The Moral End or the Good is the Realization by a Person and as a Person of Individuality.
In saying that this realization is by a person and as a person we are saying nothing new. We are simply repeating what we have already learned about moral conduct (Sec. [III]). Conduct is not that which simply reaches certain consequences—a bullet shot from a rifle does that; there is conduct only when the consequences are foreseen; made the reason of action. A person is a being capable of conduct—a being capable of proposing to himself ends and of attempting to realize them.
But what is the meaning of the rest of the formula? What do we mean by individuality? We may distinguish two factors—or better two aspects, two sides—in individuality. On one side, it means special disposition, temperament, gifts, bent, or inclination; on the other side, it means special station, situation, limitations, surroundings, opportunities, etc. Or, let us say, it means specific capacity and specific environment. Each of these elements, apart from the other, is a bare abstraction and without reality. Nor is it strictly correct to say that individuality is constituted by these two factors together. It is rather, as intimated above, that each is individuality looked at from a certain point of view, from within or from without.
If we are apt to identify individuality with the inner side alone, with capacity apart from its surroundings, a little reflection will show the error. Even the most devoted adherent of "self-culture" would not hold that a gift could be developed, or a disposition manifested, in isolation from all exterior circumstances. Let the disposition, the gift be what it may (amiable or irascible, a talent for music or for abstract science, or for engineering), its existence, to say nothing of its culture, apart from some surroundings is bare nonsense. If a person shuts himself up in a closet or goes out into the desert the better to cultivate his capacities, there is still the desert or the closet there; and it is as conditioned by them, and with reference to them that he must cultivate himself. For more is true than that, as a matter of fact, no man can wholly withdraw himself from surroundings; the important point is that the manner and the purpose of exercising his capacity is always relative to and dependent upon the surroundings. Apart from the environment the capacity is mere emptiness; the exercise of capacity is always establishing a relation to something exterior to itself. All we can say of capacity apart from environment is that if certain circumstances were supplied, there would be something there. We call a capacity capability, possibility, as if for the very purpose of emphasizing the necessity of external supplementing.
We get the same fact, on the other side, by calling to mind that circumstances, environment are not indifferent or irrelevant to individuality. The difference between one individual and another lies as much in the station in which each is placed as in the capacity of each. That is to say, environment enters into individuality as a constituent factor, helping make it what it is.
On the other hand, it is capacity which makes the environment really an environment to the individual.
The environment is not simply the facts which happen objectively to lie about an agent; it is such part of the facts as may be related to the capacity and the disposition and gifts of the agent. Two members of the same family may have what, to the outward eye, are exactly the same surroundings, and yet each may draw from these surroundings wholly unlike stimulus, material and motives. Each has a different environment, made different by his own mode of selection; by the different way in which his interests and desires play upon the plastic material about him. It is not, then, the environment as physical of which we are speaking, but as it appeals to consciousness, as it is affected by the make-up of the agent. This is the practical or moral environment. The environment is not, then, what is then and there present in space. To the Christian martyr the sufferings of his master, and the rewards of faithfulness to come to himself were more real parts of his environment than the stake and fire. A Darwin or a Wallace may find his environment in South America or the Philippine Islands—or, indeed, in every fact of a certain sort wherever found upon the earth or in whatever geological era. A man of philanthropic instincts may find his environment among Indians or Congo negroes. Whatever, however near or remote in time and space, an individual's capacities and needs relate him to, is his environment. The moment we realize that only what one conceives as proper material for calling out and expressing some internal capacity is a part of his surroundings, we see not only that capacity depends upon environment, but that environment depends upon capacity. In other words, we see that each in itself is an abstraction, and that the real thing is the individual who is constituted by capacity and environment in their relation to one another.
Function is a term which we may use to express union of the two sides of individuality. The idea of function is that of an active relation established between power of doing, on one side, and something to be done on the other. To exercise a function as a student is not to cultivate tastes and possibilities internally; it is also to meet external demands, the demands of fact, of teachers, of others needing knowledge. The citizen exercises his function not simply in cultivating sentiments of patriotism within; one has to meet the needs of the city, the country in which one lives. The realization of an artistic function is not poring over emotions of beauty pumped up within one's self; it is the exercise of some calling. On the other hand, it hardly needs saying that the function of a student, a citizen, an artist, is not exercised in bare conformity to certain external requirements. Without the inner disposition and inclination, we call conduct dead, perfunctory, hypocritical. An activity is not functional, unless it is organic, expressing the life of the agent.
A function thus includes two sides—the external and the internal—and reduces them to elements in one activity. We get an analogy in any animal function. The digestive function includes the material appropriated, just as much as it does the organ appropriating. It is the service, the work which the organ does in appropriating material. So, morally, function is capacity in action; environment transformed into an element in personal service.
Thus we get another formula for the moral end: