Intelligence is concerned with foreseeing the future so that action may have order and direction. It is also concerned with principles and criteria of judgment. The diffused or wide applicability of habits is reflected in the general character of principles: a principle is intellectually what a habit is for direct action. As habits set in grooves dominate activity and swerve it from conditions instead of increasing its adaptability, so principles treated as fixed rules instead of as helpful methods take men away from experience. The more complicated the situation, and the less we really know about it, the more insistent is the orthodox type of moral theory upon the prior existence of some fixed and universal principle or law which is to be directly applied and followed. Ready-made rules available at a moment's notice for settling any kind of moral difficulty and resolving every species of moral doubt have been the chief object of the ambition of moralists. In the much less complicated and less changing matters of bodily health such pretensions are known as quackery. But in morals a hankering for certainty, born of timidity and nourished by love of authoritative prestige, has led to the idea that absence of immutably fixed and universally applicable ready-made principles is equivalent to moral chaos.
In fact, situations into which change and the unexpected enter are a challenge to intelligence to create new principles. Morals must be a growing science if it is to be a science at all, not merely because all truth has not yet been appropriated by the mind of man, but because life is a moving affair in which old moral truth ceases to apply. Principles are methods of inquiry and forecast which require verification by the event; and the time honored effort to assimilate morals to mathematics is only a way of bolstering up an old dogmatic authority, or putting a new one upon the throne of the old. But the experimental character of moral judgments does not mean complete uncertainty and fluidity. Principles exist as hypotheses with which to experiment. Human history is long. There is a long record of past experimentation in conduct, and there are cumulative verifications which give many principles a well earned prestige. Lightly to disregard them is the height of foolishness. But social situations alter; and it is also foolish not to observe how old principles actually work under new conditions, and not to modify them so that they will be more effectual instruments in judging new cases. Many men are now aware of the harm done in legal matters by assuming the antecedent existence of fixed principles under which every new case may be brought. They recognize that this assumption merely puts an artificial premium on ideas developed under bygone conditions, and that their perpetuation in the present works inequity. Yet the choice is not between throwing away rules previously developed and sticking obstinately by them. The intelligent alternative is to revise, adapt, expand and alter them. The problem is one of continuous, vital readaptation.
The popular objection to casuistry is similar to the popular objection to the maxim that the end justifies the means. It is creditable to practical moral sense, but not to popular logical consistency. For recourse to casuistry is the only conclusion which can be drawn from belief in fixed universal principles, just as the Jesuit maxim is the only conclusion proper to be drawn from belief in fixed ends. Every act, every deed is individual. What is the sense in having fixed general rules, commandments, laws, unless they are such as to confer upon individual cases of action (where alone instruction is finally needed) something of their own infallible certainty? Casuistry, so-called, is simply the systematic effort to secure for particular instances of conduct the advantage of general rules which are asserted and believed in. By those who accept the notion of immutable regulating principles, casuistry ought to be lauded for sincerity and helpfulness, not dispraised as it usually is. Or else men ought to carry back their aversion to manipulation of particular cases, until they will fit into the procrustean beds of fixed rules, to the point where it is clear that all principles are empirical generalizations from the ways in which previous judgments of conduct have practically worked out. When this fact is apparent, these generalizations will be seen to be not fixed rules for deciding doubtful cases, but instrumentalities for their investigation, methods by which the net value of past experience is rendered available for present scrutiny of new perplexities. Then it will also follow that they are hypotheses to be tested and revised by their further working.[8]
Every such statement meets with prompt objection. We are told that in deliberation rival goods present themselves. We are faced by competing desires and ends which are incompatible with one another. They are all attractive, seductive. How then shall we choose among them? We can choose rationally among values, the argument continues, only if we have some fixed measure of values, just as we decide the respective lengths of physical things by recourse to the fixed foot-rule. One might reply that after all there is no fixed foot-rule, no fixed foot "in itself" and that the standard length or weight of measure is only another special portion of matter, subject to change from heat, moisture and gravitational position, defined only by conditions, relations. One might reply that the foot-rule is a tool which has been worked out in actual prior comparisons of concrete things for use in facilitating further comparisons. But we content ourselves with remarking that we find in this conception of a fixed antecedent standard another manifestation of the desire to escape the strain of the actual moral situation, its genuine uncertainty of possibilities and consequences. We are confronted with another case of the all too human love of certainty, a case of the wish for an intellectual patent issued by authority. The issue after all is one of fact. The critic is not entitled to enforce against the facts his private wish for a ready-made standard which will relieve him from the burden of examination, observation and continuing generalization and test.
The worth of this private wish is moreover open to question in the light of the history of the development of natural science. There was a time when in astronomy, chemistry and biology men claimed that judgment of individual phenomena was possible only because the mind was already in possession of fixed truths, universal principles, pre-ordained axioms. Only by their means could contingent, varying particular events be truly known. There was, it was argued, no way to judge the truth of any particular statement about a particular plant, heavenly body, or case of combustion unless there was a general truth already in hand with which to compare a particular empirical occurrence. The contention was successful, that is for a long time it maintained its hold upon men's minds. But its effect was merely to encourage intellectual laziness, reliance upon authority and blind acceptance of conceptions that had somehow become traditional. The actual advance of science did not begin till men broke away from this method. When men insisted upon judging astronomical phenomena by bringing them directly under established truths, those of geometry, they had no astronomy, but only a private esthetic construction. Astronomy began when men trusted themselves to embarking upon the uncertain sea of events and were willing to be instructed by changes in the concrete. Then antecedent principles were tentatively employed as methods for conducting observations and experiments, and for organizing special facts: as hypotheses.
In morals now, as in physical science then, the work of intelligence in reaching such relative certainty, or tested probability, as is open to man is retarded by the false notion of fixed antecedent truths. Prejudice is confirmed. Rules formed accidentally or under the pressure of conditions long past, are protected from criticism and thus perpetuated. Every group and person vested with authority strengthens possessed power by harping upon the sacredness of immutable principle. Moral facts, that is the concrete careers of special courses of action, are not studied. There is no counterpart to clinical medicine. Rigid classifications forced upon facts are relied upon. And all is done, as it used to be done in natural science, in praise of Reason and in fear of the variety and fluctuation of actual happenings.
