Human Nature and Conduct quotes

“Give a dog a bad name and hang him.” Human nature has been the dog of professional moralists, and consequences accord with the proverb.

Man’s nature has been regarded with suspicion, with fear, with sour looks, sometimes with enthusiasm for its possibilities but only when these were placed in contrast with its actualities.

Parents, priests, chiefs, social censors have supplied aims, aims which were foreign to those upon whom they were imposed, to the young, laymen, ordinary folk; a few have given and administered rule, and the mass have in a passable fashion and with reluctance obeyed.

Everybody knows that good children are those who make as little trouble as possible for their elders, and since most of them cause a good deal of annoyance they must be naughty by nature.

Generally speaking, good people have been those who did what they were told to do, and lack of eager compliance is a sign of something wrong in their nature.

We may anticipate the general nature of this change through considering the evils which have resulted from severing morals from the actualities of human physiology and psychology.

There is a pathology of goodness as well as of evil; that is, of that sort of goodness which is nurtured by this separation.

The badness of good people, for the most part recorded only in fiction, is the revenge taken by human nature for the injuries heaped upon it in the name of morality.

There is a pathology of goodness as well as of evil; that is, of that sort of goodness which is nurtured by this separation.

The badness of good people, for the most part recorded only in fiction, is the revenge taken by human nature for the injuries heaped upon it in the name of morality.

In the first place, morals cut off from positive roots in man’s nature is bound to be mainly negative. Practical emphasis falls upon avoidance, escape of evil, upon not doing things, observing prohibitions.

Absence of social blame is the usual mark of goodness for it shows that evil has been avoided. Blame is most readily averted by being so much like everybody else that one passes unnoticed.

Conventional morality is a drab morality, in which the only fatal thing is to be conspicuous.

If there be flavor left in it, then some natural traits have somehow escaped being subdued. To be so good as to attract notice is to be priggish, too good for this world.

To be so good as to attract notice is to be priggish, too good for this world. The same psychology that brands the convicted criminal as forever a social outcast makes it the part of a gentleman not to obtrude virtues noticeably upon others.

The Puritan is never popular, not even in a society of Puritans.

In case of a pinch, the mass prefer to be good fellows rather than to be good men. Polite vice is preferable to eccentricity and ceases to be vice.

The Puritan is never popular, not even in a society of Puritans.

In case of a pinch, the mass prefer to be good fellows rather than to be good men.

Polite vice is preferable to eccentricity and ceases to be vice. Morals that professedly neglect human nature end by emphasizing those qualities of human nature that are most commonplace and average; they exaggerate the herd instinct to conformity.

The idea persists that there is something materialistic about natural science and that morals are degraded by having anything seriously to do with material things.

If a sect should arise proclaiming that men ought to purify their lungs completely before they ever drew a breath it ought to win many adherents from professed moralists.

For the neglect of sciences that deal specifically with facts of the natural and social environment leads to a sidetracking of moral forces into an unreal privacy of an unreal self.

It would not make the moral life as simple a matter as wending one’s way along a well-lighted boulevard.

All action is an invasion of the future, of the unknown.

Conflict and uncertainty are ultimate traits. But morals based upon concern with facts and deriving guidance from knowledge of them would at least locate the points of effective endeavor and would focus available resources upon them.

It would not make the moral life as simple a matter as wending one’s way along a well-lighted boulevard. All action is an invasion of the future, of the unknown.

Conflict and uncertainty are ultimate traits.

But morals based upon concern with facts and deriving guidance from knowledge of them would at least locate the points of effective endeavor and would focus available resources upon them. It would put an end to the impossible attempt to live in two unrelated worlds.

Some activity proceeds from a man; then it sets up reactions in the surroundings. Others approve, disapprove, protest, encourage, share and resist.

Even letting a man alone is a definite response.

Envy, admiration and imitation are complicities. Neutrality is nonexistent. Conduct is always shared; this is the difference between it and a physiological process. It is not an ethical “ought” that conduct should be social. It is social, whether bad or good.

Some activity proceeds from a man; then it sets up reactions in the surroundings. Others approve, disapprove, protest, encourage, share and resist. Even letting a man alone is a definite response. Envy, admiration and imitation are complicities.

Neutrality is nonexistent.

Conduct is always shared; this is the difference between it and a physiological process. It is not an ethical “ought” that conduct should be social. It is social, whether bad or good.

