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by Andrew Preston Peabody

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Title: A Manual of Moral Philosophy

Author: Andrew Preston Peabody

Release Date: December 14, 2008 [Ebook 27531]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A

MANUAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY***
 A Manual of Moral Philosophy
Designed For
Colleges and High Schools.
By
Andrew P. Peabody, D.D., LL.D.
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in Harvard
University.
New York and Chicago:
A. S. Barnes And Company
1873
Contents
Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Chapter 1. Action. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Chapter II. The Springs Of Action. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Section I. The Appetites. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Section II. The Desires. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Section III. The Affections. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Chapter III. The Governing Principles Of Action. . . . . . 25
Chapter IV. The Right. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Chapter V. Means And Sources Of Knowledge As To
Right And Wrong. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Section I. Conscience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Section II. Sources Of Knowledge. 1. Observation,
Experience, And Tradition. . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Section III. Sources Of Knowledge. 2. Law. . . . . . . 40
Section IV. Sources Of Knowledge. 3. Christianity. . . 44
Chapter VI. Rights And Obligations. . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Chapter VII. Motive, Passion, And Habit. . . . . . . . . . 62
Chapter VIII. Virtues, And The Virtues. . . . . . . . . . . 69
Chapter IX. Prudence; Or Duties To One's Self. . . . . . . 77
Section I. Self-Preservation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Section II. The Attainment Of Knowledge. . . . . . . . 80
Section III. Self-Control. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Section IV. Moral Self-Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Chapter X. Justice; Or, Duties To One's Fellow-Beings. . . 89
Section I. Duties To God. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Section II. Duties Of The Family. . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Section III. Veracity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Section IV. Honesty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Section V. Beneficence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
iv A Manual of Moral Philosophy

Chapter XI. Fortitude; Or Duties With Reference To

Unavoidable Evils And Sufferings. . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Section I. Patience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Section II. Submission. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
Section III. Courage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Chapter XII. Order; Or Duties As To Objects Under One's
Own Control. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Section I. Time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Section II. Place. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
Section III. Measure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
Section IV. Manners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Section V. Government. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Chapter XIII. Casuistry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Chapter XIV. Ancient History Of Moral Philosophy. . . . 153
Chapter XV. Modern History Of Moral Philosophy. . . . . 163
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Footnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
[iii]
 Preface.
This book has been prepared, particularly, for the use of the
Freshman Class in Harvard College. The author has, at the same
time, desired to meet the need, felt in our high schools, of a
manual of Moral Science fitted for the more advanced classes.
In the preparation of this treatise, the author has been at no
pains to avoid saying what others had said before. Yet the book
is original, so far as such a book can be or ought to be original.
The author has directly copied nothing except Dugald Stewart's
classification of the Desires. But as his reading for several years
has been principally in the department of ethics, it is highly
probable that much of what he supposes to be his own thought
may have been derived from other minds. Of course, there is no
small part of the contents of a work of this kind, which is the
common property of writers, and must in some form reappear in
every elementary manual.
Should this work be favorably received, the author hopes to
prepare, for higher college-classes, a textbook, embracing a more
detailed and thorough discussion of the questions at issue among
the different schools—past and present—of ethical science.

[001]
 Chapter 1.

Action.
An act or action is a voluntary exercise of any power of body or
mind. The character of an action, whether good or bad, depends
on the intention of the agent. Thus, if I mean to do my neighbor
a kindness by any particular act, the action is kind, and therefore
good, on my part, even though he derive no benefit from it, or be
injured by it. If I mean to do my neighbor an injury, the action is
unkind, and therefore bad, though it do him no harm, or though it
even result to his benefit. If I mean to perform an action, good or
bad, and am prevented from performing it by some unforeseen
hindrance, the act is as truly mine as if I had performed it. Words
which have any meaning are actions. So are thoughts which we
purposely call up, or retain in the mind.
On the other hand, the actions which we are compelled to
perform against our wishes, and the thoughts which are forced
upon our minds, without our own consent, are not our actions. [002]
This is obviously true when our fellow-men forcibly compel us
to do or to hear things which we do not wish to do or to hear. It
is their action solely, and we have no more part in it than if we
were brute beasts, or inanimate objects. It is, then, the intention
that gives character to the action.
That we commonly do what we intend to do there can be no
doubt. We do not act under immediate compulsion. We are,
therefore, free agents, or actors. But are our intentions free? Is it
in our power to will otherwise than we will? When we choose to
perform an act that is just or kind, is it in our power to choose to
 4 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

perform an act of the opposite character? In other words, is the

will free? If it be not so, then what we call our intentions are not
ours, but are to be attributed to the superior will which has given
direction to our wills. If God has so arranged the order of nature
and the course of events as to force my will in certain directions,
good or evil, then it is He that does the good or evil which I
seem to do. On this supposition God is the only agent or actor
in the universe. Evil, if it be wrought, is wrought by Him alone;
and if we cannot admit that the Supreme Being does evil, the
only alternative is to deny the existence of evil, and to maintain
that what we call evil bears an essential part in the production of
good. For instance, if the horrible enormities imputed to Nero
were utterly bad, the evil that was in them is chargeable, not on
[003] Nero, but on God; or if it be maintained that God cannot do
evil, then Nero was an instrument for the advancement of human
happiness and well-being.
What reasons have we for believing that the human will is
free?
1. We have the direct evidence of consciousness. We are
distinctly conscious, not only of doing as we choose, but of
exercising our free choice among different objects of desire,
between immediate and future enjoyment, between good and
evil. Now, though consciousness may sometimes deceive us, it
is the strongest evidence that we can have; we are so constituted
that we cannot refuse our credence to it; and our belief in it lies
at the basis of all evidence and of all knowledge.
2. We are clearly conscious of merit or demerit, of self-
approval or self-condemnation, in consequence of our actions.
If our wills were acted upon by a force beyond our control, we
might congratulate or pity ourselves, but we could not praise or
blame ourselves, for what we had done.
3. We praise or blame others for their good or evil actions;
and in our conduct toward them we show that we believe them to
have been not merely fortunate or unfortunate, but praiseworthy
Chapter 1. Action. 5

or blameworthy. So far as we suppose their wills to have been

influenced by circumstances beyond their control, we regard
them with diminished approval or censure. On the other hand,
we give the highest praise to those who have chosen the good
amidst strong temptations to evil, and bestow the severest [004]
censure on those who have done evil with virtuous surroundings
and influences. Now our judgment of others must of necessity be
derived from our own consciousness, and if we regard and treat
them as freely willing beings, it can only be because we know
that our own wills are free.
These arguments, all derived from consciousness, can be
directly met only by denying the validity of consciousness as
a ground of belief. The opposing arguments are drawn from
sources independent of consciousness.
1. The most obvious objection to the freedom of the human
will is derived from the power of motives. It is said, We never act
without a motive; we always yield to the strongest motive; and
motives are not of our own creation or choice, but are brought
to bear upon us independently of our own action. There has
been, from the creation until now, an unbroken series of causes
and effects, and we can trace every human volition to some
anterior cause or causes belonging to this inevitable series, so
that, in order for the volition to have been other than it was, some
member of this series must have been displaced.
To this it may be answered:—
(a) We are capable of acting without a motive, and we do
so act in numberless instances. It was a common saying among
the Schoolmen, that an ass, at equal distances from two equal
bundles of hay, would starve to death for lack of a motive to [005]
choose either. But have we any motive whatever in the many
cases in which we choose—sometimes after the vain endeavor to
discover a ground of preference—between two equally valuable,
beautiful, or appetizing objects, between two equally pleasant
routes to the same terminus, or between two equally agreeable
 6 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

modes of passing a leisure day or hour? Yet this choice, made

without motive, may be a fruitful cause of motives that shall
have a large influence in the future. Thus, on the route which
one chooses without any assignable reason, he may encounter
persons or events that shall modify his whole plan of life. The
instances are by no means few, in which the most decisive results
have ensued upon a choice thus made entirely without motive.
(b) Motives of equal strength act differently on different
temperaments. The same motive, when it stands alone, with no
opposing motive, has not the same effect on different minds.
There is in the will of every human being a certain reluctance
to action—in some greater, in others less—corresponding to the
vis inertiæ in inanimate substances; and as the impulse which
will move a wooden ball may not suffice to move a leaden
ball, so the motive which will start into action a quick and
sensitive temperament, may produce no effect on a person of
more sluggish nature. Thus, among men utterly destitute of
honesty, some are tempted by the most paltry opportunities for
[006] theft or fraud; others, not one whit more scrupulous, have
their cupidity aroused only by the prospect of some substantial
gain. So, too, some sincerely benevolent persons are moved to
charitable actions by the slightest needs and sufferings; others,
equally kind and generous, have their sympathies excited only on
grave occasions and by imperative claims. Motives, then, have
not a determinate and calculable strength, but a power which
varies with the previous character of the person to whom they
are addressed. Moreover, the greater or less susceptibility to
motives from without is not a difference produced by education
or surroundings; for it may be traced in children from the
earliest development of character. Nor can it be hereditary; for
it may be found among children of the same parents, and not
infrequently between twins nurtured under precisely the same
care, instruction, and discipline.
(c) External motives are not the causes of action, but merely
Chapter 1. Action. 7

its occasions or opportunities. The cause of the action already

exists in the character of the agent, before the motive presents
itself. A purse of gold that may be stolen without detection
is an irresistible motive to a thief, or to a person who, though
not previously a thief, is covetous and unprincipled; but the
same purse might lie in the way of an honest man every day
for a month, and it would not make him a thief. If I recognize
the presence of a motive, I must perform some action, whether
exterior or internal; but whether that action will be in accordance
with the motive, or in the opposite direction, is determined by [007]
my previous character and habits of action.
(d) The objection which we are considering assumes, without
sufficient reason, that the phenomena of human action are closely
analogous to those of motion in the material world. The analogy
fails in several particulars. No material object can act on itself
and change its own nature, adaptations, or uses, without any
external cause; but the human mind can act upon itself without
any external cause, as in repentance, serious reflection, religious
purposes and aims. Then again, if two or more forces in different
directions act upon a material object, its motion is not in the
direction of either, or with the momentum derived from either,
but in a direction and with a momentum resulting from the
composition of these forces; whereas the human will, in the
presence of two or more motives, pursues the direction and
yields to the force of but one of those motives. We are not, then,
authorized to reason about the power of motives from the action
of material forces.
(e) Were the arguments against the freedom of the will
logically sound and unanswerable, they would be of no avail
against the testimony of consciousness. Axioms, intuitive beliefs,
and truths of consciousness can be neither proved nor disproved
by reasoning; and the reasoning by which they seem to be
disproved only evinces that they are beyond the range and reach
of argument. Thus it may be maintained with show of reason [008]
 8 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

that motion is impossible; for an object cannot move where it

is, and cannot move where it is not,—a dilemma which does
not disprove the reality of motion, but simply indicates that the
reality of motion, being an intuitive belief, neither needs nor
admits logical proof.
2. It is urged against the freedom of the human will that it
is inconsistent with God's foreknowledge of future events, and
thus represents the Supreme Being as not omniscient, and in that
particular finite and imperfect.
To this objection we reply:—
(a) If human freedom and the Divine foreknowledge of human
acts are mutually incompatible, we must still retain the freedom
of the will as a truth of consciousness; for if we discredit our own
consciousness, we cannot trust even the act of the understanding
by which we set it aside, which act we know by the testimony of
consciousness alone.
(b) If the acts of a freely willing being cannot be foreknown,
the ignorance of them does not detract from the perfectness of
the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot make two and two
five. Omnipotence cannot do what is intrinsically impossible. No
more can Omniscience know what is intrinsically unknowable.
(c) If God's foreknowledge is entire, it must include his own
acts, no less than those of men. If his foreknowledge of men's
acts is incompatible with their freedom, then his foreknowledge
[009] of his own acts is incompatible with his own freedom. We
have, therefore, on the theory of necessity, instead of a Supreme
Will on the throne of the universe, mere fate or destiny. This is
equivalent to the denial of a personal God.
(d) It cannot be proved that God's foreknowledge and man's
free will are incompatible with each other. The most that we can
say is that we do not fully see how they are to be reconciled,
which is the case with many pairs of undoubted truths that might
be named. But while a perfect explanation of the harmony of
the Divine foreknowledge and human freedom is beyond the
Chapter 1. Action. 9

scope of our faculties, we may explain it in part, from our

own experience. Human foreknowledge extends very far and
with a great degree of certainty, without abridging the freedom
of those to whom it relates. When we can foresee outward
events, we can often foretell, with little danger of mistake, the
courses of conduct to which they will give rise. In view of the
extent and accuracy of human foresight, we cannot pronounce
it impossible, that He who possesses antecedent knowledge of
the native constitution of every human being, and of the shaping
circumstances and influences to which each being is subjected,
may foreknow men's acts, even though their wills be entirely
free.

[010]
 Chapter II.

The Springs Of Action.

There are certain elements of the human constitution, in part
natural, in part acquired, which always prompt and urge men
to action, without reference to the good or evil there may be in
the action, and without reference to its ultimate effects on the
actor's well-being. These are the Appetites, the Desires, and the
Affections.

Section I.

The Appetites.
The Appetites are cravings of the body, adapted, and undoubtedly
designed, to secure the continued life of the individual and the
preservation of the species. They are common to man with the
lower orders of animals, with this difference, that in man they
may be controlled, directed, modified, in part suppressed, while
in brutes they are uncontrollable, and always tend to the same
modes of gratification.
Appetite is intermittent. When gratified, it ceases for a time,
and is renewed for the same person nearly at the same intervals,
and under similar circumstances. It is, while it lasts, an uneasy,
even a painful sensation, and therefore demands prompt relief,
Section I. The Appetites. 11

and leads to action with a view to such relief. It is also

a characteristic of appetite that its indulgence is attended, not
merely by relief, but by positive pleasure.
The appetites are essential to the well-being of men,
individually and collectively. Were it not for the pain of
hunger and thirst, and the pleasure of gratifying them, both
indolence and engrossing industry would draw off the attention
of men from their bodily needs; nourishment would be taken
irregularly, and with little reference to quality; and one would
often become aware of his neglect only too late to arrest its
consequences. A similar remark applies to the appetite designed
to secure the preservation of the species. But for this, it may be
doubted whether men would willingly take upon themselves the
cares, labors, responsibilities, and contingent disappointments
and sorrows involved in the rearing of children.
In a life conformed to nature, hunger and thirst recur only
when the body actually needs the supply which they crave. But
stimulating food, by the reaction that follows strong excitement of
any portion of the nervous system, may create hunger when there
is no need of food, and in like manner not only intoxicating, but
highly stimulating liquids, may occasion an excessive, morbid,
and injurious thirst.
Appetite is modified by habit. There is hardly any substance
so offensive that it may not by use become agreeable, then an
object of desire, and, at length, of intense craving. [012]
The craving for repose and that for muscular action, though
not classed among the appetites, have all their characteristics, and
serve similar ends in the economy of human life. After a certain
period of activity, rest is felt as a bodily necessity, as food is,
after long fasting; and in like manner, when the wearied muscles
have had their due repose, there is an irresistible tendency to
their exercise, without reference to any special employment or
recreation. It is by the alternation of these tendencies that the
active and industrious are saved from the ruinous consequences
 12 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

of overtasked limbs or brain, and that the indolent are urged to

the reluctant activity without which health and life itself would
be sacrificed.
The appetites, being mere bodily impulses, and being all liable
to excess or misdirection, need the control of the will, and of
the principles of action by which the will is determined and
regulated.

Section II.

The Desires.
The Desires are distinguished from the Appetites, first, in their
not originating from the body; secondly, in their not being
necessarily intermittent; and thirdly, in their tendency to increase
indefinitely, often through the whole of life, and to gain strength
by the attainment of their specific objects. If classified by their
objects, they might seem too numerous to be specified; but they
[013] may all be embraced under the titles of the Desire for Knowledge,
for Society, for Esteem, for Power, and for Superiority. These all
may be traced, in a more or less rudimentary form, in the inferior
animals. Many of these animals show an active curiosity. Many
are gregarious in their native state, and most of the domestic
animals delight in the society of their kind; some take manifest
pleasure in human society; and the instances are by no means rare,
in which animals, by nature mutually hostile, become strongly
attached to each other, and render to each other the most friendly
services. The dog, the horse, and the cat evidently crave the
esteem of human beings, and show tokens of genuine grief when
they incur rebuke or discern tokens of disapproval. The dog
Section II. The Desires. 13

maintains with watchful jealousy his own authority in his own

peculiar domain; and in the chase or on the race-ground the dog
and the horse are as emulous of success as their masters.
1. The Desire of Knowledge. This in the human being is
manifested with the earliest dawn of intelligence. The infant is
busy with eye and hand throughout his waking hours; and that
the desire of knowledge is innate, and has no reference to the
use that is to be made of the things known, is manifest from the
rapid growth of knowledge in the first years of life, before the
child has any distinct conception of the uses of objects, or any
conscious capacity of employing them for his own benefit. It
may be doubted whether in any subsequent year of life so much
knowledge is acquired as during the first year. The child but a [014]
year old has learned the nature of the familiar objects of the house
and the street, the faces and names of a large number of relatives,
domestics, and acquaintances, the regular succession of seasons
and events in daily domestic life, and the meanings of most of
the words that are addressed to him or employed concerning him
and the objects around him. In more advanced life this desire
grows by what it feeds on, and never ceases to be active. It
assumes, indeed, different directions, in part determining, and
in part determined by, condition, profession, or employment.
Even in the most idle and frivolous, it is strong, often intense,
though its objects be worthless. Such persons frequently are as
sedulous in collecting the paltry gossip of society as the naturalist
in acquiring the knowledge of new species of plants or insects,
and as ingenious in their inferences from what they see and hear
as the philosopher in his inductions from the facts of science.
Not only in infancy, but through life, knowledge is sought
evidently for its own sake, and not merely for its uses. But a
very small part of what one knows can be made of practical
utility as to his own comfort or emolument. Many, indeed,
voluntarily sacrifice ease, gain, position, in the pursuit of science
or literature. Fame, if it accrues, is not unwelcome; but by the
 14 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

higher order of minds fame is not pursued as an end, and there are
many departments of knowledge in which little or no reputation
[015] is to be attained. Then, too, it is not the learner, but the teacher,
not the profound scholar, merely, but the able expositor, speaker,
or writer, who can expect a distinguished name; while there are
many who content themselves with acquiring knowledge, without
attempting publicity. Nor yet can benevolence account for the
love of knowledge. Many, indeed, make their attainments the
property of others, and are zealous in diffusing their own scientific
views, or in dispensing instruction in their own departments. But
there are also many solitary, recluse students; and it may be
doubted whether, if a man who is earnestly engaged in any
intellectual pursuit were shut out entirely from human society,
and left alone with his books or with nature, his diligence would
be relaxed, or his ardor abated.
2. The Desire of Society. This, also, is manifested so early as
to show that it is an original, and not an acquired principle. Little
children dread solitude, crave the presence of familiar faces, and
evince pleasure in the company of children of their own age.
A child, reared in comparative seclusion and silence, however
tenderly, suffers often in health, always in mental vigor and
elasticity; while in a large family, and in intimate association
with companions of his own age, the individual child has the
fullest and most rapid development of all his powers. There is,
indeed, in the lives of many children, a period when the presence
of strangers is unwelcome; but this state of feeling—seldom of
long duration—can in most instances be traced to some sudden
[016] fright, harsh voice, or imagined neglect or unkindness.
The natural course of human life proves that man is by the
necessity of his nature a social being. The young of other animals
are at a very early period emancipated and forsaken by their
parents, while the human child has many years of dependence,
and is hardly prepared to dispense with the shelter and kind
offices of his native home, when he is moved to create a new
Section II. The Desires. 15

home of his own.

There is no pursuit in life in which a community of interest
fails to give added zest and energy. There is no possible
ground of association on which societies are not formed,
and the trivial, fictitious, or imaginary pretences on which
men thus combine, meet, and act in concert, are manifest
proofs of a social proclivity so strong as to create reasons
for its indulgence where such reasons do not already exist.
Even in science and in the most abstruse forms of erudition,
men of learning seek mutual countenance and encouragement,
and readily suspend their solitary research and study for the
opportunity of intercommunication on the subjects and objects of
their pursuit. The cases in which society is voluntarily shunned
or forsaken are as rare as the cases of congenital disease or
deformity; and for every such instance there may generally
be assigned some grave, if not sufficient, cause. Religious
asceticism has, indeed, induced many persons, especially in the
early Christian ages, to lead a solitary life; but the cœnobites have
always vastly outnumbered the hermits; monasteries (solitary
abodes) have become convents (assemblages); and those who [017]
are shut out from the rest of the world find comfort in social
devotion, in the common refectory, and in those seasons of
recreation when the law of silence is suspended. For prisoners
solitary confinement has been found deleterious both to body
and mind, and this system, instituted with philanthropic purpose,
and commended on grounds that seemed intimately connected
with the reformation of the guilty, is now generally repudiated
as doing violence to human nature. Even for the insane, society,
with judicious classification and restriction, is an essential part
of curative treatment, and the success of asylums, as compared
with the most skilful and humane private treatment, is due in
great part to the social element.
It cannot be maintained that the desire of society results from
fear, and from the felt need of mutual protection; for it exists in
 16 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

full at the most fearless periods of life, and among those who
are the least timid, and is equally manifest in the strong and the
weak, in those who can proffer and in those who might crave
protection.
3. The Desire of Esteem. It is almost superfluous to say
that this is a native and indestructible element of the human
constitution. Its first manifestations bear even date with the
earliest displays of intelligence and affection. To the infant,
approval is reward; rebuke, even by look, is punishment. The
hope of esteem is the most healthful and effective stimulant in
the difficult tasks of childhood and of school-life. Under the
[018] discipline of parents both wise and good, it is among the most
important and salutary means of moral discipline. It is seldom
deficient in young persons. Their chief danger lies in its excess;
for when it is too strongly developed, it inclines them to seek
at all hazards the approval of their associates for the time being.
Hence the chief danger from vicious or unscrupulous associates.
The first steps in vice are oftener prompted, no doubt, by the
desire for the complacent regard of one's companions than by
an antecedent disposition to evil. Indeed, the confession is often
made, that these steps were taken with compunction and horror,
solely from the fear of ridicule and from the desire to win the
approval and favor of older transgressors.
On the other hand, the desire of the esteem of good men is one
of the strongest auxiliary motives to virtue; while a yearning for
the Divine approval forms an essential part of true piety towards
God.
4. The Desire of Power. This is manifested in every period
of life, and in the exercise of every faculty, bodily, mental, and
moral. It is this which gives us pleasure in solitary exercises
of physical strength, in climbing mountains, swimming, lifting
heavy weights, performing difficult gymnastic feats. It is this,
more than deliberate cruelty, that induces boys to torture animals,
or to oppress and torment their weaker or more timid companions.
Section II. The Desires. 17

In intellectual pursuits, the love of power leads to many

exercises and efforts that have no ulterior result. The
mathematician will turn aside from his course of study to [019]
master a problem, which involves no new principle, but is
merely difficult and perplexing. The reading of books obscurely
written, or in languages that task the utmost power of analysis,
frequently has no other result, and probably no other object, than
the trial of strength. What can be attained only by strenuous
mental labor, is for that very reason sought, even if it promise no
utility.
In the affairs of practical life, every man desires to make his
influence felt. With persons of the highest character, the love
of power is manifest in connection with the aim to be useful.
Even the most modest men, while they may spurn flattery, are
gladdened by knowing that they are acting upon the wills and
shaping the characters of those around them.
The love of property belongs in great part under this head.
Money is power, preëminently so at the present day. Property
confers influence, and puts at one's command resources that
may be the means of extended and growing power alike over
inanimate nature and the wills of men. Avarice, or the desire of
money for its own sake, is not an original desire. Few or none
are avaricious in very early life. But money, first sought for the
power it confers, from being a means becomes an end, to such a
degree that, in order to possess it, the miser will forego the very
uses for which he at the outset learned to value it.
5. The Desire of Superiority. This is so nearly universal in
all conditions of society, and at all periods of life, that it must [020]
be regarded as an original element of human nature. Without
it there would be little progress. In every department of life,
men stimulate one another toward a higher standard of endeavor,
attainment, or excellence. What each does, his neighbor would
fain outdo; what each becomes, his neighbor would fain surpass.
It is only by perversion that this desire tends to evil. It finds
 18 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

its proper satisfaction, not in crushing, depressing, or injuring

a rival, but barely in overtaking and excelling him; and the
higher his point of attainment, the greater is the complacency
experienced in reaching and transcending it. On the race-ground,
I do not want to compete with a slow runner, nor will it afford
me the slightest satisfaction to win the race by tripping up my
competitor; what I want is to match myself with the best runner
on a fair field, and to show myself his equal or superior. The
object striven for is the individual's own ideal, and those whom
he successively passes on his course mark but successive stages
on his progress toward that ideal. Thus, in the pursuit of moral
excellence, it is only a mean and a bad man who can imagine that
he gains anything by detracting from the merit of others; but he
who is sincerely contending for a high place among virtuous men,
rejoices in the signal examples of goodness of every kind which
it is his privilege to emulate, and rejoices most of all that the ideal
of perfect excellence—once only actualized in human form—is
so pure and lofty that it may be his life-work to approach it
[021] without reaching it.
Emulation is not envy, nor need it lead to envy. Among those
who strive for superiority there need be no collision. The natural
desire is to be, not to seem, superior; to have the consciousness,
not the mere outward semblance, of high attainment; and of
attainment, not by a conventional, but by an absolute standard;
and this aim excludes none,—there may be as many first places
as there are deserving candidates for them. Then, too, there is so
wide a diversity of ideals, both in degree and in kind, there are
so many different ruling aims, and so many different routes by
which these aims are pursued, that there need be little danger of
mutual interference. Even as regards external rewards, so far as
they depend on the bounty of nature, the constitution of society,
or the general esteem and good will of men, the success of one
does not preclude the equal success of many; but, on the other
hand, the merited prosperity and honor of the individual cannot
Section III. The Affections. 19

fail to be of benefit to the whole community. It is only in offices

contingent on election or appointment that the aspirant incurs a
heavy risk of failure; but when we consider how meanly men are
often compelled to creep into office and to grovel in it, it can
hardly be supposed that a genuine desire of superiority holds a
prominent place among the motives of these who are willingly
dependent on patronage or on popular suffrage.
These desires, according as one or another has the ascendency,
prompt to action, without reference to the good or the evil there [022]
may be in the action; and they therefore need the control of
reason, and of the principles which reason recognizes in the
government of conduct.

Section III.

The Affections.
The Affections are distinguished from the Desires, mainly in
these two particulars: first, that the Desires are for impersonal
objects, the Affections, for persons; and secondly, that the
Desires prompt to actions that have a direct reference to one's
self; the Affections, to actions that have a direct reference to
others.
The Affections are benevolent or malevolent.
1. The benevolent affections are Love, Reverence, Gratitude,
Kindness, Pity, and Sympathy.
Love needs no definition, and admits of none. It probably
never exists uncaused; though it survives all real or imagined
ground for it, and in some cases seems rendered only the more
intense by the admitted unworthiness of its object. When it is
 20 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

not the reason for marriage, it can hardly fail to grow from the
conjugal relation between one man and one woman, if the mutual
duties belonging to that relation be held sacred. It is inconceivable
that a mother should not love her child, inevitably cast upon her
protection from the first moment of his being; the father who
extends a father's care over his children finds in that care a
[023] constant source of love; and the children, waking into conscious
life under the ministries of parental benignity and kindness, have
no emotion so early, and no early emotion so strong, as filial
love. It may be doubted whether there is among the members
of the same family a natural affection, independent of relations
practically recognized in domestic life. It is very certain that at
both extremities of the social scale family affection is liable to be
impaired, on the one hand, by the delegation of parental duties
to hirelings, and, on the other, by the inability to render them
constantly and efficiently. We may observe also a difference in
family affection, traceable indirectly to the influence of climate.
Out-of-door life is unfavorable to the intimate union of families;
while domestic love is manifestly the strongest in those countries
where the shelter and hearth of the common home are necessary
for a large portion of the year.
Friendship is but another name for love between persons
unconnected by domestic relations, actual or prospective.
Love for the Supreme Being, or piety, differs not in kind
from the child's love for the parent; but it rightfully transcends all
other love, inasmuch as the benefits received from God include
and surpass all other benefits. To awake, then, to a consciousness
of our actual relation to God, is “to love Him with all the heart,
and with all the understanding, and all the soul, and all the
strength.”
[024] Reverence is the sentiment inspired by advanced superiority
in such traits of mind and character as we regard with
complacency in ourselves, or with esteem in our equals. Qualities
which we do not esteem we may behold with admiration (that
Section III. The Affections. 21

is, wonder), but not with reverence. Our reverence for age is
not for advanced years alone, but for the valuable experience
which they are supposed to have given, and especially for the
maturity of excellence which belongs to the old age of good men,
of which their features generally bear the impress, and which, in
the absence of knowledge, we are prone to ascribe to a venerable
mien and aspect. A foolish or wicked old man commands no
reverence by his years.
God, as possessing in infinite fulness all the properties which
we revere in man, must ever be the worthy object of supreme
reverence.
Gratitude, though it can hardly be disjoined from love, is
seldom cherished for the same person in the same degree with
love. We love our beneficiaries more than our benefactors. We
love those dependent upon us more than those on whom we
depend. The mother's love for her child is the strongest of human
affections, and undoubtedly exceeds that even of the child for
the mother to whom he owes every benefit and blessing under
heaven. We may be fervently grateful to persons whom we
have never seen; but there cannot be much vividness in our love
for them. Love to God, whom we have not seen, needs to be
kindled, renewed, and sustained by gratitude for the incessant
flow of benefits from Him, and by the promise—contingent on [025]
character—of blessings immeasurable and everlasting.
Kindness is benevolence for one's kind,—a delight in their
happiness and well-being, a readiness to perform friendly offices
whenever and however they may be needed. In its lower forms
it is designated as good nature; when intense and universal, it is
termed philanthropy. It befits the individual man as a member
of a race of kindred, and is deemed so essential an attribute
of the human character, that he who utterly lacks it is branded
as inhuman, while its active exercise in the relief of want and
suffering is emphatically termed humanity.
Pity is the emotion occasioned by the sight or knowledge
 22 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

of distress or pain. While without it there can be no genuine

kindness, it may exist without kindness. There are persons
tenderly sensitive to every form of suffering, who yet feel only
for the sufferer, not with him, and who would regard and treat
him coldly or harshly, if he were not a sufferer. In such cases,
pity would seem to be a selfish feeling; and there can be no
doubt that some men relieve distress and poverty, as they would
remove weeds from a flower-bed, because they are offensive to
the sight.
Sympathy is feeling, not for, but with others.1 It has for its
objects successes and joys, no less than sufferings and sorrows;
and probably is as real and intense in the case of the former as
[026] of the latter, though its necessity is less felt and its offices are
less prized in happy than in sad experiences. Kindness alone
cannot produce sympathy. In order to feel with another, we must
either have passed through similar experiences, or must have an
imagination sufficiently vivid to make them distinctly present to
our thought. This latter power is by no means necessary to create
even the highest degree of kindness or of pity; and among the most
active and persevering in works of practical beneficence, there
are many who feel intensely for, yet but faintly with, the objects
of their charity. On the other hand, sympathy sometimes finds
its chief exercise in sensational literature, and there are persons,
profoundly moved by fictitious representations of distress, who
yet remain inactive and indifferent as regards the real needs and
sufferings around them that crave relief.
2. The malevolent affections are Anger, Resentment, Envy,
Revenge, and Hatred.
Anger is the sense of indignation occasioned by real or
imagined wrong. When excited by actual wrong-doing, and when
contained within reasonable bounds, it is not only innocent, but
salutary. It intensifies the virtuous feeling which gives it birth;
1
Compassion ought from its derivation to have the same meaning with
sympathy; but in common usage it is synonymous with pity.
Section III. The Affections. 23

and its due expression is among the safeguards of society against

corruption and evil. But when indulged without sufficient cause,
or suffered to become excessive or to outlast its occasion, it is
in itself evil, and it may lead to any and every form of social
injustice, and of outrage against the rights of man and the law of
God. [027]
Resentment is the feeling excited by injury done to ourselves.
This also is innocent and natural, when its occasion is sufficient,
and its limits reasonable. It may prevent the repetition of injury,
and the spontaneous tendency to it, which is almost universal, is
an efficient defence against insult, indignity, and encroachment
on the rights of individuals. But, indulged or prolonged beyond
the necessity of self-defence, it is prone to reverse the parties,
and to make the injured person himself the wrong-doer.
Both anger and resentment are painful emotions, and on this
account are self-limited in a well-ordered mind. He who makes
happiness his aim will, if wise, give these disturbing forces the
least possible hold upon him, whether in intensity or in duration.
Envy has been defined as the excess of emulation. It seems
rather to be a deficiency in the genuine principle of emulation.
The instinctive desire of superiority leads us, as we have seen,
to aim at absolutely high attainments, and to measure ourselves
less by what others are, than by our own ideal. It is only those
of lower aims, who seek to supplant others on their career. Envy
is the attempt, not to rise or excel, but to stand comparatively
high by subverting those who hold or seek a higher position. No
just man voted for the banishment of Aristides because he was
always called the Just; but his ostracism was the decree of those
who knew that they could obtain no reputation for justice till he
were put out of their way. [028]
Revenge is the desire to inflict evil for evil. In principle
it is always wrong; for the evil-doer, though he may merit
transient anger and resentment, is not therefore placed beyond
our benevolence, but is rather commended to our charity as one
 24 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

who may be reformed and may become worthy of our esteem.