The hypothesis that each moral situation is unique and that consequently general moral principles are instrumental to developing the individualized meaning of situations is declared to be anarchic. It is said to be ethical atomism, pulverizing the order and dignity of morals. The question, again is not what our inherited habits lead us to prefer, but where the facts take us. But in this instance the facts do not take us into atomism and anarchy. These things are specters seen by the critic when he is suddenly confused by the loss of customary spectacles. He takes his own confusion due to loss of artificial aids for an objective situation. Because situations in which deliberation is evoked are new, and therefore unique, general principles are needed. Only an uncritical vagueness will assume that the sole alternative to fixed generality is absence of continuity. Rigid habits insist upon duplication, repetition, recurrence; in their case there is accordingly fixed principles. Only there is no principle at all, that is, no conscious intellectual rule, for thought is not needed. But all habit has continuity, and while a flexible habit does not secure in its operation bare recurrence nor absolute assurance neither does it plunge us into the hopeless confusion of the absolutely different. To insist upon change and the new is to insist upon alteration of the old. In denying that the meaning of any genuine case of deliberation can be exhausted by treating it as a mere case of an established classification the value of classification is not denied. It is shown where its value lies, namely, in directing attention to resemblances and differences in the new case, in economizing effort in foresight. To call a generalization a tool is not to say it is useless; the contrary is patently the case. A tool is something to use. Hence it is also something to be improved by noting how it works. The need of such noting and improving is indispensable if, as is the case with moral principles, the tool has to be used in unwonted circumstances. Continuity of growth not atomism is thus the alternative to fixity of principles and aims. This is no Bergsonian plea for dividing the universe into two portions, one all of fixed, recurrent habits, and the other all spontaneity of flux. Only in such a universe would reason in morals have to take its choice between absolute fixity and absolute looseness.
Nothing is more instructive about the genuine value of generalization in conduct than the errors of Kant. He took the doctrine that the essence of reason is complete universality (and hence necessity and immutability), with the seriousness becoming the professor of logic. Applying the doctrine to morality he saw that this conception severed morals from connection with experience. Other moralists had gone that far before his day. But none of them had done what Kant proceeded to do: carry this separation of moral principles and ideals from experience to its logical conclusion. He saw that to exclude from principles all connection with empirical details meant to exclude all reference of any kind to consequences. He then saw with a clearness which does his logic credit that with such exclusion, reason becomes entirely empty: nothing is left except the universality of the universal. He was then confronted by the seemingly insoluble problem of getting moral instruction regarding special cases out of a principle that having forsworn intercourse with experience was barren and empty. His ingenious method was as follows. Formal universality means at least logical identity; it means self-consistency or absence of contradiction. Hence follows the method by which a would-be truly moral agent will proceed in judging the rightness of any proposed act. He will ask: Can its motive be made universal for all cases? How would one like it if by one's act one's motive in that act were to be erected into a universal law of actual nature? Would one then be willing to make the same choice?
Surely a man would hesitate to steal if by his choice to make stealing the motive of his act he were also to erect it into such a fixed law of nature that henceforth he and everybody else would always steal whenever property was in question. No stealing without property, and with universal stealing also no property; a clear self-contradiction. Looked at in the light of reason every mean, insincere, inconsiderate motive of action shrivels into a private exception which a person wants to take advantage of in his own favor, and which he would be horrified to have others act upon. It violates the great principle of logic that A is A. Kindly, decent acts, on the contrary, extend and multiply themselves in a continuing harmony.
This treatment by Kant evinces deep insight into the office of intelligence and principle in conduct. But it involves flat contradiction of Kant's own original intention to exclude consideration of concrete consequences. It turns out to be a method of recommending a broad impartial view of consequences. Our forecast of consequences is always subject, as we have noted, to the bias of impulse and habit. We see what we want to see, we obscure what is unfavorable to a cherished, probably unavowed, wish. We dwell upon favoring circumstances till they become weighted with reinforcing considerations. We don't give opposing consequences half a chance to develop in thought. Deliberation needs every possible help it can get against the twisting, exaggerating and slighting tendency of passion and habit. To form the habit of asking how we should be willing to be treated in a similar case—which is what Kant's maxim amounts to—is to gain an ally for impartial and sincere deliberation and judgment. It is a safeguard against our tendency to regard our own case as exceptional in comparison with the case of others. "Just this once," a plea for isolation; secrecy—a plea for non-inspection, are forces which operate in every passionate desire. Demand for consistency, for "universality," far from implying a rejection of all consequences, is a demand to survey consequences broadly, to link effect to effect in a chain of continuity. Whatever force works to this end is reason. For reason, let it be repeated is an outcome, a function, not a primitive force. What we need are those habits, dispositions which lead to impartial and consistent foresight of consequences. Then our judgments are reasonable; we are then reasonable creatures.
Certain critics in sympathy with at least the negative contention, the critical side, of such a theory as has been advanced, regard it as placing too much emphasis upon intelligence. They find it intellectualistic, cold-blooded. They say we must change desire, love, aspiration, admiration, and then action will be transformed. A new affection, a changed appreciation, brings with it a revaluation of life and insists upon its realization. A refinement of intellect at most only figures out better ways of reaching old and accustomed ends. In fact we are lucky if intellect does not freeze the ardor of generous desire and paralyze creative endeavor. Intellect is critical, unproductive while desire is generative. In its dispassionateness intellect is aloof from humanity and its needs. It fosters detachment where sympathy is needed. It cultivates contemplation when salvation lies in liberating desire. Intellect is analytic, taking things to pieces; its devices are the scalpel and test-tube. Affection is synthetic, unifying. This argument affords an opportunity for making more explicit those respective offices of wish and thought in forming ends which have already been touched upon.
First we must undertake an independent analysis of desire. It is customary to describe desires in terms of their objects, meaning by objects the things which figure as in imagination their goals. As the object is noble or base, so, it is thought, is desire. In any case, emotions rise and cluster about the object. This stands out so conspicuously in immediate experience that it monopolizes the central position in the traditional psychological theory of desire. Barring gross self-deception or the frustration of external circumstance, the outcome, or end-result, of desire is regarded by this theory as similar to the end-in-view or object consciously desired. Such, however, is not the case, as readily appears from the analysis of deliberation. In saying that the actual outcome of desire is different in kind from the object upon which desire consciously fastens, I do not mean to repeat the old complaint about the fallibility and feebleness of mortals in virtue of which man's hopes are frustrated and twisted in realization. The difference is one of diverse dimensions, not of degree or amount.
The object desired and the attainment of desire are no more alike than a signboard on the road is like the garage to which it points and which it recommends to the traveler. Desire is the forward urge of living creatures. When the push and drive of life meets no obstacle, there is nothing which we call desire. There is just life-activity. But obstructions present themselves, and activity is dispersed and divided. Desire is the outcome. It is activity surging forward to break through what dams it up. The "object" which then presents itself in thought as the goal of desire is the object of the environment which, if it were present, would secure a re-unification of activity and the restoration of its ongoing unity. The end-in-view of desire is that object which were it present would link into an organized whole activities which are now partial and competing. It is no more like the actual end of desire, or the resulting state attained, than the coupling of cars which have been separated is like an ongoing single train. Yet the train cannot go on without the coupling.
