Our "ideals," our types of excellence, are the various ways in which we figure to ourselves the outreaching and ever-expanding values of our concrete acts. Every achievement of good deepens and quickens our sense of the inexhaustible value contained in every right act. With achievement, our conception of the possible goods of life increases, and we find ourselves called to live upon a still deeper and more thoughtful plane. An ideal is not some remote all-exhaustive goal, a fixed summum bonum with respect to which other things are only means. It is not something to be placed in contrast to the direct, local, and tangible quality of our actual situations, so that by contrast these latter are lightly esteemed as insignificant. On the contrary, an ideal is the conviction that each of these special situations carries with it a final value, a meaning which in itself is unique and inexhaustible. To set up "ideals" of perfection which are other than the serious recognition of the possibilities of development resident in each concrete situation, is in the end to pay ourselves with sentimentalities, if not with words, and meanwhile it is to direct thought and energy away from the situations which need and which welcome the perfecting care of attention and affection.
Thoughtfulness and Progress.—This sense of wider values than those definitely apprehended or definitely attained is a constant warning to the individual not to be content with an accomplishment. Conscientiousness takes more and more the form of interest in improvement, in progress. Conscientiousness as sensitiveness may rest upon the plane of already secured satisfactions, upon discriminating with accuracy their quality and degree. As thoughtfulness, it will always be on the lookout for the better. The good man not only measures his acts by a standard, but he is concerned to revise his standard. His sense of the ideal, of the undefinable because ever-expanding value of special deeds, forbids his resting satisfied with any formulated standard; for the very formulation gives the standard a technical quality, while the good can be maintained only in enlarging excellence. The highest form of conscientiousness is interest in constant progress.
Love and Courage Required for Thoughtfulness.—We may close this chapter by repeating what we have already noted, that genuine moral knowledge involves the affections and the resolute will as well as the intelligence. We cannot know the varied elements of value in the lives of others and in the possibilities of our own, save as our affections are strong. Every narrowing of love, every encroachment of egoism, means just so much blindness to the good. The man who pleads "good motives" as excuse for acts which injure others is always one whose absorption in himself has wrought harm to his powers of perception. Every widening of contact with others, every deepening of the level of sympathetic acquaintance, magnifies in so much vision of the good. Finally, the chief ally of moral thoughtfulness is the resolute courage of willingness to face the evil for the sake of the good. Shrinking from apprehension of the evil to others consequent upon our behavior, because such realization would demand painful effort to change our own plans and habits, maintains habitual dimness and narrowness of moral vision.
LITERATURE
Upon the principle of virtue in general, see Plato, Republic, 427-443; Aristotle, Ethics, Books II. and IV.; Kant, Theory of Ethics (Abbott's trans.), pp. 164-182, 305, 316-322; Green, Prolegomena, pp. 256-314 (and for conscientiousness, 323-337); Paulsen, System of Ethics, pp. 475-482; Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, pp. 242-253; Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, chs. x. and xiv.; Stephen, Science of Ethics, ch. v.; Spencer, Principles of Ethics, Vol. II., pp. 3-34 and 263-276; Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, pp. 2-5 and 9-10; Rickaby, Aquinas Ethicus, Vol. I., pp. 155-195; Mezes, Ethics, chs. ix. and xvi.
For natural ability and virtue: Hume, Treatise, Part II., Book III., and Inquiry, Appendix IV.; Bonar, Intellectual Virtues.
For discussions of special virtues: Aristotle, Ethics, Book III., and Book VII., chs. i.-x.; for justice: Aristotle, Ethics, Book V.; Rickaby, Moral Philosophy, pp. 102-108, and Aquinas Ethicus (see Index); Paulsen, System of Ethics, pp. 599-637; Mezes, Ethics, ch. xiii.; Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. v.; Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, Book III., ch. v., and see Index; also criticism of Spencer in his Lectures on the Ethics of Green, Spencer and Martineau, pp. 272-302; Spencer, Principles of Ethics, Vol. II.; Stephen, Science of Ethics, ch. v.
For benevolence, see Aristotle, Ethics, Books VII.-IX. (on friendship); Rickaby, Moral Philosophy, pp. 237-244, and Aquinas Ethicus (see charity and almsgiving in Index); Paulsen, System, chs. viii. and x. of Part III.; Mezes, Ethics, ch. xii.; Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, Book II., ch. iv.; Spencer, Principles of Ethics, Vol. II.; see also the references under sympathy and altruism at end of ch. xviii. Courage and temperance are discussed in chs. x. and xi. of Mezes; in pp. 485-504 of Paulsen; pp. 327-336 of Sidgwick; ch. xi. of Ladd's Philosophy of Conduct.
FOOTNOTES:
[184] This is, of course, the point made in ch. iv. on "Customs or Mores," save that there the emphasis was upon the epoch of customary as distinct from the reflective morals, while here it is upon the customary factor in the present.