In practice, revenge can scarce ever be just. Our self-love so
exaggerates our estimate of the wrong we receive, that we could
hardly fail to retaliate by greater wrong, and thus to provoke a
renewal of the injury. There are, no doubt, cases in which self-
defence may authorize the immediate chastisement or disabling
of the wrong-doer, and in an unsettled state of society, where
there is no legal protection, it may be the right of individuals to
punish depredation or personal outrage; but acts of this kind are
to be justified on the plea of necessity, not of revenge.
Hatred is the result of either of the malevolent affections above
named, when carried to excess, or suffered to become permanent.
It precludes the exercise of all the benevolent affections. No man
can rightfully be the object of hatred; for there is no man who has
not within him some element or possibility of good, none who
has not rights that should be respected, none who is not entitled
to pity for his sufferings, and, still more, for his sins.
*****
The affections, benevolent and malevolent, are common to
man with lower animals. Love and hatred are manifested by
[029] all of them whose habits are open to our inspection; anger, by
not a few; gratitude, kindness, pity, sympathy, resentment, and
revenge, by the more intelligent; envy, by those most completely
domesticated; reverence, perhaps, by the dog towards his master.
The affections all prompt to action, and do not discriminate the
qualities of actions. Hence they need the control and guidance of
reason, and can safely be indulged only in accordance with the
principles which reason recognizes as supreme in the conduct of
life.

[030]
 Chapter III.

The Governing Principles Of Action.

The appetites, desires, and affections constitute the impelling

force in all action. Were we not possessed of them, we should not
act. There is no act of any kind, good or bad, noble or base, mental
or bodily, of which one or another of them is not the proximate
cause. They are also imperative in their demands. They crave
immediate action,—the appetites, in procuring or using the means
of bodily gratification; the desires, in the increase of their objects;
the affections, in seeking or bestowing their appropriate tokens
or expressions, whether good or evil. Were there no check, the
specific appetite, desire, or affection to which circumstances gave
the ascendency for the time being, would act in its appropriate
direction, until counteracted by another, brought into supremacy
by a new series of circumstances. This is the case with brutes,
so far as we can observe their modes of action. Here, in man,
reason intervenes, and takes cognizance of the tendencies and
the qualities of actions.
Reason considers actions under two points of view,—interest
and obligation,—expediency and right. The questions which we
inwardly ask concerning actions all resolve themselves into one [031]
of these,—Is the act useful or desirable for me? or, Is it my right
or my duty? He who is wont to ask the former of these questions
is called a prudent man; he who habitually asks the latter is
termed a virtuous or good man. He who asks neither of them
yields himself, after the manner of the brutes, to the promptings
 26 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

of appetite, desire, and affection, and thus far omits to exercise

the reason which distinguishes him from the brutes.
There can be no doubt that expediency and right coincide.
Under the government of Supreme Benevolence, it is impossible
that what ought to be done should not conduce to the welfare of
him who does it. But its beneficent results may be too remote
for him to trace them, nay, may belong to a life beyond death,
to which human cognizance does not reach; while what ought
not to be done may promise substantial benefit so far as man's
foresight extends. Then, too, it is at least supposable that there
may be cases, in which, were they solitary cases, expediency
might diverge from right, yet in which, because they belong to
a class, it is for the interest of society and of every individual
member of society that general laws should be obeyed. It is
obvious also, that there are many cases, in which the calculation
of expediency involves details too numerous and too complicated
to be fully understood by a mind of ordinary discernment, while
the same mind can clearly perceive what course of conduct is in
[032] accordance with the strict rule of right. Still farther, in a question
of conduct in which appetite, desire, or affection is concerned,
we cannot take as calm and dispassionate a view of our true
interest, as we should of the interest of another person in like
case. The impelling force may be so strong, that for the time
being we sincerely regard it as expedient—though we know that
it is not right—to yield to it.
For these reasons there is an apparent conflict between the
useful and the right. Though a perfectly wise and dispassionate
man might give precisely the same answer in every instance to the
question of interest and that of duty, men, limited and influenced
as they are, can hardly fail in many instances to answer these
questions differently. The man who makes his own imagined
good his ruling aim does many things which he would not
defend on the ground of right; the man who determines always
to do right sometimes performs acts of reputed and conscious
Chapter III. The Governing Principles Of Action. 27

self-denial and self-sacrifice.

Nor yet can more general considerations of expediency,
reference to the good of others, to the greatest good of the
greatest number, serve as a guide to the right or a test of
the right. We have less foresight as regards others than as
regards ourselves; the details involved in the true interest of any
community, society, or number of persons, are necessarily more
numerous and complicated than those involved in our own well-
being; and, if not appetite or desire, the benevolent or malevolent
affections are fully as apt to warp our judgment and to misdirect [033]
our conduct in the case of others as in our own case.
We perceive then that expediency, whether with reference to
ourselves or to others, is not a trustworthy rule of conduct.
Yet while it cannot hold the first place, it occupies an important
place; for there are many cases in which the question before us
is not what we ought to do, but what it is best for us to do.
Thus, if there be several acts, all equally right, only one of which
can be performed, we are evidently entitled to perform the act
which will be most pleasing or useful to ourselves. If there be an
end which it is our right or duty to attain, and there be several
equally innocent modes of attaining it, the question for us is, by
which of these modes we may find the least difficulty or gain
the highest enjoyment or advantage. If there be several duties
incumbent upon us at the same time and place, all of which have
equal intrinsic claims, yet one of which must necessarily take
precedence of the rest, the question which shall have precedence
is a question of expediency, that by which we may do the most
good being the foremost duty.
Expediency is not a characteristic of actions. An act is not
in itself expedient or inexpedient, but is made one or the other by
varying circumstances alone; while there are acts in themselves
good which no possible circumstances could make bad, and
there are acts in themselves bad which no possible circumstances
could make good. If, therefore, there be a science which has [034]
 28 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

for its province the intrinsic qualities of actions, questions of

expediency have no place in such a science.
Moral Philosophy, or Ethics (synonymous terms), is the
science which treats of human actions. The term morals is often
applied to external actions; but always with reference to the
intentions from which they proceed. We can conceive of the
treatment of actions under various aspects, as wise or unwise,
agreeable or disagreeable, spontaneous or deliberate; but by
the common consent of mankind, at least of the civilized and
enlightened portion of mankind, the distinction of actions as right
or wrong is regarded as of an importance so far transcending
all other distinctions, as to render them of comparatively little
moment. Therefore Moral Philosophy confines itself to this
single distinction, and takes cognizance of others, only as they
modify this, or are modified by it. The questions which Moral
Philosophy asks and answers are these:—What constitutes the
right? How is it to be ascertained? Wherein lies the obligation
to the right? What are the motives to right action? What specific
actions, or classes of actions are right, and why? What specific
actions, or classes of actions are wrong, and why?

[035]

Chapter IV.

The Right.
Chapter IV. The Right. 29

Every object, by virtue of its existence, has its appropriate

place, purpose, uses, and relations. At every moment, each
specific object is either in or out of its place, fulfilling or not
fulfilling its purpose, subservient to or alienated from its uses,
in accordance or out of harmony with its relations, and therefore
in a state of fitness or unfitness as regards other objects. Every
object is at every moment under the control of the intelligent will
of the Supreme Being, or of some finite being, and is by that
will maintained either in or out of its place, purpose, uses, or
relations, and thus in a state of fitness or unfitness with regard to
other objects. Every intelligent being, by virtue of his existence,
bears certain definite relations to outward objects, to his fellow-
beings, and to his Creator. At every moment, each intelligent
being is either faithful or unfaithful to these relations, and thus
in a state of fitness or unfitness as regards outward objects and
other beings. Thus fitness or unfitness may be affirmed, at every
moment, of every object in existence, of the volition by which
each object is controlled, and of every intelligent being, with
regard to the exercise of his will toward or upon outward objects [036]
or his fellow-beings. Fitness and unfitness are the ultimate ideas
that are involved in the terms right and wrong. These last
are metaphorical terms,—right (Latin, rectus), straight, upright,
according to rule, and therefore fit; wrong, wrung, distorted,
deflected, twisted out of place, contrary to rule, and therefore
unfit. We are so constituted that we cannot help regarding fitness
with complacency and esteem; unfitness, with disesteem and
disapproval, even though we ourselves create it or impersonate
it.
Fitness is the only standard by which we regard our own
actions or the actions of others as good or evil,—by which we
justify or condemn ourselves or others. Duty has fitness for
its only aim and end. To whatever object comes under our
control, its fit place, purpose, uses, and relations are due; and our
perception of what is thus due constitutes our duty, and awakens
 30 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

in us a sense of obligation. To ourselves, and to other beings and

objects, our fidelity to our relations has in it an intrinsic fitness;
that fitness is due to them and to ourselves; and our perception of
what is thus due constitutes our duty, and awakens in us a sense
of obligation.
Right and wrong are not contingent on the knowledge of
the moral agent. Unfitness, misuse, abuse, is none the less
intrinsically wrong, because it is the result of ignorance. It is out
of harmony with the fitness of things. It deprives an object of
its due use. It perverts to pernicious results what is salutary in
[037] its purpose. It lessens for the agent his aggregate of good and
of happiness, and increases for him his aggregate of evil and of
misery. In this sense—far more significant than that of arbitrary
infliction—the well-known maxim of jurisprudence, “Ignorance
of the law excuses no one,”2 is a fundamental law of nature.
There is, however, an important distinction between absolute
and relative right. In action, the absolute right is conduct in
entire conformity with beings and objects as they are; the relative
right is conduct in accordance with beings and objects as, with
the best means of knowledge within our reach, we believe them
to be. The Omniscient Being alone can have perfect knowledge
of all beings and things as they are. This knowledge is possessed
by men in different degrees, corresponding to their respective
measures of intelligence, sagacity, culture, and personal or
traditional experience. In the ruder conditions of society, acts
that seem to us atrociously wrong, often proceed from honest and
inevitable misapprehension, are right in their intention, and are
therefore proper objects of moral approbation. In an advanced
condition of intelligence, and especially under high religious
culture, though the realm of things unknown far exceeds that of
things known, there is a sufficiently clear understanding of the
objects and relations of ordinary life to secure men against sins
2
“Ignorantia legis neminem excusat.”
Chapter IV. The Right. 31

of ignorance, and to leave in their wrong-doing no semblance or

vestige of right.
The distinction between absolute and relative right enables us [038]
to reconcile two statements that may have seemed inconsistent
with each other, namely, that “the character of an action, whether
good or bad, depends on the intention of the agent,” and “that
unfitness, misuse, abuse, is none the less wrong because the
result of ignorance.” Both these propositions are true. The same
act may be in intent right and good, and yet, through defect of
knowledge, wrong and evil; and it may, in virtue of its good
intent, be attended and followed by beneficent results, while at
the same time the evil that there is in it may be attended or
followed by injurious consequences. We may best illustrate this
double character of actions by a case so simple that we can see
through it at a single glance. I will suppose that I carry to a sick
person a potion which I believe to be an efficient remedy, but
which, by a mistake for which I am not accountable, proves to be
a deadly poison. My act, by the standard of absolute right, is an
unfitting and therefore a wrong act, and it has its inevitable result
in killing the patient. But because my intention was right, I have
not placed myself in any wrong relation to God or man. Nay, if I
procured what I supposed to be a healing potion with care, cost,
and trouble, and for one whose suffering and need were his only
claim upon me, I have by my labor of love brought myself into
an even more intimate relation, filial and fraternal, with God and
man, the result of which must be my enhanced usefulness and
happiness. If on the other hand I had meant to poison the man,
but had by mistake given him a healing potion, my act would [039]
have been absolutely right, because conformed to the fitness of
things, but relatively wrong, because in its intention and purpose
opposed to the fitness of things; and as in itself fitting, it would
have done the sick man good, while, as in its purpose unfitting,
it would have thrown me out of the relations in which I ought to
stand both with God and man.
 32 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

Mistakes as to specific acts of duty bear the closest possible

analogy to the case of the poison given for medicine. The savage,
who sincerely means to express reverence, kindness, loyalty,
fidelity, may perform, in the expression of those sentiments, acts
that are utterly unfitting, and therefore utterly wrong; and if so,
each of these acts produces its due consequences, it may be,
baleful and lamentable. Yet because he did the best he knew in
the expression of these sentiments, he has not sunk, but risen
in his character as a moral being,—has become better and more
capable of good.
Ignorance of the right, however, is innocent, only when
inevitable. At the moment of action, indeed, what seems to me
fitting is relatively right, and were I to do otherwise, even though
my act were absolutely right, it would be relatively wrong. But
if I have had and neglected the means of knowing the right, I
have violated the fitnesses of my own nature by not employing
my cognitive powers on subjects of vital importance to my well-
[040] being. In this case, though what are called the sins of ignorance
may be mistakes and not sins, the ignorance itself has all the
characteristics that attach themselves to the term sin, and must
be attended with proportionally harmful consequences to the
offender.

[041]
 Chapter V.

Means And Sources Of Knowledge

As To Right And Wrong.

Section I.

Conscience.
Conscience is a means, not a source, of knowledge. It is
analogous to sight and hearing. It is the power of perceiving
fitness and unfitness. Yet more, it is consciousness,—a sense of
our own personal relation to the fitting and the unfitting, of our
power of actualizing them in intention, will, and conduct. It is
in this last particular that man differs from the lower animals.
They have an instinctive perception of fitness, and an instinctive
impulse to acts befitting their nature. But no brute says to himself,
“I am acting in accordance with the fitness of things;” while man
virtually says to himself, in every act, “I am doing what it is fit
for me to do,” or, “I am doing what it is unfitting for me to do.”
Conscience is a judicial faculty. Its decisions are based upon
such knowledge as the individual has, whether real or imagined,
and from whatever source derived. It judges according to such
law and evidence as are placed before it. Its verdict is always [042]
 34 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

relatively right, a genuine verdict (verum dictum), though, by the

absolute standard of right, it may be wrong, through defect of
knowledge,—precisely as in a court of law an infallibly wise and
incorruptibly just judge may pronounce an utterly erroneous or
unjust decision, if he have before him a false statement of facts,
or if the law which he is compelled to administer be unrighteous.
We may illustrate the function of conscience by reference
to a question now agitated in our community,—the question as
to the moral fitness of the moderate use of fermented liquors.
In civilized society, intoxication is universally known to be
opposed to the fitnesses of body and mind, an abuse of alcoholic
liquors, and an abuse of the drinker's own personality; and it is
therefore condemned by all consciences, by none more heartily
than by those of its victims. But there still remains open the
question whether entire abstinence from fermented liquors be a
duty, and this is a question of fact. Says one party, “Alcohol,
in every form, and in the least quantity, is a virulent poison,
and therefore unfit for body and mind.” Says the other party,
“Wine, moderately used, is healthful, salutary, restorative, and
therefore fitted to body and mind.” Change the opinion of the
latter party, their consciences would at once take the other side;
and if they retained in precept and practice their present position,
they would retain it self-condemned. Change the opinion of the
[043] former party, their consciences would assume the ground which
they now assail. Demonstrate to the whole community—as it is to
be hoped physiology will do at no distant day—the precise truth
in this matter, there would remain no difference of conscientious
judgment, whatever difference of practice might still continue.
Conscience, like all the perceptive faculties, prompts to
action in accordance with its perceptions. In this respect it
differs not in the least from sight, hearing, taste. Our natural
proclivity is to direct our movements with reference to the objects
within the field of our vision, to govern our conduct by what we
hear, to take into our mouths only substances that are pleasing
Section I. Conscience. 35

to the taste. Yet fright, temerity, or courage may impel us to

incur dangers which we clearly see; opiniativeness or obstinacy
may make us inwardly deaf to counsels or warnings which we
hear; and motives of health may induce us to swallow the most
nauseous drugs. In like manner, our inevitable tendency is
to govern our conduct by the fitness of things when clearly
perceived; but intense and unrestrained appetite, desire, or
affection may lead us to violate that fitness, though distinctly
seen and acknowledged.
Men act in opposition to conscience only under immediate
and strong temptation. The great majority of the acts of bad
men are conscientious, but not therefore meritorious; for merit
consists not in doing right when there is no temptation to evil,
but in resisting temptation. But, as has been said, it is as natural, [044]
when there is no inducement to the contrary, to act in accordance
with the fitness of things, as it is to act in accordance with what
we see and hear. It is the tendency so to act, that alone renders
human society possible, in the absence of high moral principle.
In order to live, a man must so act with reference to outward
nature; still more must he so act, in order to possess human
fellowship, physical comfort, transient enjoyment, of however
low a type; and the most depraved wretch that walks the earth
purchases his continued being and whatever pleasure he derives
from it by a thousand acts in accordance with the fitness of things
to one in which he violates that fitness.
Conscience, like all the perceptive faculties, is educated
by use. The watchmaker's or the botanist's eye acquires an
almost microscopic keenness of vision. The blind man's hearing
is so trained as to supply, in great part, the lack of sight.
The epicure's taste can discriminate flavors whose differences
are imperceptible to an ordinary palate. In like manner, the
conscience that is constantly and carefully exercised in judging
of the fit and the unfitting, the right and the wrong, becomes
prompt, keen, searching, sensitive, comprehensive, microscopic.
 36 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

On the other hand, conscience, like the senses, if seldom called

into exercise, becomes sluggish, inert, incapable of minute
discrimination, or of vigilance over the ordinary conduct of life.
Yet it is never extinct, and is never perverted. When roused to
[045] action, even in the most obdurate, it resumes its judicial severity,
and records its verdict in remorseful agony.
Conscience is commonly said to be educated by the increase
of knowledge as to the relations of beings and objects, as to the
moral laws of the universe, and as to religious verities. This,
however, is not true. Knowledge does not necessarily quicken
the activity of conscience, or enhance its discriminating power.
Conscience often is intense and vivid in the most ignorant,
inactive and torpid in persons whose cognitive powers have
had the most generous culture. Knowledge, indeed, brings the
decisions of conscience into closer and more constant conformity
with the absolute right, but it does not render its decisions more
certainly in accordance with the relative right, that is, with what
the individual, from his point of view, ought to will and do.
It has the same effect upon conscience that accurate testimony
has upon the clear-minded and uncorrupt judge, whose mind
is not made thereby the more active or discriminating, nor his
decision brought into closer accordance with the facts as they are
presented to him. Knowledge is indeed an indispensable auxiliary
to conscience; but this cannot be affirmed exclusively of any
specific department of knowledge. It is true of all knowledge;
for there is no fact or law in the universe that may not in some
contingency become the subject-matter or the occasion for the
action of conscience. Nothing could seem more remote from the
ordinary field of conscience than the theory of planetary motion;
[046] yet it was this that gave Galileo the one grand opportunity of his
life for testing the supremacy of conscience,—it may be, the sole
occasion on which his conscience uttered itself strongly against
his seeming interest, and one on which obedience to conscience
would have averted the only cloud that ever rested on his fame.
 37

Section II.

Sources Of Knowledge. 1. Observation,

Experience, And Tradition.

Except so far as there may have been direct communications from

the Supreme Being, all man's knowledge of persons, objects,
and relations is derived, in the last resort, from observation.
Experience is merely remembered self-observation. Tradition,
oral and written, is accumulated and condensed observation;
and by means of this each new generation can avail itself of
the experience of preceding generations, can thus find time to
explore fresh departments of knowledge, and so transmit its own
traditions to the generations that shall follow. Now what we
observe in objects is chiefly their properties, or, what is the
same thing, their fitnesses; for a property is that which fits an
object for a specific place or use. What we observe in persons
is their relations to other beings and objects, with the fitnesses
that belong to those relations. What we experience all resolves
itself into the fitness or unfitness of persons and objects to one
another or to ourselves. What is transmitted in history and [047]
in science is the record of fitnesses or unfitnesses that have
been ascertained by observation, or tested by experience. The
progress of knowledge is simply an enlarged acquaintance with
the fitnesses of persons and things. He knows the most, who most
fully comprehends the relations in which the beings and objects
in the universe stand, have stood, and ought to stand toward one
another. Moreover, as when we see a fitness within our sphere of
action, we perceive intuitively that it is right to respect it, wrong
to violate it, our knowledge of right and wrong is co-extensive
with our knowledge of persons and things. The more enlightened
 38 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

and cultivated a nation is, then, the more does it know as to right
and wrong, whatever may be its standard of practical morality.
For instance, in the most savage condition, men know, with
reference to certain articles of food and drink, that they are
adapted to relieve the cravings of hunger and thirst, and they
know nothing more about them. They are not acquainted with
the laws of health, whether of body or of mind. They therefore
eat and drink whatever comes to hand, without imagining the
possibility of wrong-doing in this matter. But, with the progress
of civilization, they learn that various kinds of food and drink
impair the health, cloud the brain, enfeeble the working power,
and therefore are unfit for human use; and no sooner is this known,
than the distinction of right and wrong begins to be recognized, as
[048] to what men eat and drink. The more thorough is the knowledge
of the human body and of the action of various substances on its
organs and tissues, the more minute and discriminating will be
the perception of fitness or unfitness as to the objects that tempt
the appetites, and the keener will be the sense of right or wrong
in their use.
For another illustration of the same principle, we may take
the relation between parents and children. In the ruder stages
of society, and especially among a nomadic or migratory people,
there is not a sufficient knowledge of the resources of nature or
the possibilities of art, to render even healthy and vigorous life
more than tolerable; while for the infirm and feeble, life is but
a protracted burden and weariness. At the same time, there is
no apprehension of the intellectual and moral worth of human
life, still less, of the value even of its most painful experiences
as a discipline of everlasting benefit. In fine, life is little more
than a mere struggle for existence. What wonder then, that in
some tribes filial piety has been wont to relieve superannuated
parents from an existence devoid equally of joy and of hope;
and that in others parental love may have even dictated the
exposure—with a view to their perishing—of feeble, sickly,
 39

and deformed children, incapable of being nurtured into self-

sustaining and self-depending life? But increased conversance
with nature and art constantly reveals new capacities of comfort
and happiness in life, and that, not for the strong alone, but for the [049]
feeble, the suffering, the helpless, so that there are none to whom
humanity knows not how to render continued life desirable. At
the same time, a higher culture has made it manifest that the
frailest body may be the seat of the loftiest mental activity, moral
excellence, and spiritual aspiration, and that in such a body there
is often only a surer and more finished education for a higher
state of being. Filial piety and parental love, therefore, do all in
their power to prolong the flickering existence of the age-worn
and decrepit, and to cherish with tender care the life which seems
born but to die. There is, then, to the limited view of the savage,
an apparent fitness in practices which in their first aspect seem
crimes against nature; while increased knowledge develops a real
and essential fitness, in all the refinements and endearments of
the most persevering and skilful love.
These examples, which might be multiplied indefinitely, show
the dependence of conscience on knowledge, not for relatively
right decisions, but for verdicts in accordance with the absolute
right. There is no subject that can be presented for the action
of conscience, on which, upon precisely the same principles,
divergent and often opposite courses of conduct may not be
dictated by more or less accurate knowledge of the subject and
its relations.
It will be seen, also, that with the growth of knowledge,
conscience has a constantly wider scope of action. The
number of indifferent acts is thus diminished; the number of
positively right or wrong acts, increased. An indifferent act is [050]
one for the performance of which, rather than its opposite, no
reason, involving a question of right or wrong, can be given.
Thus, if the performance or the omission of a specific act be
equally fitted to the time, place, circumstances, and persons
 40 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

concerned, the act is an indifferent one; or, if two or more ways

of accomplishing a desired end be equally fitted to time, place,
circumstances, and persons, the choice between these ways is,
morally speaking, a matter of indifference. But with a knowledge
both more extensive and more minute of the nature, relations,
and fitnesses of beings and objects, we find an increasing number
of instances in which acts that seemed indifferent have a clearly
perceptible fitness or unfitness, and thus acquire a distinct moral
character as right or wrong.

Section III.

Sources Of Knowledge. 2. Law.

Law is the result of the collective experience, in part, of
particular communities, in part, of the human race as a whole.
It encourages, protects, or at least permits whatever acts or
modes of conduct have been found or believed to be fitting, in
accordance with the nature of things and the well-being of men,
and therefore right; it forbids and punishes such acts or modes of
conduct as have been found or believed to be unfitting, opposed
[051] to nature and to human well-being, and therefore wrong. It is
far from perfect; it is below the standard of the most advanced
minds; but it represents the average knowledge or belief of the
community to which it belongs. The laws of any particular
state cannot rise far above this average; for laws unsustained
by general opinion could not be executed, and if existing in the
statute-book, they would not have the nature and force of law,
and would remain on record simply because they had lapsed
out of notice. Nor can they fall far below this average; for no
Section III. Sources Of Knowledge. 2. Law. 41

government can sustain itself while its legislation fails to meet

the demands of the people.
While law thus expresses the average knowledge of belief, it
tends to perpetuate its own moral standard. The notions of
right which it embodies form a part of the general education.
The specific crimes, vices, and wrongs which the law marks
out for punishment are regarded by young persons, from their
earliest years, as worthy of the most emphatic censure and
condemnation; while those which the law leaves unpunished are
looked upon as comparatively slight and venial. Not only so,
the degree of detestation in which a community learns to look
on specific crimes and offences is not in proportion to their
actual heinousness, but to the stress of overt ignominy attached
to them by legal penalties. Instances of this effect of law on
opinion will be readily called to mind. Thus a common thief
loses, and can hardly regain his position in society; while the
man who by dishonest bankruptcy commits a hundred thefts [052]
in one, can hold his place unchallenged, even in the Christian
church, while it is known to every one that he is living—it may
be in luxury—on the money he has stolen. The obvious reason is
that from time immemorial simple theft has been punished with
due, when not with undue, severity, while the comparatively
recent crime of fraudulent bankruptcy has as yet been brought
very imperfectly within the grasp of penal law. Again, no man of
clear moral discernment can doubt that he who consciously and
willingly imbrutes himself by intoxication is more blameworthy
than he who sells alcoholic liquors without knowing whether
they are to be used internally or externally, moderately or
immoderately, for medicine or for luxury. Yet because the
latter makes himself liable to fine and imprisonment, while the
former—unless he belong to the unprivileged classes—has legal
protection, instead of the disgraceful punishment he deserves,
there is a popular prejudice against the vender of strong drink,
and a strange tenderness toward the intemperate consumer. Yet
 42 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

another instance. There are crimes worse than murder. There

are modes of moral corruption and ruin, whose victims it were
mercy to kill. But while the murderer, if he escape the gallows,
is an outcast and an object of universal abhorrence, no social ban
rests upon him whose crime has been the death of innocence and
purity, yet, if reached at all by law, can be compounded by the
[053] payment of money.
But though law is in many respects an imperfect moral teacher,
and its deficiencies are to be regretted, its educational power
is strongly felt for good, especially in communities where the
administration of justice is strict and impartial. It is of no
little worth that a child grows up with some fixed beliefs as
to the turpitude of certain forms of evil, especially as the
positive enactments of the penal law almost always coincide
with the wisest judgments of the best men in the community.
Moreover, law is progressive in every civilized community, and
in proportion as it approaches the standard of absolute right,
it tends to bring the moral beliefs of the people into closer
conformity with the same standard. It is, then, a partial and
narrow view of law to regard it only or chiefly as the instrument
of society for the detection and punishment, or even for the direct
prevention of crime. Its far more important function is so to train
the greater part of each rising generation, that certain forms and
modes of evil-doing shall never enter into their plans or purposes.
The civil, no less than the criminal law is a source of
knowledge as to the right. The law does not create, but
merely defines the rights appertaining to persons and property.
The laws of different nations are, indeed, widely different; but
there may be that in their respective histories which makes a
difference in the actual rights of citizens, or their civil codes
may present different stages of approach toward the right. Thus
[054] the laws as to the conveyance and inheritance of property are
in some respects unlike in France, England, and the United
States, and vary considerably in the several States of our Union;
Section III. Sources Of Knowledge. 2. Law. 43

but there generally exist historical reasons for this variation,

and it would be found that the ends of justice are best served,
and the reasonable expectations of the people best met in each
community, by its own methods of procedure. By the law of
the land, then, we may learn civil rights and obligations, which
we have not the means of ascertaining by our own independent
research.
It remains for us to speak of the factitious rights and wrongs,
supposed to be created by law. Of these there are many.
Thus one mode of transacting a sale or transfer is in itself as
good as another; and it might be plausibly maintained that, if
the business be fairly and honorably conducted, it matters not
whether the legally prescribed forms—sometimes burdensome
and costly—be complied with or omitted. The law, it may be
said, here creates an obligation for which there is no ground in
nature or the fitness of things. This we deny. It is intrinsically
fitting that all transactions which are liable to dispute or question
should be performed in ways in which they can be attested; and
this cannot be effected except by the establishment of uniform
methods. He who departs from them performs not only an illegal,
but an immoral act; and the legal provisions of the kind under
discussion have an educational value in enlarging the knowledge
of the individual as to the conditions and means of security, [055]
order, and good understanding in human society.
Similar considerations apply to the crimes created by law.
Smuggling may serve as an instance. Undoubtedly there are
smugglers who would not steal; and their apology is that
they are but exercising the rights of ownership upon their own
property. But the public must have property, else its community
is dissolved; government must be able to avail itself of that
property, else its functions are suspended. Men need to be
taught that the rights of the state are inseparable from those of
individuals, and no less sacred, and the laws that protect the
revenue are among the most efficient means of teaching this
 44 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

lesson. Their only defect is that they attach less ignominy to

frauds upon the revenue than to other modes of theft, and thus
fail to declare the whole truth, that there is no moral difference
between him who robs the public and him who robs any one of
its individual members.