… as if his evil will were the sole cause of wrongdoing and those which condone offense on account of the share of social conditions in producing bad disposition, are equally ways of making an unreal separation of man from his surroundings, mind from the world.

Causes for an act always exist, but causes are not excuses.

Questions of causation are physical, not moral except when they concern future consequences. It is as causes of future actions that excuses and accusations alike must be considered.

Individuals flourish and wither away like the grass of the fields. But the fruits of their work endure and make possible the development of further activities having fuller significance.

It is of grace not of ourselves that we lead civilized lives.

There is sound sense in the old pagan notion that gratitude is the root of all virtue. Loyalty to whatever in the established environment makes a life of excellence possible is the beginning of all progress.

Taste and desire represent a prior objective fact recurring in action to secure perpetuation and extension. Desire for flowers comes after actual enjoyment of flowers. But it comes before the work that makes the desert blossom, it comes before cultivation of plants.

Every ideal is preceded by an actuality; but the ideal is more than a repetition in inner image of the actual.

It projects in securer and wider and fuller form some good which has been previously experienced in a precarious, accidental, fleeting way.

It overrides our formal resolutions, our conscious decisions. When we are honest with ourselves we acknowledge that a habit has this power because it is so intimately a part of ourselves.

It has a hold upon us because we are the habit.

Our self-love, our refusal to face facts, combined perhaps with a sense of a possible better although unrealized self, leads us to eject the habit from the thought of ourselves and conceive it as an evil power which has somehow overcome us.

They can no more be dismissed by a direct effort of will than the conditions which create drought can be dispelled by whistling for wind.

It is as reasonable to expect a fire to go out when it is ordered to stop burning as to suppose that a man can stand straight in consequence of a direct action of thought and desire.

The fire can be put out only by changing objective conditions; it is the same with rectification of bad posture.

Ideas, thoughts of ends, are not spontaneously generated.

There is no immaculate conception of meanings or purposes.

Reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction. But pure sensations out of which ideas can be framed apart from habit are equally fictitious.

Only the man who can maintain a correct posture has the stuff out of which to form that idea of standing erect which can be the starting point of a right act.

Only the man whose habits are already good can know what the good is.

Immediate, seemingly instinctive, feeling of the direction and end of various lines of behavior is in reality the feeling of habits working below direct consciousness. The psychology of illusions of perception is full of illustrations of the distortion introduced by habit into observation of objects.

Of the intermediate acts, the most important is the next one. The first or earliest means is the most important end to discover.

Means and ends are two names for the same reality.

The terms denote not a division in reality but a distinction in judgment. Without understanding this fact we cannot understand the nature of habits nor can we pass beyond the usual separation of the moral and non-moral in conduct.

Just as end, it is vague, cloudy, impressionistic. We do not know what we are really after until a course of action is mentally worked out.

Aladdin with his lamp could dispense with translating ends into means, but no one else can do so.

Now the thing which is closest to us, the means within our power, is a habit. Some habit impeded by circumstances is the source of the projection of the end. It is also the primary means in its realization.

Were it not for the continued operation of all habits in every act, no such thing as character could exist. There would be simply a bundle, an untied bundle at that, of isolated acts.

Character is the interpenetration of habits.

If each habit existed in an insulated compartment and operated without affecting or being affected by others, character would not exist. That is, conduct would lack unity being only a juxtaposition of disconnected reactions to separated situations.

But there is also an aversion to attributing omnipotence to even the best of good dispositions, and hence an aversion to applying the criterion of consequences unreservedly.

A holiness of character which is celebrated only on holy-days is unreal.

A virtue of honesty, or chastity or benevolence which lives upon itself apart from definite results consumes itself and goes up in smoke.

These associations are definite modes of interaction of persons with one another; that is to say they form customs, institutions.

There is no problem in all history so artificial as that of how “individuals” manage to form “society.”

The problem is due to the pleasure taken in manipulating concepts, and discussion goes on because concepts are kept from inconvenient contact with facts.

Then we think of the insolent coercions, the insinuating briberies, the pedagogic solemnities by which the freshness of youth can be faded and its vivid curiosities dulled.

Education becomes the art of taking advantage of the helplessness of the young; the forming of habits becomes a guarantee for the maintenance of hedges of custom.

Of course it is not wholly forgotten that habits are abilities, arts. Any striking exhibition of acquired skill in physical matters, like that of an acrobat or billiard-player, arouses universal admiration.