Such statements may seem contrary to common sense. The pertinency of the illustration used will be denied. No man desires the signboard which he sees, he desires the garage, the objective, the ulterior thing. But does he? Or is the garage simply a means by which a divided body of activities is redintegrated or coordinated? Is it desired in any sense for itself, or only because it is the means of effective adjustment of a whole set of underlying habits? While common sense responds to the ordinary statement of the end of desire, it also responds to a statement that no one desires the object for its own sake, but only for what can be got out of it. Here is just the point at which the theory that pleasure is the real objective of desire makes its appeal. It points out that not the physical object nor even its possession is really wanted; that they are only means to something personal and experiential. And hence it is argued that they are means to pleasure. The present hypothesis offers an alternative: it says that they are means of removal of obstructions to an ongoing, unified system of activities. It is easy to see why an objective looms so large and why emotional surge and stress gather about it and lift it high above the floor of consciousness. The objective is (or is taken to be) the key to the situation. If we can attain it, lay hold of it, the trick is turned. It is like the piece of paper which carries the reprieve a condemned man waits for. Issues of life hang upon it. The desired object is in no sense the end or goal of desire, but it is the sine qua non of that end. A practical man will fix his attention upon it, and not dream about eventualities which are only dreams if the objective is not attained, but which will follow in their own natural course if it is reached. For then it becomes a factor in the system of activities. Hence the truth in the various so-called paradoxes of desire. If pleasure or perfection were the true end of desire, it would still be true that the way to attainment is not to think of them. For object thought of and object achieved exist in different dimensions.
In addition to the popular notions that either the object in view or else pleasure is the end of desire, there is a less popular theory that quiescence is the actual outcome or true terminal of desire. The theory finds its most complete practical statement in Buddhism. It is nearer the psychological truth than either of the other notions. But it views the attained outcome simply in its negative aspect. The end reached quiets the clash and removes the discomfort attendant upon divided and obstructed activity. The uneasiness, unrest, characteristic of desire is put to sleep. For this reason, some persons resort to intoxicants and anodynes. If quiescence were the end and it could be perpetuated, this way of removing disagreeable uneasiness would be as satisfactory a way out as the way of objective effort. But in fact desire satisfied does not bring quiescence unqualifiedly, but that kind of quiescence which marks the recovery of unified activity: the absence of internal strife among habits and instincts. Equilibration of activities rather than quiescence is the actual result of satisfied desire. This names the outcome positively, rather than comparatively and negatively.
This disparity of dimensions in desire between the object thought of and the outcome reached is the explanation of those self-deceptions which psycho-analysis has brought home to us so forcibly, but of which it gives elaborately cumbrous accounts. The object thought of and the outcome never agree. There is no self-deceit in this fact. What, then, really happens when the actual outcome of satisfied revenge figures in thought as virtuous eagerness for justice? Or when the tickled vanity of social admiration is masked as pure love of learning? The trouble lies in the refusal of a person to note the quality of the outcome, not in the unavoidable disparity of desire's object and the outcome. The honest or integral mind attends to the result, and sees what it really is. For no terminal condition is exclusively terminal. Since it exists in time it has consequences as well as antecedents. In being a consummation it is also a force having causal potentialities. It is initial as well as terminal.
Self-deception originates in looking at an outcome in one direction only—as a satisfaction of what has gone before, ignoring the fact that what is attained is a state of habits which will continue in action and which will determine future results. Outcomes of desire are also beginnings of new acts and hence are portentous. Satisfied revenge may feel like justice vindicated; the prestige of learning may feel like an enlargement and rectification of an objective outlook. But since different instincts and habits have entered into them, they are actually, that is dynamically, unlike. The function of moral judgment is to detect this unlikeness. Here, again, the belief that we can know ourselves immediately is as disastrous to moral science as the corresponding idea regarding knowledge of nature was to physical science. Obnoxious "subjectivity" of moral judgment is due to the fact that the immediate or esthetic quality swells and swells and displaces the thought of the active potency which gives activity its moral quality.
We are all natural Jack Horners. If the plum comes when we put in and pull out our thumb we attribute the satisfactory result to personal virtue. The plum is obtained, and it is not easy to distinguish obtaining from attaining, acquisition from achieving. Jack Horner, Esq., put forth some effort; and results and efforts are always more or less incommensurate. For the result is always dependent to some extent upon the favor or disfavor of circumstance. Why then should not the satisfactory plum shed its halo retrospectively upon what precedes and be taken as a sign of virtue? In this way heroes and leaders are constructed. Such is the worship of success. And the evil of success-worship is precisely the evil with which we have been dealing. "Success" is never merely final or terminal. Something else succeeds it, and its successors are influenced by its nature, that is by the persisting habits and impulses that enter into it. The world does not stop when the successful person pulls out his plum; nor does he stop, and the kind of success he obtains, and his attitude toward it, is a factor in what comes afterwards. By a strange turn of the wheel, the success of the ultra-practical man is psychologically like the refined enjoyment of the ultra-esthetic person. Both ignore the eventualities with which every state of experience is charged. There is no reason for not enjoying the present, but there is every reason for examination of the objective factors of what is enjoyed before we translate enjoyment into a belief in excellence. There is every reason in other words for cultivating another enjoyment, that of the habit of examining the productive potentialities of the objects enjoyed.
Analysis of desire thus reveals the falsity of theories which magnify it at the expense of intelligence. Impulse is primary and intelligence is secondary and in some sense derivative. There should be no blinking of this fact. But recognition of it as a fact exalts intelligence. For thought is not the slave of impulse to do its bidding. Impulse does not know what it is after; it cannot give orders, not even if it wants to. It rushes blindly into any opening it chances to find. Anything that expends it, satisfies it. One outlet is like another to it. It is indiscriminate. Its vagaries and excesses are the stock theme of classical moralists; and while they point the wrong moral in urging the abdication of impulse in favor of reason, their characterization of impulse is not wholly wrong. What intelligence has to do in the service of impulse is to act not as its obedient servant but as its clarifier and liberator. And this can be accomplished only by a study of the conditions and causes, the workings and consequences of the greatest possible variety of desires and combinations of desire. Intelligence converts desire into plans, systematic plans based on assembling facts, reporting events as they happen, keeping tab on them and analyzing them.
Nothing is so easy to fool as impulse and no one is deceived so readily as a person under strong emotion. Hence the idealism of man is easily brought to naught. Generous impulses are aroused; there is a vague anticipation, a burning hope, of a marvelous future. Old things are to pass speedily away and a new heavens and earth are to come into existence. But impulse burns itself up. Emotion cannot be kept at its full tide. Obstacles are encountered upon which action dashes itself into ineffectual spray. Or if it achieves, by luck, a transitory success, it is intoxicated, and plumes itself on victory while it is on the road to sudden defeat. Meantime, other men, not carried away by impulse, use established habits and a shrewd cold intellect that manipulates them. The outcome is the victory of baser desire directed by insight and cunning over generous desire which does not know its way.