Section IV.

Sources Of Knowledge. 3. Christianity.

Religion, in its relation to ethics, may be regarded both as
a source of knowledge, and as supplying motives for the
performance of duty. We are now concerned with it in the
former aspect; and it will be sufficient for our present purpose
to ascertain how much Christianity adds to our knowledge of
[056] the fitnesses that underlie all questions of right and duty. We by
no means undervalue the beneficent ministry of natural religion
in the department of ethics; but the most sceptical admit that
Christianity includes all of natural religion, while its disciples
claim that it not only teaches natural religion with a certainty,
precision, and authority which else were wanting, but imparts a
larger and profounder knowledge of God and the universe than
is within the scope of man's unaided reason.
Christianity covers the entire field of human duty, and
reveals many fitnesses, recognized when seen, but discovered by
few or none independently of the teachings and example of its
Founder; while it gives the emphasis and sanction of a Divine
revelation to many other fitnesses, easily discoverable, but liable
to be overlooked and neglected.
In defining the relations of the individual human soul
to God, Christianity opens to our view a department of duty
Section IV. Sources Of Knowledge. 3. Christianity. 45

paramount to all others in importance and interest. His

fatherly love and care, his moral government and discipline,
his retributive providence, define with unmistakable distinctness
certain corresponding modes, in part, of outward action, and in
still greater part, of action in that inward realm of thought whence
the outward life receives its direction and impulse.
The brotherhood of the whole human race, also, reveals
obligations which would exist on no other ground; and for
the clear and self-evidencing statement of this truth we are [057]
indebted solely to Christianity. The visible differences of
race, color, culture, religion, and customs, are in themselves
dissociating influences. Universal charity is impossible while
these differences occupy the foreground. Slavery was a natural
and congenial institution under Pagan auspices; nor have we
in all ancient extra-Christian literature, unless it be in Seneca
(in whom such sentiments may have had indirectly3 a Christian
origin), a single expression of a fellowship broad enough to
embrace all diversities of condition, much less, of race. But
the Christian, so far as he consents to receive the obvious
and undoubted import of Christ's mission and teachings, must
regard all men as, in nature, in the paternal care of the Divine
Providence, in religious privileges, rights, and capacities, on an
equal footing. With this view, he cannot but perceive the fitness,
and therefore the obligation, of many forms of social duty, of
enlarged beneficence, of unlimited philanthropy, which on any
restricted theory of human brotherhood would be neither fitting
nor reasonable.
The immortality of the soul, in the next place, casts a light
at once broad and penetrating upon and into every department
of duty; for it is obvious, without detailed statement, that the
fitnesses, needs, and obligations of a terrestrial being of brief
3
The theory that Seneca was acquainted with St. Paul, or had any direct
intercourse with Christians in Rome or elsewhere, has no historical evidence,
and rests on assumptions that are contradicted by known facts.
 46 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

[058] duration, and those of a being in the nursery and first stage of
an endless existence, are very wide apart,—that the latter may
find it fitting, and therefore may deem it right, to do, seek, shun,
omit, endure, resign, many things which to the former are very
properly matters of indifference. Immortality was, in a certain
sense, believed before the advent of Christ, but not with sufficient
definiteness and assurance to occupy a prominent place in any
ethical system, or to furnish the point of view from which all
things in the earthly life were to be regarded. Indeed, some of
the most virtuous of the ancients, among others Epictetus, than
whom there was no better man, expressly denied the life after
death, and, of course, could have had no conception of the aspects
of human and earthly affairs as seen in the light of eternity.
Christianity makes yet another contribution to ethical
knowledge in the person and character of its Founder,
exhibiting in him the very fitnesses it prescribes, showing us,
as it could not in mere precept, the proportions and harmonies
of the virtues, and manifesting the unapproached beauty and
majesty of the gentler virtues,4 which in pre-Christian ages
were sometimes made secondary, sometimes repudiated with
contempt and derision. We cannot overestimate the importance
of this teaching by example. The instances are very numerous,
in which the fitness of a specific mode of conduct can be tested
only by experiment; and Jesus Christ tried successfully several
experiments in morals that had not been tried before within
[059] the memory of man, and evinced, in his own person and by
the success of his religion, the superior worth and efficacy of
qualities which had not previously borne the name of virtues.
Christianity still further enlarges our ethical knowledge by
declaring the universality of moral laws. There are many cases,
in which it might seem to us not only expedient, but even right, to
set aside some principle acknowledged to be valid in the greater
4
Virtutes leniores, as Cicero calls them.
Section IV. Sources Of Knowledge. 3. Christianity. 47

number of instances, to violate justice or truth for some urgent

claim of charity, or to consent to the performance of a little evil
for the accomplishment of a great good. But in all such cases
Christianity interposes its peremptory precepts, assuring us on
authority which the Christian regards as supreme and infallible,
that there are no exceptions or qualifications to any rule of right;
that the moral law, in all its parts, is of inalienable obligation,
and that the greatest good cannot but be the ultimate result of
inflexible obedience.

That Christianity gives a fuller knowledge of the right than

can be attained independently of its teachings, is shown by the
review of all extra-Christian ethical systems. There is not one of
these which does not confessedly omit essential portions of the
right, and hardly one which does not sanction dispositions and
modes of conduct confessedly wrong and evil; while even those
who disclaim Christianity as a Divine revelation, fail to detect
like omissions and blemishes in the ethics of the New Testament.
Thus, though there is hardly a precept of Jesus Christ, the [060]
like of which cannot be found in the ethical writings of Greece,
China, India, or Persia, the faultlessness and completeness of his
teachings give them a position by themselves, and are among
the strongest internal evidences of their divinity. They are
also distinguished from the ethical systems of other teachers by
their positiveness. Others say, “Thou shalt not;” Jesus Christ
says, “Thou shalt.” They forbid and prohibit; He commands.
They prescribe abstinence from evil; He, a constant approach
to perfection. Buddhism is, in our time, often referred to as
occupying a higher plane than Christianity; but its precepts are
all negative, its virtues are negative, and its disciple is deemed
most nearly perfect, when in body, mind, and soul he has
made himself utterly quiescent and inert. Christianity, on the
other hand, enjoins the unresting activity of all the powers and
faculties in pursuit of the highest ends.
 48 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

[061]
 Chapter VI.

Rights And Obligations.

Of the things that are fitting and right, there are some which,
though they may be described in general terms, cannot be defined
and limited with entire accuracy; there are others which are so
obvious and manifest, or so easily ascertained, that, in precise
form and measure, they may be claimed by those to whom
they are due, and required of those from whom they are due.
These last are rights, and the duties which result from them are
obligations. Thus it is right that a poor man should be relieved;
and it is my duty, so far as I can, to relieve the poor. But this or
that individual poor man cannot claim that it is my duty rather
than that of my neighbor to minister to his needs, or that I am
bound to give him what I might otherwise give to his equally
needy neighbor. He has no specific right to any portion of
my money or goods; I have no specific obligation to give him
anything. But if a man has lent me money, he has a right to as
much of my money or goods as will repay him with interest; and
I am under an obligation thus to repay him. Again, it is right
that in the public highway there should be, among those who
make it their thoroughfare, mutual accommodation, courtesy, [062]
and kindness; but no one man can prescribe the precise distance
within which he shall not be approached, or the precise amount
of pressure which may be allowable to his abutters in a crowd.
Nor yet can the individual citizen occupy the street in such a way
as to obstruct those who make use of it. He has no exclusive
rights in the street; nor are others under obligation to yield to him
 50 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

any peculiar privileges. But he has a right to exclude whom he

will from his own garden, and to occupy it in whatever way may
please him best; and his fellow-citizens are under obligation to
keep their feet from his alleys and flower-beds, their hands from
his fruit, and to abstain from all acts that may annoy or injure
him in the use and enjoyment of his garden.
Rights—with the corresponding obligations—might be
divided into natural and legal. But the division is nominal
rather than real; for, in the first place, there are no natural rights,
capable of being defined, which are not in civilized countries
under the sanction and protection of law; secondly, it is an
open question whether some generally recognized rights—as,
for instance, that of property—exist independently of law; and,
thirdly, it may be maintained, on the other hand, that law is
powerless to create, competent only to declare rights.
One chief agency of law as to rights is exercised in limiting
natural rights. Considered simply in his relation to outward
nature, a man has a manifest right to whatever he can make
[063] tributary to his enjoyment or well-being. But his fellow-men
have the same right. If, then, there be a restricted supply of
what he and they may claim by equal right, the alternative
is, on the one hand, usurpation or perpetual strife, or, on the
other, an adjustment by which each shall yield a part of what he
might claim were there no fellow-claimant, and thus each shall
have his proportion of what belongs equally to all. To make
this adjustment equitably is the province of law. The problem
which it attempts to solve is, How may each individual citizen
secure the fullest amount of liberty and of material well-being,
consistent with the admitted or established rights of others? Under
republican institutions, this problem presents itself in the simplest
form, society being in principle an equal partnership, in which
no one man can claim a larger dividend than another. But where
birth or condition confers certain peculiar rights, the problem
must be so modified, that the rights conceded to the common
Chapter VI. Rights And Obligations. 51

citizens shall not interfere with these inherited or vested rights.

In either case, the rights of each member of the community are
bounded only by the conterminous rights of others. Obligations
correspond to rights. Each member of the community is under
obligation, always to refrain from encroachment on the rights of
others, and in many cases to aid in securing or defending those
rights, he on like occasions and in similar ways having his own
rights protected by others.
We will consider separately rights appertaining to the
person, to property, and to reputation. [064]
1. Rights appertaining to the person. The most essential of
these is the right to life, on which of course all else that can be
enjoyed is contingent. This right is invaded, not only by direct
violence, but by whatever may impair or endanger health. The
corresponding obligation of the individual member of society is
to refrain from all acts, employments, or recreations that may
imperil life or health, and of society collectively, to furnish a
police-force adequate to the protection of its members, to forbid
and punish all crimes of violence, to enact and maintain proper
sanitary regulations, and to suppress such nuisances as may be
not only annoying, but harmful.
But the citizen is entitled to protection, only so long as he
refrains from acts by which he puts other lives in peril. If he
assault another man with a deadly weapon, and his own life be
taken in the encounter, the slayer has violated no right, nay, so far
as moral considerations are concerned, he is not even the slayer;
for the man who wrongfully puts himself in a position in which
another life can be protected only at the peril of his own, if his
own be forfeited, has virtually committed suicide. Nor is the case
materially altered, if a man in performing an unlawful act puts
himself in a position in which he may be reasonably supposed
to intend violence. Thus, while both law and conscience would
condemn me if I killed a thief in broad daylight, in order to
protect my property,—if a burglar enter my house by night with
 52 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

[065] no intention of violence, and yet in the surprise and darkness of

the hour I have reason to suppose my life and the lives of my
family in danger from him, the law regards my slaying of such a
person as justifiable homicide; and my conscience would acquit
me in defending the right to life appertaining to my family and
myself, against one whose intention or willingness to commit
violence was to be reasonably inferred from his own unlawful
act.
Society, through the agency of law, in some cases and
directions limits the right of the individual citizen to life, and
this to the contingent benefit of each,—to the absolute benefit
of all. So long as men are less than perfect in character and
condition, there must of necessity be some sacrifice of life;
but this sacrifice may be reduced to its minimum by judicious
legislation. Now, if without such legislation the percentage
of deaths would be numerically much higher than under well-
framed laws, the lives sacrificed under these laws are simply
cases in which the right of the individual is made to yield to
the paramount rights of the community. Thus, there can be no
doubt, that contagious disease of the most malignant type could,
in many cases, be more successfully treated at the homes of the
patients than in public hospitals. But if by the removal of patients
to hospitals the number of cases may be greatly diminished, and
the contagion speedily arrested, this removal is the right of the
community,—yet not under circumstances of needless privation
and hardship, not without the best appliances of comfort, care,
[066] and skill which money can procure; for the public can be justified
in the exercise of such a right, only by the extension of the most
generous offices of humanity to those who are imperilled for the
public good.
It is only on similar grounds that the death-penalty for
murder can be justified. The life of the very worst of men
should be sacrificed only for the preservation of life; for if it be
unsafe to leave them at liberty, they may be kept under restraint
Chapter VI. Rights And Obligations. 53

and duress, without being wholly cut off from the means of
enjoyment and improvement. The primeval custom of the earlier
nations required the nearest kinsman of the murdered man to kill
the murderer with his own hand, and in so doing to shed his blood,
which was believed to have a mysterious efficacy in expiating the
crime. This form of revenge was greatly checked and restricted
by the institutions of Moses; it fell into disuse among the Jews,
with their growth in civilization; and was certainly included in
the entire repeal of the law of retaliation by Jesus Christ.5 [067]
But if with the dangerous classes of men the dread of capital
punishment is a dissuasive from crimes of violence, so that the
number of murders is less, and the lives of peaceable citizens are
safer, than were murder liable to some milder penalty, then it is
the undoubted right of the public to confiscate the murderer's right
to life, and thus to sacrifice the smaller number of comparatively
worthless lives for the security of the larger number of lives
that may be valuable to the community. Or again if, by the
profligate use of the pardoning power, the murderer sentenced to
perpetual imprisonment will probably be let loose upon society
unreformed, and with passions which may lead to the repetition
5
The duty of society to inflict capital punishment on the murderer has been
maintained on the ground of the Divine command to that effect, said to have
been given to Noah, and thus to be binding on all his posterity. (Genesis
ix. 5.) My own belief—founded on a careful examination of the Hebrew
text—is, that the human murderer is not referred to in this precept, but that
it simply requires the slaying of the beast that should cause the death of a
man,—a precaution which was liable to be neglected in a rude state of society,
and was among the special enactments of the Mosaic law. (Exodus xxi. 38.)
If, however, the common interpretation be retained, the precept requires the
shedding of the murderer's blood by the brother or nearest kinsman of the
murdered man, and is not obeyed by giving up the murderer to the gallows
and the public executioner. Moreover, the same series of precepts prescribes
an abstinence from the natural juices of animal food, which would require an
entire revolution in our shambles, kitchens, and tables. If these precepts were
Divine commandments for men of all times, they should be obeyed in full; but
there is the grossest inconsistency and absurdity in holding only a portion of
one of them sacred, and ignoring all the rest.
 54 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

of his crime, it is immeasurably more fitting that he be killed,

than that he be preserved to do farther mischief. Yet again, if
there be in the death-penalty for murder an educational force,—if
by means of it each new generation is trained in the greater
reverence for human life, and the greater detestation and horror
of the crime by which it is destroyed,—then is capital punishment
to be retained as a means of preserving an incalculably greater
number of lives than it sacrifices. On these grounds, though in
opposition to early and strong conviction, we are constrained
[068] to express the belief that, in our time and country, the capital
punishment of the murderer is needed for the security of the
public, and is justified as a life-saving measure.
In enforced military service, also, legal authority exposes
the lives of a portion of the citizens for the security of the greater
number. It is an unquestionable truth that, in its moral affinities,
war is generated by evil, is allied to numberless forms of evil, and
has a countless progeny of evil. But it is equally true that war will
recur at not unfrequent intervals, so long as the moral evils from
which it springs remain unreformed. Such are the complications
of international affairs, that the most righteous and pacific policy
may not always shield a people from hostile aggressions; while
insurrection, sedition, and civil war may result not only from
governmental oppression, but from the most salutary measures
of reform and progress. In such cases, self-defence on the
part of the nation or the government assailed, is a right and an
obligation, due even in the interest of human life, and still more,
in behalf of interests more precious than life. Moreover, even
in a war of unprovoked aggression, the aggressive nation does
not forfeit the right of self-defence by the unprincipled ambition
of its rulers, and, war once declared, its vigorous pursuit may
be the only mode of averting disaster or ruin. Thus war, though
always involving atrocious wrong on the part of its promoters
and abettors, becomes to the nations involved in it a necessity for
[069] which they are compelled to provide.
Chapter VI. Rights And Obligations. 55

This provision may, in some cases, be made by voluntary

enlistment; but in most civilized countries, it has been found
necessary to fill and recruit the army by conscription, thus
forcibly endangering the lives of a portion of the citizens, in
order to avert from the soil and the homes of the people at large
the worse calamities of invasion, devastation, and conquest. So
far as this is necessary, it is undoubtedly right, and the lives
thus sacrificed are justly due to the safety and well-being of
the whole people. But in making this admission, we would
say, without abatement or qualification, that war is essentially
inhuman, barbarous, and opposed to and by the principles and
spirit of Christianity, and that should the world ever be thoroughly
Christianized, the ages when war was possible, will be looked
back upon with the same horror with which we now regard
cannibalism.
Associated with the right to life, and essential to its full
enjoyment, is the right to liberty. This includes the right to
direct one's own employments and recreations, to divide and use
his time as may seem to him good, to go where he pleases, to
bestow his vote or his influence in public affairs as he thinks best,
and to express his own opinions orally, in writing, or through
the press, without hindrance or molestation. These several rights
belong equally to all; but as they cannot be exercised in full
without mutual interference and annoyance, the common sense
of mankind, uttering itself through law, permits each individual
to enjoy them only so far as he can consistently with the freedom, [070]
comfort, and well-being of his fellow-citizens.
Slavery is so nearly extirpated from Christendom, that it is
superfluous to enter into the controversy, which a few years
ago no treatise on Moral Philosophy could have evaded. It was
defended only by patent sophistry, and its advocates argued from
the fact to the right, inventing the latter to sustain the former.
Personal liberty is legally and rightfully restricted in the
case of minors, on the ground of their immature judgment and
 56 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

discretion, of their natural state of dependence on parents, and

of their usual abode under the parental roof. The age of mature
discretion varies very widely, not only in different races, but
among different individuals of the same race, as does also the
period of emancipation from the controlling influence of parents,
and of an independent and self-sustaining condition in life. But,
as it is impossible for government to institute special inquiries in
the case of each individual, and as, were this possible, there would
be indefinite room for favoritism and invidious distinctions, there
is an intrinsic fitness in fixing an average age at which parental or
quasi-parental tutelage shall cease, and after which the man shall
have full and sole responsibility for his own acts. It is perfectly
obvious that the liberty of the insane and feeble-minded ought to
be restricted so far as is necessary for their own safety and for
[071] that of others. There is, also, in most communities, a provision
by which notorious spendthrifts may be put under guardianship,
and thus restrained in what might be claimed as their rightful
disposal of their own property. This may be justified on the
ground that, by persistent wastefulness, they may throw upon the
public the charge of their own support and that of their families.
Imprisonment is, on the part of society, a measure, not
of revenge, but of self-defence. The design of this mode of
punishment is, first, to prevent the speedy repetition of the crime
on the part of the person punished; secondly, so to work, either
upon his moral nature by confinement, labor, and instruction, or
at the worst, on his fears, by the dread of repeated and longer
restraint, that he may abstain from crime in future; and lastly,
to deter those who might otherwise be tempted to crime from
exposing themselves to its penal consequences. As regards the
prisoner, he has justly forfeited the right to liberty by employing
it in aggression on the rights of others.
As regards acts not in themselves wrong, the freedom of the
individual is rightfully restrained, when it would interfere with
the health, comfort, or lawful pursuits of his neighbors. Thus
Chapter VI. Rights And Obligations. 57

no man has the right, either legal or moral, to establish, in an

inhabited vicinage, a trade or manufacture which confessedly
poisons the air or the water in his neighborhood; nor has one
a moral right (even if there are technical difficulties in the way
of declaring his calling a nuisance), to annoy his neighbors by
an avocation grossly offensive or intolerably noisy. It is on [072]
this ground alone that legislation with reference to the Lord's
day can be justified. Christians have no right to impose upon
Jews, Pagans, or infidels, entire cessation of labor, business, or
recreation on Sunday, and the attempt at coercive measures of
this kind can only react to the damage of the cause in which they
are instituted. But if the majority of the people believe it their
duty to observe the first day of the week as a day of rest and
devotion, they have a right to be protected in its observance by
the suppression of such kinds, degrees, and displays of labor and
recreation as would essentially interfere with their employment
of the day for its sacred uses.
2. The right to property is an inevitable corollary from the
right to liberty; for this implies freedom to labor at one's will, and
to what purpose can a man labor, unless he can make the fruit of
his labor his own? All property, except land, has been created
by labor. Except where slavery is legalized, it is admitted that
the laborer owns the value he creates. If it be an article made or
produced wholly by himself, it is his to keep, to use, to give, or
to sell. If his labor be bestowed on materials not his own, or if he
be one of a body of workmen, he is entitled to a fair equivalent
for the labor he contributes.
Property in land, no doubt, originated in labor. A man was
deemed the proprietor of so much ground as he tilled. In a
sparse population there could have been no danger of mutual
interference; and in every country, governments must have been [073]
instituted before there was a sufficiently close occupation of the
soil to occasion collisions and conflicts among the occupants. The
governments of the early ages, in general, confirmed the titles
 58 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

founded in productive occupancy, and treated the unoccupied

land as the property of the state, either to be held in common, to
be ceded to individual owners in reward of loyalty or services,
or to be sold on the public account.
It is manifest that the security of property is essential to
civilization and progress. Men would labor only for the needs
of the day, if they could not retain and enjoy the fruits of their
labor; nor would they be at pains to invent or actualize industrial
improvements of any kind, if they had no permanent interest in
the results of such improvements. Then, too, if there were no
protection for property, there could be no accumulation of capital,
and without capital there could be no enterprise, no combined
industries, no expenditure in faith of a remote, yet certain profit.
Nor yet can the ends of a progressive civilization be answered by
a community of goods and gains. Wherever this experiment has
been tried, it has been attended by a decline of industrial energy
and capacity; and where there has not been absolute failure,
there have been apathy, stupidity, and a decreasing standard of
intelligence. In fine, there is in man's bodily and mental powers
a certain vis inertiæ, which can be efficiently aroused only by the
stimulus of personal interest in the results of industry, ingenuity,
[074] and prudence.
The right of property implies the right of the owner, while
he lives, to hold, enjoy, or dispose of his possessions in such
way as may please him. But his ownership necessarily ceases
at death; and what was his becomes rightfully the property of
the public. Yet in all civilized countries, it has been deemed
fitting that the owner should have the liberty—with certain
restrictions—of dictating the disposal of his property after his
death, and also that, unless alienated by his will (and in some
countries his will notwithstanding), his property should pass to
his family or his nearest kindred. It is believed that it would
discourage industry and enfeeble enterprise were their earnings
to be treated as public property on the death of the owner; and
Chapter VI. Rights And Obligations. 59

that, on the other hand, men are most surely trained to and
preserved in habits of diligence and thrift, either by the power
of directing the disposal of their property after death, or by the
certainty that they can thereby benefit those whom they hold
in the dearest regard. Laws with reference to wills and to the
succession of estates are not, then, limitations of the rights of
private property, but a directory as to what is deemed the best
mode of disposing of such property as from time to time accrues
to the public.
The law limits the right of property by appropriating to
public uses such portions of it as are needed for the maintenance,
convenience, and well-being of the body politic. This is done,
in the first place, by taxation, which—in order to be just—must
be equitable in its mode of assessment, and not excessive in [075]
amount. As to the modes of assessment, it is obvious that a
system which lightens the burden upon the rich, and thus presses
the more heavily on the poor (as would be the case were a
revenue raised on the necessaries of life, while luxuries were
left free), cannot be justified. On the other hand, it may be
maintained that the rate of taxation might fairly increase with the
amount of property; for a very large proportion of the machinery
of government is designed for the protection of property, and
the more property an individual has, the less capable is he of
protecting his various interests by his own personal care, and
the more is he in need of well-devised and faithfully executed
laws. Taxation excessive in amount is simply legalized theft.
Sinecures, supernumerary offices, needless and costly formalities
in the transaction of public business, journeys and festivities at
the public charge, buildings designed for ostentation rather than
for use, have been so long tolerated in the municipal, state, and
national administrations, that they may seem inseparable from
our system of government; but they imply gross dishonesty on
the part of large numbers of our public servants, and guilty
complicity in it on the part of many more. Under a system of
 60 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

direct taxation, assessments can be more equitably made, and

their expenditure will be more carefully watched, than in the case
of indirect taxation; while the latter method is more likely to find
[076] favor with those who hold or seek public office, as encouraging
a larger freedom of expenditure, and supporting a larger number
of needless functionaries at the public cost.
The law, also, authorizes the appropriation of specific
portions of property to public uses, as for streets, roads,
aqueducts, and public grounds, and even in aid of private
enterprises in which the community has a beneficial interest,
as of canals, bridges, and railways. This is necessary, and
therefore right. It is obvious that, but for this, the most essential
facilities and improvements might be prevented, or burdened with
unreasonable costs, by the obstinacy or cupidity of individuals.
The conditions under which such use of private property is
justified are, that the improvement proposed be for the general
good, that a fair compensation be given for the property taken,
and that as to both these points, in case of a difference of opinion,
the ultimate appeal shall be to an impartial tribunal or arbitration.
3. The right to reputation. Every man has a right to the
reputation he deserves, and is under obligation to respect that
right in every other man. This obligation is violated, not only
by the fabrication of slander, but equally by its repetition, unless
the person who repeats it knows it to be true, and also by silence
and seeming acquiescence in an injurious report, if one knows or
believes it to be false. But has a man a right to a better reputation
[077] than he deserves? Certainly not, in a moral point of view; and if
men could be generally known to be what they are, few would
fail to become what they would wish to seem. Yet the law admits
the truth of a slanderous charge in justification of the slanderer,
only when it can be shown that the knowledge of the truth is for
the public benefit. There are good reasons for this attitude of
the law, without reference to any supposed rights of the justly
accused party. There is, in many instances, room for a reasonable
Chapter VI. Rights And Obligations. 61

doubt as to evil reports that seem authentic, and in many more

instances there may be extenuating circumstances which form a
part of the case, though almost never, of the report. Then, too,
the family and kindred of the person defamed may incur, through
true, yet useless reports to his discredit, shame, annoyance, and
damage, which they do not merit. Evil reports, also, even if
true, disturb the peace of the community, and often provoke
violent retaliation. The wanton circulation of them, therefore, if
a luxury to him who gives them currency, is a luxury indulged at
the expense of the public, and he ought to be held liable for all
that it may cost. Finally, and above all, the slanderer becomes
a nuisance to the community, not only by his reports of real
or imagined wrong and evil, but by the degradation of his own
character, which can hardly remain above the level of his social
intercourse.
By the law, defamation and libel are, very justly, liable both
to criminal prosecution, as offences against the public, and [078]
to action for damages by civil process, on the obvious ground
that the injury of a man's character tends to impair his success in
business, his pecuniary credit, and his comfortable enjoyment of
his property.

[079]
 Chapter VII.

Motive, Passion, And Habit.

