(2) But, further, the movements of the sensibilities are themselves either morally good or evil, and form a sphere of personal life to which moral quality belongs. Man's affections and desires, his loves and hatreds, his enjoyments and aversions, constitute a domain where the ethical distinctions are to be applied. They hold and exhibit elements of character. We may not, indeed, say that a being of pure intellect, void of all emotion, would be utterly incapable of character and irresponsible, but we are compelled to think that the moral life in such case would be without what forms the highest ethical excellence and glory of character, viz.: love, benevolence, delight in righteousness and joy in pure affection. The regulation of the affections and passions, the purification of the inmost "thoughts" of what the sacred scriptures call "the heart" is vital to right character. The capacity to love is an equipment for the moral life. It is virtuous to love what ought to be loved. The capacity to hate is also such an equipment—the obligation being to hate what ought to be hated as morally wrong. Benevolence may not be, as some have contended it is, the essence or ground of all virtue, but, unquestionably, it is a virtue of highest rank, and the capacity for it is a prominent element in man's moral organization. The same is true of the whole emotional and affectional capacity in the human soul. It is part of the constitution for true character and life.
(3) Still further, man's powers of action, in which the ethical distinctions and choices are wrought out into their proper deeds, are part of his organization for the true moralities of life. However deeply the foundations of ethics may be laid in personal individuality, the ethical life concerns more than self, and finds its largest field in inter-human relations. Human solidarity is as real as human individuality. Humanity is an organism, in which each person has his place and mission. The individual's sphere of duty is not simply his own soul, but the broad reach of all his relations to the world about him, in which duties are developed and right conduct is required. In all this wide sphere obligation can be met only through his endowment with power to carry into effect, in action, his moral judgments and convictions of right. Moral science must consider man not merely as a knower and contemplator or lover of the right, but also as a doer of it in righteous deeds. Hence man's moral nature, as his endowment for the moral life, is not all brought under review until it is seen to include the realm of his feelings and those executive powers which turn the ethical discriminations and choices into righteous conduct.
We thus sum up the constituents of man's moral nature: intelligence, the conscience, free-will, and capacities for affection and doing. Where these are united the subject is organized for knowing duty and fulfilling it. But a final fact, of profound import, needs yet to be added, not as a further faculty, but rather as a consequence resultant from the union and co-action of these endowments, viz.: that this organism of faculties presents not simply a capacity as a possibility of the moral life, but a positive, vital motive adjustment and organic pre-disposition toward it. It is not simply framed to it as an articulation of dead timber, but is adapted to it as a complex of living forces for normal movement. The moral constitution, if not disordered or wrecked, carries thus a living trend or impulse toward knowing duty and doing it. This impulse, seemingly pervading, if not standing behind, the whole mental activity, as a sub-conscious pre-disposition, appears as an original aptitude or incorporated purpose in the total human psychical organization. Hence human nature, if normal, is not indifferent to right and wrong. Its true life is one of positive affinity for the good. If, under internal disorder or particular circumstances, counter-tendencies appear and prevail, this does not disprove the fundamental and normal set of humanity for the moral life. Man is made for the right as he is made for God. This conception of the positiveness of his total moral organization is necessary to complete the view of man as a moral agent.[32]
[CHAPTER VII.]
THE REALITY OF RIGHT AND WRONG.
In this chapter we pass the dividing line between the two great parts of ethics. Thus far we have considered only the facts and manifestations of our moral nature. We have traced the unquestionable phenomena of moral distinctions and obligation in human thinking, feeling, and conviction. We have found the explanation of these phenomena in the action of a faculty or complex of faculties of the human soul, that discerns and affirms these distinctions. We have studied this power and marked its data from its initial perception of the ethical distinction through its further discernments, emotions and judgments to its full assertion of moral responsibility. We have seen its unique authority explained by the supremacy of the law of right and duty which it reveals, and have noted the aggregate of endowments belonging to man's moral agency.
But the mere registry of these moral phenomena is not the full explanation of them. We must examine yet what they imply. From the faculty that perceives we must turn to look at the nature of that which is perceived. We may call the part already traversed the science of ethics, as dealing with and systematizing the facts of experience. The part that remains takes us into the metaphysics of ethics, as exhibiting the abiding verities so perceived and to which we find ourselves so responsibly related—not what is in us, but what is above and over us to which our moral consciousness corresponds. Having visited "the moral consciousness in its own home" and listened to its story of "right" and "duty" and "responsibility," we must go forth and explore the realm that answers to that story. This realm is the objective moral system to which human conduct is to be adjusted.
The precise question of this chapter is whether the distinction of right or wrong, subjectively and psychologically made, is also objectively true and real, marking an actual qualitative difference in the deeds and intentions of men, or is a mere appearance, a fiction and illusion of our own minds. Is the principle of duty a reality for right life, as something belonging to the constitution of the world, or only an idea which our minds have manufactured—only our own thought reflected back upon us, as is our face that seems so real in the mirror?
It would seem that the very asking of this question should be itself a sufficient answer. But doubt has been raised by speculative metaphysics. Hence we must examine it.