Mechanism is indispensable. If each act has to be consciously searched for at the moment and intentionally performed, execution is painful and the product is clumsy and halting. Nevertheless the difference between the artist and the mere technician is unmistakable.

The artist is a masterful technician.

The technique or mechanism is fused with thought and feeling. The “mechanical” performer permits the mechanism to dictate the performance. It is absurd to say that the latter exhibits habit and the former not. We are confronted with two kinds of habit, intelligent and routine.

All that metaphysics has said about the nisus of Being to conserve its essence and all that a mythological psychology has said about a special instinct of self-preservation is a cover for the persistent self-assertion of habit.

Habit is energy organized in certain channels.

When interfered with, it swells as resentment and as an avenging force. To say that it will be obeyed, that custom makes law, that nomos is lord of all, is after all only to say that habit is habit.

The query is a natural one, yet it tempts to flinging forth a paradox.

In conduct the acquired is the primitive.

Impulses although first in time are never primary in fact; they are secondary and dependent. The seeming paradox in statement covers a familiar fact. In the life of the individual, instinctive activity comes first.

They are agencies for transfer of existing social power into personal ability; they are means of reconstructive growth. Abandon an impossible individualistic psychology, and we arrive at the fact that native activities are organs of reorganization and readjustment.

The hen precedes the egg.

But nevertheless this particular egg may be so treated as to modify the future type of hen.

Habit and impulse may war with each other, but it is a combat between the habits of adults and the impulses of the young, and not, as with the adult, a civil warfare whereby personality is rent asunder.

Our usual measure for the “goodness” of children is the amount of trouble they make for grownups, which means of course the amount they deviate from adult habits and expectations.

Yet by way of expiation we envy children their love of new experiences, their intentness in extracting the last drop of significance from each situation, their vital seriousness in things that to us are outworn.

We need to discover how to rejuvenate it from within. A normal perpetuation becomes a fact in the degree in which impulse is released and habit is plastic to the transforming touch of impulse.

When customs are flexible and youth is educated as youth and not as premature adulthood, no nation grows old.

There always exists a goodly store of non-functioning impulses which may be drawn upon. Their manifestation and utilization is called conversion or regeneration when it comes suddenly. But they may be drawn upon continuously and moderately. Then we call it learning or educative growth.

A nation is always renewed by the death of its old constituents and the birth of those who are as young and fresh as ever were any individuals in the heyday of the nation’s glory.

Not the nation but its customs get old.

Its institutions petrify into rigidity; there is social arterial sclerosis. Then some people not overburdened with elaborate and stiff habits take up and carry on the moving process of life. The stock of fresh peoples is, however, approaching exhaustion.

No elaboration of statute law can forestall variant cases and the need of interpretation ad hoc. Moral and legal schemes that attempt the impossible in the way of definite formulation compensate for explicit strictness in some lines by implicit looseness in others.

The only truly severe code is the one which foregoes codification, throwing responsibility for judging each case upon the agents concerned, imposing upon them the burden of discovery and adaptation.

The relation which actually exists between undirected instinct and over-organized custom is illustrated in the two views that are current about savage life. The popular view looks at the savage as a wild man;

They persist and insensibly assimilate to themselves the outer innovations—much as American judges nullify the intended changes of statute law by interpreting legislation in the light of common law.

The force of lag in human life is enormous.

Actual social change is never so great as is apparent change. Ways of belief, of expectation, of judgment and attendant emotional dispositions of like and dislike, are not easily modified after they have once taken shape. Political and legal institutions may be altered, even abolished;

We follow the same logic in social matters when we believe that war exists because of bellicose instincts; or that a particular economic regime is necessary because of acquisitive and competitive impulses which must find expression.

Pugnacity and fear are no more native than are pity and sympathy.

The important thing morally is the way these native tendencies interact, for their interaction may give a chemical transformation not a mechanical combination. Similarly, no social institution stands alone as a product of one dominant force.

… for war by pugnacity, for the capitalistic system by the necessity of an incentive of gain to stir ambition and effort, so we account for Greece by power of esthetic observation, Rome by administrative ability, the middle ages by interest in religion and so on.

We have constructed an elaborate political zoology as mythological and not nearly as poetic as the other zoology of phoenixes, griffins and unicorns.

Native racial spirit, the spirit of the people or of the time, national destiny are familiar figures in this social zoo. As names for effects, for existing customs, they are sometimes useful. As names for explanatory forces they work havoc with intelligence.

A general social reorganization is needed which will redistribute forces, immunize, divert and nullify.

