements meet. Our spirituality is superposed on a natural basis.
Like things, we have our natural aptitudes, blind tendencies,
established functions of body and mind. These are all serviceable and
organic; but to become spiritual all need to be redeemed, or drawn
over into the field of consciousness, where our special stamp may be
set upon them. When we speak of a good act, we mean an act which shows
the results of such redemption, one whose every part has been studied
in relation to every other part, and has thus been made to bear our
own image and superscription.
And this is essentially the Christian ideal, that spirit shall be lord
of nature. I ought to reject my natural life, accounting it not my
life at all. Until shaped by myself, it is merely my opportunity for
life, material furnished, out of which my true and conscious life may
be constructed. Widely is this contrasted with the pagan conceptions,
where man appears with powers as fixed as the things around him.
Indeed, in many forms of paganism there is no distinction between
persons and things. They are blended. And such blending usually
operates to the disparagement of the person; for things being more
numerous, and their laws more urgent, the powers of man become lost in
those of nature. Or if distinction is made, and men in some dim
fashion become aware that they are different from things, still it is
the tendency of paganism to subordinate person to nature. The child is
sacrificed to the sun. The sun is not thought of as existing for the
child. From the Christian point of view everything seems turned upside
down. Man is absorbed in natural forces, natural forces are reverenced
as divine, and self-consciousness--if noticed at all--is regarded as
an impertinent accident.
In the Christian ideal all this is reversed. Man is called to be
master of himself, and therefore of all else. The many beautiful
adjustments of the natural world are thought to possess dignity only
so far as they accept the conscious purposes put by us in their
keeping. And in man himself goodness is held to exist only in
proportion as his conduct expresses fullness of self-consciousness,
fullness of direction, and fullness of conscious conjunction with
other persons. I do not see how we can escape this conclusion. The
careful argumentation through which the previous chapters have brought
us obliges us to count conduct valuable in proportion as it bears the
impress of self-conscious mind.
III
Yet it must be owned that during the last few centuries doubts have
arisen about the justice of this Christian ideal. The simple
conception of a world of spirit and a world of nature arrayed against
each other, the one of them exactly what the other is not, the world
of spirit the superior, the world of nature to be frowned on, used
possibly, but always in subordination to spiritual purposes,--this
view, dominant as it was in the Middle Ages, and still largely
influential, has been steadily falling into disrepute. There is even a
tendency in present estimates to reverse the ancient valuation and
allow superiority to nature. Such a transformation is strikingly
evident in those sensitive recorders of human ideals, the Fine Arts.
Let us see what at different times they have judged best worthy of
record.
Early painting dealt with man alone, or rather with persons; for
personality in its transcendent forms--saints, angels, God himself--
was usually preferred above little man. Except the spiritual, nothing
was regarded as of consequence. The principle of early painting might
be summed in the proud saying, "On earth there is nothing great but
man; in man there is nothing great but mind." It is true when man is
thus detached from nature he hardly appears to advantage or in his
appropriate setting. But the early painters would tolerate nothing
natural near their splendid persons. They covered their backgrounds
with gilding, so that a glory surrounded the entire figure, throwing
out the personality sharp and strong. Nothing broke its effect. But
after all, one comes to see that we inhabit a world; nature is
continually about us, and man really shows his eminence most fully
when standing dominant over nature. Early painting, accordingly, began
to set in a little landscape around the human figures, contrasting the
person with that which was not himself. But an independent interest
could not fail to spring up in these accessories. By degrees the
landscape is elaborated and the figure subordinated. The figure is
there by prescription, the landscape because people enjoy it. Nature
begins to assert her claims; and man, the eminent and worthy
representative of old ideals, retires from his ancient prominence.
When the Renaissance revolted against the teachings of the mediaeval
church, the disposition to return to nature was insolently strong.
Natural impulses were glorified, the physical world attracted
attention, and even began to be studied. Hitherto it had been thought
deserving of study only because in a few respects it was able to
minister to man. But in the Renaissance men studied it for its own
sake. Gradually the distinction between man and nature grew faint, so
that a kind of pantheism arose in which a general power, at once
natural and spiritual, appeared as the ruler of all. We individual men
emerge for a moment from this great central power, ultimately
relapsing into it. Nature had acquired coordinate, if not superior,
rights. Yet the full expression of this independent interest in nature
is more recent than is usually observed. Landscape painting goes back
but little beyond the year sixteen hundred. It is only two or three
centuries ago that painters discovered the physical world to be worthy
of representation for its own sake.
As the worth of nature thus became vindicated in painting, parallel
changes were wrought in the other arts. Arts less distinctly rational
began to assert themselves, and even to take the lead. The art most
characteristic of modern times, the one which most widely and
poignantly appeals to us, is music. But in music we are not distinctly
conscious of a meaning. Most of us in listening to music forget
ourselves under its lulling charms, abandon ourselves to its spell,
and by it are swept away, perhaps to the infinite, perhaps to an
obliteration of all clear thought. Is it not largely because we are so
hard pressed under the anxious conditions of modern life that music
becomes such an enormous solace and strength? I do not say that no
other factors have contributed to the vogue of music, but certainly it
is widely prized as an effective means of escape from ourselves. Music
too, though early known in calm and elementary forms, has within the
last two centuries been developed into almost a new art.
Of all the arts poetry is the most strikingly rational and articulate.