The realistic man of the world has evolved a regular technique for dealing with idealistic outbursts that threaten his supremacy. His aims are low, but he knows the means by which they are to be executed. His knowledge of conditions is narrow but it is effective within its confines. His foresight is limited to results that concern personal success, but is sharp, clearcut. He has no great difficulty in drafting the idealistic desire of others with its vague enthusiasms and its cloudy perceptions into canals where it will serve his own purposes. The energies excited by emotional idealism run into the materialistic reservoirs provided by the contriving thought of those who have not surrendered their minds to their sentiment.
The glorification of affection and aspiration at the expense of thought is a survival of romantic optimism. It assumes a pre-established harmony between natural impulse and natural objects. Only such a harmony justifies the belief that generous feeling will find its way illuminated by the sheer nobility of its own quality. Persons of a literary turn of mind are as subject to this fallacy as intellectual specialists are apt to the contrary fallacy that theorizing apart from force of impulse and habit will get affairs forward. They tend to fancy that things are as pliant to imagination as are words, that an emotion can compose affairs as if they were materials for a lyric poem. But if the objects of the environment were only as plastic as the materials of poetic art, men would never have been obliged to have recourse to creation in the medium of words. We idealize in fancy because our idealizations in fact are balked. And while the latter must start with imaginative idealizations instigated by release of generous impulse, they can be carried through only when the hard labor of observation, memory and foresight weds the vision of imagination to the organized efficiencies of habit.
Sometimes desire means not bare impulse but impulse which has sense of an objective. In this case desire and thought cannot be opposed, for desire includes thought within itself. The question is now how far the work of thought has been done, how adequate is its perception of its directing object. For the moving force may be a shadowy presentiment constructed by wishful hope rather than by study of conditions; it may be an emotional indulgence rather than a solid plan built upon the rocks of actuality discovered by accurate inquiries. There is no thought without the impeding of impulse. But the obstruction may merely intensify its blind surge forward; or it may divert the force of forward impulse into observation of existing conditions and forecast of their future consequences. This long way around is the short way home for desire.
No issue of morals is more far-reaching than the one herewith sketched. Historically speaking, there is point in the attacks of those who speak slightingly of science and intellect, and who would limit their moral significance to supplying incidental help to execution of purposes born of affection. Thought too often is specialized in a remote and separate pursuit, or employed in a hard way to contrive the instrumentalities of "success." Intellect is too often made a tool for a systematized apology for things as "they are," that is for customs that benefit the class in power, or else a road to an interesting occupation which accumulates facts and ideas as other men gather dollars, while priding itself on its ideal quality. No wonder that at times catastrophes that affect men in common are welcomed. For the moment they turn science away from its abstract technicalities into a servant of some human aspiration; the hard, chilly calculations of intellect are swept away by floods of sympathy and common loyalties.
But, alas, emotion without thought is unstable. It rises like the tide and subsides like the tide irrespective of what it has accomplished. It is easily diverted into any side channel dug by old habits or provided by cool cunning, or it disperses itself aimlessly. Then comes the reaction of disillusionment, and men turn all the more fiercely to the pursuit of narrow ends where they are habituated to use observation and planning and where they have acquired some control of conditions. The separation of warm emotion and cool intelligence is the great moral tragedy. This division is perpetuated by those who deprecate science and foresight in behalf of affection as it is by those who in the name of an idol labeled reason would quench passion. The intellect is always inspired by some impulse. Even the most case-hardened scientific specialist, the most abstract philosopher, is moved by some passion. But an actuating impulse easily hardens into isolated habit. It is unavowed and disconnected. The remedy is not lapse of thought, but its quickening and extension to contemplate the continuities of existence, and restore the connection of the isolated desire to the companionship of its fellows. The glorification of "will" apart from thought turns out either a commitment to blind action which serves the purpose of those who guide their deeds by narrow plans, or else a sentimental, romantic faith in the harmonies of nature leading straight to disaster.
In words at least, the association of idealism with emotion and impulse has been repeatedly implied in the foregoing. The connection is more than verbal. Every end that man holds up, every project he entertains is ideal. It marks something wanted, rather than something existing. It is wanted because existence as it now is does not furnish it. It carries with itself, then, a sense of contrast to the achieved, to the existent. It outruns the seen and touched. It is the work of faith and hope even when it is the plan of the most hard-headed "practical" man. But though ideal in this sense it is not an ideal. Common sense revolts at calling every project, every design, every contrivance of cunning, ideal, because common sense includes above all in its conception of the ideal the quality of the plan proposed.
Idealistic revolt is blind and like every blind reaction sweeps us away. The quality of the ideal is exalted till it is something beyond all possibility of definite plan and execution. Its sublimity renders it inaccessibly remote. An ideal becomes a synonym for whatever is inspiring—and impossible. Then, since intelligence cannot be wholly suppressed, the ideal is hardened by thought into some high, far-away object. It is so elevated and so distant that it does not belong to this world or to experience. It is in technical language, transcendental; in common speech, supernatural, of heaven not of earth. The ideal is then a goal of final exhaustive, comprehensive perfection which can be defined only by complete contrast with the actual. Although impossible of realization and of conception, it is still regarded as the source of all generous discontent with actualities and of all inspiration to progress.
This notion of the nature and office of ideals combines in one contradictory whole all that is vicious in the separation of desire and thought. It strives while retaining the vagueness of emotion to simulate the objective definiteness of thought. It follows the natural course of intelligence in demanding an object which will unify and fulfil desire, and then cancels the work of thought by treating the object as ineffable and unrelated to present action and experience. It converts the surge of present impulse into a future end only to swamp the endeavor to clarify this end in a gush of unconsidered feeling. It is supposed that the thought of the ideal is necessary to arouse dissatisfaction with the present and to arouse effort to change it. But in reality the ideal is itself the product of discontent with conditions. Instead however of serving to organize and direct effort, it operates as a compensatory dream. It becomes another ready-made world. Instead of promoting effort at concrete transformations of what exists, it constitutes another kind of existence already somewhere in being. It is a refuge, an asylum from effort. Thus the energy that might be spent in transforming present ills goes into oscillating flights into a far away perfect world and the tedium of enforced returns into the necessities of the present evil world.
We can recover the genuine import of ideals and idealism only by disentangling this unreal mixture of thought and emotion. The action of deliberation, as we have seen, consists in selecting some foreseen consequence to serve as a stimulus to present action. It brings future possibilities into the present scene and thereby frees and expands present tendencies. But the selected consequence is set in an indefinite context of other consequences just as real as it is, and many of them much more certain in fact. The "ends" that are foreseen and utilized mark out a little island in an infinite sea. This limitation would be fatal were the proper function of ends anything else than to liberate and guide present action out of its perplexities and confusions. But this service constitutes the sole meaning of aims and purposes. Hence their slight extent in comparison with ignored and unforeseen consequences is of no import in itself. The "ideal" as it stands in popular thought, the notion of a complete and exhaustive realization, is remote from the true functions of ends, and would only embarrass us if it could be embraced in thought instead of being, as it is, a comment by the emotions.