The appetites, desires, and affections are, as has been said, the
proximate motives of action. The perception of expediency and
the sense of right act, not independently of these motives, but
upon them and through them, checking some, stimulating others.
Thus they, both, restrain the appetites, the former, so far as
prudence requires; the latter, in subserviency to the more noble
elements of character. The former directs the desires toward
worthy, but earthly objects; the latter works most efficiently
through the benevolent affections, as exercised toward God and
man.
Exterior motives are of a secondary order, acting not directly
upon the will, but influencing it indirectly, through the springs of
action, or through the principles which direct and govern them.
The action of exterior motives takes place in three different
ways. 1. When they are in harmony with any predominant
appetite, desire, or affection, they at once intensify it, and
prompt acts by which it may be gratified. Thus, for instance, a
sumptuously spread table gives the epicure a keener appetite, and
[080] invites him to its free indulgence. The opportunity of a potentially
lucrative, though hazardous investment, excites the cupidity of
the man who prizes money above all things else, and tempts him
to incur the doubtful risk. The presence of the object of love or
hatred adds strength to the affection, and induces expressions or
acts of kindness or malevolence. 2. An exterior motive opposed
to the predominant spring of action often starts that spring into
Chapter VII. Motive, Passion, And Habit. 63

vigorous and decisive activity, and makes it thenceforth stronger

and more imperative. It is thus that remonstrances, obstacles, and
interposing difficulties not infrequently render sensual passion
more rabid; while temptation, by the acts of resistance which it
elicits, nourishes the virtue it assails. 3. An exterior motive may
have a sufficient stress and cogency to call forth into energetic
action some appetite, desire, or affection previously dormant or
feeble, thus to repress the activity of those which before held
sway, and so to produce a fundamental change in the character. In
this way the sudden presentation of vice, in attractive forms, may
give paramount sway to passions which had previously shown
no signs of mastery; and, in like manner, a signal experience of
peril, calamity, deliverance, or unexpected joy may call forth the
religious affections, and invest them with enduring supremacy
over a soul previously surrendered to appetite, inferior desires,
or meaner loves.
An undue influence in the formation or change of character
is often ascribed to exterior motives. They are oftener
the consequence than the cause of character. Men, in [081]
general, exercise more power over their surroundings, than
their surroundings over them. A very large proportion of the
circumstances which seem to have a decisive influence upon us,
are of our own choice, and we might—had we so willed—have
chosen their opposites. A virtuous person seldom finds it
necessary to breathe a vicious atmosphere. A willingness to be
tempted is commonly the antecedent condition to one's being led
into temptation. Sympathy, example, and social influences are
second in their power, whether for good or for evil, to no other
class of exterior motives; and there are few who cannot choose
their own society, and who do not choose it in accordance with
their elective affinities. It is true, indeed, that the choice of
companions of doubtful virtue is often the first outward sign of
vicious proclivities; while a tenacious adherence to the society of
the most worthy not infrequently precedes any very conspicuous
 64 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

development of personal excellence; but in either case the choice

of friends indicates the predominant springs of action, and the
direction in which the character has begun to grow. So far then
is man from being under the irresistible control of motives from
without, that these motives are in great part the results and the
tokens of his own voluntary agency.
Christianity justly claims preëminence, not only as a source
of knowledge as to the right, but equally as presenting the
most influential and persistent motives to right conduct. These
[082] motives we have in its endearing and winning manifestation
of the Divine fatherhood by Jesus Christ; in his own sacrifice,
death, and undying love for man; in the assurance of forgiveness
for past wrongs and omissions, without which there could be
little courage for future well-doing; in the promise of Divine aid
in every right purpose and worthy endeavor; in the certainty of
a righteous retribution in the life to come; and in institutions
and observances designed and adapted to perpetuate the memory
of the salient facts, and to renew at frequent intervals the
recognition of the essential truths, which give the religion its
name and character. The desires and affections, stimulated and
directed by these motives, are incapable of being perverted to
evil, while desires with lower aims and affections for inferior
objects are always liable to be thus perverted. These religious
motives, too, resting on the Infinite and the Eternal, are of
inexhaustible power; if felt at all, they must of necessity be felt
more strongly than all other motives; and they cannot fail to be
adequate to any stress of need, temptation, or trial.
*****
Passion implies a passive state,—a condition in which the
will yields without resistance to some dominant appetite, desire,
or affection, under whose imperious reign reason is silenced,
considerations of expediency and of right suppressed, and
exterior counteracting motives neutralized. It resembles insanity
[083] in the degree in which the actions induced by it are the results
Chapter VII. Motive, Passion, And Habit. 65

of unreasoning impulse, and in the unreal and distorted views

which it presents of persons, objects, and events. It differs from
insanity, mainly in its being a self-induced madness, for which,
as for drunkenness, the sufferer is morally accountable, and in
yielding to which, as in drunkenness, he, by suffering his will
to pass beyond the control of reason, makes himself responsible,
both legally and morally, for whatever crimes or wrongs he
commits in this state of mental alienation.
There is no appetite, desire, or affection which may not
become a passion, and there is no passion which does not impair
the sense of right, and interfere with the discharge of duty. The
appetites, the lower desires, the malevolent affections, and, not
infrequently, love, when they become passions, have their issues
in vice and crime. The nobler desires and affections when made
passions, may not lead to positive evil, but can hardly fail to
derange the fitting order of life, and to result in the dereliction
of some of its essential duties. Thus, the passion for knowledge
may render one indifferent to his social and religious obligations.
Philanthropy, when a passion, overlooks nearer for more remote
claims of duty, and is very prone to omit self-discipline and
self-culture in its zeal for world-embracing charities. Even the
religious affections, when they assume the character of passions,
either, on the one hand, are kindled into wild fanaticism, or,
on the other, lapse into a self-absorbed quietism, which forgets
outside duties in the luxury of devout contemplation; and though [084]
either of these is to be immeasurably preferred to indifference,
they both are as immeasurably inferior to that piety, equally
fervent and rational, which neglects neither man for God, nor
God for man, and which remains mindful of all human and
earthly relations, fitnesses, and duties, while at the same time it
retains its hold of faith, hope, and habitual communion, on the
higher life.
*****
Habit also involves the suspension of reason and motive in the
 66 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

performance of individual acts; but it differs from passion in that

its acts were in the beginning prompted by reason and motive.
Indeed, it may be plausibly maintained that in each habitual act
there is a virtual remembrance—a recollection too transient to be
itself remembered—of the reasoning or motive which induced the
first act of the series. In some cases the habitual act is performed,
as it is said, unconsciously, certainly with a consciousness so
evanescent as to leave no trace of itself. In other cases the act is
performed consciously, but as by a felt necessity, in consequence
of an uneasy sensation—analogous to hunger and thirst—which
can be allayed in this way only. Under this last head we may class,
in the first place, habits of criminal indulgence, including the
indulgence of morbid and depraved appetite; secondly, many of
those morally indifferent habits, which constitute a large portion
of a regular and systematic life; and thirdly, habits of virtuous
[085] conduct, of industry, of punctuality, of charity.
Habit bears a most momentous part in the formation and
growth of character, whether for evil or for good. It is in the
easy and rapid formation of habit that lies the imminent peril
of single acts of vicious indulgence. The first act is performed
with the determination that it shall be the last of its kind. But
of all examples one's own is that which he is most prone to
follow, and of all bad examples one's own is the most dangerous.
The precedent once established, there is the strongest temptation
to repeat it, still with a conscious power of self-control, and
with the resolution to limit the degree and to arrest the course
of indulgence, so as to evade the ultimate disgrace and ruin to
which it tends. But before the pre-determined limit is reached,
the indulgence has become a habit; its suspension is painful; its
continuance or renewal seems essential to comfortable existence;
and even in those ultimate stages when its very pleasure has
lapsed into satiety, and then into wretchedness, its discontinuance
threatens still greater wretchedness, because the craving is even
more intense when the enjoyment has ceased.
Chapter VII. Motive, Passion, And Habit. 67

The beneficent agency of habit no less deserves emphatic

notice. Its office in practical morality is analogous to that of
labor-saving inventions in the various departments of industry.
A machine by which ten men can do the work that has been done
by thirty, disengages the twenty for new modes of productive
labor, and thus augments the products of industry and the comfort
of the community. A good habit is a labor-saving instrument. [086]
The cultivating of any specific virtue to such a degree that
it shall become an inseparable and enduring element of the
character demands, at the outset, vigilance, self-discipline, and,
not infrequently, strenuous effort. But when the exercise of
that virtue has become habitual, and therefore natural, easy,
and essential to one's conscious well-being, it ceases to task
the energies; it no longer requires constant watchfulness; its
occasions are met spontaneously by the appropriate dispositions
and acts. The powers which have been employed in its culture
are thus set free for the acquisition of yet other virtues, and
the formation of other good habits. Herein lies the secret of
progressive goodness, of an ever nearer approach to a perfect
standard of character. The primal virtues are first made habits
of the unceasing consciousness and of the daily life, and the
moral power no longer needed for these is then employed in
the cultivation of the finer traits of superior excellence,—the
shaping of the delicate lines, roundings, and proportions, which
constitute "the beauty of holiness," the symmetry and grace of
character that win not only abounding respect and confidence,
but universal admiration and love.
What has been said of habit, is true not only as to outward
acts, but equally as to wonted directions and currents of
thought, study, reflection, and reverie. It is mainly through
successive stages of habit that the mind grows in its power of
application, research, and invention. It is thus that the spirit of
devotion is trained to ever clearer realization of sacred truth [087]
and a more fervent love and piety. It is thus that minds of
 68 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

good native capacity lose their apprehensive faculties and their

working power; and thus, also, that moral corruption often, no
doubt, takes place before the evil desires cherished within find
the opportunity of actualizing themselves in a depraved life.

[088]
 Chapter VIII.

Virtues, And The Virtues.

The term virtue is employed in various senses, which, though
they cover a wide range, are yet very closely allied to one another,
and to the initial conception in which they all have birth. Its
primitive signification, as its structure6 indicates, is manliness.
Now what preëminently distinguishes, not so much the human
race from the lower animals, as the full-grown and strong man
from the feebler members of his own race, is the power of resolute,
strenuous, persevering conflict and resistance. It is the part of a
man worthy of the name to maintain his own position, to hold
his ground against all invaders, to show a firm front against all
hostile force, and to prefer death to conquest. All this is implied in
the Greek and Roman idea of virtue, and is included in the Latin
virtus, when it is used with reference to military transactions,
so that its earliest meaning was, simply, military prowess. But [089]
with the growth of ethical philosophy, and especially with the
cultivation by the Stoics of the sterner and hardier traits of moral
excellence, men learned that there was open to them a more
perilous battle-ground, a severer conflict, and a more glorious
victory, than in mere physical warfare,—that there was a higher
6
Latin, virtus, from vir, which denotes not, like homo, simply a human being,
but a man endowed with all appropriate manly attributes, and comes from the
same root with vis, strength. The Greek synonyms of virtus, 絀u, is derived
from Á·Â, the god of war, who in the heroic days of Greece was the ideal
man, the standard of human excellence, and whose name some lexicographers
regard—as it seems to me, somewhat fancifully—as allied through its root to
½uÁ, which bears about the same relation to ½¸ÁÉÀ¿Â that vir bears to homo.
 70 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

type of manliness in self-conquest, in the resistance and subdual

of appetite and passion, in the maintenance of integrity and purity
under intense temptation and amidst vicious surroundings, than
in the proudest achievements of military valour. Virtue thus came
to mean, not moral goodness in itself considered, but goodness
militant and triumphant.7
But words which have a complex signification always tend
to slough off a part of their meaning; and, especially, words
that denote a state or property, together with its mode of growth or
of manifestation, are prone to drop the latter, even though it may
[090] have given them root and form. Thus the term virtue is often
used to denote the qualities that constitute human excellence,
without direct reference to the conflict with evil, whence it gets
its name, and in which those qualities have their surest growth
and most conspicuous manifestation. There is still, however,
a tacit reference to temptation and conflict in our use of the
term. Though we employ it to denote goodness that has stood
no very severe test, we use it only where such a test may be
regarded as possible. Though we call a man virtuous who has
been shielded from all corrupt examples and influences, and has
had no inducements to be otherwise than good, we do not apply
the epithet to the little child who cannot by any possibility have
been exposed to temptation. Nor yet would we apply it to the
perfect purity and holiness of the Supreme Being, who “cannot
7
In the languages which have inherited or adopted the Latin virtus, it retains
its original signification, with one striking exception, which yet is perhaps an
exception in appearance rather than in reality. In the Italian, virtu is employed
to signify taste, and virtuoso, which may denote a virtuous man, oftener means
a collector of objects of taste. We have here an historical landmark. There was
a period when, under civil despotism, the old Roman manhood had entirely
died out on its native soil, while ecclesiastical corruption rendered the nobler
idea of Christian manhood effete; and then the highest type of manhood that
remained was the culture of those refined sensibilities, those ornamental arts,
and that keen sense of the beautiful, in which Italy as far surpassed other
lands, as it was for centuries inferior to them in physical bravery and in moral
rectitude.
Chapter VIII. Virtues, And The Virtues. 71

be tempted with evil.”

Virtue then, in its more usual sense at the present time, denotes
conduct in accordance with the right, or with the fitness of
things, on the part of one who has the power to do otherwise.
But in this sense there are few, if any, perfectly virtuous men.
There are, perhaps, none who are equally sensitive to all that the
right requires, and it is often the deficiencies of a character that
give it its reputation for distinguished excellence in some one
form of virtue, the vigilance, self-discipline, and effort which
might have sustained the character in a well-balanced mediocrity
being so concentrated upon some single department of duty as
to excite high admiration and extended praise. There may be [091]
a deficient sensitiveness to some classes of obligations, while
yet there is no willing or conscious violation of the right, and
in such cases the character must be regarded as virtuous. But if
in any one department of duty a person is consciously false to
his sense of right, even though in all other respects he conforms
to the right, he cannot be deemed virtuous, nor can there be
any good ground for assurance that he may not, with sufficient
inducement, violate the very obligations which he now holds in
the most faithful regard. This is what is meant by that saying
of St. James, “Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet
offend in one point, is guilty of all,”—not that he who commits
a single offence through inadvertency or sudden temptation, is
thus guilty; but he who willingly and deliberately violates the
right as to matters in which he is the most strongly tempted to
wrong and evil, shows an indifference to the right which will lead
him to observe it only so long and so far as he finds it convenient
and easy so to do.
Here we are naturally led to inquire whether there is any
essential connection between virtue and piety,—between the
faithful discharge of the common duties of life and loving
loyalty toward the Supreme Being. On this subject extreme
opinions have been held, sceptics and unbelievers, on the one
 72 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

side, Christians with a leaven of antinomianism on the other,

maintaining the entire independence of virtue on piety; while
Christians of the opposite tendency have represented them, in
[092] spite of ample evidence to the contrary, as inseparable. We shall
find, on examination, that they are separable and independent,
yet auxiliary each to the other. Virtue is conduct in accordance
with the right, and we have seen that right and wrong, as moral
distinctions, depend not on the Divine nature, will or law,8 but on
the inherent, necessary conditions of being. The atheist cannot
escape or disown them. Whatever exists—no matter how it came
into being—must needs have its due place, affinities, adaptations,
and uses. An intelligent dweller among the things that are, cannot
but know something of their fitnesses and harmonies, and so far
as he acts upon them cannot but feel the obligation to recognize
their fitnesses, and thus to create or restore their harmonies. Even
to the atheist, vice is a violation of fitnesses which he knows
or may know. It is opposed to his conscientious judgment. He
has with regard to it an inevitable sense of wrong. We can,
therefore, conceive of an atheist's being rigidly virtuous, and that
on principle. Though among the ancient Stoics there were some
eminently devout men, there were others, men of impregnable
[093] virtue, whose theology was too vague and meagre to furnish
either ground or nourishment for piety. While, therefore, in
the mutual and reciprocal fitnesses that pervade the universe
we find demonstrative evidence of the being, unity, and moral

8
It is obviously on this ground alone that we can affirm moral attributes of the
Supreme Being. When we say that he is perfectly just, pure, holy, beneficent,
we recognize a standard of judgment logically independent of his nature.
We mean that the fitness which the human conscience recognizes as its only
standard of right, is the law which he has elected for his own administration of
the universe. Could we conceive of omnipotence not recognizing this law, the
decrees and acts of such a being would not be necessarily right. Omnipotence
cannot make that which is fitting wrong, or that which is unfitting right. God's
decrees and acts are not right because they are his, but his because they are
right.
Chapter VIII. Virtues, And The Virtues. 73

perfectness of the Creator, we are constrained to acknowledge

the possibility of these fitnesses being recognized in the conduct
of life by those who do not follow them out to the great truths of
theology to which they point and lead.
But, on the other hand, where there is a clear knowledge of,
or an undoubting belief in the being and providence of God, and
especially for persons who receive Christianity as a revelation of
the truth, though, as an affection, piety is independent of virtue,
the duties of piety are an essential part of virtue. If God is,
we stand in definable relations to Him, and those relations are
made definite through Christianity. Those relations have their
fitnesses, and we see not how he can be a thoroughly virtuous
man, who, discerning these fitnesses with the understanding, fails
to recognize them in conduct. Conscience can take cognizance
only of the fitnesses which the individual man knows or believes;
but it does take cognizance of all the fitnesses which he knows
or believes. Virtue may coexist with a very low standard of
emotional piety; but it cannot coexist, in one who believes the
truths of religion, with blasphemy, irreverence, or the conscious
violation or neglect of religious obligations. He who is willingly
false to his relations with the Supreme Being, needs only adequate
temptation to make him false to his human relations, and to the [094]
fitnesses of his daily life. Moreover, while, as we have said,
virtue may exist where there is but little emotional piety, virtue
can hardly fail to cherish piety. Loyalty of conduct deepens
loyalty of spirit; obedience nourishes love; he who faithfully
does the will of God can hardly fail to become worshipful and
devout; and while men are more frequently led by emotional
piety to virtue, there can be no doubt that with many the process
is reversed, and virtue leads to emotional piety. Then again, we
have seen that religion supplies the most efficient of all motives
to a virtuous life,—motives adequate to a stress of temptation
and trial which suffices to overpower and neutralize all inferior
motives.
 74 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

*****
Virtue is one and indivisible in its principle and essence,
yet in its external manifestations presenting widely different
aspects, and eliciting a corresponding diversity in specific traits
of character. Thus, though intrinsic fitness be equally the rule
of conduct at a pleasure-party and by a pauper's bed-side, the
conduct of the virtuous man will be widely different on these two
occasions; and not only so, but with the same purpose of fidelity
to what is fitting and right, his dispositions, aims, and endeavors
on these two occasions will have little or nothing in common
except the one pervading purpose. Hence virtue may under
different forms assume various names, and may thus be broken
[095] up into separate virtues. These are many or few, according
as we distribute in smaller or larger groups the occasions for
virtuous conduct, or analyze with greater or less minuteness the
sentiments and dispositions from which it proceeds.
The cardinal9 virtues are the hinge-virtues, those on which
the character hinges or turns, those, the possession of all which,
would constitute a virtuous character, while the absence of any
one of them would justly forfeit for a man the epithet virtuous.
There are other less salient and essential qualities—minor
virtues—the possession of which adds to the symmetry, beauty,
and efficiency of the character, but which one may lack, and yet
none the less deserve to be regarded as a virtuous man. Thus,
justice is a cardinal virtue; gentleness, one of the lesser rank.
We propose to adopt as a division of the virtues one which
recognizes four cardinal virtues, corresponding to four classes
under which may be comprehended all the fitnesses of man's
condition in this world, and the duties proceeding from them
respectively.10 There are fitnesses and duties appertaining, first,
to one's own being, nature, capacities, and needs; secondly, to
9
From cardo, a hinge.
10
It is virtually Cicero's division in the De Officiis.
Chapter VIII. Virtues, And The Virtues. 75

his relations to his fellow-beings; thirdly, to his disposition and

conduct with reference to external objects and events beyond his
control; and fourthly, to his arrangement, disposal, and use of
objects under his control. It is difficult to find names which in
their common use comprehend severally all the contents of each
of these four divisions; but yet they are all comprised within the [096]
broadest significance of the terms Prudence, Justice, Fortitude,
and Order. Thus employed, Prudence, or providence, includes
all the duties of self-government and self-culture; Justice denotes
all that is due to God and man, embracing piety and benevolence;
Fortitude, which is but a synonyme for strength, is an appropriate
general name for every mode, whether of defiance, resistance, or
endurance, in which man shows himself superior to his inevitable
surroundings; and Order is extended to all subjects in which the
question of duty is a question of time, place, or measure.
We can conceive of no right feeling, purpose, or action,
which does not come under one of these heads. It is obvious,
too, that these are all cardinal virtues, not one of which could
be wanting or grossly deficient in a virtuous man. For, in the
first place, he who omits were it only the duties of self-culture,
and thus leaves himself ignorant of what he ought to know, takes
upon himself the full burden, blame, and penalty of whatever
wrong he may commit in consequence of needless ignorance;
secondly, he who is willingly unfaithful in any of his relations to
God or man, cannot by any possibility be worthy of approbation;
nor, thirdly, can he be so, who is the slave, not the master, of
his surroundings; while, fourthly, fitnesses of time, place, and
measure are so essential to right-doing that the violation of them
renders what else were right, wrong.
Moreover, each of these four virtues, if genuine and highly [097]
developed, implies the presence of all the others. 1. There
is a world of wisdom in the question asked in the Hebrew
Scriptures: “Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge?”
There is in all wrong-doing either ignorance, or temporary
 76 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

hallucination or blindness, and imprudence is but ignorance

or delusion carried into action. Did we see clearly the certain
bearings and consequences of actions, we should need no stronger
dissuasive from all evil, no more cogent motive to every form
of virtue. 2. There is no conceivable duty which may not be
brought under the head of justice, either to God or to man; for
our duties to ourselves are due to God who has ordained them,
and to man whom we are the more able to benefit, the more
diligent we are in self-government and self-improvement. 3. Our
wrong-doing of every kind comes from our yielding to outward
things instead of rising above them; and he who truly lives above
the world, can hardly fail to do all that is right and good in it. 4.
Perfect order—the doing of everything in the right time, place,
and measure—would imply the presence of all the virtues, and
would include all their work.
With this explanation we shall use the terms Prudence,
Justice, Fortitude, and Order in the titles of the four following
chapters, at the same time claiming the liberty of employing
these words, as we shall find it convenient, in the more restricted
sense which they commonly bear.

[098]
 Chapter IX.

Prudence; Or Duties To One's Self.

Can there be duties to one's self, which are of absolute

obligation? Duties are dues, and they imply two parties,—one
who owes them, and one to whom they are due,—the debtor and
the creditor. But the creditor may, at his will, cancel the debt,
and release the debtor. In selfward duties, then, why may I not,
as creditor, release myself as debtor? Why may I not—so long
as I violate no obligation to others—be, at my own pleasure, idle
or industrious, self-indulgent or abstinent, frivolous or serious?
Why, if life seem burdensome to me, may I not relieve myself
of the trouble of living? The answer is, that to every object in
the universe with which I am brought into relation I owe its fit
use, and that no being in the universe, not even the Omnipotent,
can absolve me from this obligation. Now my several powers
and faculties, with reference to my will, are objects on which
my volitions take effect, and I am bound to will their fit uses,
and to abstain from thwarting or violating those uses, on the
same ground on which I am bound to observe and reverence
the fitnesses of objects that form no part of my personality.
Moreover, this earthly life is, with reference to my will, an [099]
object on which my volitions may take effect; I learn—if not by
unaided reason, from the Christian revelation—that my life has
its fit uses, both in this world and in preparation for a higher state
of being, and that these uses are often best served by the most
painful events and experiences; and I thus find myself bound to
 78 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

take the utmost care of my life, even when it seems the least
worth caring for.
The duties due to one's self are self-preservation, the
attainment of knowledge, self-control, and moral self-culture.

Section I.

Self-Preservation.
The uses of life, both to ourselves, and to others through us,
suffice, as we have said, to render its preservation a duty,
enjoined upon us by the law of fitness. This duty is violated
not only by suicide—against which it is useless to reason, for its
victims in modern Christendom are seldom of sound mind—but
equally by needless and wanton exposure to peril. Such exposure
is frequently incurred in reckless feats of strength or daring,
sometimes consummated in immediate death, and still oftener in
slower self-destruction by disease. There are, no doubt, occasions
when self-preservation must yield to a higher duty, and humanity
has made no important stage of progress without the free sacrifice
[100] of many noble lives; but because it may be a duty to give life
in the cause of truth or liberty, it by no means follows that one
has a right to throw it away for the gratification of vanity, for a
paltry wager, or to win the fame of an accomplished athlete.
The duty of self-preservation includes, of course, a reasonable
care for health, without which the uses of life are essentially
restricted and impaired. Here a just mean must be sought and
adhered to. There is, on the one hand, an excessive care of the
body, which, if it does not enfeeble the mind, distracts it from
its true work, and makes the spiritual nature a mere slave of the
Section I. Self-Preservation. 79

material organism. This solicitude is sometimes so excessive as

to defeat its own purpose, by creating imaginary diseases, and
then making them real; and the number is by no means small of
those who have become chronic invalids solely by the pains they
have taken not to be so. On the other hand, there is a carelessness
as to dress and diet, to which the strongest constitution must at
length yield; and the intense consciousness of strength and vigor,
which tempts one to deem himself invulnerable, not infrequently
is the cause of life-long infirmity and disability. Of the cases of
prolonged and enfeebling disease, probably more are the result
of avoidable than of unavoidable causes, and if we add to these
the numerous instances in which the failure of health is to be
ascribed to hereditary causes which might have been avoided, or
to defective sanitary arrangements that may be laid to the charge
of the public, we have an enormous amount of serviceable life [101]
needlessly wasted for all purposes of active usefulness; while
for the precious examples of patience, resignation, and cheerful
endurance, the infirmities and sufferings incident to the most
favorable sanitary conditions might have been amply sufficient.
There are, no doubt, such wide diversities of constitution and
temperament that no specific rules of self-preservation can
be laid down; and as regards diet, sleep, and exercise, habit
may render the most unlike methods and times equally safe and
beneficial. But wholesome food in moderate quantity, sleep long
enough for rest and refreshment, exercise sufficient to neutralize
the torpifying influence of sedentary pursuits, and these, though
not with slavish uniformity, yet with a good degree of regularity,
may be regarded as essential to a sound working condition of
body and mind. The same may be said of the unstinted use of
water, which has happily become a necessity of high civilization,
of pure air, the worth of which as a sanitary agent is practically
ignored by the major part of our community, and of the direct
light of heaven, the exclusion of which from dwellings from
motives of economy, while it may spare carpets and curtains,
 80 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

wilts and depresses their owners. These topics are inserted in

a treatise on ethics, because whatever has a bearing on health,
and thus on the capacity for usefulness selfward and manward
which constitutes the whole value of this earthly life, is of grave
[102] moral significance. If the preservation of life is a duty, then
all hygienic precautions and measures are duties, and as such
they should be treated by the individual moral agent, by parents,
guardians, and teachers, and by the public at large.
Self-preservation is endangered by poverty. In the lack or
precariousness of the means of subsistence, the health of the body
is liable to suffer; and even where there is not absolute want, but
a condition straitened in the present and doubtful as to the future,
the mind loses much of its working power, and life is deprived
of a large portion of its utility. Hence the duty of industry and
economy on the part of those dependent on their own exertions. It
is not a man's duty to be rich, though he who in acquiring wealth
takes upon himself its due obligations and responsibilities, is a
public benefactor; but it is every man's duty to shun poverty, if
he can, and he who makes or keeps himself poor by his own
indolence, thriftlessness, or prodigality, commits a sin against his
own life, which he curtails as to its capacity of good, and against
society, which has a beneficial interest in the fully developed life
of all its members.

Section II.

The Attainment Of Knowledge.

Inasmuch as knowledge, real or supposed, must needs precede
every act of the will, and as the adaptation of our actions to
Section II. The Attainment Of Knowledge. 81

our purposes depends on the accuracy of our knowledge, it

is intrinsically fitting that our cognitive powers should be [103]
thoroughly developed and trained, and diligently employed.
Especially is this fitting, because—as has been already shown—it
is through knowledge alone that we can bring our conduct into
conformity with the absolute right, and there is nothing within
the range of our possible knowledge, which may not become in
some way connected with our agency as moral beings.
It is of prime importance that what we seem to know we know
accurately; and as it is through the senses that we acquire our
knowledge, not only of the outward objects with which we are
daily conversant, but of other minds than our own, the education
of the senses is an obvious duty. There are few so prolific sources
of social evil, injustice, and misery, as the falsehood of persons
who mean to tell the truth, but who see or hear only in part, and
supply the deficiencies of perception by the imagination. In the
acquisition of knowledge of the highest interest and importance
this same hindrance is one of the most frequent obstacles. The
careless eye and the heedless ear waste for many minds a large
portion of the time ostensibly given to serious pursuits, and
render their growth pitifully slow and scanty as compared with
their means of culture. The senses may, especially in early life,
be trained to alertness and precision, so that they shall carry to
the mind true and full reports of what they see and hear; and it is
only by such training that the perceptive faculties can accomplish
the whole work for which they are designed and fitted. [104]

There are, also, interior senses, apprehensive powers of the

mind, which equally crave culture, and which depend for their
precision and force on careful education and diligent use. Mere
observation, experience, or study, cannot give knowledge that
will be of any avail. One may have a largely and variously stocked
memory, and yet be unable to employ its contents to his own
advantage or to the benefit of others. Indeed, there are minds that
are paralyzed by being overloaded,—by taking in freight faster
 82 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

than they have room for it. It is only materials which the mind
has made its own, incorporated into its substance, that it can fully
utilize. Knowledge must be acted upon by the understanding, the
reason, the judgment, before it can be transmuted into wisdom,
and employed either in the acquisition of new truth or in the
conduct of life. Mental activity, then, is a duty; for if we are
bound to preserve life, by parity of reason, we are bound to
improve its quality and increase its quantity, and this cannot be
done unless the intellectual powers are strengthened by diligent
exercise, as well as nourished by the facts and truths which are
the raw material of wisdom.
The fit objects of knowledge vary indefinitely with one's
condition in life. Things in themselves trivial or evanescent
may, under certain circumstances, claim our careful attention
and thorough cognizance. We ought, on the one hand, to know
all we can about matters concerning which we must speak or
act, and, on the other hand, to refrain from voluntarily speaking
[105] or acting in matters of which we are ignorant. Thus our social
relations and our daily intercourse may render it incumbent
on us to obtain for current use a large amount of accurate
knowledge which is not worth our remembering. Then a man's
profession, stated business, or usual occupation opens a large
field of knowledge, with which and with its allied provinces it
is his manifest duty to become conversant to his utmost ability;
for the genuineness and value of his work must be in a great
degree contingent on his intelligence. At the same time, every
man is bound to make his profession worthy of respect; in failing
to do so, he wrongs and injures the members of his profession
collectively; and no calling can obtain respect, if those who
pursue it show themselves uncultivated and ignorant. Thus far,
then, should knowledge be extended on grounds of practical
utility. Beyond and above this range, there is an unlimited realm
of truth, the knowledge of which is inestimably precious for the
higher culture of the mind and character. In this realm, of which
Section III. Self-Control. 83

only an infinitesimal portion can be conquered during an earthly

lifetime, there is no unfruitful region,—there is no department
of nature, of psychology, or of social science, through which the
mind may not be expanded, exalted, energized, led into more
intimate relations with the Supreme Intelligence, endowed with
added power of beneficent agency. While, therefore, knowledge
of things as they are, and of their underlying principles and laws,
so far as we are able to acquire it, is not only a privilege beyond [106]
all price, but an absolute duty, there are no moral considerations
which need direct or limit our choice of the themes of research or
study. These may properly be determined by native or acquired
proclivity, by opportunity, or by considerations of usefulness.
Nor, if the love of truth be formed and cherished, can it of be
of any essential importance whether this or that portion of truth
be pursued or neglected during the brief period of our life in this
world; for, at best, what we leave unattained must immeasurably
exceed our attainments, and there is an eternity before us for what
we are compelled to omit here. At the same time, the unbounded
scope and the vast diversity of things knowable and worthy to
be known are adapted to stimulate self-culture, and in that same
proportion to invest human life with a higher dignity, a larger
intrinsic value, and a more enduring influence.

Section III.