Its material is plain thought, plain words. We employ in it the
apparatus of conscious life. Poetry was therefore concerned in early
times entirely with things of the spirit. It dealt with persons, and
with them alone. It celebrated epic actions, recorded sagacious
judgments, or uttered in lyric song emotions primarily felt by an
individual, yet interpreting the common lot of man. But there has
occurred a great change in poetry too, a change notable during the
last century but initiated long before. Poetry has been growing
naturalistic, and is to-day disposed to reject all severance of body
and spirit. The great nature movement which we associate with the
names of Cowper, Burns, and Wordsworth, has withdrawn man's attention
from conscious responsibility, and has taught him to adore blind and
vast forces which he cannot fully comprehend. We all know the
refreshment and the deepening of life which this mystic new poetry has
brought. But it is hard to say whether poetry is nowadays a spiritual
or a natural art. Many of us would incline to the latter view, and
would hold that even in dealing with persons it treats them as
embodiments of natural forces. Our instincts and unguided passions,
the features which most identify us with the physical world, are
coming more and more to be the subjects of modern poetry.
IV
Nature, meanwhile, that part of the universe which is not consciously
guided, has become within a century our favorite field of scientific
study. The very word science is popularly appropriated to naturalistic
investigation. Of course this is a perversion. Originally it was
believed that the proper study of mankind was man. And probably we
should all still acknowledge that the study of personal structure is
as truly science as study of the structure of physical objects. Yet so
powerfully is the tide setting toward reverence for the unconscious
and the sub-conscious that science, our word for knowledge, has lost
its universality and has taken on an almost exclusively physical
character.
Perhaps there was only one farther step possible. Philosophy itself,
the study of mind, might be regarded as a study of the unconscious.
And this step has been taken. Books now bear the paradoxical title
"Philosophy of the Unconscious," and investigation of the sub-
conscious processes is perhaps the most distinctive trait of
philosophy to-day. More and more it is believed that we cannot
adequately explore a person without probing beneath consciousness. The
blind processes can no longer be ruled out. Nature and spirit cannot
be parted as our fathers supposed they might. Probably Kant is the
last great scholar who will ever try to hold that distinction firm,
and he is hardly successful. In spite of his vigorous antitheses,
hints of covert connection between the opposed forces are not absent.
Indeed, if the two are so widely parted as his usual language asserts,
it is hard to see how his ethics can have mundane worth. Curiously
enough too, at the very time when Kant was reviving this ancient
distinction, and offering it as the solid basis of personal and social
life, the opposite belief received its most clamorous announcement,
resounding through the civilized world in the teachings of Rousseau.
Rousseau warns us that the conscious constructions of man are full of
artifice and deceit, and lead to corruption and pain. Conscious
guidance should, consequently, be banished, and man should return to
the peace, the ease, and the certainty of nature.
V
Now I do not think it is worth while to blame or praise a movement so
vast as this. If it is folly to draw an indictment against a nation,
it is greater folly to indict all modern civilization. We must not say
that philosophy and the fine arts took a wrong turn at the
Renaissance,--at least it is useless to call on them now to turn back.
The world seldom turns back. It absorbs, it re-creates, it brings new
significance into the older thought. All progress, Goethe tells us, is
spiral,--coming out at the place where it was before, but higher up.
No, we cannot wisely blame or praise, but we may patiently study and
understand. That is what I am attempting to do here. The movement
described is no negligible accident of our time. It is world-wide, and
shows progress steadily in a single direction.
In order, however, to prove that such a change in moral estimates has
occurred, it was hardly necessary to survey the course of history. The
evidence lies close around us, and is found in the standards of the
society in which we move. Who are the people most prized? Are they the
most self-conscious? That should be the case if our long argument is
sound. Our preceding chapters would urge us to fill life with
consciousness. In proportion as consciousness droops, human goodness
becomes meagre; as our acts are filled with it, they grow excellent.
These are our theoretic conclusions, but the experience of daily life
does not bear them out. If, for example, I find the person who is
talking to me watches each word he utters, pauses again and again for
correction, choosing the determined word and rejecting the one which
instinctively comes to his lips, I do not trust what he says, or even
listen to it; while he is shaping his exact sentences I attend to
something else. In general, if a man's small actions impress us as
minutely planned, we turn from him. It is not the self-reflecting
persons, cautious of all they do, say, or think, who are popular. It
is rather those instinctively spontaneous creatures characterized by
abandon--men and women who let themselves go, and with all the wealth
of the world in them, allow it to come out of itself--that we take to
our hearts. We prize them for their want of deliberation. In short, we
give our unbiased endorsement not to the spiritual or consciously
guided person, but to him, on the contrary, who shows the closest
adjustment to nature.
VI
Yet even so, we have gone too far afield for evidence. First we
surveyed the ages, then we surveyed one another. But there is one
proof-spot nearer still. Let us survey ourselves. I am much mistaken
if there are not among my readers persons who have all their lives
suffered from self-consciousness. They have longed to be rid of it, to
be free to think of the other person, of the matter in hand. Instead
of this, their thoughts are forever reverting to their own share in
any affair. Too contemptible to be avowed, and more distressing than
almost any other species of suffering, excessive self-consciousness
shames us with our selfishness, yet will not allow us to turn from it.
When I go into company where everybody is spontaneous and free, easily
uttering what the occasion calls for, I can utter only what I call for
and not at all what the occasion asks. Between the two demands there
is always an awkward jar. When tortured by such experiences it does
not soothe to have others carelessly remark, "Oh, just be natural!"
That is precisely what we should like to be, but how? That little
point is continually left unexplained. Yet obviously self-
consciousness involves something like a deadlock. For how can one
consciously exert himself to be unconscious and try not to try? We
cannot arrange our lives so as to have no arrangement in them, and
when shaking hands with a friend, for example, be on our guard against
noticing. Once locked up in this vicious circle, we seem destined to
be prisoners forever. That is what constitutes the anguish of the
situation. The most tyrannical of jailers--one's self--is over us, and
from his bondage we are powerless to escape. The trouble is by no
means peculiar to our time, though probably commoner forty years ago
than at any other period of the world's history. But it had already
attracted the attention of Shakespeare, who bases on it one of his
greatest plays. When Hamlet would act, self-consciousness stands in
his way. The hindering process is described in the famous soliloquy
with astonishing precision and vividness, if only we substitute our
modern term "self-consciousness" for that which was its ancient
equivalent:--
"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action."