For the sense of an indefinite context of consequences from among which the aim is selected enters into the present meaning of activity. The "end" is the figured pattern at the center of the field through which runs the axis of conduct. About this central figuration extends infinitely a supporting background in a vague whole, undefined and undiscriminated. At most intelligence but throws a spotlight on that little part of the whole which marks out the axis of movement. Even if the light is flickering and the illuminated portion stands forth only dimly from the shadowy background, it suffices if we are shown the way to move. To the rest of the consequences, collateral and remote, corresponds a background of feeling, of diffused emotion. This forms the stuff of the ideal.
From the standpoint of its definite aim any act is petty in comparison with the totality of natural events. What is accomplished directly as the outcome of a turn which our action gives the course of events is infinitesimal in comparison with their total sweep. Only an illusion of conceit persuades us that cosmic difference hangs upon even our wisest and most strenuous effort. Yet discontent with this limitation is as unreasonable as relying upon an illusion of external importance to keep ourselves going. In a genuine sense every act is already possessed of infinite import. The little part of the scheme of affairs which is modifiable by our efforts is continuous with the rest of the world. The boundaries of our garden plot join it to the world of our neighbors and our neighbors' neighbors. That small effort which we can put forth is in turn connected with an infinity of events that sustain and support it. The consciousness of this encompassing infinity of connections is ideal. When a sense of the infinite reach of an act physically occurring in a small point of space and occupying a petty instant of times comes home to us, the meaning of a present act is seen to be vast, immeasurable, unthinkable. This ideal is not a goal to be attained. It is a significance to be felt, appreciated. Though consciousness of it cannot become intellectualized (identified in objects of a distinct character) yet emotional appreciation of it is won only by those willing to think.
It is the office of art and religion to evoke such appreciations and intimations; to enhance and steady them till they are wrought into the texture of our lives. Some philosophers define religious consciousness as beginning where moral and intellectual consciousness leave off. In the sense that definite purposes and methods shade off of necessity into a vast whole which is incapable of objective presentation this view is correct. But they have falsified the conception by treating the religious consciousness as something that comes after an experience in which striving, resolution and foresight are found. To them morality and science are a striving; when striving ceases a moral holiday begins, an excursion beyond the utmost flight of legitimate thought and endeavor. But there is a point in every intelligent activity where effort ceases; where thought and doing fall back upon a course of events which effort and reflection cannot touch. There is a point in deliberate action where definite thought fades into the ineffable and undefinable—into emotion. If the sense of this effortless and unfathomable whole comes only in alternation with the sense of strain in action and labor in thought, then we spend our lives in oscillating between what is cramped and enforced and a brief transitory escape. The function of religion is then caricatured rather than realized. Morals, like war, is thought of as hell, and religion, like peace, as a respite. The religious experience is a reality in so far as in the midst of effort to foresee and regulate future objects we are sustained and expanded in feebleness and failure by the sense of an enveloping whole. Peace in action not after it is the contribution of the ideal to conduct.
Over and over again, one point has recurred for criticism;—the subordination of activity to a result outside itself. Whether that goal be thought of as pleasure, as virtue, as perfection, as final enjoyment of salvation, is secondary to the fact that the moralists who have asserted fixed ends have in all their differences from one another agreed in the basic idea that present activity is but a means. We have insisted that happiness, reasonableness, virtue, perfecting, are on the contrary parts of the present significance of present action. Memory of the past, observation of the present, foresight of the future are indispensable. But they are indispensable to a present liberation, an enriching growth of action. Happiness is fundamental in morals only because happiness is not something to be sought for, but is something now attained, even in the midst of pain and trouble, whenever recognition of our ties with nature and with fellow-men releases and informs our action. Reasonableness is a necessity because it is the perception of the continuities that take action out of its immediateness and isolation into connection with the past and future.
Perhaps the criticism and insistence have been too incessant. They may have provoked the reader to reaction. He may readily concede that orthodox theories have been onesided in sacrificing the present to future good, making of the present but an onerous obligation or a sacrifice endured for future gain. But why, he may protest, go to an opposite extreme and make the future but a means to the significance of the present? Why should the power of foresight and effort to shape the future, to regulate what is to happen, be slighted? Is not the effect of such a doctrine to weaken putting forth of endeavor in order to make the future better than the present? Control of the future may be limited in extent, but it is correspondingly precious; we should jealously cherish whatever encourages and sustains effort to that end. To make little of this possibility, in effect, it will be argued, is to decrease the care and endeavor upon which progress depends.
Control of the future is indeed precious in exact proportion to its difficulty, its moderate degree of attainability. Anything that actually tends to make that control less than it now is would be a movement backward into sloth and triviality. But there is a difference between future improvement as a result and as a direct aim. To make it an aim is to throw away the surest means of attaining it, namely attention to the full use of present resources in the present situation. Forecast of future conditions, scientific study of past and present in order that the forecast may be intelligent, are indeed necessities. Concentration of intellectual concern upon the future, solicitude for scope and precision of estimate characteristic of any well conducted affair, naturally give the impression that their animating purpose is control of the future. But thought about future happenings is the only way we can judge the present; it is the only way to appraise its significance. Without such projection, there can be no projects, no plans for administering present energies, overcoming present obstacles. Deliberately to subordinate the present to the future is to subject the comparatively secure to the precarious, exchange resources for liabilities, surrender what is under control to what is, relatively, incapable of control.
The amount of control which will come into existence in the future is not within control. But such an amount as turns out to be practicable accrues only in consequence of the best possible management of present means and obstacles. Dominating intellectual pre-occupation with the future is the way by which efficiency in dealing with the present is attained. It is a way, not a goal. And, upon the very most hopeful outlook, study and planning are more important in the meaning, the enrichment of content, which they add to present activity than is the increase of external control they effect. Nor is this doctrine passivistic in tendency. What sense is there in increased external control except to increase the intrinsic significance of living? The future that is foreseen is a future that is sometime to be a present. Is the value of that present also to be postponed to a future date, and so on indefinitely? Or, if the good we are struggling to attain in the future is one to be actually realized when that future becomes present, why should not the good of this present be equally precious? And is there, again, any intelligent way of modifying the future except to attend to the full possibilities of the present? Scamping the present in behalf of the future leads only to rendering the future less manageable. It increases the probability of molestation by future events.
