We have reviewed, then, some of these conflicts. I hope that you see upon what general issue they all alike turn. The moralists are essentially the partisans of action. They seek a good. But their great postulate is that there is something right for us to do. Therefore the issue is that between our need of something not ourselves to save us and our power to win a greater or lesser good through our own moral activity. Whoever so exclusively emphasises the fact that the divine is not of our making, and that its ways are not our ways, and that its good is something beyond our power to create or attain of ourselves--whoever, I say, so exclusively emphasises these things that he makes light of our efforts to attain the good somewhere comes into conflict with moralists. Whoever, as moralist, so exclusively appeals to our own energies that he seems to hold that our duty would be just as much our duty, "If we were alone upon the earth and the gods blind," somewhere meets the religious opponent who mocks his pride, or despises his restlessness, or laments his contempt for the divine grace.
Now these conflicts are, I insist, no merely speculative controversies. They play a great part in history. They have darkened countless lives. And they grow out of motives deep in human nature. What is here most important for us is that they point us toward our new source of insight. What a narrower way of living can divide, a deeper and [{181}] truer mode of living can unite. Our problem assumes a new form. Is there any mode of living that is just both to the moral and to the religious motives? Is there any way of reconciling our need, of a grace that shall save with the call of the moral life that we shall be strenuous in the pursuit of our duty?
Let us here approach this problem from the side of our moral consciousness. For at this point we are already familiar with the religious need. Does there exist amongst men a type of morality that, in and for itself, is already essentially religious, so that it knows nothing of this conflict between duty and religion? I reply, there is such a type of morality. There is a sort of consciousness which equally demands of those whom it inspires, spiritual attainment and strenuousness, serenity and activity, resignation and vigour, life in the spirit and ceaseless enterprise in service. Is this form of consciousness something belonging only to highly and intellectually cultivated souls? Is it the fruit of abstract thinking alone? Is it the peculiar possession of the philosophers? Or, on the other hand, does it arise solely through dumb and inarticulate intuitions? Is it consistent only with a highly sensitive and mystical temperament? Does it belong only to the childhood of the spirit? Is it exclusively connected with the belief in some one creed? To all these questions I reply: No.
This sort of consciousness is possessed in a very [{182}] high degree by some of the humblest and least erudite of mankind. Those in whose lives it is a notable feature may be personally known only to a few near friends. But the spirit in which they live is the most precious of humanity's possessions. And such people may be found belonging to all the ages in which we can discover any genuinely humane activities, and to all those peoples that have been able to do great work, and to all the faiths that contain any recognisable element of higher religious significance.
III
I can best show you what I mean by next very briefly reviewing the motives upon which the idea of duty itself rests, and by then showing to what, upon the noblest level of human effort, these motives lead.
Our moral interests have a development which, in all its higher phases, runs at least parallel to the development of our religious interests, even in cases where the two sorts of interests seem to clash. The moral problems arise through certain interactions that take place between our individual and our social experience. The reason reviews these interactions and takes interest in unifying our plan of life. The will is always, from the very nature of the case, concerned in the questions that here arise. For whatever else morality is, it is certain that your morality has to do with your conduct, and that [{183}] moral goodness cannot be yours unless your will itself is good. Wealth might come to you as a mere gift of fortune. Pleasure might be brought to you from without, so far as you have the mere capacity for pleasure. The same might appear to be true even in case of salvation, if, indeed, salvation is wholly due to saving grace. But moral goodness, if you can get it at all, requires your active cooperation. You can earn it only in case you do something to possess it. Its motto reads: "Erwirb es um es zu besitzen."
Therefore the moral question always takes the form of asking: What am I to do? The first contribution to the answer is furnished, upon all levels of our self-consciousness, by our individual experience. And one apparently simple teaching that we get from this source may be stated in a maxim which wayward people often insist upon, but which only the very highest type of morality can rationally interpret: "I am to do what I choose, in case only I know what I choose and am able to do it." From this point of view, my only limitations, at first sight, seem to be those set for me by my physical weakness. There are many things that, if I had the power, I should or might choose to do. But since I frequently cannot accomplish my will, I must learn to limit myself to what I can carry out. So far, I say, our individual experience, if taken as our sole moral guide, seems at first to point out the way.
But this first teaching of our individual experience is by no means so simple as it seems. For the question arises: What is it, on the whole, that I choose to do? And, as we saw very early in these discussions, each of us is by nature so full of caprices and of various aims, that, left to ourselves, we live not only narrowly but inconsistently. Hence we spend much of our lives in finding out, after the fact, that what we chose to do at one moment of our lives has hopelessly thwarted what we intended to do at some other moment. Self-will then, left to itself, means self-defeat. That is the lesson of life. And the question: What is it that, on the whole, I would choose to do if I had the power? is a question that individual experience, taken by itself, never answers in any steadily consistent way. Therefore, as we all sooner or later come to see, one of our most persistent limitations is not our physical weakness to accomplish what we choose, but our incapacity, when left to ourselves, to find out what it is that we propose and really choose to do. Therefore, just because individual experience, taken by itself, never gives steady guidance, we have to look elsewhere for a rule.