Self-Control.
A man must be either self-governed, or under a worse
government than his own. God governs men, only by teaching
and helping them to govern themselves. Good men, if also wise,
 84 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

seek not, even for the highest ends, to control their fellow-men,
but, so far as they can, enable and encourage them to exercise a
[107] due self-control. It is only unwise or bad men who usurp the
government of other wills than their own. But the individual will
is oftener made inefficient by passion, than by direct influence
from other minds. Man, in his normal state, wills either what is
expedient or what is right. Passion suspends, as to its objects, all
reference to expediency and right, even when there is the clearest
knowledge of the tendencies of the acts to which it prompts.
Thus the sensualist often knows that he is committing sure and
rapid suicide, yet cannot arrest himself on the declivity of certain
ruin. The man in whom avarice has become a passion is perfectly
aware of the comforts and enjoyments which he is sacrificing,
yet is as little capable of procuring them as if he were a pauper.
Anger and revenge not infrequently force men to crimes which
they know will be no less fatal to themselves than to their victims.
Now if a man will not put and keep himself under the government
of conscience, it concerns him at least to remain under the control
of reason, which, if it do not compel him to do right, will restrain
him within the limits of expediency, and thus will insure for him
reputation, a fair position, and a safe course in life, even though
it fail of the highest and most enduring good.
Self-control is easily lost, and is often lost unconsciously.
The first surrender of it is prone to be final and lifelong. Indeed,
in many cases, the passion destined to be dominant has nearly
reached the maturity of its power previously to any outward
violation of the expedient or the right. Where the restraining
[108] influences of education and surroundings are strong, where
important interests are at stake, or where conscience has not
been habitually silenced or tampered with, the perilous appetite,
desire, or affection broods long in the thought, and is so largely
indulged in reverie and anticipation, that it becomes imperious
and despotic before it assumes its wonted forms of outward
manifestation. Hence, the sudden infatuation and rapid ruin
Section IV. Moral Self-Culture. 85

which we sometimes witness,—the cases in which there seems

but a single step between innocence and deep depravity. In truth
there are many steps; but until they become precipitous, they are
veiled from human sight.
Self-control, then, in order to be effective, must be
exercised upon the thoughts and feelings, especially upon
the imagination, which fills so largely with its phantasms and
day-dreams our else unoccupied hours. Let these hours be as
few as possible; and let them be filled with thoughts which we
would not blush to utter, with plans which we could actualize
with the approving suffrage of all good men. The inward life
which would dread expression and exposure, already puts the
outward life in peril; for passion, thus inwardly nourished and
fostered, can hardly fail to assume sooner or later the control of
the conduct and the shaping of the character. Let the thoughts
be well governed, and the life is emancipated from passion, and
under the control of reason and principle.

[109]

Section IV.

Moral Self-Culture.
It is evident that, whatever a man's aims may be, the
attainment of them depends more upon himself than upon any
agency that he can employ. If his aim be extended influence, his
words and acts have simply the force which his character gives
them. If his aim be usefulness, his own personality measures
in part the value of his gifts, and determines entirely the worth
of his services. If his aim be happiness, the more of a man he
 86 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

is, the larger is his capacity of enjoyment; for as a dog gets

more enjoyment out of life than a zoöphyte, and a man than a
dog, so does the fully and symmetrically developed man exceed
in receptivity of happiness him whose nature is imperfectly or
abnormally developed. Now it is through the thorough training
and faithful exercise of his moral faculties and powers that man
is most capable of influence, best fitted for usefulness, and
endowed with the largest capacity for happiness. History shows
this. The men whose lot (if any but our own) we would be
willing to assume, have been, without an exception, good men. If
there are in our respective circles those whose position we deem
in every respect enviable, they are men of preëminent moral
excellence. We would not take—could we have it—the most
desirable external position with a damaged character. Probably
[110] there are few who do not regard a virtuous character as so much
to be desired, that in yielding to temptation and falling under the
yoke of vicious habits they still mean to reform and to become
what they admire. Old men who have led profligate lives always
bear visible tokens of having forfeited all the valuable purposes
of life, often confess that their whole past has been a mistake,
and not infrequently bear faithful testimony to the transcendent
worth of moral goodness. To remain satisfied without this is,
therefore, a sin against one's own nature, a sacrifice of well-being
and happiness which no one has a right to make, and which no
prudent man will make.
Self-culture in virtue implies and demands reflection on duty
and on the motives to duty, on one's own nature, capacities and
liabilities, and on those great themes of thought, which by their
amplitude and loftiness enlarge and exalt the minds that become
familiar with them. The mere tongue-work or hand-*work, of
virtue slackens and becomes deteriorated, when not sustained by
profound thought and feeling. Moreover, it is the mind that acts,
and it puts into its action all that it has—and no more—of moral
and spiritual energy, so that the same outward act means more
Section IV. Moral Self-Culture. 87

or less, is of greater or less worth, in proportion to the depth

and vigor of feeling and purpose from which it proceeds. It is
thus that religious devotion nourishes virtue, and that none are so
well fitted for the duties of the earthly life as those who, in their
habitual meditation, are the most intimately conversant with the
heavenly life. [111]

In moral self-culture great benefit is derived from example,

whether of the living or the dead. Perhaps the dead are, in this
respect, more useful than the living. In witnessing the worthy
deeds and beneficent agency of a person of superior excellence,
the tendency is to an over-exact imitation of specific acts and
methods, which, precisely because they are spontaneous and
fitting in his case, will not be so in the case of his copyist; while
the biography of an eminently good man enlists our sympathy
with his spirit rather than with the details of his life, and stimulates
us to embody the same spirit in widely different forms of duty and
usefulness. Thus the school-master who in Dr. Arnold's lifetime
heard of his unprecedented success as an educator, would have
been tempted to go to Rugby, to study the system on the ground,
and then to adopt, so far as possible, the very plans which he
there saw in successful operation,—plans which might have been
fitted neither to his genius, the traditions of his school, nor the
demands of its patrons. At the same time, the interior of Rugby
School was very little known, the principles of its administration
still less, to persons other than teachers. But Arnold's biography,
revealing the foundation-principles of his character and his work,
raised up for him a host of imitators of all classes and conditions.
Price, who converted his immense candle-factory near London
into a veritable Christian seminary for mutual improvement in
knowledge, virtue, and piety, professed to owe his impulse to this
enterprise solely to the “Life of Arnold,” and like instances were [112]
multiplied in very various professions throughout the English-
speaking world. In fine, example is of service to us, not in
pointing out the precise things to be done, but in exhibiting
 88 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

the beauty, loveliness, and majesty of moral goodness, the

possibility of exalted moral attainments, and the varied scope
for their exercise in human life. Even he whose example we,
as Christians, hold in a reverence which none other shares, is to
be imitated, not by slavishly copying his specific acts, which,
because they were suitable in Judæa in the first century, are for
the most part unfitting in America in the nineteenth century, but
by imbibing his spirit, and then incarnating it in the forms of
active duty and service appropriate to our time and land.
Finally, and obviously, the practice of virtue is the most
efficient means of moral self-culture. As the thought uttered or
written becomes indelibly fixed in the mind, so does the principle
or sentiment embodied in action become more intimately and
persistently an element of the moral self-consciousness.

[113]
 Chapter X.

Justice; Or, Duties To One's

Fellow-Beings.
Justice, in the common use of the word, refers only to such
rights and dues as can be precisely defined, enacted by law, and
enforced by legal authority. Yet we virtually recognize a broader
meaning of the word, whenever we place law and justice in
opposition to each other, as when we speak of an unjust law. In
this phrase we imply that there is a supreme and universal justice,
of whose requirements human law is but a partial and imperfect
transcript. This justice must embrace all rights and dues of all
beings, human and Divine; and it is in this sense that we may
regard whatever any one being in the universe can fitly claim of
another being as coming under the head of justice. Such, as we
have already intimated, is the sense in which we have used the
term in the caption of a chapter which will embrace piety and
benevolence no less than integrity and veracity.

Section I.

Duties To God.
 90 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

While we cannot command our affections, we can so govern

and direct our thoughts as to excite the affections which we [114]
desire to cherish; and if certain affections must inevitably result
from certain trains or habits of thought, those affections may
be regarded as virtually subject to the will, and, if right, as
duties. It is in this sense that gratitude and love to God are
duties. We cannot contemplate the tokens of his love in the
outward universe, the unnumbered objects which have no other
possible use than to be enjoyed, the benignity of his perpetual
providence, the endowments and capacities of our own being, the
immortality of our natural aspiration and our Christian faith and
hope, the forgiveness and redemption that come to us through
Jesus Christ, and the immeasurable blessings of his mission and
gospel, without fervent gratitude to our infinite Benefactor. Nor
can we think of him as the Archetype and Source of all those
traits of spiritual beauty and excellence which, in man, call
forth our reverence, admiration, and affection, without loving
in Him perfect goodness, purity, and mercy. These attributes
might, indeed, of themselves fail to present the Supreme Being to
our conceptions as a cognizable personality, were it not that the
personal element is so clearly manifest in the visible universe and
in God's constant providence. But there are numerous objects,
phenomena, and events in nature and providence which have—so
to speak—a distinctive personal expression, so that the familiar
metaphors of God's countenance, smile, hand, and voice do not
transcend the literal experience of him who goes through life
[115] with the inward eye and ear always open.
The omnipresence of God makes it the dictate of natural piety
to address Him directly in thanksgiving and prayer,—not,
of necessity, in words, except as words are essential to the
definiteness of thoughts, but in such words or thoughts as
constitute an expression to Him of the sentiments of which He is
fittingly the object. As regards prayer, indeed, the grave doubts
that exist in some minds as to its efficacy might be urged as a
Section I. Duties To God. 91

reason why it should not be offered; but wrongly. It is so natural,

so intrinsically fitting to ask what we desire and need of an
omnipresent, omnipotent, all-merciful Being, who has taught us
to call him our Father, that the very appropriateness of the asking
is in itself a strong reason for believing that we shall not ask in
vain. Nor can we ask in vain, if through this communion of the
human spirit with the Divine there be an inflow of strength or of
peace into the soul that prays, even though the specific objects
prayed for be not granted. That these objects, when material, are
often not granted, we very well know; yet we know too little
of the extent of material laws, and of the degree to which a
discretionary Providence may work, not in contravention of, but
through those laws, to pronounce dogmatically that the prayers
of men are wholly unrecognized in the course of events.
As the members of the same community have very numerous
blessings and needs in common, it is obviously fitting that they
should unite in public worship, praise, and prayer; and if
this be a duty of the community collectively, participation [116]
in it must, by parity of reason, be the duty of its individual
members. Public worship involves the fitness, we may even
say the necessity, of appropriating exclusively to it certain
places and times. Associations attach themselves to places so
indelibly, that it would be impossible to maintain the gravity
and sacredness of devotional services in buildings or on spots
ordinarily devoted to secular purposes, either of business or
of recreation. Nor could assemblies for worship be convened,
otherwise that at predetermined and stated intervals; nor could
their devotional purpose be served, were there not stated portions
of time sequestered from ordinary avocations and amusements.
Hence the duty—on the part of all who admit the fitness of public
worship—of reverence for conventionally sacred places, and of
abstinence from whatever is inconsistent with the religious uses
of the day appropriated to worship.11 [117]
11
The points at issue with regard to sabbatical observance hardly belong to
92 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

It remains for us to consider the obligations imposed by an

acknowledged revelation from God. The position in which
we are placed by such a revelation may best be illustrated by
reference to what takes place in every human family. A judicious
father's commands, precepts, or counsels to his son are of two
kinds. In the first place, he lays emphatic stress on duties which
the son knows or might know from his own sense of the fitting
and the right, such as honesty, veracity, temperance. These
duties will not be in reality any more incumbent on the son
because they are urged upon him by his father; but if he be a son
worthy of the name, he will be more profoundly impressed by
their obligation, and will find in his filial love an additional and
strong motive toward their observance. The father will, in the
second place, prescribe either for his son's benefit or in his own
service certain specific acts, in themselves morally indifferent,
and these, when thus prescribed, are no longer indifferent, but, as
acts of obedience to rightful authority, they become fitting, right,
obligatory, and endowed with all the characteristics of acts that
are in themselves virtuous. Now a revelation naturally would, and
the Christian revelation does, contain precepts and commands of

an elementary treatise on ethics. I ought not, however, to leave any doubt as to

my own opinion. I believe, then, the rest of the Sabbath a necessity of man's
constitution, physical and mental, of that of the beasts subservient to his use,
and, in some measure, even of the inanimate agents under his control, while
the sequestration of the day from the course of ordinary life is equally a moral
and religious necessity. The weekly Sabbath I regard as a dictate of natural
piety, and a primeval institution, re-enacted, not established, by Moses, and
sanctioned by our Saviour when he refers to the Decalogue as a compend of
moral duty, as also in various other forms and ways. As to modes of sabbatical
observance, the rigid abstinences and austerities once common in New England
were derived from the Mosaic ceremonial law, and have no sanction either in
the New Testament or in the habits of the early Christians. I can conceive of no
better rule for the Lord's day, than that each person so spend it as to interfere
as little as possible with its fitting use by others, and to make it as availing as
he can for his own relaxation from secular cares, and growth in wisdom and
goodness.
Section II. Duties Of The Family. 93

both these classes. It prescribes with solemn emphasis the natural

virtues which are obligatory upon us on grounds of intrinsic [118]
fitness; and though these are not thus made any the more our
duty, we have, through the teachings and example of Jesus Christ,
a more vivid sense of our obligation, a higher appreciation of
the beauty of virtue, and added motives to its cultivation derived
from the love, the justice, and the retributive providence of God.
The Christian revelation, also, contains certain directions, not
in themselves of any intrinsic obligation, as, for instance, those
relating to baptism and the eucharist. So far as we can see, other
and very different rites might have served the same purpose with
these. Yet it is fitting and right that these, and not others, should
be observed, simply because the Divine authority which enacts
them has a right to command and to be obeyed. Duties of this
class are commonly called positive, in contradistinction from
natural obligations. Both classes are equally imperative on the
ground of fitness; but with this difference, that in the latter class
the fitness resides in the duties themselves, in the former it grows
out of the relation between him who gives and those who receive
the command.

Section II.

Duties Of The Family.

The inviolableness and permanence of marriage are so
absolutely essential to the stability and well-being of families, [119]
as to be virtually a part of the law of nature. The young of
other species have but a very brief period of dependence; while
the human child advances very slowly toward maturity, and
 94 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

for a considerable portion of his life needs, for both body and
mind, support, protection, and guidance from his seniors. The
separation of parents by other causes than death might leave it
an unsolvable question, to which of them the custody of their
children appertained; and in whichever way they were disposed
of, their due nurture and education would be inadequately
secured. The children might be thrown upon the mother's
care, while the means of supporting them belonged exclusively
to the father. Or in the father's house they might suffer for
lack of a mother's personal attention and services; while if he
contracted a new matrimonial connection, the children of the
previous marriage could hardly fail of neglect, or even of hatred
and injury, from their mother's successful rival, especially if she
had children of her own.12
The life-tenure of the marriage-contract contributes equally
to the happiness of the conjugal relation, in the aggregate.
There are, no doubt, individual cases of hardship, in which an
[120] utter and irremediable incompatibility of temper and character
makes married life a burden and a weariness to both parties. But
the cases are much more numerous, in which discrepancies of
taste and disposition are brought by time and habit into a more
comprehensive harmony, and the husband and wife, because
unlike, become only the more essential, each to the other's
happiness and welfare. Where there is sincere affection, there
is little danger that lapse of years in a permanent marriage will
enfeeble it; while, were the contract voidable at will, there
might be after marriage, as often before marriage, a series of
attachments of seemingly equal ardor, each to be superseded in its

12
It was the malignity displayed toward the children of divorced wives by the
women who succeeded them in the affections and homes of their husbands, that
in Roman literature attached to the name of a stepmother (noverca) the most
hateful associations, which certainly have no place in modern Christendom,
where the stepmother oftener than not assumes the maternal cares of the
deceased wife as if they were natively her own.
Section II. Duties Of The Family. 95

turn by some new attraction. Where, on the other hand, the union
is the result, not of love, but of mutual esteem and confidence,
aided by motives of convenience, the very possibility of an easy
divorce would render each party captious and suspicious, so that
confidence could be easily shaken, and esteem easily impaired;
while in those who expect always to have a common home the
tendency is to those habits of mutual tolerance, accommodation,
and concession, through which confidence and esteem ripen into
sincere and lasting affection.
As in many respects each family must be a unit, and as
the conflict of rival powers is no less ruinous to a household
than to a state, the family must needs have one recognized
head or representative, and this place is fittingly held by the
husband rather than by the wife; for by the laws and usages
of all civilized nations he is held responsible—except in [121]
criminal matters—for his wife and his minor children. But
in the well-ordered family, each party to the marriage-contract
is supreme in his or her own department, and in that of the
other prompt in counsel, sympathy, and aid, and slow in dissent,
remonstrance, or reproof. These departments are defined with
perfect distinctness by considerations of intrinsic fitness, and any
attempt to interchange them can be only subversive of domestic
peace and social order.
The parent's duties to the child are maintenance in his
own condition in life, care for his education and his moral and
religious culture, advice, restraint when needed, punishment
when both deserved and needed, pure example and wholesome
influence, aid in the formation of habits and aptitudes suited to
his probable calling or estate in his adult years, and provision
for his favorable entrance on his future career. Some of these
duties are obviously contingent on the parent's ability; others
are absolute and imperative. The judicious parent will, on the
one hand, retain his parental authority as long as he is legally
responsible for his child; but, on the other hand, will train him
 96 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

gradually to self-help and self-dependence, and will concede to

him, as he approaches years of maturity, such freedom of choice
and action as is consistent with his permanent well-being.
The child's duty is unqualified submission to the parent's
authority, obedience to his commands, and compliance with his
[122] wishes, in all things not morally wrong, and this, not only
for the years of minority, but so long as he remains a member
of his parent's family, or dependent on him for subsistence.
Subsequently, it is undoubtedly his duty to consult the reasonable
wishes of his parent, to hold him in respect and reverence, to
minister assiduously to his comfort and happiness, and, if need
be, to sustain him in his years of decline and infirmity.

Section III.

Veracity.
The duty of veracity is not contingent on the rights of any second
person, but is derived from considerations of intrinsic fitness. If
representations of facts, truths, or opinions are to be made, it is
obviously fitting and right that they should be conformed to one's
knowledge or belief; and no one can make representations which
he knows to be false without the consciousness of unfitness and
wrong.
The most important interests of society depend on the
confidence which men repose in one another's veracity. But
for this, history would be worth no more than fiction, and its
lessons would be unheeded. But for this, judicial proceedings
would be a senseless mockery of justice, and the administration
of law and equity, the merest haphazard. But for this, the
Section III. Veracity. 97

common intercourse of life would be invaded by incessant doubt

and suspicion, and its daily transactions, aimless and tentative. [123]
Against this condition of things man is defended by his own
nature. It is more natural to tell the truth than to utter falsehood.
The very persons who are the least scrupulous in this matter utter
the truth when they have no motive to do otherwise. Spontaneous
falsehood betokens insanity.
The essence of falsehood lies in the intention to deceive,
not in the words uttered. The words may bear a double sense;
and while one of the meanings may be true, the circumstances or
the manner of utterance may be such as inevitably to impose the
false meaning upon the hearer. A part of the truth may be told in
such a way as to convey an altogether false impression. A fact
may be stated with the express purpose of misleading the hearer
with regard to another fact. Looks or gestures may be framed
with the intent to communicate or confirm a falsehood. Silent
acquiescence in a known falsehood may be no less criminal than
its direct utterance.
But has not one a right to conceal facts which another has
no right to know? In such a case, concealment is undoubtedly
a right; but falsehood, or equivocation, or truth which will
convey a false impression, is not a right. This question has not
unfrequently arisen with regard to anonymous publications. It
might be a fair subject of inquiry, whether anonymous writing
is not in all cases objectionable, on the ground that a sense of
personal responsibility for statements given to the public would
insure a more uniform regard to truth and justice, as well as [124]
greater care in the ascertainment of facts, and more mature
deliberation in the formation of judgments and opinions. But
if anonymous writing be justified, the writer is authorized to
guard his secret by employing a copyist, or by covert modes
of transmission to the press, or by avoiding such peculiarities
of style as might betray him. But if, notwithstanding these
precautions, the authorship be suspected and charged upon him,
 98 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

we cannot admit his right to denial, whether expressly, or by

implication, or even by the utterance of a misleading fact. He
undertook the authorship with the risk of discovery; he had no
right to give publicity to what he has need to be ashamed of; and
if there be secondary, though grave reasons why he would prefer
to remain unknown, they cannot be sufficient to justify him in
falsehood.
Is truth to be told to an insane person, when it might be
dangerous to him or to others? May not he be deceived for his
benefit, decoyed into a place of safe detention, or deterred by
falsehood from some intended act of violence? Those who have
the guardianship of the insane are unanimous in the opinion that
falsehood, when discovered by them, is always attended with
injurious consequences, and that it should be resorted to only
when imperatively required for their immediate safety or for that
of others. But in such cases the severest moralist could not deny
the necessity, and therefore the right, of falsehood. But it would
[125] be falsehood in form, and not in fact. Truth-telling implies two
conscious parties. The statement from which an insane person
will draw false inferences, and which will drive him to an act or
paroxysm of madness, is not truth to him. The statement which
is indispensable to his safety, repose, or reasonable conduct,
is virtually true to him, inasmuch as it conveys impressions as
nearly conformed to the truth as he is capable of receiving.
Is falsehood justifiable for the safety of one's own life or
that of others? This is a broad question, and comprehends a
very wide diversity of cases. It includes the cases, in which the
alternative is to deny one's political or religious convictions, or
to suffer death for the profession of them. Here, however, there
can be no difference of opinion. Political freedom and religious
truth have been, in past ages, propagated more effectively by
martyrdoms, than by any other instrumentality; and no men have
so fully merited the gratitude and reverence of their race as those
who have held the truth dearer than life.
Section III. Veracity. 99

But the form which the question ordinarily assumes is this:

If by false information I can prevent the commission of an
atrocious crime, am I justified in the falsehood? It ought first
to be said, that this is hardly a practical question. Probably it has
never presented itself practically to any person under whose eye
these pages will fall, or in any instance within his knowledge.
Nor can the familiar discussion of such extreme cases be of any
possible benefit. On the other hand, he who familiarizes himself [126]
with the idea that under such a stress of circumstances what
else were wrong becomes right, will be prone to apply similar
reasoning to an exigency somewhat less urgent, and thence to
any case in which great apparent good might result from a
departure from strict veracity. Far better is it to make literal truth
the unvarying law of life, and then to rest in the assurance that,
should an extreme case present itself, the exigency of the moment
will suggest the course to be pursued. Yet, in ethical strictness,
falsehood from one self-conscious person to another cannot be
justified; but we can conceive of circumstances in which it might
be extenuated. There are no degrees of right; but of wrong there
may be an infinite number of degrees. One straight line cannot
be straighter than another; but we can conceive of a curve or
a waving line that shall have but an infinitesimal divergence
from a straight line. So in morals, there may be an infinitesimal
wrong,—an act which cannot be pronounced right, yet shall
diverge so little from the right that conscience would contract
from it no appreciable stain, that man could not condemn it, and
that we cannot conceive of its being registered against the soul in
the chancery of heaven. Such may be the judgment which would
properly attach itself to a falsehood by which an atrocious crime
was prevented.
*****
Promises belong under the head of veracity for a double
reason, inasmuch as they demand in their making the truthful [127]
declaration of a sincere purpose, and in their execution an equal
 100 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

loyalty to the truth, even though it involve inconvenience, cost,

or loss. The words of a promise may often bear more than
one interpretation; but it is obviously required by veracity that
the promiser should fulfil his promise in the sense in which he
supposed it to be understood by him to whom it was made.
There are cases in which a promise should not be kept. The
promise to perform an immoral act is void from the beginning. It
is wrong to make it, and a double wrong to keep it. The promise
to perform an act, not intrinsically immoral, but unlawful, should
be regarded in the same light. If both parties were aware,
when the promise was made, of the unlawfulness of the act,
then neither party has the right to deem himself injured by the
other. If, however, the promiser was aware of the unlawfulness
of his promise, while the promisee supposed it lawful, the
promiser, though not bound by his promise, is under obligation
to remunerate the promisee for his disappointment or loss. If
the act promised becomes unlawful between the making and the
execution of the promise, the promise is made void, and the
promisee has no ground of complaint against the promiser. Thus,
if a man promised to send to a correspondent goods of a certain
description at a certain time, and before that time the exportation
of such goods were prohibited by law, he would be free both
[128] from his promise and from responsibility for its non-fulfilment.
A promise neither immoral nor unlawful, but made under
a mistake common to both parties, and such as—had it been
known—would have prevented the promise, is void. An extorted
promise to perform an immoral or unlawful act cannot be binding.
One has, indeed, no moral right to make such a promise, though
if the case be one of extreme urgency and peril, extenuating
circumstances may reduce the wrong to an infinitesimal deviation
from the right; but, when the duress is over, no considerations
can justify the performance of what it was wrong to promise. But
a promise, not in itself immoral or unlawful, is binding, though
made under duress. Thus, if a man attacked by bandits has had
Section III. Veracity. 101

his life spared on condition of a pecuniary ransom, he is bound

to pay the ransom; for at the moment of peril he thought his life
worth all he promised to give for it, and it is neither immoral nor
unlawful to give money, even to a robber. In a case like this,
regard for the safety of others should, also, have weight; for in a
country liable to such perils, the breach of a promise by one man
might cost the community the lives of many.
Contracts are mutual promises, in which each party puts
himself under specific obligations to the other. They are to be
interpreted on the same principles, and to be regarded as void or
voidable on the same grounds, with promises.
An oath is an invocation of the protection and blessing of [129]
God, or of his indignation and curse, upon the person swearing,
according as his assertion is true or false, or as his promise shall
be observed or violated. “So help you God,” the form in common
use in this country, expresses the idea that underlies an oath,—so
being, of course, the emphatic word. Oaths are exacted of
witnesses in courts of justice in confirmation of their testimony,
and of incumbents of public offices in pledge of their fidelity.
They are required, too, in attestation of invoices, inventories of
estates, returns of taxable property, and various financial and
statistical statements made under public authority. There are,
also, not a few persons of whom, and occasions on which an
oath of allegiance to the government of the state or nation is
demanded.
An oath does not enhance one's obligation to tell the truth,
or to fulfil his promise. This obligation is entire and perfect in all
cases, on the ground of intrinsic fitness, and of the known will
and command of God. But the tendency of oaths is to establish
in the minds of men two classes of assertions and promises, one
more sacred than the other. He who is required under the solemn
sanction of an oath merely to tell the truth or to make a promise in
good faith, arrives naturally at the conclusion that he is bound to a
less rigid accuracy or fidelity in ordinary statements or promises.
 102 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

The law of the land, as we have seen, bears an important part

in the ethical education of the young; and by means of the legal
[130] distinction created between assertions or promises under oath
and those made without that sanction, children and youth are
trained to regard simple truth-telling and promise-keeping as of
secondary obligation. This effect of legal oaths is attested by
the prevalence of profane swearing, and by the frequent use
of oath-like forms of asseveration, not regarded as profane, by
persons of a more serious character. Except in the religious sects
that abjure the use of oaths, nine persons out of ten swear more or
less, and spontaneously confirm statements which are in the least
degree strange or difficult of belief, or promises to which they
wish to give an air of sincerity and earnestness, by the strongest
oaths they dare to use. This comes of a felt necessity, which will
exist as long as preëminent sanctity is attached to legal oaths.
Oaths are notoriously ineffective in insuring truth and
fidelity. So far as their educational influence is concerned, they
tend, as we have seen, to undermine the reverence for truth in itself
considered, which is the surest safeguard of individual veracity.
Then too, so far as reliance is placed upon an oath, the attention
of those concerned is directed with the less careful scrutiny to the
character for veracity borne by him to whom it is administered.
In point of fact, men swear falsely whenever and wherever they
would be willing to utter falsehood without an oath. In courts of
justice, the pains and penalties of perjury undoubtedly prevent
a great deal of false swearing; but precisely the same penalties
are attached to the affirmation of persons who, on the ground of
[131] religious scruples, are excused from swearing, and they certainly
are none too severe for false testimony, in whatever way it may
be given. Notwithstanding this check, however, it is well known
that before a corrupt or incompetent tribunal, an unprincipled
advocate never finds any difficulty in buying false testimony;
and even where justice is uprightly and skilfully administered, it
is not rare to encounter between equally credible witnesses such
Section III. Veracity. 103

flagrant and irreconcilable contradictions as to leave no room for

any hypothesis other than perjury on one side or both. Perjury
in transactions with the national revenue and with municipal
assessors is by no means unprecedented among persons of high
general reputation. False oaths of this description are, indeed,
not infrequently preceded by some fictitious formalism, such as
an unreal and temporary transfer of property; but this is done, not
in order to evade the guilt of perjury, but, in case of detection, to
open a technical escape from its legal penalty. Promissory oaths
are of equally little worth. There is not a public functionary from
the President of the United States to the village constable, who
does not take what is meant to be a solemn oath (though often
administered with indecent levity) to be loyal to the constitution
of the country or state, and faithful in the discharge of his official
duties. Yet what effect has this vast amount of swearing, if it
be not to make perjury so familiar an offence as to be no longer
deemed disgraceful? Not a bribe is taken by a member of [132]
Congress, not a contract surreptitiously obtained by a municipal
official, not an appointment made to the known detriment of the
public on personal or party grounds, without the commission of a
crime, in theory transcendentally heinous, in practice constantly
condoned and ignored. Nor can we be mistaken in regarding the
sacrilege and virtual blasphemy resulting from the institution of
judicial, assertory, and promissory oaths, as holding no secondary
place among the causes of the moral decline and corruption of
which we witness so manifest tokens.
To one who does not carry foregone conclusions of his own
to the interpretation of the New Testament, it can hardly appear
otherwise than certain that the Founder of Christianity intended
to prohibit all oaths. His precept, “Swear not at all,” occurs
in a series of specifications of maxims drawn from the standard
morality of his day, under each of which he sets aside the existing
ethical rule, and substitutes for it one covering precisely the same
ground, and conformed to the intrinsic right as represented in his
 104 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

own spirit and life. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An
eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; but I say unto you, that
ye resist not evil.” “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou
shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you,
Love your enemies.” The analogy of these and other declarations
of the same series compels us to believe that when Jesus said,
[133] “Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time,
Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord
thine oaths,” the precept which followed, “I say unto you, Swear
not at all,” must have applied to the same subject-matter with
the maxim which precedes it,—that Jesus must have intended to
disallow something that had been previously permitted. If so,
not trivial or profane oaths alone, but oaths made in good faith
and with due solemnity must have been included in the precept,
“Swear not at all.”13 It is historically certain that the primitive
Christians thus understood the evangelic precept. They not only
refused the usual idolatrous forms of adjuration, but maintained
that all oaths had been forbidden by their Divine Lawgiver; nor
13
When Jesus forbids swearing by heaven, because “it is God's throne,” and
by the earth, because “it is his footstool,” the inference is obvious that, for
still stronger reasons, all direct swearing by God himself is prohibited. The
word ¼uĵ, which introduces the oaths by inferior objects specified in the text
under discussion, not infrequently corresponds to our phrase not even. With
this sense of ¼uĵ, the passage would be rendered, “But I say unto you, Swear
not at all, not even by heaven,” etc.
I find that some writers on this subject quote in vindication of oaths on
solemn occasions the instances in the Scriptures in which God is said to have
sworn by Himself. The reply is obvious, that no being can swear by himself,
the essential significance of an oath being an appeal to some being or object
other than one's self. Because God “can swear by no greater,” it is certain that
when this phraseology is used concerning Him, it is employed figuratively,
to aid the poverty of human conceptions, and to express the certainty of his
promise by the strongest terms which human language affords. In like manner,
God is said by the sacred writers to repent of intended retribution to evil-doers,
not that infinite justice and love can change in thought, plan, or purpose, but
because a change of disposition and feeling is wont to precede human clemency
to evil-doers.
Section IV. Honesty. 105

have we any proof of their having receded from this position, [134]
until that strange fusion of church and state under Constantine, in
which it is hard to say whether Christianity mounted the throne
of the Cæsars or succumbed to their rule.