And such is our experience. We, too, have purposed all manner of
important and serviceable acts; but just as we were setting them in
execution, consideration fell upon us. We asked whether it was the
proper moment, whether he to whom it was to be done was really needy,
or were we the fit doer, or should it be done in this way or that. We
hesitated, and the moment was gone. Self-consciousness had again
demonstrated its incompetence for superintending a task. Many of us,
far from regarding self-consciousness as a ground of goodness, are
disposed to look upon it as a curse.
VII
Before, however, attempting to discover whether our theoretic
conclusions may he drawn into some sort of living accord with these
results of experience, let us probe a little more minutely into these
latter, and try to learn what reasons there may be for this very
general distrust of self-consciousness as a guide. Hitherto I have
exhibited that distrust as a fact. We always find it so; our neighbors
find it so, the ages have found it so. But why? I have not pointed out
precisely the reasons for the continual fact. Let me devote a page or
two to rational diagnosis.
To begin with, I suppose it will be conceded that we really cannot
guide ourselves through and through. There are certain large tracts of
life totally unamenable to consciousness.
Of our two most important acts, and those by which the remaining ones
are principally affected, birth and death, the one is necessarily
removed from conscious guidance, and the other is universally
condemned if so guided. We do not--as we have previously seen--happen
to be present at our birth, and so are quite cut off from controlling
that. Yet the conditions of birth very considerably shape everything
else in life. We cannot, then, be purely spiritual; it is impossible.
We must be natural beings at our beginning; and at the other end the
state of things is largely similar, for we are not allowed to fix the
time of our departure. The Stoics were. "If the house smokes," they
said, "leave it." When life is no longer worth while, depart. But
Christianity will not allow this. Death must be a natural affair, not
a spiritual. I am to wait till a wandering bacillus alights in my
lung. He will provide a suitable exit for me. But neither I nor my
neighbors must decide my departure. Let laws of nature reign.
And if these two tremendous events are altogether removed from
conscious guidance, many others are but slightly amenable to it. The
great organic processes both of mind and body are only indirectly, or
to a partial extent, under the control of consciousness. A few
persons, I believe, can voluntarily suspend the beating of their
hearts. They are hardly to be envied. The majority of us let our
hearts alone, and they work better than if we tried to work them.
Though it is true that we can control our breathing, and that we
occasionally do so, this also in general we wisely leave to natural
processes. A similar state of affairs we find when we turn to the mind
itself. The association of ideas, that curious process by which one
thought sticks to another and through being thus linked draws after it
material for use in all our intellectual constructions, goes on for
the most part unguided. It would be plainly useless, therefore, to
treat our great distinction as something hard and fast. Nature and
spirit may be contrasted; they cannot be sundered. Spirit removed from
nature would become impotent, while nature would then proceed on a
meaningless career.
Then too there are all sorts of degrees in consciousness. No man was
ever so conscious of himself and his acts that he could not be more
so. When introspection is causing us our sharpest distress, it may
still be rendered more minute. That is one cause of its peculiar
anguish. We are always uncertain whether our troubles have not arisen
from too little self-consciousness, and we whip ourselves into greater
nicety and elaborateness of personal observation. Varying through a
multitude of degrees, the fullness of consciousness is never reached.
A more thorough exercise of it is always possible. At the last, nature
must be admitted as a partner in the control of our lives, and her
share in that partnership the present age believes to be a large one.
VIII
For could we always consciously steer our conduct, we should be unwise
to do so. Consciousness hinders action. Acts are excellent in
proportion as they are sure, swift, and easy. When we undertake
anything, we seek to do exactly that thing, reach precisely that end,
and not merely to hit something in the neighborhood. Occasions, too,
run fast, and should be seized on the minute. Action is excellent only
when it meets the urgent and evasive demands of life. Faltering and
hesitation are fatal. Nor must action unduly weary. Good conduct
effects its results with the least necessary expenditure of effort.
When there are so many demands pressing upon us, we should not allow
ourselves to become exhausted by a single act, but should keep
ourselves fresh for further needs. Efficient action, then, is sure,
swift, and easy.
Now the peculiarity of self-consciousness is that it hinders all this
and makes action inaccurate, slow, and fatiguing. Inaccuracy is almost
certain. When we study how something is to be done, we are apt to lay
stress on certain features of the situation, and not to bring others
into due prominence. It is difficult separately to correlate the many
elements which go to make up a desired result. Sometimes we become
altogether puzzled and for the moment the action ceases. When I have
had occasion to drive a screw in some unusual and inconvenient place,
after setting the blade of the screw-driver into the slot I have asked
myself, "In which direction does this screw turn?" But the longer I
ask, the more uncertain I am. My only solution lies in trusting my
hand, which knows a great deal more about the matter than I. When we
once begin to meditate how a word is spelled, how helpless we are! It
is better to drop the question, and pick up the dictionary. In all
such cases consideration tends to confuse.
It tends to delay, too, as everybody knows. To survey all the
relations in which a given act may stand, to balance their relative
gains and losses, and with full sight to decide on the course which
offers the greatest profit, would require the years of Methuselah. But
at what point shall we cut the process short? To obtain full
knowledge, we should pass in review all that relates to the act we
propose; should inquire what its remoter consequences will be, and how
it will affect not merely myself, my cousin, my great-grandchild, but
the man in the next street, city, or state. There is no stopping. To
carry conscious verification over a moderate range is slow business.
If on the impulse of occasion we dash off an action unreflectingly,
life will be swift and simple. If we try to anticipate all
consequences of our task it will be slow and endless.
