LIV.
Moral Institutions.
This world of purposes and activities is differentiated into various institutions. The child is born as a member of a family; as he grows up he finds that others have possessions which he must respect, that is, he runs upon the institution of property. As he grows still older, he finds persons outside of the family of whose actions he must take account as respects his own: society, in the limited sense as meaning relations of special intimacy or acquaintanceship. Then he finds the political institutions; the city, state and nation. He finds an educational institution, the school, the college; religious institutions, the church, etc., etc. Everywhere he finds men having common wants and thus proposing common ends and using coöperative modes of action. To these organized modes of action, with their reference to common interests and purposes, he must adjust his activities; he must take his part therein, if he acts at all, though it be only negatively or hostilely, as in evil conduct. These institutions are morality real and objective; the individual becomes moral as he shares in this moral world, and takes his due place in it.
Institutions, then, are organized modes of action, on the basis of the wants and interests which unite men. They differ as the family from the town, the church from the state, according to the scope and character of the wants from which they spring. They are not bare facts like objects of knowledge; they are practical, existing for the sake of, and by means of the will—as execution of ideas which have interest. Because they are expressions of common purposes and ideas, they are not merely private will and intelligence, but, in the literal sense, public will and reason.
The moral endeavor of man thus takes the form not of isolated fancies about right and wrong, not of attempts to frame a morality for himself, not of efforts to bring into being some praiseworthy ideal never realized; but the form of sustaining and furthering the moral world of which he is a member. Since the world is one of action, and not of contemplation like the world of knowledge, it can be sustained and furthered only as he makes its ends his own, and identifies himself and his satisfaction with the activities in which other wills find their fulfillment.
This is simply a more concrete rendering of what has already been said about the moral environment (see Sec. [33]).