Human actions, we have said, are sometimes good, sometimes bad. These two qualifications have degrees in proportion to the importance or the difficulty of the action. It is thus we call an action suitable, estimable, beautiful, admirable, sublime, etc. On the other hand, a bad action is sometimes but a simple mistake, and sometimes a crime. It is culpable, base, abominable, execrable, etc.
If we observe in an agent the habit of good actions, a constant tendency to conform to the law of duty, this habit or constant tendency is called virtue, and the contrary tendency is called vice.
Whilst man feels himself bound by his conscience to seek the right, he is impelled by his nature to seek pleasure. When he enjoys pleasure without any admixture of pain, he is happy; and the highest degree of possible pleasure with the least degree of possible pain is happiness. Now, experience shows that happiness is not always in harmony with virtue, and that pleasure does not necessarily accompany right doing.
And yet we find such a separation unjust; and we believe in a natural and legitimate connection between pleasure and right, pain and wrong. Pleasure, considered as the consequence of well-doing, is called recompense; and pain, considered as the legitimate consequence of evil, is called punishment.
When a man has done well he thinks, and all other men think, that he has a right to a recompense. When he has done ill they think the contrary, and he himself thinks also that he must atone for his wrong-doing by a chastisement. This principle, by virtue of which we declare a moral agent deserving of happiness or unhappiness according to his good or bad actions, is called the principle of merit and demerit.
The sum total of the rewards and punishments attached to the execution or violation of a law is called sanction; the sanction of the moral law will then be called moral sanction.
All law presupposes a legislator. The moral law will presuppose, then, a moral legislator, and morality consequently raises us to God. All human or earthly sanction being shown by observation to be insufficient, the moral law calls for a religious sanction. It is thus that morality conducts us to the immortality of the soul.
If we go back upon the whole of the ideas we have just briefly expressed, we shall see that at each of the steps we have taken there are always two contraries opposed the one to the other: good and evil, command and prohibition, virtue and vice, merit and demerit, pleasure and pain, reward and punishment.
Human life presents itself, then, under two aspects. Man can choose between the two. This power is liberty. This choice is difficult and laborious; it exacts from us incessant efforts. It is for this reason that life is said to be a trial, and is often represented as a combat. It should therefore not be represented as a play, but rather as a manly and valiant effort. Struggle is its condition, peace its prize.
Such are the fundamental ideas morality has for its object, and of which it seeks, at the same time, both the principles and the applications.