Nor need I dwell on the fatigue such conscious work involves. In
writing a letter, we usually sit down before our paper, our minds
occupied with what we would say. We allow our fingers to stroll of
themselves across the page, and we hardly notice whether they move or
not. If anybody should ask, "How did you write the letter _s?_" we
should be obliged to look on the paper to see. But suppose, instead
of writing in this way, I come to the task to-morrow determined to
superintend all the work consciously. How shall I hold my pen in the
best possible manner? How shape this letter so that each of its curves
gets its exact bulge? How give the correct slant to what is above or
below the line? I will not ask how long a time a letter prepared in
this fashion would require, or whether when written it would be fit to
read, for I wish to fix attention on the exhaustion of the writer. He
certainly could endure such fatigue for no more than a single epistle.
The schoolboy, when forced to it, seldom holds out for more than half
a page, though he employs every contortion of shoulder, tongue, and
leg to ease and diversify the struggle.
A dozen years ago some nonsense verses were running through the
papers,--verses pointing out with humorous precision the very
infelicities of conscious control to which I am now directing
attention. They put the case thus:--
"The centipede was happy, quite,
Until the toad for fun
Said, 'Pray which leg comes after which?'
This worked her mind to such a pitch
She lay distracted in a ditch,
Considering how to run."
And no wonder! Problems so complex as this should be left to the
disposal of nature, and not be drawn over into the region of spiritual
guidance. But the complexities of the centipede are simple matters
when compared with the elaborate machinery of man. The human mind
offers more alternatives in a minute than does the centipede in a
lifetime. If spiritual guidance is inadequate to the latter, and is
found merely to hinder action, why is not the blind control of nature
necessary for the former also? Our age believes it is and, ever
disparaging the conscious world, attaches steadily greater consequence
to the unconscious. "It is the unintelligent me," writes Dr. O. W.
Holmes, "stupid as an idiot, that has to try a thing a thousand times
before he can do it and then never knows how he does it, that at last
does it well. We have to educate ourselves through the pretentious
claims of intellect into the humble accuracy of instinct; and we end
at last by acquiring the dexterity, the perfection, the certainty
which those masters of arts, the bee and the spider, inherit from
nature."
REFERENCES ON NATURE AND SPIRIT
Green's Prolegomena, Section 297.
Dewey's Study of Ethics, Section xli.
Seth's Study of Ethical Principles, pt. i. ch. 3, Section 6.
Alexander's Moral Order and Progress, bk. i. ch. i. Section iii.
Earle's English Prose, p. 490-500.
Palmer in The Forum, Jan. 1893.
VII
THE THREE STAGES OF GOODNESS
I
Such is the mighty argument conducted through several centuries in
behalf of nature against spirit as a director of conduct. I have
stated it at length both because of its own importance and because it
is in seeming conflict with the results of my early chapters. But
those results stand fast. They were reached with care. To reject them
would be to obliterate all distinction between persons and things.
Self-consciousness is the indisputable prerogative of persons. Only so
far as we possess it and apply it in action do we rise above the
impersonal world around. And even if we admit the contention in behalf
of nature as substantially sound, we are not obliged to accept it as
complete. It may be that neither nature nor spirit can be dispensed
with in the supply of human needs. Each may have its characteristic
office; for though in the last chapter I have been setting forth the
superiorities of natural guidance, in spiritual guidance there are
advantages too, advantages of an even more fundamental kind. Let us
see what they are.
They may be summarily stated in a single sentence: consciousness alone
gives fresh initiative. Disturbing as the influence of consciousness
confessedly is, on its employment depends every possibility of
progress. Natural action is regular, constant, conformed to a pattern.
In the natural world event follows event in a fixed order, Under the
same conditions the same result appears an indefinite number of times.
The most objectionable form of this rigidity is found in mechanism. I
sometimes hear ladies talking about "real lace" and am on such
occasions inclined to speak of my real boots. They mean, I find, not
lace that is the reverse of ghostly, but simply that which bears the
impress of personality. It is lace which is made by hand and shows the
marks of hand work. Little irregularities are in it, contrasting it
with the machine sort, where every piece is identical with every other
piece. It might be more accurately called personal lace. The machine
kind is no less real--unfortunately--but mechanism is hopelessly dull,
says the same thing day after day, and never can say anything else.
Now though this coarse form of monotonous process nowhere appears in
what we call the world of nature, a restriction substantially similar
does; for natural objects vary slowly and within the narrowest limits.
Outside such orderly variations, they are subjected to external and
distorting agencies effecting changes in them regardless of their
gains. Branches of trees have their wayward and subtle curvatures, and
are anything but mechanical in outline. But none the less are they
helpless, unprogressive, and incapable of learning. The forces which
play upon them, being various, leave a truly varied record. But each
of these forces was an invariable one, and their several influences
cannot be sorted, judged, and selected by the tree with reference to
its future growth. Criticism and choice have no place here, and
accordingly anything like improvement from year to year is impossible.
The case of us human beings would be the same if we were altogether
managed by the sure, swift, and easy forces of nature. Progress would
cease. We should move on our humdrum round as fixedly constituted, as
submissive to external influence, and with as little exertion of
intelligence as the dumb objects we behold. Every power within us
would be actual, displayed in its full extent, and involving no
variety of future possibility. We should live altogether in the
present, and no changes would be imagined or sought. From this dull
routine we are saved by the admixture of consciousness. For a gain so
great we may well be ready to encounter those difficulties of
conscious guidance which my last chapter detailed. Let the process of
advance be inaccurate, slow, and severe, so only there be advance. For
progress no cost is too great. I am sometimes inclined to congratulate
those who are acute sufferers through self-consciousness, because to
them the door of the future is open. The instinctive, uncritical
person, who takes life about as it comes, and with ready acceptance
responds promptly to every suggestion that calls, may be as popular as
the sunshine, but he is as incapable of further advance. Except in
attractiveness, such a one is usually in later life about what he was
in youth; for progress is a product of forecasting intelligence. When
any new creation is to be introduced, only consciousness can prepare
its path.
