4. The activities and uses of the intellect. Often theorists have denied any moral element in these, mainly because of a certain "necessity" in intellect under psychical law, and because its function is simply "to know." It does nothing, either good or bad; "it only knows." Its sphere is the sphere of knowledge, not of conduct. But this is a very inadequate view of its total activity, and of its place in the moral agent's life. As to the question of "necessity," the activities of the intellect are as much under the command of the moral agent as are his sensibilities, his affections, desires, and passions. It would be difficult to see why he should be amenable for the direction and regulation of these desires and passions, and not also for the direction and character of his intellectual work and the use he makes of these high endowments. As to the question of the non-moral character of cognitive or thought activities, they are correctly conceded to be, in very large measure, without any ethical quality. But it is also true, that there may be activities, as for example, in the imagination, and in purposive scheming, which are impure and grossly violative of justice and right. Because the intellect in itself, as contradistinguished from the will, does not choose and has no choice, we may not, indeed, say of its activity: "It is guilty," "it is under obligation," since obligation and guilt pertain not to the act but to the moral person; but yet we may speak of intellectual activity or work as morally "right" or "wrong," according as it is in harmony or in conflict with the true ends for which the intellectual powers have been framed and the well-being they are designed to serve. It would be difficult to see why the intellectual activity which plans out the details of a theft or a murder is not as really immoral, i. e. something morally condemnable, as is the desire or wish to commit it, or why the person is less blameworthy for the one than the other. In both cases it is part of his personal activity. And if he is "blameworthy," it is only because the activity is in itself "wrong." Is he any less guilty for allowing his intellect to think out the wrong than his feelings to desire it? The moral sense must condemn this intellectual work as inconsistent with the relations of the intellect to human well-being and righteousness. In these days of worship of intellectual brilliancy, and the large prostitution of the imagination to activities which flood literature with thoughts that defile and suggestions that carry moral blight and desolation, producing every form of vice and crime, it is of prime importance to recognize that this intellectualism does not stand altogether apart from moral quality, and that men are under the completest obligation to keep it all in harmony with righteousness and the ethical ends of life.
Acts of the Will.
5. Our view of intentions has touched on part of the functions of the will with respect to moral quality, but its acts in the stricter sense and more specific forms require further statement. "Intentions" are, indeed, under the command of the will, yet they are there as motives, whose force and quality stand specially in the objects desired and aimed at. They draw their quality rather from the ends sought than from the working of the will which consents to the ends. We must see yet whether the conscience judges also the proper and specific acts of the will.
Of course that which we name "the will" is simply the soul's power of choosing, or rather, it is the personal self as causal for choices and executive action. Its acts are "volitions." Does moral quality attach to these? There can be no doubt of it. Upon these volitions, preferential and executive choices, electing between duty and its opposite, between conduct in harmony or in conflict with moral requirement, between indulgence of good or wicked feelings, between virtuous and evil intentions, between higher and lower motives, between actions materially right or wrong, making the decision for or against righteousness and goodness and purity, in all the questions of daily behavior in which life rises into ethical excellence and blessedness or descends into wrong, vice, crime, and consequent wretchedness, the moral sense of mankind pours its most unequivocal approvals or reprobations. It not only judges them as right or wrong in themselves, but as, among all human activities, most creative or most destructive of moral character. It is a fundamental postulate in ethical thinking that moral law binds the will.[63]
In the action of the will the moral judgment finds its object of highest approval and of most thorough condemnation. It is to the will, i. e. the personal self, that moral law presents its claims. It is the point in which personality is summed up in free and responsible selfhood, and where the great reality of responsibility is pivoted. The will, as another name for the soul's power of choosing, sustains the decisive relation between all the motives that precede and the actions which follow the volitions. The action contemplated may be right or wrong, the motive may be good or bad, but when the question is brought by the conscience into the presence of the will, the place of supreme and final responsibility for virtue or sin is reached.
This justifies the conclusion that moral character belongs to the exercise of the will as it does not to any other activity of our moral nature. For it is the point, and the only point, of freedom in our whole constitution. Necessity marks the action of each and every part from the lowest functions up to the will; and beyond this there stretches on another realm of necessity in the consequences of volition. For example, necessity rules in the physical nature. The processes go on under fixed uniform laws, with no freedom or choice. So in the intellect and the sensibility. We begin to think in non-optional spontaneity, or we would not think at all. In perception, representation, in the discursive and intuitive powers, and in the emotions, affections and desires that arise from the activity of the intellect, the movement is bound up under laws of cause and effect. Whatever power of regulation, change or control we possess over these functions does not belong to the powers themselves, but to the will or the personal capacity of free choice and self-regulation. It is only through our will-power that we can handle and direct our thinking or control the direction and force of our feelings. So, too, the ideas of right and wrong, the perceptions of duty and the sense of obligation come into the presence of the will of necessity. All before the will is of necessity. Thus men see the right and perceive obligation. At this point all the responsibility of character is thrown upon the will. If contemplated action appear right or wrong, as action that ought or ought not to be done, the will must decide whether it shall be done. If good or bad motives plead for rulership, the will must say which shall prevail. If feelings are out of harmony with duty and right in the relations of life, with respect to God or man, it is to be remembered that the feelings cannot choose, and the will alone can guide them in virtuous action. To it, therefore, virtue or guilt belongs as nowhere else. For it not only accepts and makes its own all the right or wrong that appears elsewhere, but it also remains true or becomes false to its own supreme duty and obligation to moral law, when, under the behests of conscience, it directs life and character either up the heights of moral excellence and happiness, or into the wrong and guilt and miseries of immorality. Where the will is moral the man is moral; for the will is the zenith of personality. Where it is immoral the man is immoral.
[CHAPTER XI.]
THE ETHICAL VIEW UNDER CHRISTIAN TEACHING.
These conclusions with respect to the nature and office of conscience, the ethical distinction, its theistic implications, its transcendental character and objective validity, its relation to personality and freedom, the proximate and ultimate ground of right, and the different parts of human activity to which moral quality belongs, are conclusions reached by the scientific method and stand on the warrant of reason. They arise from phenomena of history and life, and form, in their essential statements, a body of scientific and philosophical knowledge of equal certainty and authority with the most assured results of other branches of rational investigation. Ethics, therefore, finds its fundamental truths in the natural constitution of the world, and is able to build these truths into a science possessed of all the rights and force of systematized and established knowledge.