The alteration of conscience due to the advent in thought of a new person is often so marked that one view of duty is quite evidently supplanted by a fresh one, due to the fresh suggestion. Thus, to take an example probably familiar to all who are used to mental application, it sometimes happens that a student is fagged and yet feels that he must think out his problem; there is a strong sense of oughtness backing this view, which, so long as it is unopposed, holds its ground as the call of duty. But now a friend may come in and suggest to him that he ought to stop, that if he goes on he will harm himself and do poor work. Here is another view of right, and the mind must now make a fresh synthesis and come, perhaps, to feel that its duty is to leave off.
Because of its dependence upon personal suggestion, the right always reflects a social group; there is always a circle of persons, more or less extended, whom we really imagine, and who thus work upon our impulses and our conscience; while people outside of this have not a truly personal existence for us. The extent of this circle depends upon many circumstances, as for instance upon the vigor of our imaginations, and the reach of the means of communication through which personal symbols are impressed upon them.
In these days of general literacy, many get their most potent impressions from books, and some, finding this sort of society more select and stimulating than any other, cultivate it to the neglect of palpable persons. This kind of people often have a very tender conscience regarding the moral problems presented in novels, but a rather dull one for those of the flesh-and-blood life about them. In fact, a large part of the sentiments of imaginative persons are purely literary, created and nourished by intercourse with books, and only indirectly connected with what is commonly called experience. Nor should it be assumed that these literary sentiments are necessarily a mere dissipation. Our highest ideals of life come to us largely in this way, since they depend upon imaginative converse with people we do not have a chance to know in the flesh. Indeed, the expansion of conscience that is so conspicuous a fact of recent years, the rise of moral sentiment regarding international relations, alien races and social and industrial classes other than our own, could not have taken place without the aid of cheap printing and rapid communication. Such understanding and sense of obligation as we have regarding the populace of great cities, for instance, is due chiefly to writers who, like the author of “How the Other Half Lives,” describe the life of such people in a vivid, personal way, and so cause us to imagine it.
Not to pursue this line of thought too far, it is enough for our purpose to note that conscience is always a group conscience, however the group may be formed, so that our moral sentiment always reflects our time, our country, and our special field of personal imagination. On the other hand, our sense of right ignores those whom we do not, through sympathy, feel as part of ourselves, no matter how close their physical contiguity. To the Norman conqueror the Saxon was an inferior animal, whose sentiments he no more admitted to his imagination, I suppose, than a farmer does those of his cattle, and toward whom, accordingly, he did not feel human obligation. It was the same with the slaveholder and the slave, and so it sometimes is with employer and wage-earner. The behavior of the Europeans toward the Chinese during the recent invasion of China showed in a striking manner how completely moral obligation breaks down in dealing with people who are not felt to be of kindred humanity with ourselves.
In minds capable of constructive imagination the social factor in conscience may take the form of ideal persons, whose traits are used as a standard of behavior.
Idealization, of this or any other sort, is not to be thought of as sharply marked off from experience and memory. It seems probable that the mind is never indifferent to the elements presented to it, but that its very nature is to select, arrange, harmonize, idealize. That is, the whole is always acting upon the parts, tending to make them one with itself. What we call distinctively an ideal is only a relatively complex and finished product of this activity. The past, as it lives in our minds, is never a mere repetition of old experience, but is always colored by our present feeling, is always idealized in some sense; and it is the same with our anticipation of the future, so that to wholesome thought expectation is hope. Thus the mind is ever an artist, re-creating things in a manner congenial to itself, and special arts are only a more deliberate expression of a general tendency.
An ideal, then, is a somewhat definite and felicitous product of imagination, a harmonious and congenial reconstruction of the elements of experience. And a personal ideal is such a harmonious and congenial reconstruction of our experience of persons. Its active function is to symbolize and define the desirable, and by so doing to make it the object of definite endeavor. The ideal of goodness is only the next step beyond the good man of experience, and performs the same energizing office. Indeed, as I have already pointed out, there is no separation between actual and ideal persons, only a more or less definite connection of personal ideas with material bodies.
There are all degrees of vagueness or definition in our personal ideals. They may be no more than scattered imaginings of traits which we have met in experience and felt to be worthy; or they may assume such fulness and cohesion as to be distinct ideal persons. There may even be several personal ideals; one may cherish one ideal of himself and a different one for each of his intimate friends; or his imagination may project several ideals of himself, to correspond to various phases of his development.
Probably the phrase “ideal person” suggests something more unified and consistent than is actually present in the minds of most people when they conceive the desirable or good in personal character. Is it not rather ideal traits or sentiments, fragments of personal experience, phases of past intercourse returning in the imagination with a new emphasis in the presence of new situations? We have at times divined in other people courage, generosity, patience and justice, and judged them to be good. Now, when we find ourselves in a situation where these traits are called for, we are likely to be reminded by that very fact of our previous experience of them; and the memory of it brings these sentiments more vividly to life and gives them more authority in conscience. Thus a person hesitating whether to smuggle in dutiable goods is likely to think in his perplexity of some one whom he has come to regard as honorable in such matters, and of how that one would feel and act under like conditions.
This building up of higher personal conceptions does not lend itself to precise description. It is mostly subconscious; the mind is continually at work ordering and bettering its past and present experiences, working them up in accordance with its own instinctive need for consistency and pleasantness; ever idealizing, but rarely producing clean-cut ideals. It finds its materials both in immediate personal intercourse and through books and other durable media of expression. “Books, monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming.” “All that is said of the wise man ... describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.”[[101]] “A few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents, have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to their apparent significance, if you measure them by the ordinary standards. They relate to your gift. Let them have their weight, and do not reject them and cast about for illustrations more usual in literature. What your heart thinks great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.”[[102]]