Evidently, then, there are strong advantages in guidance through the
spirit. But natural guidance has advantages no less genuine. Human
life is a complex and demanding affair, requiring for its ever-
enlarging good whatever strength can be summoned from every side.
Probably we must abandon that magnificent conception of our ancestors,
that spirit is all in all and nature unimportant. But must we, in
deference to the temper of our time, eliminate conscious guidance
altogether? May not the disparagement of recent ages have arisen in
reaction against attempts to push conscious guidance into regions
where it is unsuitable? Conceivably the two agencies may be
supplementary. Possibly we may call on our fellow of the natural world
for aid in spiritual work. The complete ideal, at any rate, of good
conduct unites the swiftness, certainty, and ease of natural action
with the selective progressiveness of spiritual. Till such a
combination is found, either conduct will be insignificant or great
distress of self-consciousness will be incurred. Both of these evils
will be avoided if nature can be persuaded to do the work which we
clearly intend. That is what goodness calls on us to effect. To
showing the steps through which it may be reached the remainder of
this chapter will be given.
II
Let us, then, take a case of action where we are trying to create a
new power, to develop ourselves in some direction in which we have not
hitherto gone. For such an undertaking consciousness is needed, but
let us see how far we are able to hand over its work to
unconsciousness. Suppose, when entirely ignorant of music, I decide to
learn to play the piano. Evidently it will require the minutest
watchfulness. Approaching the strange instrument with some uneasiness,
I try to secure exactly that position on the stool which will allow my
arms their proper range along the keyboard. There is difficulty in
getting my sheet of music to stand as it should. When it is adjusted,
I examine it anxiously. What is that little mark? Probably the note C.
Among these curious keys there must also be a C. I look up and down.
There it is! But can I bring my finger down upon it at just the right
angle? That is accomplished, and gradually note after note is
captured, until I have conquered the entire score. If now during my
laborious performance a friend enters the room, he might well say, "I
do not like spiritual music. Give me the natural kind which is not
consciously directed." But let him return three years later. He will
find me sitting at the piano quite at my ease, tossing off notes by
the unregarded handful. He approaches and enters into conversation
with me. I do not cease my playing; but as I talk, I still keep my
mind free enough to observe the swaying boughs outside the window and
to enjoy the fragrance of the flowers which my friend has brought. The
musical phrases which drop from my fingers appear to regulate
themselves and to call for little conscious regard.
Yet if my friend should try to show me how mistaken I had been in the
past, attempting to manage consciously what should have been left to
nature, if he should eulogize my natural action now and contrast it
with my former awkwardness, he would plainly be in error. My present
naturalness is the result of long spiritual endeavor, and cannot be
had on cheaper terms; and the unconsciousness which is now noticeable
in me is not the same thing as that which was with me when I began to
play. It is true the incidental hardships connected with my first
attack on the piano have ceased. I find myself in possession of a new
and seemingly unconscious power. An automatic train of movements has
been constructed which I now direct as a whole, its parts no longer
requiring special volitional prompting. But I still direct it, only
that a larger unit has been constituted for consciousness to act upon.
The naturalness which thus becomes possible is accordingly of an
altogether new sort; and since the result is a completer expression of
conscious intention, it may as truly be called spiritual as natural.
III
It has now become plain that our early reckoning of actions as either
natural or spiritual was too simple and incomplete. Conduct has three
stages, not two. Let us get them clearly in mind. At the beginning of
life we are at the beck and call of every impulse, not having yet
attained reflective command of ourselves. This first stage we may
rightly call that of nature or of unconsciousness, and manifestly most
of us continue in it to some extent and as regards certain tracts of
action throughout life. Then reflection is aroused; we become aware of
what we are doing. The many details of each act and the relations
which surround it come separately into conscious attention for
assessment, approval, or rejection. This is the stage of spirit, or
consciousness. But it is not the final stage. As we have seen in our
example, a stage is possible when action runs swiftly to its intended
end, but with little need of conscious supervision. This mechanized,
purposeful action presents conduct in its third stage, that of second
nature or negative consciousness. As this third is least understood,
is often confused with the first, and yet is in reality the complete
expression of the moral ideal and of that reconciliation of nature and
spirit of which we are in search, I will devote a few pages to its
explanation.
The phrase negative consciousness describes its character most
exactly, though the meaning is not at once apparent. Positive
consciousness marks the second stage. There we are obliged to think of
each point involved, in order to bring it into action. In piano-
playing, for example, I had to study my seat at the piano, the music
on the rack, the letters of the keyboard, the position of my fingers,
and the coordination of all these with one another. To each such
matter a separate and positive attention is given. But even at the
last, when I am playing at my ease, we cannot say that consciousness
is altogether absent. I am conscious of the harmony, and if I do not
direct, I still verify results. As an entire phrase of music rolls off
my rapid fingers, I judge it to be good. But if one of the notes
sticks, or I perceive that the phrase might be improved by a slightly
changed stress, I can check my spontaneous movements and correct the
error. There is therefore a watchful, if not a prompting,
consciousness at work. It is true that, the first note started, all
the others follow of themselves in natural sequence. Though I withdraw
attention from my fingers, they run their round as a part of the
associated train. But if they go awry, consciousness is ready with its
inhibition. I accordingly call this the stage of negative
consciousness. In it consciousness is not employed as a positive
guiding force, but the moment inhibition or check is required for
reaching the intended result, consciousness is ready and asserts
itself in the way of forbiddal. This third stage, therefore, differs
from the first through having its results embody a conscious purpose;
from the second, through having consciousness superintend the process
in a negative and hindering, rather than in a positive and prompting
way. It is the stage of habit. I call it second nature because it is
worked, not by original instincts, but by a new kind of associative
mechanism which must first be laboriously constructed.