Section IV.

Honesty.
Honesty relates to transactions in which money or other property
is concerned. In its broadest sense, it forbids not only the
violation of the rights of individuals, but, equally, acts and
practices designed to gain unfair emolument at the expense of the
community, or of any class or portion of its members. It enjoins
not merely the paying of debts and the performance of contracts,
but rigid fidelity in every trust, whether private or public. Its
ground is intrinsic fitness; and a sense of fitness will suggest its
general rules, and will always enable one to determine his duty in
individual cases. Its whole field may be covered by two precepts,
level with the humblest understanding, and infallible in their
application. The first relates to transactions between man and
man,—Do that, and only that, which you would regard as just
and right, if it were done to you. The second embraces concerns
that affect numbers or classes of persons,—Do that, and only
that, which, were you the responsible trustee and guardian of the
public good, you would prescribe or sanction as just and right. [135]
Notwithstanding the undoubted increase of dishonesty in
recent times and its disastrous frequency, there can be no doubt
that the majority of men are honest, and that the transactions in
which there is no deception or wrong, largely outnumber those
 106 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

which are fraudulent. Were this not so, there could be neither
confidence nor credit, enterprise would be paralyzed, business
would be reduced to the lowest demands of absolute necessity,
and every man would be the sole custodian of what he might
make, produce, or in any way acquire. There can, therefore, be
no element more directly hostile to the permanence, not to say the
progress, of material civilization and of the higher interests which
depend upon it, than fraud, peculation, and the violation of trust,
in pecuniary and mercantile affairs, and with reference to public
funds and measures. Yet there are methods, for which to a large
degree honest men are responsible, in which dishonesty is created,
nourished, and rewarded. In political life, if few office-holders
are inaccessible to bribes, it is not because men of impregnable
integrity might not, as in earlier times, be found in ample
numbers for all places of trust; but because the compromises,
humiliations, and concessions through which alone, in many of
our constituencies, one can become the candidate of a party,
are such as an honest man either would spurn at the outset,
or could endure only by parting with his honesty. So long
as men will persist in electing to municipal trusts those whose
[136] sole qualification is blind loyalty and unscrupulous service to a
party, they can expect only robbery under the form of taxation;
and, in fact, the financial revelations that have been made in
the commercial metropolis of our country are typical of what is
taking place, so far as opportunity serves, in cities, towns, and
villages all over the land. As regards embezzlements, forgeries,
and frauds in the management of pecuniary trusts, there can be
no doubt that the number is greatly multiplied by the morbid
sympathy of the public with the criminals, by their frequent
evasion of punishment or prompt pardon after conviction, and
by the ease with which they have often recovered their social
position and the means of maintaining it.
In addition to this complicity with fraud and wrong on the
part of the public, there are many ways in which dishonesty
Section IV. Honesty. 107

engenders, almost necessitates dishonesty. A branch of

business, in itself honest, may be virtually closed against an
honest man. The adulterations of food, so appallingly prevalent,
will suggest an illustration of this point. There are commodities
in which the mixture of cheaper ingredients cannot be detected
by the purchaser, and which in their debased form can be offered
at so low a price as to drive the genuine commodities which they
replace out of the market; and thus the alternative is presented
to the hitherto honest dealer to participate in the fraud, or to quit
the business. The former course is, no doubt, taken by many who
sincerely regret the seeming necessity. [137]

Dishonesty not only injures the immediate sufferer by the

fraud or wrong, but when it becomes frequent, is a public injury
and calamity. In one way or another it alienates from the use
of every honest man a very large proportion of his earnings or
income. In this country, at the present time, we probably fall
short of the truth in saying that at least a third part of every
citizen's income is paid in the form of either direct or indirect
taxation, and of this amount a percentage much larger than would
be readily believed is pillaged on its way into the treasury or
in its disbursement. Then, as regards bad debts (so-called),
most of them fraudulently contracted or evaded, they are not,
in general, the loss of the immediate creditor, nor ought they
to be; he is obliged to charge for his goods a price which will
cover these debts, and honest purchasers must thus pay the dues
of the insolvent purchaser. Nor is this a solitary instance in
which innocent persons are obliged to suffer for wrongs with
which they seem to have no necessary connection. There are
very few exceptions to the rule, under which, however, we have
room but one more example. It is a well known fact that many
American railways have not only cost very much more money
than was ever laid out upon them, but are made, by keeping the
construction-account long and generously open, to represent on
the books of the respective corporations much larger sums than
 108 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

they cost,—especially in cases where the enterprise is lucrative

[138] and the dividends are limited by statute.
Now in some sections of our country a transaction of
this kind—essentially fraudulent, under however respectable
auspices—is a disastrous check on productive industry by the
heavy freight-tariff which it imposes,—so heavy sometimes as
to keep bulky commodities, as wheat and corn, out of the
markets where, at a fair cost for transportation, they might find
remunerative sale. Thus the very means devised for opening
the resources of a region of country may be abused to their
obstruction and hindrance. In fine, dishonesty in all its forms
has a diffusive power of injury, and, on the mere ground of
self-defence, demands the remonstrance and antagonism of the
entire community.
While in most departments of conduct there is a wide neutral
ground between the right and the condemnably wrong, there
are matters of business in which there seems to be no such
intermediate territory, but in which what is fair, honorable,
and even necessary, is closely contiguous to dishonesty. Thus,
except in the simplest retail business, all modern commerce
is speculation, and the line between legitimate and dishonest
speculation is to some minds difficult of discernment. Yet the
discrimination may be made. A man has a right to all that he
earns by services to the community, and these earnings may
in individual instances reach an immense sum. We can easily
understand how this may be, nay, must needs be the case with the
very high salaries paid to master manufacturers. Such salaries
[139] would not be paid, did not the intelligence, skill, and organizing
capacity of these men cheapen by a still larger amount the
commodities made under their direction. The case is precisely
similar with the merchant engaged in legitimate commerce. By
his knowledge of the right times and best modes of purchasing,
by his enterprise and sagacity in maintaining intercourse with
and between distant markets, and by his outlay of capital and skill
Section IV. Honesty. 109

as a carrier of commodities from the place of their production to

the place where they are needed for use, he cheapens the goods
that pass through his hands by a greater amount than the toll he
levies upon them, which—however large—is his rightful due.
Thus also, when, in anticipation of a scarcity of some one
commodity, a merchant so raises the price as essentially to
diminish the sale, he earns his increased profits; for an enhanced
price is the only practicable check on consumption. For instance,
if at the actual rate of consumption the bread-stuff on hand
would be consumed a month before the new harvest could be
made availing, no statistical statement could prevent the month
of famine; but experienced grain-merchants can adjust the price
of the stock in hand so as to induce precisely the amount of
economy which will make that stock last till it can be replaced.
They will, indeed, obtain a large profit on their sales, and will
be accused by ignorant persons of speculating on scarcity and
popular apprehension; but it will be due wholly to their prescience
that the scarcity did not become famine, and the apprehension [140]
suffering; and they will have merited for this service more than
the largest profits that can accrue to them.
The same principles will apply to speculation in stocks,
which is in many minds identified with dishonest gain. Stocks
are marketable commodities, equally with sugar and salt. They
are liable to legitimate fluctuations in value, their actual value
being affected, often by facts that transpire, often by opinions
that rest on assignable grounds. Now if a man possess skill and
foresight enough to buy stocks at their lowest rates and to sell
them when they will bring him a profit, he makes a perfectly
legitimate investment of his intelligence and sagacity, and in
facilitating sales for those who need to sell, and purchases for
those who wish to buy, and thus preventing capital from lying
unused, or remaining inconvertible at need, he earns all that his
business yields him by the substantial services which he renders.
The legitimate business of the merchant and the broker is
 110 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

contingent, as we have seen, on fluctuations in the market,

and he who has the sagacity to foresee these fluctuations and the
enterprise to prepare for them, derives from them advantage to
which he is fairly entitled. But it is precisely at this point that the
stress of temptation rests, and the opportunity presents itself for
dishonesty in ways of which the laws take no cognizance, and on
which public opinion is by no means severe. The contingencies
[141] which sagacity can foresee, capital and credit can often create.
Virtual scarcity may be produced by forestalling and monopoly.
When there is no actual dearth, even famine-prices may be
obtained for the necessaries of life by the skilful manipulation
of the grain-market. So too, in the stock-market, bonds and
shares, instead of being bought or sold for what they are worth,
of actual owners and to real purchasers, may be merely gambled
with,—bought in large amounts in order to create a demand
that shall swell their price, or so thrown upon the market as to
reduce their price below their real value, and all this with the sole
purpose of mutual contravention and discomfiture. By operations
of this kind, not only is no useful end subserved, but the financial
interests and relations of the community are injuriously, often
ruinously, deranged; while not a few private holders of stock
have their credit essentially impaired by a sudden fall of price, or
by the inflation of nominal value are led into rash speculations.
In the cases cited it may be seen how closely the right abuts
upon the wrong, so that one may over-pass the line almost
unconsciously. Yet it is believed that a man may determine for
himself on which side of the line he belongs. The department of
business, or the mode of transacting business, which cannot by
any possibility be of benefit to the community, still more, that
which in its general course is of positively injurious tendency, is
essentially dishonest, even though there be no individual acts of
[142] fraud. He really defrauds the public who lives upon the public
without rendering, or purposing to render any valuable return;
and if there be any profession or department of business to which
Section IV. Honesty. 111

this description applies, it should be avoided or forsaken by every

man who means to be honest.
Among the many mooted cases in which the question of
honesty is involved, our proposed limits will permit us to consider
only that of usury14 (so-called). There can be no doubt that usury
laws and the opinion that sustains them sprang from the false
theory, according to which money was regarded, not as value, but
merely as the measure of value. It is now understood that it owes
its capacity to measure value solely to its own intrinsic value;
that its paper representatives can equal it in purchasing power
only when convertible at pleasure into coin; and that paper not
immediately convertible can obtain the character of money only
so far as there is promise or hope of its ultimate conversion into
coin. It follows that money stands on the same footing with all
other values,—that its use, therefore, is a marketable commodity,
varying indefinitely in its fitting price, according as money is
abundant or scarce, the loan for a long or a short period, and the
borrower of more or less certain solvency. For ordinary loans the
relations of supply and demand are amply competent to regulate
the rate of interest, while he who incurs an extra-hazardous risk [143]
fairly earns a correspondingly high rate of compensation. There
is, therefore, no intrinsic wrong in one's obtaining for the use of
his money all that it is worth; and while we cannot justify the
violation of any laws not absolutely immoral, dishonesty forms
no part of the offence of the man who takes more than legal
interest.15
14
The odious meaning of excessive interest, as attached to usury, is of
comparatively recent date. In the earlier English, as in our translation of the
Bible, it denotes any sum given for the use of money.
15
In this country usury laws are fast yielding to the growth of intelligence in
monetary affairs. Wherever they exist in their severer forms, they only enhance
the rate of interest paid by the major portion of the class of borrowers, as the
lender must be compensated, not only for the use of his money, and for the risk
of his creditor's inability to repay it, but also for the additional risk of detection,
prosecution, and forfeiture.
 112 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

Section V.

Beneficence.

We have a distinct consciousness of the needs of human

beings. If we have not suffered destitution in our own persons,
we yet should deprecate it. What we should dread others feel.
The things which we find or deem essential to our well-being,
many lack. We, it may be, possess them or the means of
procuring them, beyond our power of personal use. This larger
share of material goods has come to us, indeed, honestly, by
the operation of laws inherent in the structure of society, and
thus, as we believe, by Divine appointment. At the same time
we are conscious, in a greater or less degree, of the benevolent
affections. We are moved to pity by the sight or knowledge of
[144] want or suffering. Our sense of fitness is painfully disturbed
by the existence of needs unsupplied, of calamities unrelieved.
We cannot but be aware of the adaptation of such superfluity of
material goods as we may possess to beneficent uses; and it can
hardly be that we shall not rest in the belief that, in the inevitable
order of society, it is the predetermined design and purpose of
abundance to supply deficiency,—of the capacity of service, to
meet the ever pressing demands for service. Beneficence, then,
is a duty based on considerations of intrinsic fitness.
But beneficence must be actual, not merely formal, good-
doing. Some of the most easy and obvious modes of supply
or relief are adapted to perpetuate the very evils to which they
minister, either by destroying self-respect, by discouraging self-
help, or by granting immunity to positively vicious habits. The
tendency of instinctive kindness is to indiscriminate giving. But
there can be very few cases in which this is not harmful. It
sustains mendicants as a recognized class of society; and as such
Section V. Beneficence. 113

they are worse than useless. They necessarily lose all sense
of personal dignity; they remain ignorant or become incapable
of all modes of regular industry, and it is impossible for them
to form associations that will be otherwise than degrading and
corrupting.
Of equally injurious tendency are the various modes of relief
at the public charge. They affix upon their beneficiaries
the indelible brand of pauperism, which in numerous instances
becomes hereditary, and in not a few cases has been transmitted
through several generations. Experience has shown that recovery [145]
from a condition thus dependent is exceedingly rare, even with
the young and strong, who, had they been tided over the stress
of need by private and judicious charity, would shortly have
resumed their place among the self-subsisting members of the
community. Public alms, while they are thus harmful to their
recipients, impose upon society a far heavier burden than private
charity. This is due in part to the permanent pauperism created
by the system, in part to the wastefulness which characterizes
public expenditures of every kind. By special permission of the
national legislature, the experiment was tried in Glasgow, under
the direction of Dr. Chalmers, of substituting private munificence
for relief from the public chest, in one of the poorest territorial
parishes of the city, embracing a population of ten thousand,
and the result was the expenditure of little more than one third
of what had been expended under legal authority. At the same
time, the poor and suffering were so much more faithfully and
kindly cared for, that there was a constant overflow of poverty
from the other districts of the city into this. Public charity,
when thoroughly systematized, is liable to the still stronger
objection, that those who are able to give relief, in ceasing to
feel the necessity, lose the will and the capacity of benevolent
effort. Yet, were there no public provision for the poor, there
would be cases of destitution, disease, disability, and mental
imbecility, which would elude private charity, however diligent [146]
 114 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

and generous. It must be remembered, too, that the same causes

may at once enhance the demand for beneficent aid, and cripple
its resources. Thus, in a conflagration, a flood, a dearth, or a
commercial panic, while the stress of need among the poor is
greatly intensified, the persons on whose charity, under ordinary
circumstances, they could place the most confident reliance, may
be among the chief sufferers. Thus, also, during the prevalence
of infectious disease, a large proportion of those who are wont to
perform the offices of humanity for the suffering, are withdrawn
by their own fears, or those of their friends, from their wonted
field of service. Then, too, there are various forms of disease
and infirmity, which demand special treatment or a permanent
asylum; and while institutions designed to meet these wants are
more wisely and economically administered under private than
under public auspices, the state should never suffer them to fail
or languish for lack of subsidy from private sources. The most
desirable condition of things undoubtedly is that—more nearly
realized in France than in any other country in Christendom—in
which the relief of the poor and suffering in ordinary cases, and
the charge of charitable institutions to a large degree, are left
to individuals, voluntary organizations, and religious fraternities
and sisterhoods, while government supplements and subsidizes
private charity where it is found inadequate to the need.
[147] The demands upon beneficence are by no means exhausted,
when material relief and aid have been bestowed. Indeed,
alms are often given as a purchase of quitclaim for personal
service. But the manifestation and expression of sympathy
may make the gift of immeasurably more worth and efficacy.
Considerate courtesy, delicacy, and gentleness are essential parts
of beneficence. There are very few so abject that they do
not feel insulted and degraded by what is coldly, grudgingly,
superciliously, or chidingly bestowed; while the thoughtful
tenderness which never forgets the sensibilities of those whom it
relieves, inspires comfort, hope, and courage, arouses whatever
Section V. Beneficence. 115

capacity there may be of self-help, and is often the means of

replacing the unfortunate in the position from which they have
fallen.
Beneficence has a much broader scope than the mere relief
of the poor and suffering. In the daily intercourse of life
there are unnumbered opportunities for kindness, many of them
slight, yet in their aggregate, of a magnitude that eludes all
computation. There is hardly a transaction, an interview, a casual
wayside meeting, in which it is not in the power of each person
concerned to contribute in an appreciable degree to the happiness
or the discomfort of those whom he thus meets, or with whom he
is brought into a relation however transient. In all our movements
among our fellow-men, it is possible for us to “go about doing
good.” What we can thus do we are bound to do. We perceive and
feel that this is fitting for us as social and as mutually dependent
beings. We are conscious of the benefit accruing to us from [148]
little, nameless attentions and courtesies, often of mere look, or
manner, or voice; and from these experiences we infer that the
possibility, and therefore the duty of beneficence is coextensive
with our whole social life.
The measure of beneficence, prescribed for us on the most
sacred authority, “All things whatsoever ye would that men
should do to you, do ye even so to them,” needs only to be
stated to be received as authentic. It supplies a measure for our
expectations also, as well as for our duties. We have a right
to expect from others as much courtesy, kindness, service as,
were they in our place and we in theirs, we should feel bound
to render to them,—a rule which would often largely curtail
our expectations, and in the same proportion tone down our
disappointments and imagined grievances.
There is another scriptural precept, “Thou shalt love
thy neighbor as thyself,” which might at first sight seem
impracticable, yet which, as we shall see on closer examination,
represents not only a possible attainment, but one toward which
 116 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

all who heartily desire and love to do good are tending. There are
various conditions under which, confessedly, human beings love
others as well as themselves, or better. What else can we say of
the mother's love for her child, for whose well-being she would
make any conceivable sacrifice, nay, were there need, would
surrender life itself? Have we not also sometimes witnessed, a
[149] filial devotion equally entire and self-forgetting?
Nor are instances wanting, in which brothers and sisters, or
friends who had no bonds of consanguinity, have shown by
unmistakable deeds and sufferings that their love for one another
was at least equal to their self-love. This same love for others,
as for himself, is manifested by the self-devoting patriot, the
practical philanthropist, the Christian missionary. There is ample
ground for it in the theory of humanity which forms a part of
our accustomed religious utterance. We call our fellow-men our
brethren, as children of the same Father. So far as sayings like
these are sentiments, and not mere words, there must be in our
feelings and conduct toward and for our fellow-men in general
a kindness, forbearance, self-forgetfulness, and self-sacrifice
similar to that of which, toward our near kindred, we would not
confess ourselves incapable. Here it must be borne in mind that
the precepts of Christianity represent the perfection which should
be our constant aim and our only goal, not the stage of attainment
which we are conscious of having reached, or of being able to
reach with little effort.
The love of enemies is also enjoined upon us by Jesus Christ.
Is this possible? Why not? There are cases where one's nearest
kindred are his worst enemies; and we have known instances
in which love has survived this rudest of all trials. Were the
Christian idea of universal brotherhood a profound sentiment,
it would not be quenched by enmity, however bitter. Enmity
[150] toward ourselves need not affect our estimate of one's actual
merit or claims. If we should not think the worse of a man
because he was the enemy of some one else, why should we
Section V. Beneficence. 117

think the worse of him because he is our enemy? He may have

mistaken our character and our dispositions; and if so, is he
more culpable for this than for any other mistake? Or if, on the
other hand, he has some substantial reason for disliking us, we
should either remove the cause, or submit to the dislike without
feeling aggrieved by it. At any rate we can obey the precept,
“Do good to them that hate you;” and this is the only way, and
an almost infallible way, in which the enmity may be overcome,
and superseded by relations of mutual kindness and friendship.

[151]
 Chapter XI.

Fortitude; Or Duties With Reference

To Unavoidable Evils And
Sufferings.
There are, in almost every prolonged human experience,
privations and sufferings to be endured, disappointments to
be submitted to, obstacles and difficulties to be surmounted
and overcome. From whatever source these elements of
experience proceed, even if from blind chance, or from
fate (which denotes the utterance or decree of arbitrary and
irresponsible power), the strong man will brace himself up to
bear them; the wise man will shape his conduct by them; the man
of lofty soul will rise above them. But the temper in which they
will be borne, yielded to, or surmounted, must be contingent on
the belief concerning them. If they are regarded as actual evils,
they will probably be endured with sullenness, or submitted to
with defiance and scorn, or surmounted with pride and self-
inflation. Even in the writings of the later Stoics, which abound
in edifying precepts of fortitude and courage under trial, there
is an undertone of defiance, as if the sufferer were contending
with a hostile force, and a constant tendency to extol and almost
deify the energy of soul which the good man displays in fighting
with a hard destiny. If, on the other hand, physical evils are
[152] regarded as wise and benign appointments of the Divine love
and fatherhood, the spirit in which they are borne and struggled
Section I. Patience. 119

against is characterized by tenderness, meekness, humility, trust,

and hope. It is instructive in this regard to read alternately the
Stoics and St. Paul, and to contrast their magnanimous, but grim
and stern resignation, with the jubilant tone in which, a hundred
times over, and with a vast variety of gladsome utterance, he
repeats the sentiment contained in those words, “As sorrowful,
yet always rejoicing.” As ours is the Christian theory as to the
(so-called) evils of human life, we shall recognize it in our
treatment of the several virtues comprehended under the general
title of Fortitude.

Section I.

Patience.16

Patience is incumbent on us, only under inevitable sufferings

or hardships, or under such as are incurred in the discharge of
manifest duty, or for the benefit of our fellow-men. Needless
sufferings or privations we are bound to shun or to escape, not
to bear. The caution and foresight by which they may be evaded [153]
hold an essential place among the duties of prudence. Nor does
reason or religion sanction self-imposed burdens or hardships of
any kind, whether in penance for wrong-doing, as a means of
purchasing the Divine favor, or as a mode of spiritual discipline.
16
The reader need not be told that patience and passion are derived from
different participles of the same verb. Patience comes from the present
participle, and fittingly denotes the spirit in which present suffering should be
met; while passion comes from the perfect or past participle, and as fittingly
denotes the condition ensuing upon any physical, mental, or moral affection,
induced from without, which has been endured without protest or resistance.
 120 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

Patience implies serenity, cheerfulness, and hopefulness,

under burdens and trials. It must be distinguished from apathy,
which is a temperament, not a virtue. There are some persons
whose sensibilities are so sluggish that they are incapable of keen
suffering, and of profound and lasting sorrow. We can hardly
call this a desirable temperament; for its capacity of enjoyment
is equally defective, and, as there is more happiness than misery
in almost every life, he whose susceptibility of both pain and
pleasure is quick and strong is, on the whole, the gainer thereby.
The serenity of patience requires vigorous self-command. It is
essential, first of all, to control, and as far as possible to suppress,
the outward tokens of pain and grief. They, like all modes of
utterance, deepen the feeling they express; while a firm and
self-contained bearing enhances the fortitude which it indicates.
Control must also be exercised over the thoughts, that they be
abstracted from the painful experience, and employed on themes
that will fill and task them. Mental industry is the best relief that
mere philosophy has for pain and sorrow; and though it certainly
is not a cure, it never fails to be of service as a palliative. Even
[154] when bodily distress or infirmity renders continuous thought
impossible, the effort of recollection, or the employment of the
mind in matters too trivial for its exercise in health, may relieve
the weariness and lighten the stress of suffering. Nor let devices
of this sort be deemed unworthy of a place even among duties;
for they are often essential means to ends of high importance.
They assert and maintain the rightful supremacy of the mind
over the body; they supersede that morbid brooding upon painful
experiences which generates either melancholy or querulousness;
and they leave in the moral nature an unobstructed entrance to
all soothing and elevating influences.
Cheerfulness in the endurance of pain and hardship must
result in great part from the belief. If I regard myself as
irresistibly subject to an automatic Nature, whose wheels may
bruise or crush me at any moment, I know not why or how I
Section I. Patience. 121

could be cheerful, even in such precarious health or prosperity as

might fall to my lot; and there could certainly be no reassuring
aspect to my adverse fortune. But if I believe that under a
fatherly Providence there can be no suffering without its ministry
of mercy, no loss without its greater gain within my reach and
endeavor, no hardship without its reflex benefit in inward growth
and energy, then I can take and bear the inevitable burdens of this
earthly life in the same spirit in which I often assume burdens not
imposed upon me from without, for the more than preponderant
benefit which I hope to derive from them. But if I have this faith
in a benignant Providence which will not afflict me uselessly, I [155]
am under obligation not to let my faith, if real, remain inactive
in my seasons of pain, loss, or grief. I am bound so to ponder on
my assured belief, and on such proofs of it as may lie in my past
experience, that it shall give its hue to my condition, its tone to
my thought, its direction to the whole current of my sentiment
and feeling. Thus may endurance be not only calm, but cheerful,
because pervaded by the conviction that at the heart of all that
seems evil there is substantial good.
Yet, it cannot be denied that there are life-long burdens and
griefs,—incurable illnesses, irretrievable losses, bereavements
that will never cease to be felt, and cannot be replaced.
Especially in advanced years there are infirmities, disabilities,
and privations, which cannot by any possibility have a resultant
revenue equivalent to what they take from us; for in old age the
growth of character is too slow to be worth the sacrifice which in
earlier life may be more than compensated by the consciousness
of spiritual enlargement and increase. How shall these burdens
be borne cheerfully? They cannot, unless they be also borne
hopefully. But if there be presented to the faith, beyond the
earthly life, a future, the passage into which is to be made the
easier by loss and sorrow here; if families are there to be reunited,
and void places in the affections filled again; if worthy hopes,
seemingly disappointed, are only postponed for a richer and
 122 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

[156] happier fulfilment,—there is in that future exhaustless strength

for solace and support under what must be endured here. Earthly
trial must seem light and momentary in view of perfect and
eternal happiness; and thus the hope that lays hold on an infinite
domain of being is coined into utilities for the daily needs of the
tried, suffering, afflicted, and age-bowed, supplying to patience
an element without which it cannot be made perfect.

Section II.

Submission.
There are events, seemingly adverse, which in themselves
are transient, and inflict no permanent discomfort, but which
necessitate the surrender of cherished expectations, the change
of favorite plans, it may be, the life-long abandonment of aims
and hopes that had held the foremost place in the anticipated
future. Here submission of some sort is a necessity. But the
submission may be querulous and repining; it may be bitter and
resentful; it may be stern and rigid. In the last of these types
only can there be any semblance of virtue; and this last can be
virtuous, only where inevitable events are attributed to Fate, and
not to Providence. But if a wise and kind Providence presides
over human affairs, its decrees are our directory. The very events
which hedge in, mark out our way. The tree which has its upward
[157] growth checked spreads its branches; that which is circumscribed
in its lateral expansion attains the greater height. The tendrils of
the vine are guided by the very obstacles placed in its way. Thus,
in human life, impassable barriers in one direction prescribe aims
and endeavors in a different direction. The things that we cannot
Section II. Submission. 123

do determine the things that we ought to do. The growth which

is impeded must give place to growth of a different type, and
to us undoubtedly more wholesome, more congenial with our
capacities, more conducive to our true well-being. What seem
obstacles may be supports, giving the best possible direction to
our active powers, and so training our desires and affections as
to lead to higher happiness and more substantial good than could
have otherwise been attained.
Submission, then, must be grounded in faith. The inevitable
must be to us the appointment of Omniscient Love. In our
childhood the very regimen and discipline that were least to our
taste proceeded often from the wisest counsels, and in due time
we acquiesced in them as judicious and kind, nor would we in
the retrospect have had them otherwise. As little as we then knew
what was best for our well-being in the nearer future, we may
now know as to what is best for us in a remote future, whether in
the present or in a higher state of being. All that remains for us is
acquiescence, cheerful and hopeful, in a Wisdom that cannot err,
in a Love which can will only the best of which we are capable.
Submission is not merely a passive, but equally an active [158]
virtue. Inevitable events impose imperative duties. In the
direction which they indicate there is work for us, of self-culture,
of kindness, of charity. Our characters can be developed, not
by yielding, however cheerfully, to what seem misfortunes, but
by availing ourselves of the opportunities which they present, in
place of those of which they have deprived us. When the way
we had first chosen is barred against us, we are not to lie still,
but to move onward with added diligence on the way that is thus
opened to us. If outward success is arrested and reverted, there
is only the more reason for improving the staple of our inward
being. If those dearest to us have passed beyond the reach of our
good offices, there are the more remote that may be brought near,
and made ours, by our beneficence. If our earthly life is rendered
desolate, the affections, hopes, and aims thus unearthed may by
 124 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

our spiritual industry and thrift be trained heavenward. All this is

included in full submission to the will of the Divine providence;
for that will is not our loss, disappointment, or suffering, but our
growth, by means of it, in quantity of mental and spiritual life, in
capacity of duty, and in the power of usefulness.

Section III.