Hinton was doubtless right when he wrote that the only way to abolish war was to make peace heroic.

It now appears that the heroic emotions are not anything which may be specialized in a sideline, so that the war-impulses may find a sublimation in special practices and occupations. They have to get an outlet in all the tasks of peace.

Even a workman in a modern factory where depersonalization is extreme gets to have “his” machine and is perturbed at a change. Possession shapes and consolidates the “I” of philosophers.

“I own, therefore I am” expresses a truer psychology than the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am.”

A man’s deeds are imputed to him as their owner, not merely as their creator. That he cannot disown them when the moment of their occurrence passes is the root of responsibility, moral as well as legal.

In truth man acts anyway, he can’t help acting. In every fundamental sense it is false that a man requires a motive to make him do something.

To a healthy man inaction is the greatest of woes.

Anyone who observes children knows that while periods of rest are natural, laziness is an acquired vice—or virtue. While a man is awake he will do something, if only to build castles in the air.

Habits once formed perpetuate themselves, by acting unremittingly upon the native stock of activities. They stimulate, inhibit, intensify, weaken, select, concentrate and organize the latter into their own likeness.

They create out of the formless void of impulses a world made in their own image.

Man is a creature of habit, not of reason nor yet of instinct.

Habits once formed perpetuate themselves, by acting unremittingly upon the native stock of activities. They stimulate, inhibit, intensify, weaken, select, concentrate and organize the latter into their own likeness. They create out of the formless void of impulses a world made in their own image.

Man is a creature of habit, not of reason nor yet of instinct.

Recognition of the correct psychology locates the problem but does not guarantee its solution. Indeed, at first sight it seems to indicate that every attempt to solve the problem and secure fundamental reorganizations is caught in a vicious circle.

Even though it were abstractly desirable it is impossible. And it is not desirable because the inflexibility of old habits is precisely the chief cause of their decay and disintegration.

Plaintive lamentations at the prevalence of change and abstract appeals for restoration of senile authority are signs of personal feebleness, of inability to cope with change.

It is a “defense reaction.”

We are guilty of a presumption which nature promptly punishes. We are rendered incompetent to deal effectively with the delicacies and novelties of nature and life.

Our thought is hard where facts are mobile; bunched and chunky where events are fluid, dissolving.

The tendency to forget the office of distinctions and classifications, and to take them as marking things in themselves, is the current fallacy of scientific specialism. It is one of the conspicuous traits of highbrowism, the essence of false abstractionism.

In reality the more we concretely dwell upon the common fact of fulfilment, the more we realize the difference in the kinds of selves fulfilled.

In pointing out that both the north and the south poles are poles we do not abolish the difference of north from south; we accentuate it.

The explanation of the fallacy is however too easy to be convincing. There must have been some material, empirical reason why intelligent men were so easily entrapped by a fairly obvious fallacy.

… person is not immune to harsh arrogances, and he may find himself involved in so much trouble as a consequence of a kindly act, that he allows his generous impulses to shrivel and henceforth governs his conduct by the dictates of the strictest worldly prudence.

Inconsistencies and shiftings in character are the commonest things in experience.

Only the hold of a traditional conception of the singleness and simplicity of soul and self blinds us to perceiving what they mean: the relative fluidity and diversity of the constituents of selfhood. There is no one ready-made self behind activities.

Inconsistencies and shiftings in character are the commonest things in experience. Only the hold of a traditional conception of the singleness and simplicity of soul and self blinds us to perceiving what they mean: the relative fluidity and diversity of the constituents of selfhood.

There is no one ready-made self behind activities.

There are complex, unstable, opposing attitudes, habits, impulses which gradually come to terms with one another, and assume a certain consistency of configuration, even though only by means of a distribution of inconsistencies which keeps them in watertight compartments, giving them separate turns or tricks …

… complex, unstable, opposing attitudes, habits, impulses which gradually come to terms with one another, and assume a certain consistency of configuration, even though only by means of a distribution of inconsistencies which keeps them in watertight compartments, giving them separate turns or tricks in action.

Many good words get spoiled when the word self is prefixed to them: Words like pity, confidence, sacrifice, control, love.

The reason is not far to seek. The word self infects them with a fixed introversion and isolation.

Pity for self withdraws the mind back into itself, rendering its subject unable to learn from the buffetings of fortune. Sacrifice may enlarge a self by bringing about surrender of acquired possessions to requirements of new growth.