Years ago when I began to teach at Harvard College, we used to regard
our students as roaring animals, likely to destroy whatever came in
their way. We instructors were warned to keep the doors of our lecture
rooms barred. As we came out, we must never fail to lock them. So
always in going to a lecture, as I passed through the stone entry and
approached the door my hand sought my pocket, the key came out, was
inserted in the keyhole, turned, was withdrawn, fell back into my
pocket, and I entered the room. This series of acts repeated day after
day had become so mechanized that if on entering the room I had been
asked whether on that particular day I had really unlocked the door, I
could not have told. The train took care of itself and I was not
concerned in it sufficiently for remembrance. Yet it remained my act.
On one or two occasions, after shoving in the key in my usual
unconscious fashion, I heard voices in the room and knew that it would
be inappropriate to enter. Instantly I stopped and checked the
remainder of the train. Habitual though the series of actions was, and
ordinarily executed without conscious guidance, it as a whole was
aimed at a definite end. If this were unattainable, the train stopped.
All are aware how large a part is played by such mechanization of
conduct. Without it, life could not go on. When a man walks to the
door, he does not decide where to set his foot, what shall be the
length of his step, how he shall maintain his balance on the foot that
is down while the other is raised. These matters were decided when he
was a child. In those infant years which seem to us intellectually so
stationary, a human being is probably making as large acquisitions as
at any period of his later life. He is testing alternatives and
organizing experience into ordered trains. But in the rest of us a
consolidation substantially similar should be going on in some section
of our experience as long as we live. For this is the way we develop:
not the total man at once, but this year one tract of conduct is
surveyed, judged, mechanized; and next year another goes through the
same maturing process. Not until such mechanization has been
accomplished is the conduct truly ours. When, for example, I am
winning the power of speech, I gradually cease to study exactly the
word I utter, the tone in which it is enunciated, how my tongue, lips,
and teeth shall be adjusted in reference to one another. While
occupied with these things, I am no speaker. I become such only when,
the moment I think of a word, the actions needed for its utterance set
themselves in motion. With them I have only a negative concern.
Indeed, as we grow maturer of speech, collocations of words stick
naturally together and offer themselves to our service. When we
require a certain range of words from which to draw our means of
communication, there they stand ready. We have no need to rummage the
dimness of the past for them. Mechanically they are prepared for our
service.
Of course this does not imply that at one period we foolishly believed
consciousness to be an important guide, but subsequently becoming
wiser, discarded its aid. On the contrary, the mechanization of second
nature is simply a mode of extending the influence of consciousness
more widely. The conclusions of our early lectures were sound. The
more fully expressive conduct can be of a self-conscious personality,
so much the more will it deserve to be called good. But in order that
it may in any wide extent receive this impress of personal life, we
must summon to our aid agencies other than spiritual. The more we
mechanize conduct the better. That is what maturing ourselves means.
When we say that a man has acquired character, we mean that he has
consciously surveyed certain large tracts of life, and has decided
what in those regions it is best to do. There, at least, he will no
longer need to deliberate about action. As soon as a case from this
region presents itself, some electric button in his moral organism is
touched, and the whole mechanism runs off in the surest, swiftest,
easiest possible way. Thus his consciousness is set free to busy
itself with other affairs. For in this third stage we do not so much
abandon consciousness as direct it upon larger units; and this not
because smaller units do not deserve attention, but because they have
been already attended to. Once having decided what is our best mode of
action in regard to them, we wisely turn them over to mechanical
control.
IV
Such is the nature of moral habit. Before goodness can reach
excellence, it must be rendered habitual. Consideration, the mark of
the second stage, disappears in the third. We cannot count a person
honest so long as he has to decide on each occasion whether to take
advantage of his neighbor. Long ago he should have disciplined himself
into machine-like action as regards these matters, so that the
dishonest opportunity would be instinctively and instantly dismissed,
the honest deed appearing spontaneously. That man has not an amiable
character who is obliged to restrain his irritation, and through all
excitement and inner rage curbs himself courageously. Not until
conduct is spontaneous, rooted in a second nature, does it indicate
the character of him from whom it proceeds.
That unconsciousness is necessary for the highest goodness is a
cardinal principle in the teaching of Jesus. Other teachers of his
nation undertook clearly to survey the entirety of human life, to
classify its situations and coolly to decide the amount of good and
evil contained in each. Righteousness according to the Pharisees was
found in conscious conformity to these decisions. Theirs was the
method of casuistry, the method of minute, critical, and instructed
judgment. The fields of morality and the law were practically
identified, goodness becoming externalized and regarded as everywhere
substantially the same for one man as for another. Pharisaism, in
short, stuck in the second stage. Jesus emphasized the unconscious and
subjective factor. He denounced the considerate conduct of the
Pharisees as not righteousness at all. It was mere will-worship. Jesus
preached a religion of the heart, and taught that righteousness must
become an individual passion, similar to the passions of hunger and
thirst, if it would attain to any worth. So long as evil is easy and
natural for us, and good difficult, we are evil. We must be born
again. We must attain a new nature. Our right hand must not know what
our left hand does. We must become as little children, if we would
enter into the kingdom of heaven.