Remarks cast in this form probably seem too much like a logical manipulation of the concepts of present and future to be convincing. Building a house is a typical instance of an intelligent activity. It is an activity directed by a plan, a design. The plan is itself based upon a foresight of future uses. This foresight is in turn dependent upon an organized survey of past experiences and of present conditions, a recollection of former experiences of living in houses and an acquaintance with present materials, prices, resources, etc. Now if a legitimate case of subordination of present to regulation of the future may anywhere be found, it is in such a case as this. For a man usually builds a house for the sake of the comfort and security, the "control," thereby afforded to future living rather than just for the fun—or the trouble—of building. If in such a case inspection shows that, after all, intellectual concern with the past and future is for the sake of directing present activity and giving it meaning, the conclusion may be accepted for other cases.
Note that the present activity is the only one really under control. The man may die before the house is built, or his financial conditions may change, or he may need to remove to another place. If he attempts to provide for all contingencies, he will never do anything; if he allows his attention to be much distracted by them, he won't do well his present planning and execution. The more he considers the future uses to which the house will probably be put the better he will do his present job which is the activity of building. Control of future living, such as it may turn out to be, is wholly dependent upon taking his present activity, seriously and devotedly, as an end, not a means. And a man has his hands full in doing well what now needs to be done. Until men have formed the habit of using intelligence fully as a guide to present action they will never find out how much control of future contingencies is possible. As things are, men so habitually scamp present action in behalf of future "ends" that the facts for estimating the extent of the possibility of reduction of future contingencies have not been disclosed. What a man is doing limits both his direct control and his responsibility. We must not confuse the act of building with the house when built. The latter is a means, not a fulfilment. But it is such only because it enters into a new activity which is present not future. Life is continuous. The act of building in time gives way to the acts connected with a domicile. But everywhere the good, the fulfilment, the meaning of activity, resides in a present made possible by judging existing conditions in their connections.
If we seek for an illustration on a larger scale, education furnishes us with a poignant example. As traditionally conducted, it strikingly exhibits a subordination of the living present to a remote and precarious future. To prepare, to get ready, is its key-note. The actual outcome is lack of adequate preparation, of intelligent adaptation. The professed exaltation of the future turns out in practice a blind following of tradition, a rule of thumb muddling along from day to day; or, as in some of the projects called industrial education, a determined effort on the part of one class of the community to secure its future at the expense of another class. If education were conducted as a process of fullest utilization of present resources, liberating and guiding capacities that are now urgent, it goes without saying that the lives of the young would be much richer in meaning than they are now. It also follows that intelligence would be kept busy in studying all indications of power, all obstacles and perversions, all products of the past that throw light upon present capacity, and in forecasting the future career of impulse and habit now active—not for the sake of subordinating the latter but in order to treat them intelligently. As a consequence whatever fortification and expansion of the future that is possible will be achieved—as it is now dismally unattained.
A more complicated instance is found in the dominant quality of our industrial activity. It may be dogmatically declared that the roots of its evils are found in the separation of production from consumption—that is, actual consummation, fulfilment. A normal case of their relationship is found in the taking of food. Food is consumed and vigor is produced. The difference between the two is one of directions or dimensions distinguished by intellect. In reality there is simply conversion of energy from one form to another wherein it is more available—of greater significance. The activity of the artist, the sportsman, the scientific inquirer exemplifies the same balance. Activity should be productive. This is to say it should have a bearing on the future, should effect control of it. But so far as a productive action is intrinsically creative, it has its own intrinsic value. Reference to future products and future enjoyments is but a way of enhancing perception of an immanent meaning. A skilled artisan who enjoys his work is aware that what he is making is made for future use. Externally his action is one technically labeled "production." It seems to illustrate the subjection of present activity to remote ends. But actually, morally, psychologically, the sense of the utility of the article produced is a factor in the present significance of action due to the present utilization of abilities, giving play to taste and skill, accomplishing something now. The moment production is severed from immediate satisfaction, it becomes "labor," drudgery, a task reluctantly performed.
Yet the whole tendency of modern economic life has been to assume that consumption will take care of itself provided only production is grossly and intensely attended to. Making things is frantically accelerated; and every mechanical device used to swell the senseless bulk. As a result most workers find no replenishment, no renewal and growth of mind, no fulfilment in work. They labor to get mere means of later satisfaction. This when procured is isolated in turn from production and is reduced to a barren physical affair or a sensuous compensation for normal goods denied. Meantime the fatuity of severing production from consumption, from present enriching of life, is made evident by economic crises, by periods of unemployment alternating with periods of exercise, work or "over-production." Production apart from fulfilment becomes purely a matter of quantity; for distinction, quality, is a matter of present meaning. Esthetic elements being excluded, the mechanical reign. Production lacks criteria; one thing is better than another if it can be made faster or in greater mass. Leisure is not the nourishment of mind in work, nor a recreation; it is a feverish hurry for diversion, excitement, display, otherwise there is no leisure except a sodden torpor. Fatigue due for some to monotony and for others to overstrain in maintaining the pace is inevitable. Socially, the separation of production and consumption, means and ends, is the root of the most profound division of classes. Those who fix the "ends" for production are in control, those who engage in isolated productive activity are the subject-class. But if the latter are oppressed the former are not truly free. Their consumptions are accidental ostentation and extravagance, not a normal consummation or fulfilment of activity. The remainder of their lives is spent in enslavement to keeping the machinery going at an increasingly rapid rate.
Meantime class struggle grows between those whose productive labor is enforced by necessity and those who are privileged consumers. And the exaggeration of production due to its isolation from ignored consumption so hypnotizes attention that even would-be reformers, like Marxian socialists, assert that the entire social problem focuses at the point of production. Since this separation of means from ends signifies an erection of means into ends, it is no wonder that a "materialistic conception of history" emerges. It is not an invention of Marx; it is a record of fact so far as the separation in question obtains. For practicable idealism is found only in a fulfilment, a consumption which is a replenishing, growth, renewal of mind and body. Harmony of social interests is found in the wide-spread sharing of activities significant in themselves, that is to say, at the point of consumption.[9] But the forcing of production apart from consumption leads to the monstrous belief that class-struggle civil war is a means of social progress, instead of a register of the barriers to its attainment. Yet here too the Marxian reads aright the character of most current economic activity.
The history of economic activity thus exemplifies the moral consequences of the separation of present activity and future "ends" from each other. It also embodies the difficulty of the problem—the tax placed by it upon thought and good will. For the professed idealist and the hard-headed materialist or "practical" man, have conspired together to sustain this situation. The "idealist" sets up as the ideal not fullness of meaning of the present but a remote goal. Hence the present is evacuated of meaning. It is reduced to being a mere external instrument, an evil necessity due to the distance between us and significant valid satisfaction. Appreciation, joy, peace in present activity are suspect. They are regarded as diversions, temptations, unworthy relaxations. Then since human nature must have present realization, a sentimental, romantic enjoyment of the ideal becomes a substitute for intelligent and rewarding activity. The utopia cannot be realized in fact but it may be appropriated in fantasy and serve as an anodyne to blunt the sense of a misery which after all endures. Some private key to a present entering upon remote and superior bliss is sought, just as the evangelical enjoys a complacent and superior sense of a salvation unobtained by fellow mortals. Thus the normal demand for realization, for satisfaction in the present, is abnormally met.
