Reflection sets up ideal standards. Reflection constantly sets up ideal standards by which current codes of conduct are judged and corrected. It is clear that ideals of life, even when sincerely entertained, are not always possible of immediate fulfillment. Theory tends continually to outrun practice, since human reflection tends to set up goals in advance of its achievement. For many individuals, anxious to attain immediate self-enhancement, the current cones are not criticized at all, but are taken for granted, as inevitable and irrefragable bases of operation.
Many men, perhaps after a first flush of altruistic rebellion in adolescence, settle down with more or less complacency to the current moral codes. They do in Rome as the Romans do. They may have an intellectual awareness of the crassness, the stupidity, the essential injustice and inadequacy of the codes by which men in contemporary society live, but they may also, out of selfish preoccupation with their own interests, let things go at that. If the established ways are not as they ought to be, at least they are as they are. And since the current system is the one by which a man must live, assent is the better part of wisdom. There are comparatively few who persist in a criticism of prevailing standards, or who are troubled very much beyond their early twenties by a tormenting conviction that things are not done as they ought to be done. It is from the few who realize intellectually the inadequacies of prevailing customs, and are emotionally disturbed by them, that moral criticism arises. And it is only by such criticism that moral progress is made possible. "The duty of some exercise of discriminating intelligence as to existing customs, for the sake of improvement and progress, is thus a mark of reflective morality—of the régime of conscience as over against custom."[1]
[Footnote 1: Dewey and Tufts: Ethics, pp. 181-82.]
Reflection is thus the process by which progress is made possible, although, as we shall presently see, it is not thereby insured. The function of intelligence is precisely to indicate anticipated goods, "to imagine a future which is the projection of the desirable in the present." Even the best ordered life or society reveals some maladjustment, some remove, near or far, from perfection. It is the business of reflection and imagination to note the discrepancy between what is, and what ought to be, and assiduously to foster the vision of the latter, so that in the light of that imagined good, men's ways of life may be amended.
Nor does the setting-up of ideal standards mean the construction of fruitless Utopias. Reflection upon the present ways of life and the prospect of their improvement does not mean a mere wistful yearning after better things. It means careful inquiry into those elements of established ways which may be incorporated into the construction of the ideal. It means the resolute application of intelligence to an analysis of present maladjustments in the interests of preserving out of inherited and current ways those factors which point towards the goal desired. It means to be eager for perfection, and sensitive to current imperfections. Moral progress demands a vision of the desirable future, and a persistent and discriminating reflection upon the means of its attainment out of the materials of the present.
The defects of reflective morality. Reflection, as already pointed out, tends to stop with merely destructive criticism. Provoked by maladjustment and imperfection, it frequently goes no further than to note these, with cynicism or despair. Criticism of established customs and ways of life frequently rests with the exhibition of absurdities in men's ways, finding refuge in laughter or rebellion. There is no one so cynical as the man who has been recently wakened out of dogmatic and innocent faith in the traditions to which he has been reared.
The child receives from the herd the doctrines, let us say, that truthfulness is the most valuable of all the virtues, that honesty is the best policy, that to the religious man death has no terrors, and that there is in store a future life of perfect happiness and delight. And yet experience tells him with persistence that truthfulness as often as not brings him punishment, that his dishonest playfellow has as good if not a better time than he, that the religious man shrinks from death with as great a terror as the unbeliever, is as broken-hearted by bereavement, and as determined to continue his hold upon this imperfect life rather than trust himself to what he declares to be the certainty of future bliss.... Who of us is there who cannot remember the vague feeling of dissatisfaction, the obscure and elusive sense of something being wrong, which is left by these and similar conflicts?[1]
[Footnote 1: Trotter: Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, p. 49.]
A little reflection is, in morals, a dangerous thing. It discovers difficulties, and does not solve them. It finds that human life is darkly strewn with hypocrisies, with shams, with makeshifts and compromises. And having made this discovery, it sighs or satirizes or forgets. It is notorious with what frequency men "go to pieces" when they are loosed from the moorings of their childhood moralities, before they have had a chance to acquire new and more reasonable constraints. Plato, in protesting that young men should not study philosophy too early, has well described the dangers of shallow analysis.[2]
[Footnote 2: "And will it not be one great precaution to forbid their meddling with it [philosophy] while young? For I suppose you have noticed, that whenever boys taste dialectic for the first time, they pervert it into an amusement, and always employ it for purposes of contradiction, and imitate in their own persons the artifices of those who study refutation,—delighting, like puppies, in pulling and tearing to pieces with logic any one who comes near them.... Hence, when they have experienced many triumphs and many defeats, they fall, quickly and vehemently, into an utter disbelief of their former sentiments: and thereby both they and the whole cause of philosophy have been prejudiced in the eyes of the world." (Plato: Republic, Golden Treasury edition, p. 267.)]