The chief difficulty in comprehending this doctrine of the three
stages lies in the easy confusion of the first and the third. Jesus
guards against this, not bidding us to be or to remain children, but
to become such. The unconsciousness and simplicity of childhood is the
goal, not the starting-point. The unconsciousness aimed at is not of
the same kind as that with which we set out. In early life we catch
the habits of our home or even derive our conduct from hereditary
bias. We begin, therefore, as purely natural creatures, not asking
whether the ways we use are the best. Those ways are already fixed in
the usages of speech, the etiquettes of society, the laws of our
country. These things make up the uncriticised warp and woof of our
lives, often admirably beautiful lives. When speaking in my last
chapter of the way in which our age has come to eulogize guidance by
natural conditions, I might have cited as a striking illustration the
prevalent worship of childhood. Only within the last century has the
child cut much of a figure in literature. He is an important enough
figure to-day, both in and out of books. In him nature is displayed
within the spiritual field, nature with the possibilities of spirit,
but those possibilities not yet realized. We accordingly reverence the
child and delight to watch him. How charming he is, graceful in
movement, swift of speech, picturesque in action! Enviable little
being! The more so because he is able to retain his perfection for so
brief a time.
But we all know the unhappy period from seven to fourteen when he who
formerly was all grace and spontaneity discovers that he has too many
arms and legs. How disagreeable the boy then becomes! Before, we liked
to see him playing about the room. Now we ask why he is allowed to
remain. For he is a ceaseless disturber; constantly noisy and
constantly aware of making a noise, his excuses are as bad as his
indiscretions. He cannot speak without making some awkward blunder. He
is forever asking questions without knowing what to do with the
answers. A confused and confusing creature! We say he has grown
backward. Where before he was all that is estimable, he has become all
that we do not wish him to be.
All that _we_ do not wish him to be, but certainly much more what God
wishes him to be. For if we could get rid of our sense of annoyance,
we should see that he is here reaching a higher stage, coming into his
heritage and obtaining a life of his own. Formerly he lived merely the
life of those about him. He laid a self-conscious grasp on nothing of
his own. When now at length he does lay that grasp, we must permit him
to be awkward, and to us disagreeable. We should aid him through the
inaccurate, slow, and fatiguing period of his existence until, having
tested many tracts of life and learned in them how to mechanize
desirable conduct, he comes back on their farther side to a childhood
more beautiful than the original. Many a man and woman possesses this
disciplined childhood through life. Goodness seems the very atmosphere
they breathe, and everything they do to be exactly fitting. Their acts
are performed with full self-expression, yet without strut or
intrusion of consciousness. Whatever comes from them is happily
blended and organized into the entirety of life. Such should be our
aim. We should seek to be born again, and not to remain where we were
originally born.
V
In what has now been said there is a good deal of comfort for those
who suffer the pains of self-consciousness, previously described. They
need not seek a lower degree of self-consciousness, but only to
distribute more wisely what they now possess. In fullness of
consciousness they may well rejoice, recognizing its possession as a
power. But they should take a larger unit for its exercise. In meeting
a friend, for example, we are prone to think of ourselves, how we are
speaking or poising our body. But suppose we transfer our
consciousness to the subject of our talk, and allow ourselves a hearty
interest in that. Leaving the details of speech and posture to
mechanized past habits, we may turn all the force of our conscious
attention on the fresh issues of the discussion. With these we may
identify ourselves, and so experience the enlargement which new
materials bring. When we were studying the intricacies of self-
sacrifice, we found that the generous man is not so much the self-
denier or even the self-forgetter, but rather he who is mindful of his
larger self. He turns consciousness from his abstract and isolated
self and fixes it upon his related and conjunct self. But that is a
process which may go on everywhere. Our rule should be to withdraw
attention from isolated minutiae, for which a glance is sufficient.
Giving merely that glance, we may then leave them to themselves.
Encouraging them to become mechanized, we should use these mechanized
trains in the higher ranges of living. The cure for self-consciousness
is not suppression, but the turning of it upon something more
significant.
VI
Every habit, however, requires perpetual adjustment, or it may rule us
instead of allowing us instead to rule through it. We do well to let
alone our mechanized trains while they do not lead us into evil. So
long as they run in the right direction, instincts are better than
intentions. But repeatedly we need to study results,--and see if we
are arriving at the goal where we would be. If not, then habit
requires readjustment. From such negative control a habit should never
be allowed to escape. This great world of ours does not stand still.
Every moment its conditions are altering. Whatever action fits it now
will be pretty sure to be a slight misfit next year. No one can be
thoroughly good who is not a flexible person, capable of drawing back
his trains, reexamining them, and bringing them into better adjustment
to his purposes.
It is meaningless, then, to ask whether we should be intuitive and
spontaneous, or considerate and deliberate. There is no such
alternative. We need both dispositions. We should seek to attain a
condition of swift spontaneity, of abounding freedom, of the absence
of all restraint, and should not rest satisfied with the conditions in
which we were born. But we must not suffer that even the new nature
should be allowed to become altogether natural. It should be but the
natural engine for spiritual ends, itself repeatedly scrutinized with
a view to their better fulfillment.
VII
The doctrine of the three stages of conduct, elaborated in this
chapter, explains some curious anomalies in the bestowal of praise,
and at the same time receives from that doctrine farther elucidation.
When is conduct praiseworthy? When may we fairly claim honor from our
fellows and ourselves? There is a ready answer. Nothing is
praiseworthy which is not the result of effort. I do not praise a lady
for her beauty, I admire her. The athlete's splendid body I envy,
wishing that mine were like it. But I do not praise him. Or does the
reader hesitate; and while acknowledging that admiration and envy may
be our leading feelings here, think that a certain measure of praise
is also due? It may be. Perhaps the lady has been kind enough by care
to heighten her beauty. Perhaps those powerful muscles are partly the
result of daily discipline. These persons, then, are not undeserving
of praise, at least to the extent that they have used effort. Seeing a
collection of china, I admire the china, but praise the collector. It
is hard to obtain such pieces. Large expense is required, long
training too, and constant watchfulness. Accordingly I am interested
in more than the collection. I give praise to the owner. A learned man
we admire, honor, envy, but also praise. His wisdom is the result of
effort.