Meantime the practical man wants something definite, tangible and presumably obtainable for which to work. He is looking after "a good thing" as the average man is looking after a "good time," that natural caricature of an intrinsically significant activity. Yet his activity is impractical. He is looking for satisfaction somewhere else than where it can be found. In his utopian search for a future good he neglects the only place where good can be found. He empties present activity of meaning by making it a mere instrumentality. When the future arrives it is only after all another despised present. By habit as well as by definition it is still a means to something which has yet to come. Again human nature must have its claims satisfied, and sensuality is the inevitable recourse. Usually a compromise is worked out, by which a man for his working-hours accepts the philosophy of activity for some future result, while at odd leisure times he enters by conventionally recognized channels upon an enjoyment of "spiritual" blessings and "ideal" refinements. The problem of serving God and Mammon is thus solved. The situation exemplifies the concrete meaning of the separation of means from ends which is the intellectual reflex of the divorce of theory and practice, intelligence and habit, foresight and present impulse. Moralists have spent time and energy in showing what happens when appetite, impulse, is indulged without reference to consequences and reason. But they have mostly ignored the counterpart evils of an intelligence that conceives ideals and goods which do not enter into present impulse and habit. The life of reason has been specialized, romanticized, or made a heavy burden. This situation embodies the import of the problem of actualizing the place of intelligence in conduct.
Our whole account of the place of intelligence in conduct is exposed however to the charge of being itself romantic, a compensatory idealization. The history of mind is a record of intellect which registers, with more or less inaccuracy, what has happened after it has happened. The crisis in which the intervention of foreseeing and directing mind is needed passes unnoted, with attention directed toward incidentals and irrelevancies. The work of intellect is post mortem. The rise of social science, it will be pointed out, has increased the amount of registering that occurs. Social post mortems occur much more frequently than they used to. But one of the things which the unbiased mind will register is the impotency of discussion, analysis and reporting in modifying the course of events. The latter goes its way unheeding. The reply that this condition of matters shows not the impotency of intelligence but that what passes for science is not science is too easy a retort to be satisfactory. We must have recourse to some concrete facts or surrender our doctrine just at the moment when we have formulated it.
Technical affairs give evidence that the work of inquiry, reporting and analysis is not always ineffectual. The development of a chain of "nation-wide" tobacco shops, of a well managed national telephone system, of the extension of the service of an electric-light plant testify to the fact that study, reflection and the formation of plans do in some instances determine a course of events. The effect is seen in both engineering management and in national commercial expansion. Such potency however, it must be admitted, is limited to just those matters that are called technical in contrast with the larger affairs of humanity. But if we seek, as we should, for a definition of "technical," we can hardly find any save one that goes in a circle: Affairs are technical in which observation, analysis and intellectual organization are determining factors. Is the conclusion to be drawn a conviction that our wider social interests are so different from those in which intelligence is a directing factor that in the former science must always remain a belated visitor coming upon the scene after matters are settled? No, the logical conclusion is that as yet we have no technique in important economic, political and international affairs. Complexity of conditions render the difficulties in the way of the development of a technique enormous. It is imaginable they will never be overcome. But our choice is between the development of a technique by which intelligence will become an intervening partner and a continuation of a regime of accident, waste and distress.
Conduct when distributed under heads like habit, impulse and intelligence gets artificially shredded. In discussing each of these topics we have run into the others. We conclude, then, with an attempt to gather together some outstanding considerations about conduct as a whole.
The foremost conclusion is that morals has to do with all activity into which alternative possibilities enter. For wherever they enter a difference between better and worse arises. Reflection upon action means uncertainty and consequent need of decision as to which course is better. The better is the good; the best is not better than the good but is simply the discovered good. Comparative and superlative degrees are only paths to the positive degree of action. The worse or evil is a rejected good. In deliberation and before choice no evil presents itself as evil. Until it is rejected, it is a competing good. After rejection, it figures not as a lesser good, but as the bad of that situation.
Actually then only deliberate action, conduct into which reflective choice enters, is distinctively moral, for only then does there enter the question of better and worse. Yet it is a perilous error to draw a hard and fast line between action into which deliberation and choice enter and activity due to impulse and matter-of-fact habit. One of the consequences of action is to involve us in predicaments where we have to reflect upon things formerly done as matter of course. One of the chief problems of our dealings with others is to induce them to reflect upon affairs which they usually perform from unreflective habit. On the other hand, every reflective choice tends to relegate some conscious issue into a deed or habit henceforth taken for granted and not thought upon. Potentially therefore every and any act is within the scope of morals, being a candidate for possible judgment with respect to its better-or-worse quality. It thus becomes one of the most perplexing problems of reflection to discover just how far to carry it, what to bring under examination and what to leave to unscrutinized habit. Because there is no final recipe by which to decide this question all moral judgment is experimental and subject to revision by its issue.
The recognition that conduct covers every act that is judged with reference to better and worse and that the need of this judgment is potentially coextensive with all portions of conduct, saves us from the mistake which makes morality a separate department of life. Potentially conduct is one hundred per cent of our acts. Hence we must decline to admit theories which identify morals with the purification of motives, edifying character, pursuing remote and elusive perfection, obeying supernatural command, acknowledging the authority of duty. Such notions have a dual bad effect. First they get in the way of observation of conditions and consequences. They divert thought into side issues. Secondly, while they confer a morbid exaggerated quality upon things which are viewed under the aspect of morality, they release the larger part of the acts of life from serious, that is moral, survey. Anxious solicitude for the few acts which are deemed moral is accompanied by edicts of exemption and baths of immunity for most acts. A moral moratorium prevails for everyday affairs.
When we observe that morals is at home wherever considerations of the worse and better are involved, we are committed to noting that morality is a continuing process not a fixed achievement. Morals means growth of conduct in meaning; at least it means that kind of expansion in meaning which is consequent upon observations of the conditions and outcome of conduct. It is all one with growing. Growing and growth are the same fact expanded in actuality or telescoped in thought. In the largest sense of the word, morals is education. It is learning the meaning of what we are about and employing that meaning in action. The good, satisfaction, "end," of growth of present action in shades and scope of meaning is the only good within our control, and the only one, accordingly, for which responsibility exists. The rest is luck, fortune. And the tragedy of the moral notions most insisted upon by the morally self-conscious is the relegation of the only good which can fully engage thought, namely present meaning of action, to the rank of an incident of a remote good, whether that future good be defined as pleasure, or perfection, or salvation, or attainment of virtuous character.
