[307.] In this connection the instances of one-sidedness of ethical judgment must not be overlooked, such as occur when one of the practical ideas stands out more prominently than another, or when that which is outwardly proper rises above them all.
[308.] (3) All desires persistently operative and productive of fluctuating states of emotional excitement, therefore rightly called passions, lead to experiential knowledge of the beneficial and the injurious. The beneficial suggests frequent repetition in the future, the injurious continued avoidance. Accordingly rules of life take shape, and the resolution always to observe them is made. In other words, maxims result.
From simple resolution to actual observance is still, to be sure, a far cry. But the claim for the universal validity of the rule, so that the individual may regard it as applicable to others as well as to himself, enters the mind far more directly by way of desires which point forward to similar cases in the future, than it does under the guidance of ethical judgments whose universal element is abstracted from given single instances with difficulty. In fact, this difficulty is often so great that the ethical judgment itself may be missed in the search for the universal.
[309.] Now, the promptness and loyalty of obedience to the sum total of duties, once recognized as such and fixed through the maxims adopted, are passed upon by the moral judgment. Correct moral judgment, therefore, presupposes true insight into the value of will, which insight again can be obtained only through the ethical estimate as a whole. But in view of the circumstances pointed out a moment ago, we must expect to come upon maxims that are false or at least inaccurate. Under the latter head fall points of honor, social obligations, fear of ridicule.
[310.] (4) Maxims ought to form a unit, but in youth they are not fully determined even singly, much less are they closely united into a definite whole. The proviso of exceptions still clings to them, so also that of future tests through experience.
The maxims arising out of the desires and pleasures can never be brought into perfect union with those springing from ethical judgments. Accordingly the wrong subordination takes place, or, at all events, a contamination of the latter by the former.
[311.] (5) In the application of maxims more or less unified, the volition of the moment is apt to prove stronger than the previous resolves. Hence, man becomes only too prone to condone and fall in with discriminations between theory and practice. The consequence is a certain moral empiricism, which, if nothing else will do to justify its disregard of moral law, falls back upon pious feelings. Plans of action are formed without regard to maxims, but with the apparent compensation of another kind of morally regular life.
Such contempt of moral judgment gains ground and spreads ruin all the more, the farther the ethical judgments on which morality must rest fall short of the clearness that ought to mark them, and the cruder the pupil’s knowledge is of the antithesis between them and maxims of utility or pleasure.
[312.] The natural aid to the formation and union of maxims is the system of practical philosophy itself. But the teaching of it involves difficulties. One of them is that such marked differences occur among young men in the relation of systematic exposition to the grade of culture which they have attained. For observations of this nature, religious instruction prior to confirmation provides an early opportunity. How such instruction is to be given, is, of course, by no means immaterial, but, after all, the moral sentiments, which it gathers together and strengthens, must, in substance, already exist.