Self-sacrifice means a self-maiming which asks for compensatory pay in some later possession or indulgence.

Confidence as an outgoing act is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life, trusting them to bring instruction and support to a developing self. Confidence which terminates in the self means a smug complacency that renders a person obtuse to instruction by events.

In another case, it takes effect upon weaker and impotent children, and the reflected appreciated consequence is one of achievement, victory, power and a knowledge of the means of having one’s own way.

The notion that anger still remains a single force is a lazy mythology.

Even in the cases of hunger and sex, where the channels of action are fairly demarcated by antecedent conditions (or “nature”), the actual content and feel of hunger and sex, are indefinitely varied according to their social contexts.

The traditional psychology of instincts obscures recognition of this fact. It sets up a hard-and-fast preordained class under which specific acts are subsumed, so that their own quality and originality are lost from view.

This is why the novelist and dramatist are so much more illuminating as well as more interesting commentators on conduct than the schematizing psychologist.

The artist makes perceptible individual responses and thus displays a new phase of human nature evoked in new situations. In putting the case visibly and dramatically he reveals vital actualities.

in which, to use our previous language, the impulse operates as a pivot, or reorganization of habit. Or again a released impulsive activity may be neither immediately expressed in isolated spasmodic action, nor indirectly employed in an enduring interest. It may be “suppressed.”

Suppression is not annihilation.

“Psychic” energy is no more capable of being abolished than the forms we recognize as physical. If it is neither exploded nor converted, it is turned inwards, to lead a surreptitious, subterranean life. An isolated or spasmodic manifestation is a sign of immaturity, crudity, savagery;

A rebellious disposition is also a form of romanticism. At least rebels set out as romantics, or, in popular parlance, as idealists.

There is no bitterness like that of conscious impotency, the sense of suffocatingly complete suppression.

The world is hopeless to one without hope. The rage of total despair is a vain effort at blind destructiveness.

For the rebel is not self-generated. In the beginning no one is a revolutionist simply for the fun of it, however it may be after the furor of destructive power gets under way. The rebel is the product of extreme fixation and unintelligent immobilities.

Life is perpetuated only by renewal. If conditions do not permit renewal to take place continuously it will take place explosively.

The cost of revolutions must be charged up to those who have taken for their aim arrest of custom instead of its readjustment.

Habits are conditions of intellectual efficiency. They operate in two ways upon intellect. Obviously, they restrict its reach, they fix its boundaries.

They are blinders that confine the eyes of mind to the road ahead.

They prevent thought from straying away from its imminent occupation to a landscape more varied and picturesque but irrelevant to practice. Outside the scope of habits, thought works gropingly, fumbling in confused uncertainty;

So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions.

Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned.

Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.

Habit incorporates, enacts or overrides objects, but it doesn’t know them. Impulse scatters and obliterates them with its restless stir. A certain delicate combination of habit and impulse is requisite for observation, memory and judgment.

Knowledge which is not projected against the black unknown lives in the muscles, not in consciousness.

We may, indeed, be said to know how by means of our habits. And a sensible intimation of the practical function of knowledge has led men to identify all acquired practical skill, or even the instinct of animals, with knowledge.

Hence the “stream of consciousness” in general, and in particular that phase of it celebrated by William James as alternation of flights and perchings.

Life is interruptions and recoveries.

Continuous interruption is not possible in the activities of an individual. Absence of perfect equilibrium is not equivalent to a complete crushing of organized activity. When the disturbance amounts to such a pitch as that, the self goes to pieces. It is like shell-shock.

The experiment is carried on by tentative rehearsals in thought which do not affect physical facts outside the body. Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure and disaster.

An act overtly tried out is irrevocable, its consequences cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable.

Each conflicting habit and impulse takes its turn in projecting itself upon the screen of imagination. It unrolls a picture of its future history, of the career it would have if it were given head.

“Pure” activity is for consciousness pure emptiness. It acquires a content or filling of meanings only in static termini, what it comes to rest in, or in the obstacles which check its onward movement and deflect it.

As has been remarked, the object is that which objects.

There is no difference in this respect between a visible course of conduct and one proposed in deliberation. We have no direct consciousness of what we purpose to do.

We want things that are incompatible with one another; therefore we have to make a choice of what we really want, of the course of action, that is, which most fully releases activities.

Choice is not the emergence of preference out of indifference. It is the emergence of a unified preference out of competing preferences.

