CHAPTER III
THE BIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF MORALITY
Morality is a restraint which the community imposes on each of its members. It demands from the individual the sacrifice of his transitory and momentary comfort in favour of his general welfare which is dependent on that of the community. It prohibits the pleasure of gratifying his desires in order that by this unpleasant renunciation his lasting well-being may be ensured. Subjectively experienced and viewed, therefore, Morality always implies the limitation of free will, the curbing of desire, opposition to inclinations and appetites, and the diminution or suppression of free, or let us rather say of unbridled, action. Before Morality can profit the community, it disturbs and incommodes the individual, it rouses in him disagreeable sensations which may reach such a pitch as to be intense pain. It is only after deep reflection, of which not everyone is capable, that the individual realizes that Morality is an essential condition of the life of society, and that the preservation of society is an essential condition of his own life; before he investigates, before he even meditates on Morality, the individual feels it directly to be unpleasant, laborious, stern—nay, hostile.
The control which Morality exercises over the actions, and indeed in many cases over the most secret thoughts of the individual, appears at the first glance to be somewhat paradoxical. It is by no means obvious why the individual should always take sides against himself and, adopting a defensive and disapproving attitude, hold his instinctive tendencies in check. Moral conduct would be intelligible if the community were always ready with means of coercion and could constrain the individual by brute force to place its interest before his own pleasure. But the individual does not wait for police intervention on the part of the community. He frowns upon himself with the awful severity of the law. He threatens himself with a cudgel. He divides himself into two beings, one of which wants to follow its instincts, while the other curbs them vigorously; one is a rearing, often a refractory, horse, the other a rider with bridle, whip and spur.
This reduplication of the ego, one-half of which establishes control over the other, one-half of which tries to remain true to itself, while the other divests itself of its identity and denies itself—this is the inner process, the outward manifestation of which is moral conduct. This demands investigation and explanation. We must show how the organism could develop from within itself the power to paralyse, or completely repress, its own elemental activities, and how Morality was able to become an integral part in the general scheme of life processes.
The mechanism whereby the mind, appraising, foreseeing and judging, checks the first movement of impulse, is inhibition or repression. Without inhibition moral conduct would not be possible. The mind would have no method of indicating the path and prescribing rules to the organism's instinct. It would have no means of making its insight prevail over the desires of the senses. It would have no weapon with which to force its being to actions opposed to its organic inclinations. Without inhibition the individual would never give precedence to the demands of the community and lay himself open to disagreeable emotions in order to please the community. Inhibition was the necessary organic preliminary to the phenomenon of Morality. It had to be pre-existent in the individual, so that Morality could make itself at home in his intellectual life, so that it could acquire creative, ruling and practical power among the elect, and become an unconscious and easy habit among the average. Morality took possession of a pre-existent organic aptitude and made it serve its own purposes. But organic aptitudes are not alike in all individuals. In some cases they are more or less perfect; in others they may be lacking altogether. Indeed only individuals with highly developed powers of inhibition are capable of that heroic Morality which liberates them from the weakness of the flesh and makes them independent of the demands of the body; those in whom this power of inhibition is scantily developed evade the influence of Morality entirely, and it has no authority over them.
That which is called character is at bottom the name we give to the power of inhibition. Where it is weak we speak of lack of character, whereas by strength of character we mean that the power of inhibition is great. The will makes use of inhibition. With its help the will guides the living machine in a certain direction and urges it to perform given tasks. At the first glance it may not seem obvious that positive actions can come of repression, which is something negative. But if we analyse psychologically the actions demanded and promoted by the will, and trace them back to their organic origins, we shall find that, as a rule, the first elements consist in the prevention of impulsive movements, and that the impetus to positive effort is given by the will, which converts these movements into contrary ones. A few instances may make this psychic process clearer. Winkelried, at Sempach, cleaves a path through the cuirassiers while they bury their lances in his breast; he becomes capable of this great deed of self-sacrifice in that, by a mighty effort of will power, he suppresses the strongest of all instincts, that of self-preservation, and forces all his energies, which are naturally directed towards flight from danger, to challenge danger and yield completely to it. The lover who overcomes his passion and renounces its object, because his idol is the bride of his best friend, begins with the determined inhibition of the impulse which urges him towards the woman, and attains renunciation by the suppression of his desire; this renunciation finds expression in positive actions, in the rupture of relations which bring him happiness, the avoidance of meetings which would prevent the wound in his heart from healing, and so on. The brave rescuer who plunges into the waves to save a drowning man, or enters a burning house to save a fellow creature threatened by the flames, must first overcome his natural shrinking fear of the water and the fire; and not till after the suppression of strong impulses to avoid the uncanny adventure, does he succeed in making his muscles obey the impulse to save life.
Inhibition, therefore, is the organic foundation on which Morality builds, not only that Morality which consists in abstention from certain actions, but that which is manifested in active virtue. But inhibition is a faculty which the organism has developed for its own ends, the better and more easily to preserve its own life, and to render its power of achievement greater. Morality makes use of this faculty, which it finds ready to hand, for the ends of the community, and very often against the immediate interests of the individual for whose advantage it is nevertheless intended. Now the individual would not put up with this inexpedient use, one is tempted to say this clever misuse, of one of its organic capacities, if this yielding up of the mechanism of inhibition to Morality were not beneficial to life and therefore came within the sphere of the biological purpose of inhibition. By being grafted on a pre-existent organic faculty Morality becomes such itself; it forms a link in the chain of biological processes within the individual organism; it ceases to be purely a product of society forced upon the individual to his molestation and in spite of his annoyance; it acquires the character of a differentiation of inhibition in order to help the individual, or even to make it at all possible for him to adapt himself to life in a society.