Whether a person’s life, in its moral or any other aspect, is obviously changeful, or, on the contrary, appears to be merely repetitive or habitual, depends upon whether the state of his mind, and of the conditions about it, are favorable to rapid changes in the system of his thought. Thus if he is young and vigorous, and if he has a natural open-mindedness and keenness of sensibility, he will be so much the more likely, other things equal, to incorporate fresh elements of thought and make a new synthesis, instead of running on habit. Variety of life in the past, preventing excessive deepening of the mental ruts, and contact with strong and novel influences in the present, have the same tendency.
The rigidly habitual or traditionary morality of savages is apparently a reflection of the restriction and sameness of their social life; and a similar type of morals is found even in a complex society, as in China, when the social system has become rigid by the equilibration of competing ideas. On the other hand, the stir and change of the more active parts of our society make control by mere habit impossible. There are no simple dominant habits; tendencies are mixed and conflicting, so that the person must either be intelligently moral or else degenerate. He must either make a fresh synthesis or have no synthesis at all.
What is called principle appears to be simply a habit of conscience, a rule formed originally by a synthesis of various impulses, but become somewhat mechanical and independent of its origin—as it is the nature of habit to do. As the mind hardens and matures there is a growing inaptitude to take in novel and powerful personal impressions, and a corresponding ascendency of habit and system; social sentiment, the flesh and blood of conduct, partly falls away, exposing a skeleton of moral principles. The sense of duty presents itself less and less as a vivid sympathetic impulse, and more and more as a sense of the economy and restfulness of a definite standard of conduct. When one has come to accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of lifted responsibility, even if the course involves pain and renunciation. It is like obedience to some external authority; any clear way, though it lead to death, is mentally preferable to the tangle of uncertainty.
Actions that appear memorable or heroic are seldom achieved at the moment of decisive choice, but are more likely to come after the habit of thought which produces the action has become somewhat mechanical and involuntary. It is probably a mistake to imagine that the soldier who braves death in battle, the fireman who enters the burning building, the brakeman who pursues his duty along the icy top of a moving train, or the fisherman who rows away from his vessel into the storm and mist, is usually in an acute state of heroism. It is all in the day’s work; the act is part of a system of thought and conduct which has become habitual and would be painful to break. Death is not imagined in all its terrors and compared with social obligation; the case is far simpler. As a rule there is no time in a crisis for complicated mental operations, and whether the choice is heroic or cowardly it is sure to be simple. If there is any conflict of suggestions it is brief, and the one that gains ascendency is likely to be followed mechanically, without calculation of the future.
One who studies the “sense of oughtness” in children will have no difficulty in seeing that it springs largely from a reluctance to break habits, an indisposition, that is, to get out of mental ruts. It is in the nature of the mind to seek a principle or unifying thought—the mind is a rule-demanding instinct—and in great part this need is met by a habit of thought, inculcated perhaps by some older person who proclaims and enforces the rule, or perhaps by the unintended pressure of conditions which emphasize one suggestion and shut out others. However the rule originates, it meets a mental want, and, if not too strongly opposed by other impulses, is likely to be adopted and felt as obligatory just because it is a consistent way of thinking. As Mr. Sully says, “The truth is that children have a tremendous belief in law.”[[98]]
The books on child-study give many instances of the surprising allegiance which children often give to rule, merely as rule, and even an intermittent observer will be sure to corroborate them. Thus a child five years old, when on a visit, was invited to “open his mouth and shut his eyes,” and upon his doing so a piece of candy was put into the former. When he tasted it he pulled it out and exclaimed, “Mamma don’t want me to have candy.” Now this did not seem to be affectation, nor was the child other than fond of sweets, nor afraid of punishment or blame; he was simply under the control of a need for mental consistency. The no-candy rule had been promulgated and enforced at home; he had adopted it as part of his system of thought, and, when it was broken, his moral sense, otherwise the harmony of his mind, was shocked to a degree that the sweet taste of the candy could not overcome. Again, R. was subjected nearly every evening for several years to a somewhat painful operation called “bending his foot,” intended to correct a slight deformity. After becoming accustomed to this he would sometimes protest and even cry if it were proposed to omit it. I thought I could see that moral allegiance to a rule, merely as such, weakened as he grew older; and the explanation of this I took to be that the increasing competition of suggestions and conflict of precepts made this simple, mechanical unity impossible, and so forced the mind, still striving for harmony, to exert its higher organizing activity and attempt a larger sort of unification. It is the same principle as that which prevents the civilized man from retaining the simple allegiance to rule and habit that the savage has; his complex life cannot be unified in this way, any more than his accounts can be notched on a stick; and he is forced, if he is to achieve any unity of life, to seek it in some more elaborate standard of behavior. Under uniform conditions the habitual is the rational, and therefore the moral; but under complex conditions this ceases to be the case.
Of course this way of looking at the matter does not do away with all the difficulties involved in it, but does, it seems to me, put habitual and other morality on the common ground of rationality, and show the apparently sharp division between them to be an illusion.
Those who think as I do will reject the opinion that the right is, in any general sense, the social as opposed to the individual. As already stated, I look upon this antithesis as false when used to imply a radical opposition. All our human thought and activity is either individual or social, according to how you look at it, the two being no more than phases of the same thing, which common thought, always inclined to confuse words with things, attempts to separate. This is as true in the ethical field as in any other. The consideration of other persons usually enters largely into questions of right and wrong; but the ethical decision is distinctly an assertion of a private, individualized view of the matter. Surely there is no sound general principle in accordance with which the right is represented by the suggestions of the social environment, and the wrong by our more private impulses.
The right is always a private impulse, always a self-assertion, with no prejudice, however, to its social character. The “ethical self” is not less a self for being ethical, but if anything more of a self, because it is a fuller, more highly organized expression of personality. All will recognize, I imagine, that a strong sense of duty involves self-feeling, so that we say to ourselves emphatically I ought. It would be no sense of duty at all if we did not feel that there was something about it peculiar to us and antithetical to some of the influences acting upon us. It is important for many purposes to emphasize the fact that the ethical self is always a public self; but it is equally true and important that it is always a private self.
In short, ethical thinking and feeling, like all our higher life, has its individual and social aspects, with no peculiar emphasis on either. If the social aspect is here at its highest, so also is the individual aspect.