Courage.
Patience, as its name imports, is a passive quality; Submission
[159] blends the passive and the active; while Courage is preëminently
an active virtue. Patience resigns itself to what must be endured;
submission conforms itself to what it gladly would, but cannot
reverse; courage resists what it cannot evade, surmounts what it
cannot remove, and declines no conflict in which it is honorable
to engage. It is obvious that the occasions for these virtues are
widely different. Patience has its place where calm and cheerful
endurance is the only resource; submission, where there must
be voluntary self-adaptation to altered circumstances; courage,
where there is threatened evil which strenuous effort can avert,
mitigate, or subdue.
Courage is a virtue, only when it is a necessity. There is
no merit in seeking danger, in exciting opposition, in courting
hostility. Indeed, conduct of this description more frequently
proceeds from persons who know themselves cowards and fear
to be thought so, than from those who are actually possessed of
courage. But there are perils, encounters, enmities, which cannot
by any possibility be avoided, and there are others which can be
avoided only by the sacrifice of principle, or by the surrender of
Section III. Courage. 125

opportunities for doing good, and which, therefore, to a virtuous

man are inevitable.
The physical courage, commonly so called, which is prompt
and fearless in the presence of imminent danger, or in armed
conflict with enemies, may be, or may not be, a virtue. It may
proceed from a mind too shallow and frivolous to appreciate the
worth of life or the magnitude of the peril that threatens it; it may, [160]
as often in the case of veteran soldiers, be the result of discipline
without the aid of principle; or it may depend wholly on intense
and engrossing excitement, so that he who would march fearlessly
at the head of a forlorn hope might quail before a solitary foe. But
if one be, in the face of peril, at the same time calm and resolute,
self-collected and firm, cautious and bold, fully aware of all that
he must encounter and unfalteringly brave in meeting it, such
courage is a high moral attainment. Its surest source is trust in
the Divine providence,—the fixed conviction that the inevitable
cannot be otherwise than of benignant purpose and ministry,
though that purpose may be developed and that ministry effected
only in a higher state of being. To this faith must be added a
strong sense of one's manhood, and of his superiority by virtue of
that manhood over all external surroundings and events. We are
conscious of a rightful supremacy over the outward world, and
deem it unworthy to succumb, without internecine resistance, to
any force by which we may be assailed, whether that force be a
power of nature or a wrongful assault from a fellow-man. It is
the presence of this consciousness that wins our admiration for
all genuine heroism, and the absence of it at the moment of need
that makes cowardice contemptible.
There is a moral courage required in pursuing our
legitimate course in life, or in discharging our manifest duty,
notwithstanding straitnesses, hindrances, obstacles, to which the [161]
feeble and timid could not but yield. The constituent elements of
this type of courage are precisely the same that are needed in the
encounter with physical peril. In both cases it is equally unmanly
 126 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

to succumb until we have resisted to the utmost. But while

physical courage can at best only insure our safety, moral courage
contributes essentially to the growth of mind and character; and
the larger the opportunity for its exercise, the greater will be
the mass of mind, the quantity of character, the power of duty
and of usefulness. Straitnesses develop richer resources than
they bar. Hindrances nurture hardihood of spirit in the struggle
against them, or in the effort to neutralize them. Obstacles, when
surmounted, give one a higher position than could be attained on
an unobstructed path. The school of difficulty is that in which
we have our most efficient training for eminence, whether of
capacity or of moral excellence. What are accounted inevitable
evils are, when met with courage, only benefits and blessings,
inasmuch as they bring into full and vigorous exercise the hardier
muscles and sinews of the inner man, to measure strength with
them or to rise above them.
Courage is needed in the profession and maintenance of
the true and the right, when denied, assailed, or vilipended.
Communities never move abreast in the progress of opinion.
There are always pioneer minds and consciences; and the men
who are in advance of their time must encounter obloquy at least,
[162] often persecution, loss, hardship, sometimes legal penalties
and disabilities. Under such circumstances, there are doubtless
many more that inwardly acknowledge the unpopular truth or
the contested right, than there are who are willing to avow and
defend their belief. Many are frightened into false utterance or
deceptive silence. But there must be in such minds a conscious
mendacity, fatal to their own self-respect, and in the highest
degree detrimental to their moral selfhood. It demands and at
the same time nurtures true greatness of soul to withstand the
current of general opinion, to defy popular prejudice, to make
one's self “of no reputation” in order to preserve his integrity
unimpaired. Therefore is it that, in the lapse of time, the very men
who have been held in the lowest esteem rise into eminence in
Section III. Courage. 127

the general regard, sometimes while they are still living, oftener
with a succeeding generation. Martyrs in their day, they receive
the crown of martyrdom when the work which they commenced
is consummated. The history of all the great reforms which have
been successive eras in the moral progress of Christendom is full
of names, once dishonored, now among the foremost of their
race.
This type of courage has, in less enlightened ages than our
own, been made illustrious by those who have sacrificed life
rather than deny or suppress beliefs which they deemed of
vital moment. It can hardly be anticipated that the civilized
world will recede so far into barbarism as to light again the [163]
death-flame of persecution; but it may be questioned whether the
chronic sacrifice of all which men most desire in life requires or
manifests less of heroism than in earlier times furnished victims
for the arena or the stake.
In the moral hierarchy the first rank is probably due to the
courage that inspires and sustains arduous and perilous
philanthropic enterprise. The martyr for opinion suffers or dies
rather than stain his soul with the positive guilt of falsehood;
while the philanthropist might evade toil and danger without
committing any actual sin, or making himself liable to censure
or disapproval either from God or man. In the former case,
hardship or danger is rendered inevitable by the felt necessity
of self-respect; in the latter, by the urgency of a love for man
equal or superior to the love for self. As examples of this
highest type of courage, it may suffice to name Howard, whose
labors for prison-reform were pursued at the well-known risk
and the ultimate cost of his life; Florence Nightingale and the
noble sisterhood inaugurated by her, who have won all the
untarnished and undisputed laurels of recent wars on both sides
of the Atlantic; and the Christian missionaries to savage tribes
and in pestilential climates, who have often gone to their work
with as clear a consciousness of deadly peril as if they had been
 128 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

on their way to a battle-field.

[164]
 Chapter XII.

Order; Or Duties As To Objects

Under One's Own Control.
There are many duties that are self-defined and self-limited.
Thus, the ordinary acts of justice and many of the charities of
daily life include in themselves the designation of time, place,
and measure. There are other duties, of equal obligation, which
admit of wide variance as to these particulars, but which can be
most worthily and efficiently performed only when reference is
had to them. There are, also, many acts, in themselves morally
indifferent, which acquire their moral character as right or wrong
solely from one or more of these particulars. Thus recreations that
are innocent and fitting on Saturday, may be inconsistent with
the proprieties of Sunday; conversation and conduct perfectly
befitting the retirement of home may be justly offensive in a place
of public concourse; or there may be great guilt in the excessive
use of that which used in moderation may be blameless, fitting,
and salutary. [165]

Section I.

Time.
 130 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

A life-time is none too long for a life's work. Hence the fitness,
and therefore the duty, of a careful economy of time. This
economy can be secured only by a systematic arrangement of
one's hours of labor, relaxation, and rest, and the assignment to
successive portions of the day, week, or year, of their appropriate
uses. The amount of time wasted, even by an industrious man
who has no method or order in his industry, bears a very large
proportion to the time profitably employed. In the needlessly
frequent change of occupations, there is at each beginning and
ending a loss of the working power, which can neither start on
a new career at full speed, nor arrest itself without previous
slackening. This waste is made still greater by the suspense or
vacillation of purpose of those who not only have no settled plans
of industry, but often know not what to do, or are liable, so soon
as they are occupied in one way, to feel themselves irresistibly
drawn in a different direction.
But in the distribution of time a man should be the master,
not the slave of his system. The regular work and the actual
duty of the moment do not always coincide. Due care for health,
the opportunity for earned and needed recreation, the claims
of charity, courtesy, and hospitality, in fine, the immediate
[166] urgency of any duty selfward, manward, or Godward, should
always take precedence of routine-work however wisely planned.
Obstinate adherence to system may lead to more and greater
criminal omissions of duty than would be incurred, even in the
spasmodic industry which takes its impulse from the passing
moment. It must be remembered that timeliness is the essential
element of right and obligation in many things that ought to
be done, especially in all forms of charity, alike in great
services, and in those lesser amenities and kindnesses which
contribute so largely to the charm of society and the happiness
of domestic life. There are many good offices which, performed
too late, were better left undone,—courtesies which, postponed,
are incivilities,—attentions which, out of season, are needless
Section I. Time. 131

and wearisome.
Every day, every waking hour has its own duty, either
its special work, or its due portion of one's normal life-work.
Procrastination is, therefore, as unwise as it is immoral, or rather,
it is immoral because it is unwise and unfitting. The morrow has
its own appropriate duties; and if to-day's work be thrown into
it, the massing of two days' good work into one exceeds ordinary
ability. The consequence is, either that both days' works are
imperfectly performed, or that part of what fitly belongs to the
morrow is pushed farther on, and the derangement of duty made
chronic. Thus there are persons who are always in arrears with
their engagements and occupations,—in chase, as it were, after
duties which they never lose from sight, and never overtake. [167]

Hardly less grave, though less common, is the error of those

who anticipate duty, and do to-day what they ought to do to-
morrow. The work thus anticipated may be superseded, or may
be performed under better auspices and with fewer hindrances
in its own time; while it can hardly fail to interfere injuriously
with the fit employment or due relaxation of the passing day.
Moreover, the habit of thus performing work before its time at
once betokens and intensifies an uneasy, self-distrusting frame
of mind, unfavorable to vigorous effort, and still more so to the
quiet enjoyment of needed rest and recreation. There are those,
who are perpetually haunted by the forecast shadows, not only
of fixed, but of contingent obligations and duties,—shadows
generally larger than the substance, and often wholly destitute of
substance.
Punctuality17 denotes the most scrupulous precision as to
time,—exactness to a moment in the observance of all times that
can be designated or agreed upon. In matters with which we
alone are concerned, we undoubtedly have of right, and may
often very fittingly exercise, the dispensing power. Thus, in the
17
From punctum, a point.
 132 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

arrangement of our own pursuits, the clock may measure and

direct our industry, without binding us by its stroke. It is often
of more consequence that we finish what is almost done, than
that we change our work because the usual hour for a change
[168] has arrived. But where others are concerned, rigid punctuality
is an imperative duty. A fixed time for an assembly, a meeting
of a committee or board of trust, or a business interview, is a
virtual contract into which each person concerned has entered
with every other, and the strict rules that apply to contracts of all
kinds are applicable here. Failure in punctuality is dishonesty. It
involves the theft of time, which to some men is money's worth,
to others is worth more than money. It ought not to surprise us if
one wantonly or habitually negligent in this matter should prove
himself oblivious of other and even more imperative obligations;
for the dullness of conscience and the obscure sense of right,
indicated by the frequent breach of virtual contracts as to time,
betoken a character too feeble to maintain its integrity against
any strong temptation.

Section II.

Place.
The trite maxim, A place for everything, and everything in its
place, so commends itself to the sense of fitness, as hardly to need
exposition or enforcement; yet while no maxim is more generally
admitted, scarce any is so frequently violated in practice. In duty,
the elements of time and place are intimately blended. Disorder
in place generates derangement in time. The object which is out
[169] of place can be found only by the waste of time; and the most
Section II. Place. 133

faithful industry loses a large part of its value when its materials
are wanting where they ought to be, and must be sought where
they ought not to be.
Apart from considerations of utility, order is an æsthetic duty.
It is needed to satisfy the sense of beauty. Its violation offends
the eye, insults the taste. The æsthetic nature craves and claims
culture. It has abundant provision made for it in external nature;
but so large a part of life must be passed within doors, at least in a
climate like ours, that it is starved and dwarfed, if there be not in
interior arrangements some faint semblance of the symmetry and
harmony of the universe. To effect this needs neither abundance
nor costliness of material. A French man or woman will charm the
eye at a cost which in England would be represented by bare and
squalid poverty. A Parisian shop-window will make with a few
francs' worth of goods an exhibition of artistical beauty which
might challenge the most fastidious criticism. These effects
are produced solely by prime reference to fitness of place,—to
orderly arrangement,—to a symmetry which all can understand,
and which any one might copy. Our very capacity of receiving
gratification from this source is the measure of our duty in this
regard. If with the simplest materials we can give pleasure to the
soul through the eye by merely assigning its fit place to every
object, order is among the plainest dictates of beneficence.
Order is essential to domestic comfort and well-being, and [170]
thus to all the virtues which have their earliest and surest nurture
in domestic life. There are homes at once affluent and joyless,
groaning with needless waste and barren of needed comfort,
in which the idea of repose seems as irrelevant as Solomon's
figure of lying down on the top of a mast, and all from a
pervading spirit of disorder. In such dwellings there is no love of
home. The common house is a mere lodging and feeding place.
Society is sought elsewhere, pleasure elsewhere; and for the
young and easily impressible there is the strongest inducement to
those modes of dissipation in which vice conceals its grossness
 134 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

behind fair exteriors and under attractive forms. On the other

hand, the well-ordered house affords to its inmates the repose,
comfort, and enjoyment which they crave and need, and for those
whose characters are in the process of formation may neutralize
allurements to evil which might else be irresistible.

Section III.

Measure.
There are many objects, as to which the question of duty is
a question of more or less. To this class belong not only
food and drink, but all forms of luxury, indulgence, recreation,
and amusement. In all these the choice lies between excess,
abstinence, and temperance. The tendency to excess is intensely
[171] strong, when not restrained by prudence or principle. This
tendency is by no means confined to the appetite for intoxicating
liquors, though modern usage has restricted to excess in this
particular the term intemperance, which properly bears a much
more extended signification. There is reason to believe that there
is fully as much intemperance in food as in drink, and with at least
equally ruinous consequences as to capacity, character, health,
and life,—with this difference only, that gluttony stupefies and
stultifies, while drunkenness maddens; and that the glutton is
merely a dead weight on the community, while the drunkard
is an active instrument of annoyance and peril. There are
probably fewer who sink into an absolutely beastly condition
by intemperance in food than by intemperance in drink; but of
persons who do not expose themselves to open scandal, those
whose brains are muddled, whose sensibilities are coarsened,
Section III. Measure. 135

and whose working power is impaired by over-eating, are more

numerous than those in whom similar effects are produced by
over-free indulgence in intoxicating drinks. Intemperance in
amusements, also, is not uncommon, and would undoubtedly be
more prevalent than it is, were not the inevitable necessity of
labor imposed on most persons from a very early period. In this
matter the limit between temperance and excess is aptly fixed by
the term recreation, as applied to all the gay and festive portions
of life. Re-creation is making over, that is, replacing the waste of
tissue, brain-power, and physical and mental energy occasioned
by hard work. Temperance permits the most generous indulgence [172]
of sport, mirth, and gayety that can be claimed as needful or
conducive to this essential use, but excludes all beyond this
measure.
Abstinence from all forms of luxury and recreation, and
from food and drink beyond the lowest demands of subsistence,
has, under various cultures, been regarded as a duty, as an
appropriate penance for sin, as a means of spiritual growth, as
a token of advanced excellence. This notion had its origin in
the dualistic philosophy or theology of the East. It was believed
that the sovereignty of the universe was divided between the
semi-omnipotent principles of good and evil, and that the earth
and the human body were created by the evil principle,—by
Satan or his analogue. Hence it was inferred that the evil
principle could be abjured and defied, and the good principle
propitiated in no way so effectually as by renouncing the world
and mortifying the body. Fasting, as a religious observance,
originated in this belief. It was imported from the East. The
Hebrew fasts were not established by Moses; they were evidently
borrowed from Babylon, and seem to have been regarded with
no favor by the prophets. The Founder of Christianity prescribed
no fast, nor have we any reason to believe that his immediate
disciples regarded abstinence as a duty. Christian asceticism in
all its forms is, like the Jewish fasts, of Oriental origin, and
 136 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

had its first developments in close connection with those hybrids

[173] of Christianity and Oriental philosophy of which the dualism
already mentioned forms a prominent feature.
With regard to all objects of appetite, desire, and enjoyment,
temperance is evidently fitting, and therefore a duty, unless
there be specific reasons for abstinence. Temperance demands
and implies moral activity. In the temperate man the appetites,
desires, and tastes have their continued existence, and need
vigilant and wise control, so that he has always work to do, a
warfare to wage; and as conflict with the elements gives vigor to
the body, so does conflict with the body add strength continually
to the moral nature. The ascetic may have a hard struggle at the
outset; but his aim is to extirpate his imagined enemies in the
bodily affections, and when these are completely mortified, or put
to death, there remains no more for him to do, and moral idleness
and lethargy ensue. Simon Stylites, who spent thirty-seven years
on pillars of different heights, had probably stupefied his moral
faculties and sensibilities as effectually as he had crushed to
death the appetites and cravings of the body. It must not be
forgotten that the body no less than the soul is of God's building,
and that in his purpose all the powers and capacities of the body
are good in their place and uses, and therefore to be controlled
and governed, not destroyed or suppressed. The mediæval saint,
feeding on the offal of the streets, was unwittingly committing
sacrilege, by degrading and imbruting an appetite for which God
[174] had provided decent and wholesome nutriment.
Temperance is better than abstinence, also, because the
moderate use of the objects of desire is a source of refining and
elevating influences. It is not without meaning that, in common
speech, the possession or loss of the senses is made synonymous
with mental sanity or derangement. By the temperate gratification
of the senses the mind is sustained in its freshness, vigor, and
serenity; while when they are perverted by excess, impaired
by age, or deadened by disease, in that same proportion the
Section III. Measure. 137

mental powers are distracted, enfeebled, or benumbed. Taste,

the faculty through which we become conversant with the whole
realm of beauty, and than which devotion has no more efficient
auxiliary, derives its name from what the ascetic deems the
lowest animal enjoyment, which, however, has its range of the
very highest ministries. The table is the altar of home-love
and of hospitality, and there are clustered around it unnumbered
courtesies, kindnesses, and charities that make a large part of the
charm and joy of life. So far is thoughtfulness for its graceful and
generous service from indicating a low type of character, that
there is hardly any surer index of refinement and elegant culture
than is furnished by the family meal. Similar remarks apply to
the entire range of pleasurable objects and experiences. While
there are none of them in which excess is safe, they all, when
enjoyed in moderation, stimulate the mental powers, develop and
train the æsthetic faculty, and multiply beneficial relations alike
with nature and with society. [175]
Temperance, rather than abstinence, is needed on grounds
connected with social economy. Labor for the mere necessaries
of life occupies hardly a tithe of human industry. A nation of
ascetics would be a nation of idlers. It is the demand for objects of
enjoyment, taste, luxury, that floats ships, dams rivers, stimulates
invention, feeds prosperity, and creates the wealth of nations. It
is only excess and extravagance that sustain and aggravate social
inequalities, wrongs, wants, and burdens; while moderate, yet
generous use oils the springs and speeds the wheels of universal
industry, progress, comfort, and happiness.
But there are cases in which abstinence, rather than
temperance, is a duty.
Past excess may render temperance hardly possible. From
the derangement consequent upon excess, an appetite may lose
the capacity of healthy exercise. In such a case, as we would
amputate a diseased and useless limb, we should suppress the
appetite which we can no longer control. Physiological researches
 138 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

have shown that the excessive use of intoxicating drinks, when

long continued, produces an organic condition, in which the
slightest indulgence is liable to excite a craving so intense as to
transcend the control of the will.
Inherited proclivities may, in like manner, render temperance
so difficult as to make abstinence a duty. It is conceivable that
a nation or a community may, by the prevalence of excess in
past generations, be characterized by so strong a tendency to
[176] intemperance as to render general abstinence a prerequisite to
general temperance.
Abstinence may also become a duty, if to many around us our
example in what we may enjoy innocently would be ensnaring
and perilous. The recreation, harmless in itself, which by long
abuse has become a source of corruption, it may be our duty to
forego. The indulgence, safe for us, which would be unsafe for
our associates, it may be incumbent on us to resign. The food,
the drink which would make our table a snare to our guests, we
may be bound to refrain from, though for ourselves there be in
it no latent evil or lurking danger. This, however, is a matter in
which each person must determine his duty for himself alone,
and in which no one is authorized to legislate for others. It may
seem to a conscientious man a worthy enterprise to vindicate and
rescue from its evil associations an amusement or indulgence
in itself not only harmless, but salutary; and there may be an
equally strong sense of right on both sides of a question of social
morality falling under this head. The joyous side of life must be
maintained. The young, sanguine, and happy will at all events
have recreations, games, festivities, and of these there is not a
single element, material, or feature that has not been abused,
perverted, or invested with associations offensive to a pure moral
taste. To disown and oppose them all in the name of virtue, is
to prescribe a degree of abstinence which can have the assent
[177] of those only who have outlived the capacity of enjoyment.
The more judicious course is to favor, or at least to tolerate such
Section IV. Manners. 139

modes of indulgence as may for the present be the least liable

to abuse, or such as may in prospect be the safest in their moral
influence, and by sanctioning these to render more emphatic and
efficient the disapproval and rejection of such as are intrinsically
wrong and evil.

Section IV.

Manners.
The ancients had but one word for manners and morals. It
might be well if the same were the case with us,—yet with this
essential difference, that while they degraded morals to the level
of manners, a higher culture would lead us to raise manners to
the level of morals. The main characteristics of good manners
are comprised in the three preceding Sections. They are the
observance, in one's demeanor and conduct toward others, of the
fitnesses of time and place, and of the due and graceful mean
between overwrought, extravagant, or fantastic manifestations
of regard on the one hand, and coldness, superciliousness,
or indifference on the other. Courtesies, like more substantial
kindnesses, are neutralized by delay, and, when slow, seem forced
and reluctant. Attentions, which in their place are gratifying, may,
if misplaced, occasion only mortification and embarrassment, as
when civilities befitting interior home-life are rehearsed for the [178]
public eye and ear. Nor is there any department of conduct in
which excess or deficiency is more painfully felt,—a redundance
of compliments and assiduities tending to silence and abash the
recipient, while their undue scanting inflicts a keen sense of
slight, neglect, and injury.
 140 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

Politeness must, indeed, in order even to appear genuine,

be the expression of sincere kindness. There is no pretence so
difficult to maintain as the false show of genial and benevolent
feeling. The mask cannot be so fitted to the face as not to betray
its seams and sutures. Yet kindness is not of itself politeness.
Its spontaneous expressions may be rude and awkward; or they
may take forms not readily understood and appreciated. There
are conventional modes of polite demeanor no less than of
courteous speech. These modes may have no intrinsic fitness,
yet they acquire a fitness from their long and general use; and
while the mere repetition of stereotyped formulas whether in
word or deportment is justly offensive, he who would have
his politeness recognized and enjoyed must beware lest he
depart too widely from the established sign-language of society.
There is a brusquerie often underlying hearty kindness and good
fellowship, which at the outset pains, wounds, and repels those
brought within its sphere, and which the most intimate friends
endure and excuse rather than approve.
Politeness is to be regarded as an indispensable duty. It
[179] is believed that from its neglect or violation more discomfort
ensues than from any other single cause, and in some circles and
conditions of society more than from all other causes combined.
There are neighborhoods and communities that are seldom
disturbed by grave offences against the criminal law, but none
which can insure itself against the affronts, enmities, wounded
sensibilities, rankling grievances, occasioned by incivility and
rudeness. Moreover, there are persons entirely free from vice,
perhaps ostentatious in the qualities which are the opposites
of vices, and not deficient in charitable labors and gifts, who
cultivate discourtesy, are acrid or bitter in their very deeds of
charity, and carry into every society a certain porcupine selfhood,
which makes their mere presence annoying and baneful. Such
persons, besides the suffering they inflict on individuals, are of
unspeakable injury to their respective circles or communities, by
Section V. Government. 141

making their very virtues unlovely, and piety, if they profess

it, hateful. On the other hand, there is no truer benefactor
to society—if the creation of happiness be the measure of
benefit—than the genuine gentleman or gentlewoman, who adds
grace to virtue, politeness to kindness; who under the guidance
of a sincere fellow-feeling, studies the fitnesses of speech and
manner, in civility and courtesy endeavors to render to all their
due, and in the least details that can affect another's happiness,
does carefully and conscientiously all that the most fastidious
sensibility could claim or desire.

[180]

Section V.

Government.
The establishment and preservation of order is the prime
and essential function of government; the prevention and
punishment of crime, its secondary, incidental, perhaps even
temporary use. In a perfect state of society, government would
still be necessary; for it would be only by the observance of
common and mutual designations of time, place, and measure,
that each individual member of society could enjoy the largest
liberty and the fullest revenue from objects of desire, compatible
with the just claims and rights of others. These benefits can, under
no conceivable condition in which finite beings can be placed,
be secured except by system, under a central administration,
and with the submission of individual wills and judgments to
constituted and established authority. A bad government, then, is
better than none; for a bad government can exist only by doing a
 142 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

part of its appropriate work, while in a state of anarchy the whole

of that work is left undone and unattempted.
Obedience to government is, then, fitting, and therefore a
duty, independently of all considerations as to the wisdom, or
even the justice of its decrees or statutes. If they are unwise,
they yet are rules to which the community can conform itself,
and by which its members can make their plans and govern
[181] their expectations, while lawlessness is the negation alike of
guidance for the present and of confidence in the future. If they
are unjust, they yet do less wrong and to fewer persons, than
would be done by individual and sporadic attempts to evade or
neutralize them. Nay, unwise and inequitable laws, to which
the habits and the industrial relations of a people have adjusted
themselves, are to be preferred to vacillating legislation, though
in a generally right direction. Laws that affect important interests
should be improved only with reference to the virtual pledges
made by previous legislation, and so as to guard the interests
involved against the injurious effects of new and revolutionary
measures. The tariff regulations of our own country will illustrate
the bearing of this principle. It forms no part of our present plan
to discuss the mooted questions of free trade and protection. But
in the confession of even extreme partisans on either side, the
capital and industry of our people could never have suffered so
much from any one tariff of duties, however injudicious, as they
suffered for a series of years from sudden changes of policy,
by which investments that had been invited by the legislation
of one Congress were made fruitless by the action of the next,
and manufactures stimulated into rapid growth by high protective
duties, were arrested and often ruined by their sudden repeal. The
stability of laws is obviously a higher good than their conformity
to the theoretical views of the more enlightened citizens. Except
[182] under a despotism, laws are virtually an expression of the opinion
or will of the majority; and laws which by any combination of
favoring circumstances are enacted in advance of the general
Section V. Government. 143

opinion, are always liable to speedy repeal, with a double series

of the injurious consequences which can hardly fail to ensue
immediately on any change.
But are there no limits to obedience? Undoubtedly there are.
A bad law is to be obeyed for the sake of order; an immoral law
is to be disobeyed for the sake of the individual conscience; and
of the moral character of a particular law, or of action under it,
the individual conscience is the only legitimate judge. Where the
law of the land and absolute right are at variance, the citizen is
bound, not only to withhold obedience, but to avow his belief,
and to give it full expression in every legitimate form and way, by
voice and pen, by private influence and through the ballot-box.
But in the interest of the public order, it is his duty to confine
his opposition to legal and constitutional methods, to refrain
from factious and seditious resistance, to avoid, if possible, the
emergency in which disobedience would become his duty, and
in case his conscience constrains him to disobedience, still to
show his respect for the majesty of law by quietly submitting
to its penalty. The still recent history of our country furnishes
a case in point. By the Fugitive-Slave Law—which the Divine
providence, indeed, repealed without waiting for the action of
Congress—the private citizen who gave shelter, sustenance, or
comfort to a fugitive slave; who, knowing his hiding-place, [183]
omitted to divulge it, or who, when called upon to assist in
arresting him, refused his aid, was made liable to a heavy fine
and a long imprisonment. Now as to this law, it was obviously the
duty of a citizen who regarded the slave as entitled to the rights
of a man, to seek its repeal by all constitutional methods within
his power. It was equally his duty to refrain from all violent
interference with the functionaries charged with its execution,
and to avoid, if possible, all collision with the government. But
if, without his seeking, a fugitive slave had been cast upon his
humane offices, the question then would have arisen whether he
should obey God or man; and to this question he could have
 144 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

had but one answer. Yet his obedience to God would have
lacked its crowning grace, if he had not meekly yielded to the
penalty for his disobedience to the law of the land. It was by this
course that the primitive Christians attested their loyalty at once
to God and to “the powers that be,” which were “ordained of
God.” They refused obedience to the civil authorities in matters
in which their religious duty was compromised; but they neither
resisted nor evaded the penalty for their disobedience. Similar
was the course of the Quakers in England and America almost
down to our own time. They were quiet and useful citizens,
performing the same functions with their fellow-citizens, so far
as their consciences permitted, and, where conscience interposed
its veto, taking patiently the distraining of their goods, and the
[184] imprisonment of their bodies, until, by their blameless lives and
their meek endurance, they won from the governments both of
the mother country and of the United States, amnesty for their
conscientious scruples.
There may be a state of society in which it becomes the
duty of good citizens to assume an illegal attitude, and to
perform illegal acts, in the interest of law and order. If those
who are legally intrusted with executive and judicial offices are
openly, notoriously, and persistently false to their trusts, to such
a degree as to derange and subvert the social order which it is
their function to maintain, good citizens, if they have the power,
have undoubtedly the right to displace them, and to institute a
provisional government for the temporary emergency. A case
of this kind occurred a few years ago in San Francisco. The
entire government of the city had for a series of years been
under the control of ruffians and miscreants, and force and fraud
had rendered the ballot-box an ineffectual remedy. No law-
abiding citizen deemed his life or property safe; gross outrages
were committed with impunity; and thieves and murderers alone
had the protection of the municipal authorities. Despairing of
legal remedy, the best citizens of all parties organized themselves
Section V. Government. 145

under the direction of a Committee of Safety, forcibly deposed the

municipal magistrates and judges, brought well-known criminals
to trial, conviction, and punishment, reëstablished the integrity
of suffrage, and resigned their power to functionaries lawfully
elected, under whom and their successors the city has enjoyed a [185]
degree of order, tranquillity, and safety at least equal to that of
any other great city on the continent.
The right of revolution undoubtedly is inherent in a national
body politic; but it is an extreme right, and is to be exercised only
under the most urgent necessity. Its conditions cannot be strictly
defined, and its exercise can, perhaps, be justified only by its
results. A constitutional government can seldom furnish occasion
for violent revolutionary measures; for every constitution has its
own provisions for legal amendment, and the public sentiment
ripe for revolution can hardly fail to be strong enough to carry
the amendments which it craves, through the legal processes,
which, if slow and cumbrous, are immeasurably preferable to the
employment of force and the evils of civil war. On the other hand,
a despotic or arbitrary government may admit of abrogation only
by force; and if its administration violates private rights, imposes
unrighteous burdens and disabilities, suppresses the development
of the national resources, and supersedes the administration of
justice or the existence of equitable relations between class and
class or between man and man, the people—the rightful source
and arbiter of government—has manifestly the right to assert
its own authority, and to substitute a constitution and rulers of
its own choice for the sovereignty which has betrayed its trust.
Under similar oppression, the same right unquestionably exists
in a remote colony, or in a nation subject by conquest to a
foreign power. If that power refuses the rights and privileges [186]
of subjects to a people over which it exercises sovereignty, and
governs it in its own imagined interests, with a systematic and
persistent disregard to the well-being of the people thus governed,
resistance is a right, and may become a duty. In fine, the function
 146 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

of government is the maintenance of just and beneficent order;

a government forfeits its rights when it is false to this function;
and the rights thus forfeited revert to the misgoverned people.