"Present" activity is not a sharp narrow knife-blade in time. The present is complex, containing within itself a multitude of habits and impulses. It is enduring, a course of action, a process including memory, observation and foresight, a pressure forward, a glance backward and a look outward. It is of moral moment because it marks a transition in the direction of breadth and clarity of action or in that of triviality and confusion. Progress is present reconstruction adding fullness and distinctness of meaning, and retrogression is a present slipping away of significance, determinations, grasp. Those who hold that progress can be perceived and measured only by reference to a remote goal, first confuse meaning with space, and then treat spatial position as absolute, as limiting movement instead of being bounded in and by movement. There are plenty of negative elements, due to conflict, entanglement and obscurity, in most of the situations of life, and we do not require a revelation of some supreme perfection to inform us whether or no we are making headway in present rectification. We move on from the worse and into, not just towards, the better, which is authenticated not by comparison with the foreign but in what is indigenous. Unless progress is a present reconstructing, it is nothing; if it cannot be told by qualities belonging to the movement of transition it can never be judged.
Men have constructed a strange dream-world when they have supposed that without a fixed ideal of a remote good to inspire them, they have no inducement to get relief from present troubles, no desires for liberation from what oppresses and for clearing-up what confuses present action. The world in which we could get enlightenment and instruction about the direction in which we are moving only from a vague conception of an unattainable perfection would be totally unlike our present world. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient it is to stimulate us to remedial action, to endeavor in order to convert strife into harmony, monotony into a variegated scene, and limitation into expansion. The converting is progress, the only progress conceivable or attainable by man. Hence every situation has its own measure and quality of progress, and the need for progress is recurrent, constant. If it is better to travel than to arrive, it is because traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying. We find our clews to direction in the projected recollections of definite experienced goods not in vague anticipations, even when we label the vagueness perfection, the Ideal, and proceed to manipulate its definition with dry dialectic logic. Progress means increase of present meaning, which involves multiplication of sensed distinctions as well as harmony, unification. This statement may, perhaps, be made generally, in application to the experience of humanity. If history shows progress it can hardly be found elsewhere than in this complication and extension of the significance found within experience. It is clear that such progress brings no surcease, no immunity from perplexity and trouble. If we wished to transmute this generalization into a categorical imperative we should say: "So act as to increase the meaning of present experience." But even then in order to get instruction about the concrete quality of such increased meaning we should have to run away from the law and study the needs and alternative possibilities lying within a unique and localized situation. The imperative, like everything absolute, is sterile. Till men give up the search for a general formula of progress they will not know where to look to find it.
A business man proceeds by comparing today's liabilities and assets with yesterday's, and projects plans for tomorrow by a study of the movement thus indicated in conjunction with study of the conditions of the environment now existing. It is not otherwise with the business of living. The future is a projection of the subject-matter of the present, a projection which is not arbitrary in the extent in which it divines the movement of the moving present. The physician is lost who would guide his activities of healing by building up a picture of perfect health, the same for all and in its nature complete and self-enclosed once for all. He employs what he has discovered about actual cases of good health and ill health and their causes to investigate the present ailing individual, so as to further his recovering; recovering, an intrinsic and living process rather than recovery, which is comparative and static. Moral theories, which however have not remained mere theories but which have found their way into the opinions of the common man, have reversed the situation and made the present subservient to a rigid yet abstract future.
The ethical import of the doctrine of evolution is enormous. But its import has been misconstrued because the doctrine has been appropriated by the very traditional notions which in truth it subverts. It has been thought that the doctrine of evolution means the complete subordination of present change to a future goal. It has been constrained to teach a futile dogma of approximation, instead of a gospel of present growth. The usufruct of the new science has been seized upon by the old tradition of fixed and external ends. In fact evolution means continuity of change; and the fact that change may take the form of present growth of complexity and interaction. Significant stages in change are found not in access of fixity of attainment but in those crises in which a seeming fixity of habits gives way to a release of capacities that have not previously functioned: in times that is of readjustment and redirection.
No matter what the present success in straightening out difficulties and harmonizing conflicts, it is certain that problems will recur in the future in a new form or on a different plane. Indeed every genuine accomplishment instead of winding up an affair and enclosing it as a jewel in a casket for future contemplation, complicates the practical situation. It effects a new distribution of energies which have henceforth to be employed in ways for which past experience gives no exact instruction. Every important satisfaction of an old want creates a new one; and this new one has to enter upon an experimental adventure to find its satisfaction. From the side of what has gone before achievement settles something. From the side of what comes after, it complicates, introducing new problems, unsettling factors. There is something pitifully juvenile in the idea that "evolution," progress, means a definite sum of accomplishment which will forever stay done, and which by an exact amount lessens the amount still to be done, disposing once and for all of just so many perplexities and advancing us just so far on our road to a final stable and unperplexed goal. Yet the typical nineteenth century, mid-victorian conception of evolution was precisely a formulation of such a consummate juvenilism.
If the true ideal is that of a stable condition free from conflict and disturbance, then there are a number of theories whose claims are superior to those of the popular doctrine of evolution. Logic points rather in the direction of Rousseau and Tolstoi who would recur to some primitive simplicity, who would return from complicated and troubled civilization to a state of nature. For certainly progress in civilization has not only meant increase in the scope and intricacy of problems to be dealt with, but it entails increasing instability. For in multiplying wants, instruments and possibilities, it increases the variety of forces which enter into relations with one another and which have to be intelligently directed. Or again, Stoic indifference or Buddhist calm have greater claims. For, it may be argued, since all objective achievement only complicates the situation, the victory of a final stability can be secured only by renunciation of desire. Since every satisfaction of desire increases force, and this in turn creates new desires, withdrawal into an inner passionless state, indifference to action and attainment, is the sole road to possession of the eternal, stable and final reality.
Again, from the standpoint of definite approximation to an ultimate goal, the balance falls heavily on the side of pessimism. The more striving the more attainments, perhaps; but also assuredly the more needs and the more disappointments. The more we do and the more we accomplish, the more the end is vanity and vexation. From the standpoint of attainment of good that stays put, that constitutes a definite sum performed which lessens the amount of effort required in order to reach the ultimate goal of final good, progress is an illusion. But we are looking for it in the wrong place. The world war is a bitter commentary on the nineteenth century misconception of moral achievement—a misconception however which it only inherited from the traditional theory of fixed ends, attempting to bolster up that doctrine with aid from the "scientific" theory of evolution. The doctrine of progress is not yet bankrupt. The bankruptcy of the notion of fixed goods to be attained and stably possessed may possibly be the means of turning the mind of man to a tenable theory of progress—to attention to present troubles and possibilities.