The main significance of the view that the right is the rational is to deny that there is any sharp distinction in kind between the question of right and wrong and other mental questions; the conclusion of conscience being held to be simply a more comprehensive judgment, reached by the same process as other judgments. It still leaves untouched the remoter problems, mental and social, underlying all judgments; as, for instance, of the nature of impulses, of what determines their relative intensity and persistence, of the character of that process of competition and assimilation among them of which judgments are the outcome; and of the social order as determining impulses both indirectly, through its action upon heredity, and directly through suggestion.
And behind these is that problem of problems, to which all the roads of thought lead, that question of organization or vital process, of which all special questions of society or of the mind are phases. From whatever point of view we look at life, we can see something going on which it is convenient to call organization, development, or the like; but I suppose that all who have thought much about the matter feel that we have only a vague notion of what the fact is that lies behind these words.
I mention these things merely to disclaim any present attempt to fathom them, and to point out that the aim of this chapter is limited to some observations on the working of social or personal factors in the particular sort of organization which we call conscience or moral judgment.
It is useless to look for any other or higher criterion of right than conscience. What is felt to be right is right; that is what the word means. Any theory of right that should turn out to be irreconcilable with the sense of right must evidently be judged as false. And when it is urged that conscience is variable, we can only answer that, for this very reason, the right cannot be reduced to a universal and conclusive formula. Like life in all its phases, it is a progressive revelation out of depths we do not penetrate.
For the individual considering his own conduct, his conscience is the only possible moral guide, and though it differ from that of everyone else, it is the only right there is for him; to violate it is to commit moral suicide. Speculating more largely on conduct in general he may find the right in some collective aspect of conscience, in which his own conscience appears as member of a larger whole; and with reference to which certain particular consciences, at variance with his own, like those of certain sorts of criminals, may appear as degenerate or wrong—and this will not surprise him, because science teaches us to expect degenerate variations in all forms of life. But, however broad a view he takes, he cannot do otherwise than refer the matter to his conscience; so that what I think, or—to generalize it—what we think, must, in one form or another, be the arbiter of right and wrong, so far as there can be any. Other tests become valid only in so far as conscience adopts them.
It would seem that any scientific study of the matter must consist essentially in investigating the conditions and relations of concrete right—the when, where, and why of what people do think is right. Social or moral science can never be a final source or test of morality; though it can reveal facts and relations which may help conscience in making its authoritative judgment.
The view that the right is the rational is quite consistent with the fact that, for those who have surplus energy, the right is the onward. The impulse to act, to become, to let out the life that rises within from obscure springs of power, is the need of needs, underlying all more special impulses; and this onward Trieb must always count in our judgments of right: it is one of the things conscience has to make room for. There can be no harmony in a mental life which denies expression to this most persistent and fundamental of all instinctive tendencies: and consequently the equilibrium which the active mind seeks, and a sense of which is one with the sense of right, is never a state of rest, but an equilibrium mobile. Our situation may be said to resemble that of an acrobat balancing himself upon a rolling sphere, and enabled to stand upright only on condition of moving continually forward. The right never remains precisely the same two days in succession; but as soon as any particular state of right is achieved, the mental centre of gravity begins to move onward and away from it, so that we can hold our ground only by effecting a new adjustment. Hence the merely negative can never be the right to a vigorous person, or to a vigorous society, because the mind will not be content with anything so inadequate to its own nature. The good self must be what Emerson calls a “crescive self,” and the right must mark a track across the “waste abyss of possibility” and lead out the energies to congenial exertion.
This idea is nowhere, perhaps, more cogently stated and illustrated than in M. Guyau’s penetrating work, “A Sketch of Morality.” He holds that the sense of duty is, in one aspect, a sense of a power to do things, and that this power tends in itself to create a sense of obligation. We can, therefore we must. “Obligation is an internal expansion—a need to complete our ideas by converting them into action.”[[94]] Even pain may be sought as part of that larger life which the growing mind requires. “Leopardi, Heine, or Lenau would probably not have exchanged those hours of anguish in which they composed their finest songs for the greatest possible enjoyment. Dante suffered.... Which of us would not undergo a similar suffering? Some heart-aches are infinitely sweet.”[[95]] And so with benevolence and what is called self-sacrifice. “... charity is but one with overflowing fecundity; it is like a maternity too large to be confined within the family. The mother’s breast needs life eager to empty it; the heart of the truly humane creature needs to be gentle and helpful to all.”[[96]] “The young man is full of enthusiasm; he is ready for every sacrifice because, in point of fact, it is necessary that he should sacrifice something of himself—that he should diminish himself to a certain extent; he is too full of life to live only for himself.”[[97]]
The right, then, is not merely the repressive discipline with which we sometimes identify it, but is also something warm, fresh and outward-looking. That which we somewhat vaguely and coldly call mental development is, when at its best, the revelation of an expanding, variegating, and beautiful whole, of which the right act is a harmonious member.
When, on the other hand, we say that right is largely determined by habit, we only emphasize the other aspect of that progressive mingling of continuity with change, which we see in mental life in all its phases. Habit, we know, makes lines of less resistance in thought, feeling, and action; and the existence of these tracks must always count in the formation of a judgment of right, as of any other judgment. It ought not, apparently, to be set over against novel impulses as a contrary principle, but rather thought of as a phase of all impulses, since novelty always consists, from one point of view, in a fresh combination of habits. It is much the same question as that of suggestion and choice, or of invention and imitation. The concrete fact, the real thing, in each case, is not one of these as against the other, or one modified by the other, but a single, vital act of which these are aspects, having no separate existence.