Plainly, then, praise and blame are attributable exclusively to
spiritual beings. Nature is unfit for honor. We may admire her, may
wish that our ways were like hers, and envy her great law-abiding
calm. But it would be foolish to praise her, or even to blame when her
volcanoes overwhelm our friends. We praise spirit only, conscious
deeds. Where self-directed action forces its path to a worthy goal, we
rightly praise the director.
Now, if all this is true, there seems often-times a strange
unsuitableness in praise. We may well decline to receive it. To praise
some of our good qualities, pretty fundamental ones too, often strikes
us as insulting. You are asked a sudden question and put in a
difficult strait for an answer. "Yes," I say, "but you actually did
tell the truth. I wish to congratulate you. You were successful and
deserve much praise." But who would feel comfortable under such
eulogy? And why not? If telling the truth is a spiritual excellence
and the result of effort, why should it not be praised? But there lies
the trouble. I assumed that to be a truth-teller required strain on
your part. In reality it would have required greater strain for
falsehood. It might then seem that I should praise those who are not
easily excellent, since I am forbidden to praise those who are. And
something like this seems actually approved. If a boy on the street,
who has been trained hardly to distinguish truth from lies, some day
stumbles into a bit of truth, I may justly praise him. "Splendid
fellow! No word of falsehood there!" But when I see the father of his
country bearing his little hatchet, praise is unfit; for George
Washington cannot tell a lie.
Absurd as this conclusion appears, I believe it states our soundest
moral judgment; for praise never escapes an element of disparagement.
It implies that the unexpected has happened. If I praise a man for
learning, it is because I had supposed him ignorant; if for helping
the unfortunate, I hint that I did not anticipate that he would regard
any but himself. Wherever praise appears, we cannot evade the
suggestion that excellence is a matter of surprise. And as nobody
likes to be thought ill-adapted to excellence, praise may rightly be
resented.
It is true, there is a group of cases where praise seems differently
employed. We can praise those whom we recognize as high and lifted up.
"Sing praises unto the Lord, sing praises," the Psalmist says. And our
hearts respond. We feel it altogether appropriate. We do not disparage
God by daily praise. No, but the element of disparagement is still
present, for we are really disparaging ourselves. That is the true
significance of praise offered to the confessedly great. For them, the
praise is inappropriate. But it is, nevertheless, appropriate that it
should be offered by us little people who stand below and look up.
Praising the wise man, I really declare my ignorance to be so great
that I have difficulty in conceiving myself in his place. For me, it
would require long years of forbidding work before I could attain to
his wisdom. And even in the extreme form of this praise of superiors,
substantially the same meaning holds. We praise God in order to abase
ourselves. Him we cannot really praise. That we understand at the
start. He is beyond commendation. Excellence covers him like a
garment, and is not attained, like ours, by struggle through
obstacles. Yet this difference between him and us we can only express
by trying to imagine ourselves like him, and saying how difficult such
excellence would then be. We have here, therefore, a sort of reversed
praise, where the disparagement which praise always carries falls
exclusively on the praiser. And such cases are by no means uncommon,
cases in which there is at least a pretense on the praiser's part of
setting himself below the one praised. But praise usually proceeds
down from above, and then, implicitly, we disparage him whom we
profess to exalt.
Nor do I see how this is to be avoided; for praise belongs to goodness
gained by effort, while excellence is not reached till effort ceases
in second nature. To assert through praise that goodness is still a
struggle is to set the good man back from our third stage to our
second. In fact by the time he really reaches excellence praise has
lost its fitness, goodness now being easier than badness, and no
longer something difficult, unexpected, and demanding reward. For this
reason those persons are usually most greedy of praise who have a
rather low opinion of themselves. Being afraid that they are not
remarkable, they are peculiarly delighted when people assure them that
they are. Accordingly the greatest protection against vanity is pride.
The proud man, assured of his powers, hears the little praisers and is
amused. How much more he knows about it than they! Inner worth stops
the greedy ear. When we have something to be vain about, we are seldom
vain.
VIII
But if all this is true, why should praise be sweet? In candor most of
us will own that there is little else so desired. When almost every
other form of dependence is laid by, to our secret hearts the good
words of neighbors are dear. And well they may be! Our pleasure
testifies how closely we are knitted together. We cannot be satisfied
with a separated consciousness, but demand that the consciousness of
all shall respond to our own. A glorious infirmity then! And the
peculiar sweetness which praise brings is grounded in the
consciousness of our weakness. In certain regions of my life, it is
true, goodness has become fairly natural; and there of course praise
strikes me as ill-adjusted and distasteful. I do not like to have my
manners praised, my honesty, or my diligence. But there are other
tracts where I know I am still in the stage of conscious effort. In
this extensive region, aware of my feebleness and hearing an inward
call to greater heights, it will always be cheering to hear those
about me say, "Well done!" Of course in saying this they will
inevitably hint that I have not yet reached an end, and their praises
will displease unless I too am ready to acknowledge my incompleteness.
But when this is acknowledged, praise is welcome and invigorating. I
suspect we deal in it too little. If imagination were more active, and
we were more willing to enter sympathetically the inner life of our
struggling and imperfect comrades, we should bestow it more liberally.
Occasion is always at hand. None of us ever quite passes beyond the
deliberate, conscious, and praise-deserving line. In some parts of our
being we are farther advanced, and may there be experiencing the peace
and assurance of a considerable second nature. But there too perpetual
verification is necessary. And so many tracts remain unsubdued or
capable of higher cultivation that throughout our lives, perhaps on
into eternity, effort will still find room for work, and suitable
praises may attend it.
REFERENCES ON THE THREE STAGES OF GOODNESS
James's Psychology, ch. iv.
Bain's Emotions and the Will, ch. ix.
Wundt's Facts of the Moral Life, ch. iii.
Stephen's Science of Ethics, ch. vii. Section iii.
Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory, pt. ii. bk. i. ch. iii.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Nature of Goodness, by George Herbert Palmer
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