lingering and widespread evils; and the act of drinking the polluted water, though to a very thirsty man a keen temptation, is immoral. Morality is thus an acting upon a right perspective of life. Personal morality considers the goods and evils in the one stream of consciousness, social morality the goods and evils in other conscious lives concerned. Between them they sum up the law and the prophets.

The best life for humanity is that which is, on the whole, felt best; not necessarily that which is judged best by this man or that, for our judgments are narrow and misrepresent actual values, but that which has had from beginning to end the greatest total of happiness. No other ultimate criterion for conduct can ever justify itself, and most theoretical statements reduce to this. To be virtuous is to be a virtuoso in life. All sorts of objections have been raised to this simple, and apparently pagan, way of stating the case; they will be considered in due time. The reader is asked to refrain from parting company with the writer, if his prejudices are aroused, until the consonance of this sketchy account of the basis of morality with Christianity and all idealism can be demonstrated.

H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, chap. III. S. E. Mezes, Ethics, chap. IX. Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics, chaps. II, IX. F. Thilly, Introduction to Ethics, chaps. IV, v. F. Paulsen, bk. II, chap. I. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism. B. P. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, chap. II. The classic accounts of a rational foundation of ethics are to be found by the discerning reader in Plato's Protagoras, Gorgias, and Republic (esp. bks. I, II, IV), and Aristotle's Ethics (esp. bks. I and II). For refinements in the definition of right and wrong, see G. E. Moore, Ethics, chaps. I-v; B. Russell, Philosophical Essays, I, secs. II, III. International Journal of Ethics, vol. 24, p. 293. Definitions of value without reference to pleasure or pain will be found in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. 11, pp. 29, 113, 141. An elaborate and careful discussion will be found in G. H. Palmer's Nature of Goodness.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MEANING OF DUTY

Why are there conflicts between duty and inclination?

IF virtue is simply conduct that makes most truly for happiness, why are not all but fools virtuous? The answer is, in a word, because what will bring about the greatest good in the long run, and to the most people, is not always what the individual desires at the moment. The two great temptations are the lure of the selfish and the lure of the immediate. To purchase one's own happiness at the expense of others, and to purchase present satisfaction by an act which will bring less good in the end these are the cardinal sins, and under these two heads every specific sin can be put. The root of the trouble is that, in spite of the superposition of conscience upon their primitive impulses, human organisms have not yet motor-mechanisms fully adjusted to their individual or combined needs. Some instincts are over-strong, others under-developed, none is delicately enough attuned to the changing possibilities of the situation. Our desires tug toward all sorts of acts which would prove disastrous either to ourselves or others. Many of our faults we commit "without realizing it"; we follow our impulses blindly, unconscious of their treachery. Other sins we commit knowingly, because in spite of warning voices we cannot resist the momentary desire. Readjustment of our impulses is always painful; it is easier and pleasanter to yield than to control.

Duty is the name we give virtue when she is opposed to inclination. She is the representative at the helm of our conduct of all absent or undeveloped impulses. The saints

have no need of the concept; virtue to them is easy and agreeable; they have learned the beauty of holiness and have no unruly longings. Sometimes this happy adjustment of desire to need has been won by severe struggle; the dangerous impulses have been trained to come to heel through many a painful sacrifice. In other cases an approximation to this ideal state is the result of early training; by skillful guidance the growing boy or girl has had his safe impulses fostered and his perilous desires atrophied with disuse. The proverb, "Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart therefrom," has much truth in it. But no parent and no man himself can ever breathe quite safe; we can never tell when some submerged animal instinct will rise up in us, stun all our laboriously acquired morality into inactivity, and bring on consequences that in any coolheaded moment we should have known enough to avoid.

Thus duty, although she is the truest friend and servant of happiness, figures as her foe. And some moralists, realizing vividly the frequent need of opposing inclination, have generalized the situation by saying that happiness cannot be our end. "Foolish Word-monger and Motive-grinder,' shouts Carlyle, "who in thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtue from the husks of Pleasure, I tell thee, Nay!. Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some Passion, some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction others profit by? I know not; only this I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. . . . 'Happy,' my brother? First of all, what difference is it whether thou art happy or not! . . . 'Happiness our being's end and aim,' all that very paltry speculation is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world." 1

1 Sartor Resartus: "The Everlasting No." Past and Present: “Happy.”

Leaving aside this last statement, which is an irrelevant untruth, we probably feel an instinctive sympathy with Carlyle, and a sort of shame that we should have thought of happiness as the goal of conduct. Carlyle goes so far in his tirades as to call our happiness-morality a "pig-philosophy,' which makes the universe out to be a huge "swine's trough' from which mankind is trying to get the maximum “pigs' wash." Again he calls it a "Mechanical Profit-and-Loss theory." In such picturesque language he embodies a point of view which in milder terms has been expressed by many.

But to say that we must often oppose inclination in the name of duty is by no means to say that we must do what in the end will make against happiness. The trouble with inclination and passion is precisely that they are often ruiners of happiness. The very real and frequent opposition of desire and duty is no support of the view that duty is irrelevant to happiness, but quite consistent with the rational account of morality - that dates at least back to the ancient Greeks which shows it to be the means to man's most lasting and widespread happiness.

Must we deny that duty is the servant of happiness?

We may go on to point out various flaws in the doctrine, of which Carlyle is one of the extreme representatives, that the account of morality as a means to happiness is immoral and leads to shocking results.

(1) The plausibility of the doctrine rests largely on its confusion with the very different truth that we should not make happiness our conscious aim. It is one of the surest fruits of experience that happiness is best won by forgetting it; he that loses his life shall truly find it. To think much of happiness slides inevitably over into thinking too much of present happiness, and more of one's own than others' happiness; it leads to what Spencer properly dubs "the

pursuit of happiness without regard to the conditions by fulfillment of which happiness is to be achieved." Carlyle is practically on the right track in bidding us think rather of duty, of work, of accomplishment. But that is far from denying that these aims have their ultimate justification in the happiness they forward. In order that remote ends may be attained, it is often necessary to cease thinking of them and concentrate the mind upon immediate means. To acquire unconsciousness of manner, the last thing to do is to aim directly for it; to acquire happiness, the worst procedure is to make it one's conscious quest. Yet in the former case the attainment of the ease of manner sought, and in the latter case the attainment of the happiest life for one's self and those whom one's action affects is the touchstone which at bottom determines the method to be adopted. The proper method, we contend, is - morality. It is the method that Carlyle recommends. So that in practice we agree with him, while parting with him in theory.

(2) Carlyle evidently has in mind usually the thought that it is one's own happiness only that is put up as the end by the moralists he opposes. This was pure misunderstanding, however, or perversity. Other men's happiness has intrinsic worth (or is intrinsic worth, for the word and the phrase are synonymous) as truly as mine; and morality is concerned quite as much with guiding the individual toward the general good as toward his own ultimate welfare. To this point we must return, merely mentioning here the fact that no reputable moralist now preaches the selfish theory.

(3) A part of Carlyle's ammunition consists in the slurring connotations which have grown up about the word "pleasure," and even the word "happiness." Because of the practical need of opposing immediate in the interests of remoter good, the various words that designate intrinsic and imme