Biases that had held one another in check now, temporarily at least, reinforce one another, and constitute a unified attitude. The moment arrives when imagination pictures an objective consequence of action which supplies an adequate stimulus and releases definitive action.

The conclusion is not that the emotional, passionate phase of action can be or should be eliminated in behalf of a bloodless reason.

More “passions,” not fewer, is the answer.

To check the influence of hate there must be sympathy, while to rationalize sympathy there are needed emotions of curiosity, caution, respect for the freedom of others—dispositions which evoke objects which balance those called up by sympathy, and prevent its degeneration into maudlin sentiment and …

… was in reality part of a movement to develop a type of character which should have a wide social outlook, sympathy with the experiences of all sentient creatures, one zealous about the social effects of all proposed acts, especially those of collective legislation and administration.

It was concerned not with extracting the honey of the passing moment but with breeding improved bees and constructing hives.

After all, the object of foresight of consequences is not to predict the future. It is to ascertain the meaning of present activities and to secure, so far as possible, a present activity with a unified meaning.

The best laid plans of men as well of mice gang aglee; and for the same reason: inability to dominate the future. The power of man and mouse is infinitely constricted in comparison with the power of events.

Men always build better or worse than they know, for their acts are taken up into the broad sweep of events.

Hence the problem of deliberation is not to calculate future happenings but to appraise present proposed actions. We judge present desires and habits by their tendency to produce certain consequences.

Deliberation is not calculation of indeterminate future results.

The present, not the future, is ours.

No shrewdness, no store of information will make it ours.

But new movements do not start in a new and clear field. The context of old institutions and corresponding habits of thought persisted. The new movement was perverted in theory because prior established conditions deflected it in practice.

Thus the new industrialism was largely the old feudalism, living in a bank instead of a castle and brandishing the check of credit instead of the sword.

An old theological doctrine of total depravity was continued and carried over in the idea of an inherent laziness of human nature which rendered it averse to useful work, unless bribed by expectations of pleasure, or driven by fears of pains.

Our minor decisions differ in acuteness and range, but not in principle. Our world does not so obviously hang upon any one of them; but put together they make the world what it is in meaning for each one of us.

Crucial decisions can hardly be more than a disclosure of the cumulative force of trivial choices.

A radical distinction thus exists between deliberation where the only question is whether to invest money in this bond or that stock, and deliberation where the primary decision is as to the kind of activity which is to be engaged in.

Its use, in which alone good or satisfaction is found, is left indeterminate, contingent upon further deliberation, or else is left matter of routine habit.

We do not eat money, or wear it, or marry it, or listen for musical strains to issue from it.

If by any chance a man prefers a less amount of money to a greater amount, it is not for economic reasons.

It is wilful folly to fasten upon some single end or consequence which is liked, and permit the view of that to blot from perception all other undesired and undesirable consequences.

It is like supposing that when a finger held close to the eye covers up a distant mountain the finger is really larger than the mountain.

Not the end—in the singular—justifies the means; for there is no such thing as the single all-important end.

Why is it not universally recognized that an end is a device of intelligence in guiding action, instrumental to freeing and harmonizing troubled and divided tendencies? The answer is virtually contained in what was earlier said about rigid habits and their effect upon intelligence.

Ends are, in fact, literally endless, forever coming into existence as new activities occasion new consequences.

“Endless ends” is a way of saying that there are no ends—that is no fixed self-enclosed finalities. While however we cannot actually prevent change from occurring we can and do regard it as evil. We strive to retain action in ditches already dug.

Love of certainty is a demand for guarantees in advance of action.

Ignoring the fact that truth can be bought only by the adventure of experiment, dogmatism turns truth into an insurance company.

Fixed ends upon one side and fixed “principles”—that is authoritative rules—on the other, are props for a feeling of safety, the refuge of the timid and the means by which the bold prey upon the timid.

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.

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;

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 clues 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.

They illumine curiosity and steady courage. Then when the future arrives with its inevitable disappointments as well as fulfilments, and with new sources of trouble, failure loses something of its fatality, and suffering yields fruit of instruction not of bitterness.

Humility is more demanded at our moments of triumph than at those of failure.

For humility is not a caddish self-depreciation. It is the sense of our slight inability even with our best intelligence and effort to command events; a sense of our dependence upon forces that go their way without our wish and plan.

a sense of our dependence upon forces that go their way without our wish and plan. Its purport is not to relax effort but to make us prize every opportunity of present growth.

