Extreme self-sacrifice is sometimes demanded of a man by his moral principles. Is the sacrifice worth making? Would Regulus have suffered, from remorse, pain worse than death, had he chosen life at the cost of honor, or would he have found, as many do, that remorse is amongst the passions most easily lived down? To these questions can only be answered that morality must often involve pain, but that the virtuous man nevertheless chooses it.
We must thus conclude, leaving one great difficulty unsolved; and this is because this difficulty is intrinsically insoluble; there is no absolute coincidence between virtue and happiness. The scientific moralist has to do with facts; beyond these he cannot go. From the scientific point of view, we may hold that evolution implies progress, and that progress implies a solution of many discords and an extirpation of many evils; but there is no reason for supposing that all evil will be extirpated and perfect harmony attained. New sensibilities bring with them new dangers; even sympathy, when not guided by knowledge, may lead to rash changes productive of evil as well as good. To improve, whether for the race or the individual, whether in knowledge or in sympathy, is to be put in a position where a new set of experiments has to be tried, and experience to be bought at the price of pain.
It is true that beyond the science lies the art; we must incite the intrinsic motives to good through the pressure of the social factor. A certain disadvantage to the individual cannot form a reason for our not endeavoring to make him moral as far as possible; the good of society as a whole is involved; and even the man who is himself immoral sees the advantage of living in a moral medium, and would prefer that the world at large should not be guided by his own principles.
B. CARNERI
Carneri begins his book on "Morality and Darwinism" ("Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus," 1871), with the rejection of the older Spiritualism in favor of Idealism, on the ground that modern investigation has made it impossible for philosophy to assume any foundation but one sanctioned by science; and with a rejection of dualism in favor of monism, on the ground that the investigations of Wundt and others have shown the psychical and the physical to be identical.
Instinct is defined by Carneri as thought upon the standpoint of mere sensation, but following the laws of the same logic as governs conscious thought. There is, thus, according to his view, no exception to be taken to the conception which represents instinct as the action of mental force, the difference between it and human reason as one of degree only. It is nevertheless a confusion which ascribes reason to the animals. Even their intelligence is one-sided, since it does not reach self-consciousness, and it is not to be regarded as an unqualified improvement upon instinct, since the latter loses both in intensity and in certainty of action when it no longer governs undisturbed by other influences: only such animals as are endowed with intelligence ever eat of injurious food. In human beings instinct has almost disappeared;—almost, we say, since savages do many things in an instinctive manner, and even civilized men at times perform acts which, on account of the exceeding rapidity of their execution, cannot be regarded as the results of reflection. Instinct may be compared to polarity in magnetism, according to which opposites are attracted. Instinct was evolved by natural selection. But intelligence and judgment are doubtless also to be found even far down in the scale of species. The brute consciousness is, nevertheless, only a transition-stage, in which the individual is still lost in the species; and, as such, it is not to be confused with human reason. Consciousness in the brutes is purely subjective, a consciousness "für sich"; while in human beings it is consciousness "an und für sich," consciousness that becomes subject-object through the concepts developed by language.
Man is as unconditionally subject to the law of causality, psychically and physically, as the merest atom. There is no such thing as chance; but in this very fact lies a consolation. In the concept of individualization in its broadest sense, is included the conception of freedom, and in the very nature of man there is an indestructible impulse to freedom; his being, as self-conscious, is identical with the latter impulse. This increases with increasing civilization, and has finally become the problem by the solution of which alone man can attain to self-satisfaction. It is true that the power of choice is inconsistent with the law of causality; but in the manner in which the man, as a thinking being, takes his stand over against the species, he becomes a person, an individuality. As one of the species, he shares the characteristics of the species, is an expression of the species-idea, and his action is determined outwardly by things; but it is so determined only mediately by means of thought, of concepts; these are the immediate determinants. Hence, man's relation to things is a different one according to the grade of his knowledge. In so far as this is adequate, that is, corresponds to the truth of actuality, his relation is an active one; in so far as it is, on the contrary, inadequate, the relation is a passive one.
Character is inborn and can never be effaced but only clarified, though this least through the bitter experience of the results of action. As the horse loses his sure-footedness after one fall, and falls again more easily, so we lose, through many a deed, the motive furnished by the consciousness of never having committed it, and have a greater tendency to repeat it. If an act has bad results, it is more likely that an attempt to avoid these results by cunning will be made at later opportunities for the act, than that the act itself will be avoided. And even if it were to be avoided, such avoidance would not constitute an improvement of the character; the latter would but hide itself under a mask to reappear at the first prospect of exemption from punishment. That which alone can modify character is a considerable extension of knowledge. For, since all things influence us only in proportion to the worth we attribute to them, their power over us must differ according to the correctness or incorrectness of our judgment. Therefore, the more we regard things in the light of their actual worth and hence also in their relations to each other, the more our character, beholding in these relations the general as the true, will incline to avoid extremes in action. A preponderantly sensual character remains such through life; but there is no doubt that a careful education, which makes it acquainted with nobler principles and develops a sensibility to true beauty, may ennoble it; while, if the education is, on the contrary, neglected, it must sink deeper and deeper into the mire of coarseness and vulgarity.
Character is the sum of its "affections," that is, of all states and motions of the disposition. These are divisible into "passions,"—included under selfishness, which is the general, all-embracing passion,—and the active conditions of existence. These two divisions are also identical with pain and pleasure, passion with pain, and activity with pleasure. All desires have their root in the primary instinct of self-preservation and self-propagation, the instinct of self-propagation being only the racial form of the instinct of self-preservation. The instinct of self-propagation is the highest of all the passions, yet, as Spinoza says, every form of love which recognizes another cause than mental freedom is easily turned to hate,—if it is not already a sort of madness, nourished rather by discord than concord. The various forms of family love, the love of country, and friendship, noble sisters of love in the narrower sense, result in desirable activity only as they exist in the form of concepts. Civilization is nothing but the struggle of inadequate and adequate concepts, in which, as in the struggle for existence in nature, only that is triumphant which, instead of assuming a position of separation, makes the general and the conditions of existence its own; so that charity in the widest sense of the term is, of all humane feelings, that to which the palm has been given. In this feeling, the dialectic movement of the concept "man" is completed and perfected, the single man, instead of perishing in the struggle of all against all, first working his way upward out of his species and then taking up, in his own being, the whole of mankind through the medium of benevolence. By this evolution he raises himself to the level of the general. Far higher than that confused sympathy which, in lending temporary aid to one, brings lasting harm to many, is this adequate concept; true benevolence is founded upon the clearest reasoning, and is the activity of the mind's fullest power. The discord which self-consciousness has caused in man can be done away with only by the greatest possible clarification of self-consciousness: man returns mentally to the bosom of the universal, when every living thing causes him to exclaim in the words of the Indian philosopher: "Behold thyself."