The Feelings, Passions and Desires.
2. The various feelings, passions, and desires are not only springs of action that may issue in conduct, but are in themselves either right or wrong, according as they are exercised in harmony with moral law or in conflict with it.
(1) Though our feelings spring spontaneously and immediately out of our knowledge and fundamental psychical character, they are subject to training and regulation by the will, and their states and movements are part of our moral life. And though by natural unperverted constitution all these primary feelings and affections have right and good functions, their activities, under noxious stimulation, may run into forms and in directions thoroughly immoral. Love, which, in its holiest direction, toward God, and in its purest forms of benevolence, toward men, is the highest virtue, may take forbidden directions and corrupt and disorder life. Hate, the reverse of love, instead of being directed against evil which ought to be hated, often emits its venom against that which ought to be loved for its goodness. Self-esteem, as a proper respect for what has been put into a person's being to be cared for and enjoyed, frequently runs into condemnable selfishness. Many of the "desires" are apt to be in offense because of over-development, clashing in anarchic insubordination in the soul, or rushing toward unlawful objects. Desire for possessions tends to grow into covetousness, desire for honor into unscrupulous ambition, desire for pleasure into a ruling passion. Such feelings as malice and envy, mongrel products of selfishness and ill-will, are at once adjudged to be sinful.
(2) Were further proof needed that morality attaches to the affections and desires, it is found in their relations as motives to conduct. We have not traced actions completely to their moral source when we have ascertained the volition from which they proceed. We must go a step further back and mark the impulses that either rightly or wrongly influenced the will. We must do as do courts of justice in seeking the character of an act, and ascertain not only that the act was done in free-will, but also what feelings influenced the free-will in doing it. An act of volition may have very different motives behind it. The immoral character of the volition is not only from the immorally-acting will itself, but also from the wrong feelings or desires acting on the will. Indeed, the very will is betrayed into wrong-doing by their perverting persuasions. It becomes clear, therefore, that if it be at all true that "actions take moral character from their motives," this character must be predicable of these motive sensibilities.
(3) A special question has place here—whether moral quality belongs even to the personal dispositions, propensities and inclinations that lie back of the exercise of the feelings, as attitudes or habitudes of the soul with respect to good and evil? The facts of life unquestionably show the existence of such propensities or tendencies derived through heredity and descending from generation to generation. The scientific theory of evolution recognizes them and draws many of its conclusions, both psychological and moral, from them. They express rather a state of the personal constitution than any exercise of its faculties. They denote so basally the psychical life-condition, that they characterize rather what the person is than what he does morally. Since they, as states of the personal agent, constitute his attitude, among other things, toward good and evil, an attitude either right or wrong, this question manifestly requires an affirmative answer.
Aims and Intentions.
3. Intentions. In judging conduct we inquire especially into the aim, purpose, intention, which directed it. We look at the end sought. And in a peculiar degree conduct is pronounced right or wrong according to this. For the intention is pre-eminently the very heart and informing principle of the moral act. Besides largely shaping the material action in agreement or conflict with objective duty it is the inner soul of the total deed.
It may make an act that in its external form is morally indifferent thoroughly virtuous or deeply criminal—such as that of handing a sum of money to another, in one case to relieve suffering, in another to secure murder. The intention to do what is known to be wrong, even when the overt deed is prevented, stamps upon the person its own moral character.
In intentions we find the teleology of the ethical conduct—the chosen ends at which men are aiming in their constant endeavor—and they have a place of importance corresponding to this directive relation. Life moves as these turn, and the great body of human activity, in its mighty sweep of purposive conduct, whether rising into its loftiest and purest virtues or descending to its lowest and most horrid crimes, is their result. In this teleological position they differ as "motives" from the motives found in the simple feelings, affections and passions which act non-voluntarily and unconscious of ends, but are springs of impulse and incentives from the subjective psychical organization. Intentions are deliberate voluntary purposes aiming at chosen objects and adjusting means to ends. For this class of motives, therefore, we are peculiarly and pre-eminently responsible.
Activities of the Intellect.