In morals, the infinitive and the imperative develop from the participle, present tense. Perfection means perfecting, fulfilment, fulfilling, and the good is now or never.

Idealistic philosophies, those of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, like the hypothesis now offered, have found the good in meanings belonging to a conscious life, a life of reason, not in external achievement.

If any such theory is objectionable, the objection is against the character or quality assigned to the self. Of course an individual is the bearer or carrier of experience. What of that? Everything depends upon the kind of experience that centers in him.

Not the residence of experience counts, but its contents, what’s in the house.

The center is not in the abstract amenable to our control, but what gathers about it is our affair. We can’t help being individual selves, each one of us.

To foster conditions that widen the horizon of others and give them command of their own powers, so that they can find their own happiness in their own fashion, is the way of “social” action.

Otherwise the prayer of a freeman would be to be left alone, and to be delivered, above all, from “reformers” and “kind” people.

A non-sentimental morals will seek for all the instruction natural science can give concerning the biological conditions and consequences of inferiority and superiority. But knowledge of facts does not entail conformity and acquiescence. The contrary is the case.

Perception of things as they are is but a stage in the process of making them different.

They have already begun to be different in being known, for by that fact they enter into a different context, a context of foresight and judgment of better and worse.

It is absurd to suppose that knowledge about the connection between inferiority and its consequences prescribes adherence to that connection.

It is like supposing that knowledge of the connection between malaria and mosquitoes enjoins breeding mosquitoes.

The fact when it is known enters into a new environment. Without ceasing to belong to the physical environment it enters also into a medium of human activities, of desires and aversions, habits and instincts. It thereby gains new potencies, new capacities.

The fact when it is known enters into a new environment. Without ceasing to belong to the physical environment it enters also into a medium of human activities, of desires and aversions, habits and instincts. It thereby gains new potencies, new capacities.

Gunpowder in water does not act the same as gunpowder next a flame.

A fact known does not operate the same as a fact unperceived. When it is known it comes into contact with the flame of desire and the cold bath of antipathy.

Without ceasing to belong to the physical environment it enters also into a medium of human activities, of desires and aversions, habits and instincts. It thereby gains new potencies, new capacities. Gunpowder in water does not act the same as gunpowder next a flame.

A fact known does not operate the same as a fact unperceived.

When it is known it comes into contact with the flame of desire and the cold bath of antipathy. Knowledge of the conditions that breed incapacity may fit into some desire to maintain others in that state while averting it for one’s self.

After we have discovered the place and consequences of conflict in nature, we have still to discover its place and working in human need and thought. What is its office, its function, its possibility, or use? In general, the answer is simple.

Conflict is the gadfly of thought.

It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving. Not that it always effects this result; but that conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.

What is its office, its function, its possibility, or use? In general, the answer is simple. Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention.

It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.

Not that it always effects this result; but that conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.

It is to be hoped therefore that there remains an alternative; that the road to freedom may be found in that knowledge of facts which enables us to employ them in connection with desires and aims.

A physician or engineer is free in his thought and his action in the degree in which he knows what he deals with.

Possibly we find here the key to any freedom.

The gratuitous help of unforeseen circumstance we cannot afford to despise. Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us.

But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.

And the gifts of fortune when they come are fleeting except when they are made taut by intelligent adaptation of conditions. In neutral and adverse circumstances, study and foresight are the only roads to unimpeded action.

Organization tends, however, to become rigid and to limit freedom. In addition to security and energy in action, novelty, risk, change are ingredients of the freedom which men desire.

Variety is more than the spice of life; it is largely of its essence, making a difference between the free and the enslaved.

Invariant virtue appears to be as mechanical as uninterrupted vice, for true excellence changes with conditions. Unless character rises to overcome some new difficulty or conquer some temptation from an unexpected quarter we suspect its grain is only a veneer.

Variety is more than the spice of life; it is largely of its essence, making a difference between the free and the enslaved. Invariant virtue appears to be as mechanical as uninterrupted vice, for true excellence changes with conditions.

Unless character rises to overcome some new difficulty or conquer some temptation from an unexpected quarter we suspect its grain is only a veneer.

Choice is an element in freedom and there can be no choice without unrealized and precarious possibilities.

It is their elimination from the life of a slave which makes his life servile, intolerable to the freeman who has once been on his own, no matter what his animal comfort and security.

A free man would rather take his chance in an open world than be guaranteed in a closed world.

These considerations give point to the third factor in love of freedom: the desire to have desire count as a factor, a force.

