We may, perhaps, represent the matter nearly enough for our purpose by comparing the higher and lower kinds of thought to the human race and the inferior animals. The former is so much more powerful, on the whole, though not always so individually, that it determines, in all settled countries, the general organization of life, erecting cities and railroads, clearing forests, and the like, to suit itself, and with only incidental regard to other animals. The latter are preserved within the system only in so far as they are useful, or at any rate not very troublesome, to mankind. So all sensual impulses are judged by their relation to a system of thought dominated by social sentiment. The pleasures of eating, harmless in themselves, begin to be judged wrong so soon as they are indulged in such a way as to blunt the higher faculties, or to violate justice, decency, or the like. A shipwrecked man, it is felt, should rather perish of hunger than kill and eat another man, because the latter action violates the whole system of social thought. And in like manner it is held that a soldier, or indeed any man, should prefer honor and duty to life itself.
The working of personal influence upon our judgments of right is not different in kind from its working upon other judgments: it simply introduces vivid impulses, which affect the moral synthesis something in the way that picking up a weight will change one’s centre of gravity and force him to alter his footing.
As was suggested above, the morality of mere rule and habit becomes the less conspicuous in the life of children the more they are subjected to fresh personal influences. If their sympathies are somewhat dull, or if they are secluded, their minds naturally become grooved; and all children, perhaps, become much bound to habit in matters where personal influence is not likely to interfere. But in most children, and in most matters, it will be found that the moral judgment and feeling are, from the very earliest, intensely sympathetic and personal, charged with shame, affection, anger, jealousy, and desire to please. The mind has already to struggle for harmony among vivid emotions, aroused by the appeals of life to hereditary instinct, each giving intensity to certain ideas of conduct, and tending to sway the judgment of right in their sense.
If the boy who refused the candy, as mentioned above, had possessed a vivid imagination of personal attitudes, which he did not, his situation might have been much more intricate. He might have been drawn to accept it not only by the sweet taste but by a desire to please the friends who offered it; and on the other hand he might have been deterred by a vision of the reproving face and voice of his mother. Thus M., nearly sixteen months old, had been frowned at and called naughty in a severe tone of voice when she tried to claw her brother’s face. Shortly after, while sitting with him on the bed, her mother being at a distance, she was observed to repeat the offence and then, without further cause or suggestion, to bow her head and look abashed and guilty. Apparently she had a sense of wrong, a conviction of sin, perhaps consisting only in a reminiscence of the shame she had previously felt when similar behavior was followed by rebuke.
Here, then, we have a simple manifestation of a moral force that acts upon every one of us in countless ways, and every day of his life—the imagined approval or disapproval of others, appealing to instinctive emotion, and giving the force of that emotion to certain views of conduct. The behavior that connects itself with such social sentiment as we like and feel the impulse to continue, is so much the more likely to be judged as right; but if the sentiment is one from which we are averse, the behavior is the more likely to be judged as wrong. The child’s moral sense, says Perez, “begins as soon as he understands the signification of certain intonations of the voice, of certain attitudes, of a certain expression of countenance, intended to reprimand him for what he has done or to warn him against something he was on the point of doing. This penal and remunerative sanction gives rise by degrees to a clear distinction of concrete good and evil.”[[99]]
A child who is not sensitive to praise or blame, but whose interests are chiefly impersonal, or at any rate only indirectly personal, sometimes appears to have no moral sense at all, to be without the conviction of sin or any notion of personal wrong. He has little experience of those peculiarly acute and trying mental crises which result from the conflict of impulses of sympathetic origin with one another or with animal appetites. This was much the case with R. in his earliest years. Living in quiet surroundings, somewhat isolated from other children, with no violent or particularly mischievous impulses, occupied all day long with blocks, sand-pile, and other impersonal interests, not sensitive to blame nor inclined to take it seriously, he gave the impression of being non-moral, an unfallen spirit. M. was the very opposite of all this. From the first week she was visibly impulsive, contentious, sensitive, sympathetic; laying traps for approval, rebelling against criticism, sudden and quick to anger, sinning, repenting, rejoicing; living almost altogether in a vivid personal world.
A character of the latter sort has an intenser moral life, because the variety of strong impulses introduced by a sensitive and personally imaginative temperament are sure to make crises for the mind to wrestle with. The ethics of personal feeling which it has to work out seems widely apart from the ethics of rule and habit, as in fact it is, so far as regards the materials that enter into the moral synthesis. The color and content, all the concrete elements of the moral life, are as different as are the different characters of people: the idea of right is not a fraction of thought alike in all minds, but a comprehensive, integrating state of mind, characteristic of the personality of which it is an expression.
The idea of justice is, of course, a phase of the idea of right, and arises out of the mental attempt to reconcile conflicting impulses. As Professor Baldwin points out, the child is puzzled by contradictions between his simpler impulses, such as those to appropriate food and playthings, and other impulses of more imaginative or sympathetic origin. Needing to allay this conflict he readily grasps the notion of a tertium quid, a reconciling rule or law which helps him to do so.
Our mature life is not radically distinguished from childhood as regards the working of personal influence upon our moral thought. If there is progress it is in the way of fulness of experience and better organization: the mental life may become richer in those sympathetic or imaginative impulses which we derive from healthy intercourse with the world, and without a good store of which our judgments of right must be narrow and distorted; there may at the same time be a completer ordering and discipline of these materials, a greater power to construct the right, the unifying thought, out of diverse elements, a quicker recognition of it when achieved, and a steadier disposition to act upon it. In most cases, perhaps, a person after thirty years of age gains something in the promptness and steadfastness of his moral judgment, and loses something in the imaginative breadth of his premises. But the process remains the same, and our view of right is still a sort of microcosm of our whole character. Whatever characteristic passions we have will in some way be represented in it, and until we stiffen into mental rigidity and decline, it will change more or less with every important change in our social surroundings.
To a very large class of minds, perhaps to the largest class, the notion of right presents itself chiefly as a matter of personal authority. That is, what we feel we ought to do is simply what we imagine our guide or master would do, or would wish us to do. This, for instance, is the idea very largely inculcated and practised by the Christian Church. It is not anything opposed to or different from the right as a mental synthesis, but simply means that admiration, reverence, or some other strong sentiment, gives such overwhelming force to the suggestions of a certain example, that they more or less completely dominate the mind. The authority works through conscience and not outside of it. Moreover the relation is not so one-sided as it would seem, since our guide is always, in one point of view, the creation of our own imaginations, which are sure to interpret him in a manner congenial to our native tendency. Thus the Christ of Fra Angelico is one thing, and the Christ of Michelangelo, directing the ruin of the damned, is quite another.