What do they do that is distinctive? The answer is that they give us all the control of future possibilities which is open to us. And this control is the crux of our freedom.

Without it, we are pushed from behind. With it we walk in the light.

The doctrine that knowledge, intelligence rather than will, constitutes freedom is not new. It has been preached by moralists of many a school. All rationalists have identified freedom with action emancipated by insight into truth.

It is assumed sometimes that if it can be shown that deliberation determines choice and deliberation is determined by character and conditions, there is no freedom.

This is like saying that because a flower comes from root and stem it cannot bear fruit.

The question is not what are the antecedents of deliberation and choice, but what are their consequences. What do they do that is distinctive? The answer is that they give us all the control of future possibilities which is open to us.

But if the ox foresees the consequences of the use of the yoke, if he anticipates the possibility of harvest, and identifies himself not with the yoke but with the realization of its possibilities, he acts freely, voluntarily.

He hasn’t accepted a necessity as unavoidable; he has welcomed a possibility as a desirability.

Perception of necessary law plays, indeed, a part. But no amount of insight into necessity brings with it, as such, anything but a consciousness of necessity. Freedom is the “truth of necessity” only when we use one “necessity” to alter another.

But intelligence treats events as moving, as fraught with possibilities, not as ended, final. In forecasting their possibilities, the distinction between better and worse arises. Human desire and ability cooperates with this or that natural force according as this or that eventuality is judged better.

We do not use the present to control the future. We use the foresight of the future to refine and expand present activity.

In this use of desire, deliberation and choice, freedom is actualized.

Intelligence becomes ours in the degree in which we use it and accept responsibility for consequences. It is not ours originally or by production.

“It thinks” is a truer psychological statement than “I think.”

Thoughts sprout and vegetate; ideas proliferate. They come from deep unconscious sources. “I think” is a statement about voluntary action. Some suggestion surges from the unknown. Our active body of habits appropriates it. The suggestion then becomes an assertion.

Our intelligence is bound up, so far as its materials are concerned, with the community life of which we are a part. We know what it communicates to us, and know according to the habits it forms in us.

Science is an affair of civilization not of individual intellect.

So with conscience. When a child acts, those about him re-act. They shower encouragement upon him, visit him with approval, or they bestow frowns and rebuke.

We foreknow how others will act, and the foreknowledge is the beginning of judgment passed on action. We know with them; there is conscience. An assembly is formed within our breast which discusses and appraises proposed and performed acts.

The community without becomes a forum and tribunal within, a judgment-seat of charges, assessments and exculpations.

Our thoughts of our own actions are saturated with the ideas that others entertain about them, ideas which have been expressed not only in explicit instruction but still more effectively in reaction to our acts.

Our thoughts of our own actions are saturated with the ideas that others entertain about them, ideas which have been expressed not only in explicit instruction but still more effectively in reaction to our acts.

Liability is the beginning of responsibility.

We are held accountable by others for the consequences of our acts. They visit their like and dislike of these consequences upon us. In vain do we claim that these are not ours;

Theories about responsibility may become confused, but in practice no one is stupid enough to try to change the past. Approbation and disapprobation are ways of influencing the formation of habits and aims; that is, of influencing future acts.

The individual is held accountable for what he has done in order that he may be responsive in what he is going to do.

Gradually persons learn by dramatic imitation to hold themselves accountable, and liability becomes a voluntary deliberate acknowledgment that deeds are our own, that their consequences come from us.

We intend that you shall deliberate before you do it again, and that if possible your deliberation shall prevent a repetition of this act we object to. The reference in blame and every unfavorable judgment is prospective, not retrospective.

Theories about responsibility may become confused, but in practice no one is stupid enough to try to change the past.

Approbation and disapprobation are ways of influencing the formation of habits and aims; that is, of influencing future acts. The individual is held accountable for what he has done in order that he may be responsive in what he is going to do.

Explicit recognition of this fact is a prerequisite of improvement in moral education and of an intelligent understanding of the chief ideas or “categories” of morals.

Morals is as much a matter of interaction of a person with his social environment as walking is an interaction of legs with a physical environment.

The character of walking depends upon the strength and competency of legs.

Moreover this tendency is a chief reason why the social forces effective in shaping actual morality work blindly and unsatisfactorily.

Judgment in which the emphasis falls upon blame and approbation has more heat than light.

It is more emotional than intellectual. It is guided by custom, personal convenience and resentment rather than by insight into causes and consequences.