[187]
 Chapter XIII.

Casuistry.
Casuistry is the application of the general principles of morality
to individual cases in which there is room for question as to duty.
The question may be as to the obligation or the rightfulness of a
particular act, as to the choice between two alternative courses, as
to the measure or limit of a recognized duty, or as to the grounds
of preference when there seems to be a conflict of duties. A
large proportion of these cases disappear under any just view of
moral obligation. Most questions of conscience have their origin
in deficient conscientiousness. He who is determined to do the
right, the whole right, and nothing but the right, is seldom at a
loss to know what he ought to do. But when the aim is to evade
all difficult duties which can be omitted without shame or the
clear consciousness of wrong, and to go as close as possible to
the boundary line between good and evil without crossing it, the
questions that arise are often perplexing and complicated, and
they are such as, in the interest of virtue, may fittingly remain
unanswered. There are always those whose aim is, not to attain
any definite, still less any indefinitely high, standard of goodness,
but to be saved from the penal consequences of wrong-doing; [188]
and there are even (so-called) religious persons, and teachers too,
with whom this negative indemnity from punishment fills out the
whole meaning of the sacred and significant term salvation. It
must be confessed that questions which could emanate only from
such minds, furnish a very large part of the often voluminous
and unwieldy treatises on casuistry that have come down to us
 148 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

from earlier times, especially of those of the Jesuit moralists,

whose chief endeavor is to lay out a border-path just outside the
confines of acknowledged wrong and evil.
Yet there are cases in which the most conscientious persons
may be in doubt as to the right. We can here indicate only the
general principles on which such cases are to be decided, with a
very few specific illustrations.
The question of duty is often a question, not of principle,
but of fact. It is the case, the position and relations of the
persons or objects concerned, that we do not fully understand.
For instance, when a new appeal is made for our charitable aid,
in labor or money, the question is not whether it is our duty to
assist in a work of real beneficence, but whether for the proposed
object, and under the direction of those who make the appeal,
our labor or money will be lucratively invested in the service
of humanity. There are, certainly, benevolent associations and
enterprises for the very noblest ends, whose actual utility is open
[189] to the gravest doubt. It is sometimes difficult even to determine
a question of justice or equity, simply because the circumstances
of the case, so far as we can understand them, do not define the
right. Instances of this class might be multiplied; but they are
all instances in which there is no obscurity as to our obligation
or duty, and therefore no question for moral casuistry. We are,
however, obviously bound, by considerations of fitness, to seek
the fullest information within our power in every case in which
we are compelled to act, or see fit to act; nor can we regard
action without knowledge, even though the motive be virtuous,
as either safe or blameless.
The measure or limit of duty is with many conscientious
persons a serious question. Here an exact definition is hardly
possible, and a generous liberty may be given to individual taste
or judgment; yet considerations of fitness set bounds to that
liberty. Thus direct and express self-culture is a duty incumbent
on all, yet in which diversity of inclination may render very
Chapter XIII. Casuistry. 149

different degrees of diligence equally fitting and right; but all

self-centred industry is fittingly limited by domestic, social, and
civic obligations. Thus, also, direct acts of beneficence are
obviously incumbent on all; but the degree of self-sacrifice for
beneficent ends need not, nay, ought not to be the same for every
one; and while we hold in the highest admiration those who
make the entire surrender of all that they have and are to the
service of mankind, we have no reason to scant our esteem for
those who are simply kind and generous, while they at the same
time labor, spend, or save for their own benefit. Indeed, the [190]
world has fully as much need of the latter as of the former. Were
the number of self-devoting philanthropists over-large, a great
deal of the necessary business and work of life would be left
undone; and did self-denying givers constitute a very numerous
body, the dependent and mendicant classes would be much more
numerous than they are; while the withdrawal of expenditure
for personal objects would paralyze industrial enterprise, and
arrest the creation of that general wealth which contributes to
the general comfort and happiness, and the accumulation of
those large fortunes which are invaluable as safety-funds and
movement-funds for the whole community.
There are cases in which there is manifestly a conflict of
duties. This most frequently occurs between prudence and
beneficence. Up to a certain point they coincide. No prudent man
will suffer himself to contract unsocial, or selfish, or miserly
habits, or to neglect the ordinary good offices and common
charities of life. But is one bound to transcend the limits
of prudence, and, without any specific grounds of personal
obligation, to incur loss, hardship, or peril, in behalf of another
person? One is no doubt bound to do all that he could reasonably
expect from another, were their positions reversed; but is it his
duty to do more than this? In answer, it must be admitted that
he who in such a case suffers prudence to limit his beneficence
has done all that duty absolutely requires; but, in proportion to
 150 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

[191] the warmth of his benevolence and the loftiness of his spirit
and character, he will find himself constrained to transcend this
limit, and to sacrifice prudence to beneficence. Thus—to take
an instance from a class of events by no means infrequent—if
I see a man in danger of drowning, it is obviously my duty to
do all that I can do for his rescue without putting my own life
in jeopardy. But I owe him no more than this. My own life
is precious to me and to my family, and I have a right so to
regard it. I shall not deserve censure or self-reproach, if I decline
exposing myself to imminent peril. Yet if I have the generosity
and the courage which belong to a truly noble nature, I shall not
content myself with doing no more than this,—I shall hazard my
own safety if there is reason to hope that my efforts may have a
successful issue; and in so doing I shall perform an act of heroic
virtue. The same principle will apply to exposure, danger, and
sacrifice of every kind, incurred for the safety, relief, or benefit
of others. We transgress no positive law of right, when we omit
doing for others more than we could rightfully expect were we
in their place. Prudence in such a case is our right. But it is a
right which it is more noble to surrender than to retain; and the
readiness with which and the degree in which we are willing to
surrender it, may be taken as a fair criterion of our moral growth
and strength.
Under the title of Justice, with the broad scope which we have
given to it, there may be an apparent conflict of duties, and there
[192] are certain obvious laws of precedence which may cover all such
cases. We should first say that our obligations to the Supreme
Being have a paramount claim above all duties to inferior beings,
had we not reason to believe that God is in no way so truly
worshipped and served as by acts of justice and mercy to his
children. The Divine Teacher has given us to understand, not
that there is no time or place too sacred for charity, but that holy
times and places have their highest consecration in the love to
man which love to God inspires.
Chapter XIII. Casuistry. 151

Toward men, it hardly needs to be said that justice (in

the limited and ordinary acceptation of the word) has the
precedence of charity. Indeed, were it not for the prevalence of
injustice—individual, social, and civic—there would hardly be
any scope for the active exercise of charity. Want comes almost
wholly from wrong. Were justice universal, that is, were the
rights and privileges which fitly belong to men as men, extended
to and made available by all classes and conditions of men, there
would still be great inequalities of wealth and of social condition;
but abject and squalid poverty could hardly exist. In almost every
individual instance, the withholding or delay of justice tends
more or less directly toward the creation of the very evils which
charity relieves. No amount of generosity, then, can palliate
injustice, or stand as a substitute for justice.
As regards the persons to whom we owe offices of kindness or
charity, it is obvious that those related to us by consanguinity
or affinity have the first claim. These relations have all the [193]
elements of a natural alliance for mutual defence and help; and
it is impossible that their essential duties should be faithfully
discharged and their fitnesses duly observed, without creating
sympathies that in stress of need will find expression in active
charity. In the next rank we may fittingly place our benefactors,
if their condition be such as to demand a return for their kind
offices in our behalf. Nearness in place may be next considered;
for the very fact that the needs of our neighbors are or may be
within our cognizance, commends them especially to our charity,
and enables us to be the more judicious and effective in their
relief. Indeed, in smaller communities, where the dwellings of
the rich and of the poor are interspersed, a general recognition of
the claims of neighborhood on charity would cover the field of
active beneficence with an efficiency attainable in no other way,
and at a greatly diminished cost of time and substance. There
is yet another type of neighborhood, consecrated to our reverent
observance by the parable of the Good Samaritan. There are from
 152 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

time to time cases of want and suffering brought, without our

seeking, under our immediate regard,—cast, as it were, directly
upon our kind offices. The person thus commended to us is, for
the time, our nearest neighbor, nay, our nearest kinsman, and the
very circumstances which have placed him in this relation to us,
make him fittingly the foremost object of our charity.
[194] The question sometimes presents itself whether we shall
bestow an immediate, yet transient benefit, or a more remote,
but permanent good. If the two are incompatible, and the former
is not a matter of absolute necessity, the latter is to be preferred.
Thus remunerative employment is much more beneficial than
alms to an able-bodied man, and it is better that he suffer some
degree of straitness till he can earn a more comfortable condition,
than that he be first made to feel the dependence of pauperism.
Yet if his want be entire and urgent, the delay of immediate
relief is the part of cruelty. On similar grounds, beneficence
which embraces a class of cases or persons is to be preferred to
particular acts of kindness to individuals. Thus it seems harsh to
refuse alms to an unknown street beggar; but as such relief gives
shelter to a vast amount of fraud, idleness, and vice, it is much
better that we should sustain, by contributions proportioned to
our ability, some system by which cases of actual need, and
such only, can be promptly and adequately cared for, and that
we then—however reluctantly—refuse our alms to applicants of
doubtful merit.

[195]
 Chapter XIV.

Ancient History Of Moral

Philosophy.
The numerous ethical systems that have had currency in earlier or
later times, may be divided into two classes,—the one embracing
those which make virtue a means; the other, those which make
it an end. According to the former, virtue is to be practised
for the good that will come of it; according to the latter, for
its own sake, for its intrinsic excellence. These classes have
obvious subdivisions. The former includes both the selfish and
the utilitarian theory; while the latter embraces a wide diversity
of views as to the nature, the standard, and the criterion of
virtue, according as it is believed to consist in conformity to the
fitness of things, in harmony with an unsophisticated taste, in
accordance with the interior moral sense, or in obedience to the
will of God. There are, also, border theories, which blend, or
rather force into juxtaposition, the ideas that underlie the two
classes respectively.
It is proposed, in the present chapter, to give an outline of the
history of ethical philosophy in Greece and Rome, or rather,
in Greece; for Rome had no philosophy that was not born in
Greece.
Socrates was less a moral philosopher than a preacher of [196]
virtue. Self-ordained as a censor and reformer, he directed his
invective and irony principally against the Sophists, whose chief
characteristic as to philosophy seems to have been the denial
 154 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

of objective truth, and thus, of absolute and determinate right.

Socrates, in contrast with them, seeks to elicit duty from the
occasions for its exercise, making his collocutors define right
and obligation from the nature of things as presented to their own
consciousness and reflection. Plato represents him, whenever
a moral question is under discussion, as probing the very heart
of the case, and drawing thence the response as from a divine
oracle.
Plato held essentially the same ground, as may be seen in
his identifying the True, the Beautiful, and the Good; but it is
impossible to trace in his writings the outlines of a definite ethical
system, whether his own, or one derived from his great master.
The three principal schools of ethical philosophy in Greece
were the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic.
The Peripatetics derived their philosophy from Aristotle, and
their name from his habit of walking up and down under the
plane-trees of the Lyceum. According to him, virtue is conduct
so conformed to human nature as to preserve all its appetites,
proclivities, desires, and passions, in mutual check and limitation.
It consists in shunning extremes. Thus courage stands midway
between cowardice and rashness; temperance, between excess
[197] and self-denial; generosity, between prodigality and parsimony;
meekness, between irascibility and pusillanimity. Happiness is
regarded as the supreme good; but while this is not to be attained
without virtue, virtue alone will not secure it. Happiness requires,
in addition, certain outward advantages, such as health, riches,
friends, which therefore a good man will seek by all lawful
means. Aristotle laid an intense stress on the cultivation of the
domestic virtues, justly representing the household as the type,
no less than the nursery, of the state, and the political well-being
of the state as contingent on the style of character cherished and
manifested in the home-life of its members.
There is reason to believe that Aristotle's personal character
was conformed to his theory of virtue,—that he pursued the
Chapter XIV. Ancient History Of Moral Philosophy. 155

middle path, rather than the more arduous route of moral

perfection. Though much of his time was spent in Athens,
he was a native of Macedonia, and was for several years resident
at the court of Philip as tutor to Alexander, with whom he
retained friendly relations for the greater part of his royal pupil's
life. Of his connection with the Macedonian court and public
affairs, there are several stories that implicate him dishonorably
with political intrigues, and though there is not one of these that
is not denied, and not one which rests on competent historical
authority, such traditions are not apt so to cluster as to blur the
fair fame of a sturdily incorruptible man, but are much more
likely to cling to the memory of a trimmer and a time-server. [198]

Epicurus, from whom the Epicurean philosophy derives its

name, was for many years a teacher of philosophy in Athens.
He was a man of simple, pure, chaste, and temperate habits,
in his old age bore severe and protracted sufferings, from
complicated and incurable disease, with singular equanimity,
and had his memory posthumously blackened only by those
who—like theological bigots of more recent times—inferred, in
despite of all contemporary evidence, that he was depraved in
character, because they thought that his philosophy ought to have
made him so.
He represented pleasure as the supreme good, and its
pleasure-yielding capacity as the sole criterion by which any
act or habit is to be judged. On this ground, the quest of
pleasure becomes the prime, or rather the only duty. “Do
that you may enjoy,” is the fundamental maxim of morality.
There is no intrinsic or permanent distinction between right and
wrong. Individual experience alone can determine the right,
which varies according to the differences of taste, temperament,
or culture. There are, however, some pleasures which are more
than counterbalanced by the pains incurred in procuring them, or
by those occasioned by them; and there are, also, pains which
are the means of pleasures greater than themselves. The wise
 156 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

man, therefore, will measure and govern his conduct, not by the
pleasure of the moment, but with reference to the future and
ultimate effects of acts, habits, and courses of conduct, upon his
happiness. What are called the virtues, as justice, temperance,
[199] chastity, are in themselves no better than their opposites;
but experience has shown that they increase the aggregate of
pleasure, and diminish the aggregate of pain. Therefore, and
therefore alone, they are duties. The great worth of philosophy
consists in its enabling men to estimate the relative duration, and
the permanent consequences, as well as the immediate intensity,
of every form of pleasure.
Epicurus specifies two kinds of pleasure, that of rest and
that of motion. He prefers the former. Action has its reaction;
excitement is followed by depression; effort, by weariness;
thought for others involves the disturbance of one's own peace.
The gods, according to Epicurus, lead an easy, untroubled life,
leave the outward universe to take care of itself, are wholly
indifferent to human affairs, and are made ineffably happy by
the entire absence of labor, want, and care; and man becomes
most godlike and most happy, therefore most virtuous, when he
floats through life, unharming and unharmed, idle and useless,
self-contained and self-sufficing, simple in his tastes, moderate
in his requirements, frugal in his habits.
It may be doubted whether Epicurus denoted by pleasure,18
mere physical pleasure alone. It is certain that his later
followers regarded the pleasures of the body as the only good;
and Cicero says that Epicurus himself referred all the pleasures
of the intellect to the memory of past and the hope of future
[200] sensual gratification. Yet there is preserved an extract of a letter
from Epicurus, in which he says that his own bodily pains in
his years of decrepitude are outweighed by the pleasure derived
from the memory of his philosophical labors and discoveries.
18
)´¿½u.
Chapter XIV. Ancient History Of Moral Philosophy. 157

Epicureanism numbered among its disciples, not only men

of approved virtue, but not a few, like Pliny the Younger, of
a more active type of virtue than Epicurus would have deemed
consistent with pleasure. But in lapse of time it became the pretext
and cover for the grossest sensuality; and the associations which
the unlearned reader has with the name are only strengthened by
conversance with the literature to which it gave birth. Horace is its
poet-laureate; and he was evidently as sincere in his philosophy
as he was licentious in his life. There is a certain charm in good
faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and
it is his perfect frankness, self-complacency, nay, self-praise, in
a sensuality which in plain prose would seem by turns vapid and
disgusting, that makes Horace even perilously fascinating, so that
the guardians of the public morals may well be thankful that for
the young the approach to him is warded off by the formidable
barriers of grammar and dictionary.
While Epicureanism thus generated, on the one hand, in men
of the world laxity of moral principle and habit, on the other hand,
in minds of a more contemplative cast, it lapsed into atheism.
From otiose gods, careless of human affairs, the transition was
natural to a belief in no gods. The universe which could preserve [201]
and govern itself, could certainly have sprung into uncaused
existence; for the tendencies which, without a supervising power,
maintain order in nature, continuity in change, ever-new life
evolved from incessant death, must be inherent tendencies to
combination, harmony, and organization, and thus may account
for the origin of the system which they sustain and renew. This
type of atheism has its most authentic exposition in the “De
Rerum Natura” of Lucretius. He does not, in so many words,
deny the being of the gods,—he, indeed, speaks of them as
leading restful lives, withdrawn from all care of mortal affairs;
but he so scoffs at all practical recognition of them, and so jeers
at the reverence and awe professed for them by the multitude,
that we are constrained to regard them as rather the imagery of
 158 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

his verse than the objects of his faith. He maintains the past
eternity of matter, which consists of atoms or monads of various
forms. These, drifting about in space, and impinging upon one
another, by a series of happy chances, fell into orderly relations
and close-fitting symmetries, whence, in succession, and by a
necessity inherent in the primitive atoms, came organization, life,
instinct, love, reason, wisdom. This poem has a peculiar value at
the present day, as closely coincident in its cosmogony with one
of the most recent phases of physical philosophy, and showing
that what calls itself progress may be motion in a circle.
[202] The Stoics, so called from a portico19 adorned with
magnificent paintings by Polygnotus, in which their doctrines
were first taught, owe their origin to Zeno, who lived to a very
great age, illustrious for self-control, temperance, and the severest
type of virtue, and at length, in accordance with a favorite dogma
and practice of his school, when he found that he had before him
only growing infirmity with no hope of restoration, terminated
his life by his own hand.
According to the Stoic philosophy, virtue is the sole end
of life, and virtue is the conformity of the will and conduct to
universal nature. Virtue alone is good; vice alone is evil; and
whatever is neither virtue nor vice is neither good nor evil in
itself, but is to be sought or shunned, according as it is auxiliary to
virtue or conducive to vice,—if neither, to be regarded with utter
indifference. Virtue is indivisible. It does not admit of degrees.
He who only approximates to virtue, however closely, is yet to
be regarded as outside of its pale. Only the wise man can be
virtuous. He needs no precepts of duty. His intuitions are always
to be trusted. His sense of right cannot be blinded or misled.
As for those who do not occupy this high philosophic ground,
though they cannot be really virtuous, they yet may present some
show and semblance of virtue, and they may be aided in this
19
£Ä¿q.
Chapter XIV. Ancient History Of Moral Philosophy. 159

by precepts and ethical instruction.20 It was for the benefit of [203]

those who, on account of their lack of true wisdom, needed such
direction, and were at the same time so well disposed as to receive
and follow it, that treatises on practical morality were written by
many of the later Stoics, and that in Rome there were teachers of
this school who exercised functions closely analogous to those
of the Christian preacher and pastor.
Stoicism found its most congenial soil in the stern, hardy
integrity and patriotism of those Romans, whose incorruptible
virtue is the one redeeming feature of the declining days of the
Republic and the effeminacy and coarse depravity of the Empire.
Seneca's ethical writings21 are almost Christian, not only in
their faithful rebuke of every form of wrong, but in their tender
humanity for the poor, the slaves, the victims of oppression, in
their universal philanthropy, and in their precepts of patience
under suffering, forbearance, forgiveness, and returning good for
evil. Epictetus, the deformed slave of a capricious and cruel [204]
master, beaten and crippled in mere wantonness, enfranchised
in his latter years, only to be driven into exile and to sound
the lowest depths of poverty, exhibited a type of heroic virtue

20
The words employed by the Stoics to indicate specific duties, as presented
to the common understanding, recognize intrinsic fitness as the ground of right.
These duties are termed in Greek, º±¸uº¿½Ä±, that is, be-fitting, and in Latin,
officia, from ob and facio, that which is done ob aliquid, for some assignable
reason.
21
How far Seneca's character was represented by his philosophy is, we
believe, a fairly open question. That the beginning and the close of his career
were in accordance with his teachings, is certain. That as a courtier, he was in
suspicious proximity to, if not in complicity with, gross scandals and crimes,
is equally certain. The evidence against him is weighty, but by no means
conclusive. He may have lingered in the purlieus of the palace in fond memory
of what Nero had been in the promise of his youth, and in the groundless
hope of bringing him again under more humane influences. This supposition
is rendered the more probable by the well-known fact, that during his whole
court life, and notwithstanding his great wealth, Seneca's personal habits were
almost those of an anchorite.
 160 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

which has hardly been equalled, perhaps never transcended by

a mere mortal; and though looking, as has been already said, to
annihilation as the goal of life, he maintained a spirit so joyous,
and has left in his writings so attractive a picture of a soul serenely
and supremely happy, that he has given support and consolation
to multitudes of the bravest and best disciples of the heaven-born
religion, which he can have known—if at all—only through
its slanderers and persecutors. Marcus Aurelius, in a kindred
spirit, and under the even heavier burdens of a tottering empire,
domestic dissensions, and defeat and disaster abroad, maintained
the severest simplicity and purity of life, appropriated portions of
his busiest days to devout contemplation, meditated constantly
on death, and disciplined himself to regard with contempt alike
the praise of flatterers and the contingency of posthumous fame.
We have, especially in Nero's reign, the record of not a few
men and women of like spirit and character, whose lofty and
impregnable virtue lacked only loving faith and undoubting trust
in a fatherly Providence to assimilate them to the foremost among
the Apostles and martyrs of the Christian Church.
The Sceptical school of philosophy claims in this connection
a brief notice. Though so identified in common speech with the
[205] name of a single philosopher, that Pyrrhonism is a synonyme
for Scepticism, it was much older than Pyrrho, and greatly
outnumbered his avowed followers. It was held by the teachers
of this school that objective truth is unattainable. Not only do the
perceptions and conceptions of different persons vary as to every
object of knowledge; but the perceptions and conceptions of the
same persons as to the same object vary at different times. Nay,
more, at the same time one sense conveys impressions which
another sense may negative, and not infrequently the reflective
faculty negatives all the impressions derived from the senses,
and forms a conception entirely unlike that which would have
taken shape through the organs of sense. The soul that seeks to
know, is thus in constant agitation. But happiness consists in
Chapter XIV. Ancient History Of Moral Philosophy. 161

imperturbableness of spirit, that is, in suspense of judgment; and

as it is our duty to promote our own happiness, it is our duty
to live without desire or fear, preference or abhorrence, love or
hatred, in entire apathy,—a life of which Mohammed's fabled
coffin is the fittest symbol.
The New Academy, whose philosophy was a hybrid of
Platonism and Pyrrhonism, while it denied the possibility of
ascertaining objective truth, yet taught that on all subjects of
speculative philosophy probability is attainable, and that, if
the subject in hand be one which admits of being acted upon,
it is the duty of the moral agent to act in accordance with
probability,—to pursue the course in behalf of which the more
and the better reasons can be given. There are moral acts and [206]
habits which seem to be in accordance with reason and the nature
of things. We may be mistaken in thinking them so; yet the
probability that they are so creates a moral obligation in their
favor. The New Academy professed a hypothetical acquiescence
in the ethics of the Peripatetic school, maintaining, therefore,
that the mean between two extremes is probably in accordance
with right and duty, and that virtue is probably man's highest
good, yet probably not sufficient in itself without the addition of
exterior advantages.
Cicero considered himself as belonging to the New Academy.
His instincts as an advocate, often induced by professional
exigencies to deny what he had previously affirmed, made the
scepticism of this school congenial to him; while his love of
elegant ease and luxury and his lack of moral courage were in
closer harmony with the practical ethics of the Peripatetics than
with the more rigid system of the Stoics. At the same time, his
pure moral taste and his sincere reverence for the right brought
him into sympathy with the Stoic school. His “De Officiis” is an
exposition of the Stoic system of ethics, though by the professed
disciple of another philosophy. It is as if a Mohammedan, without
disclaiming his own religion, should undertake an exposition of
 162 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

the ethics of Christianity, on the ground that, though Mohammed

was a genuine prophet, there was, nevertheless, a higher and
purer morality in the New Testament than in the Koran.

[207]
 Chapter XV.

Modern History Of Moral

Philosophy.
For several centuries after the destruction of the Western
Empire, philosophy had hardly an existence except in its records,
and these were preserved chiefly for their parchment, half-
effaced, covered by what took the place of literature in the (so
called) Dark Ages, and at length deciphered by such minute and
wearisome toil as only mediæval cloisters have ever furnished.
For a long period, monasteries were the only schools, and in
these the learned men of the day were, either successively or
alternately, learners and teachers, whence the appellation of
Schoolmen. The learned men who bear this name were fond
of casuistry, and discussed imagined and often impossible cases
with great pains (their readers would have greater); but, so far
as we know, they have left no systematic treatises on moral
philosophy, and have transmitted no system that owes to them
its distinguishing features. Yet we find among them a very broad
division of opinion as to the ground of right. The fundamental
position of the Stoics, that virtue is conformity to nature, and thus
independent of express legislation,—not created by law, human
or divine, but the source and origin of law,—had its champions, [208]
strong, but few; while the Augustinian theology, then almost
universal, replaced Epicureanism in its denial of the intrinsic and
indelible moral qualities of actions. The extreme Augustinians
regarded the positive command of God as the sole cause and
 164 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

ground of right, so that the very things which are forbidden under
the severest penalties would become virtuous and commendable,
if enjoined by Divine authority. William of Ockham, one of
the most illustrious of the English Schoolmen, wrote: “If God
commanded his creatures to hate himself, the hatred of God
would be the duty of man.”
The earliest modern theory of morals that presented striking
peculiarities was that of Hobbes (A. D. 1588-1679), who was
indebted solely to the stress of his time, alike for his system
and for whatever slender following it may have had. He was
from childhood a staunch royalist, was shortly after leaving
the University the tutor of a loyal nobleman, and, afterward,
of Charles II. during the early years of his exile; and the
parliamentary and Puritan outrages seemed to him to be aimed
at all that was august and reverend, and adapted to overturn
society, revert progress, and crush civilization. According to
him, men are by nature one another's enemies, and can be
restrained from internecine hostility only by force or fear. An
instinctive perception of this truth in the infancy of society
gave rise to monarchical and absolute forms of government; for
only by thus centralizing and massing power, which could be
[209] directed against any disturber of the peace, could the individual
members of society hold property or life in safety. The king thus
reigns by right of human necessity, and obedience to him and to
constituted authorities under him is man's whole duty, and the
sum of virtue. Might creates right. Conscience is but another
name for the fear of punishment. The intimate connection of
religion with civil freedom in the English Commonwealth no
doubt went far in uprooting in Hobbes all religious faith; and
while he did not openly attack Christianity, he maintained the
duty of entire conformity to the monarch's religion, whatever it
might be, which is of course tantamount to the denial of objective
religious truth.22
22
Spinoza's ethical system was closely parallel to that of Hobbes. He denied
Chapter XV. Modern History Of Moral Philosophy. 165

Hobbes may fairly be regarded as the father of modern

ethical philosophy,—not that he had children after his own
likeness; but his speculations were so revolting equally to
thinking and to serious men, as to arouse inquiry and stimulate
mental activity in a department previously neglected.
The gauntlet thus thrown down by Hobbes was taken up by
Cudworth (A. D. 1617-1688), the most learned man of his time,
whose “Intellectual System of the Universe” is a prodigy of
erudition,—a work in which his own thought is so blocked up [210]
with quotations, authorities, and masses of recondite lore, that it
is hardly possible to trace the windings of the river for the débris
of auriferous rocks that obstruct its flow. The treatise with which
we are concerned is that on “Eternal and Immutable Morality.”
In this he maintains that the right exists, independently of all
authority, by the very nature of things, in co-eternity with the
Supreme Being. So far is he from admitting the possibility of
any dissiliency between the Divine will and absolute right, that
he turns the tables on his opponents, and classes among Atheists
those of his contemporaries who maintain that God can command
what is contrary to the intrinsic right; that He has no inclination
to the good of his creatures; that He can justly doom an innocent
being to eternal torments; or that whatever God wills is just
because He wills it.
Samuel Clarke (A. D. 1675-1729) followed Cudworth in the
same line of thought. He was, it is believed, the first writer who
employed the term fitness as defining the ground of the immutable
and eternal right, though the idea of fitness necessarily underlies
every system or theory that assigns to virtue intrinsic validity.
Shaftesbury (A. D. 1671-1713) represents virtue as residing,
the intrinsic difference between right and wrong; but he regarded aristocracy
as the natural order of society. With him, as with Hobbes, virtue consists solely
in obedience to constituted authority; and so utterly did he ignore a higher law,
that he maintained it to be the right of a state to abjure a treaty with another
state, when its terms ceased to be convenient or profitable.
 166 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

not in the nature or relations of things, but in the bearing of

actions on the welfare or happiness of beings other than the actor.
Benevolence constitutes virtue; and the merit of the action and
[211] of the actor is determined by the degree in which particular
affections are merged in general philanthropy, and reference is
had, not to individual beneficiaries or benefits, but to the whole
system of things of which the actor forms a part. The affections
from which such acts spring commend themselves to the moral
sense, and are of necessity objects of esteem and love. But the
moral sense takes cognizance of the affections only, not of the
acts themselves; and as the conventional standard of the desirable
and the useful varies with race, time, and culture, the acts which
the affections prompt, and which therefore are virtuous, may be
in one age or country such as the people of another century or land
may repudiate with loathing. Las Casas, in introducing negro
slavery into America, with the fervently benevolent purpose of
relieving the hardships of the feeble and overtasked aborigines,
performed, according to this theory, a virtuous act; but had he
once considered the question of intrinsic right or natural fitness,
a name so worthily honored would never have been associated
with the foulest crime of modern civilization.
According to Adam Smith (A. D. 1723-1790), moral
distinctions depend wholly on sympathy. We approve in others
what corresponds to our own tastes and habits; we disapprove
whatever is opposed to them. As to our own conduct, “we suppose
ourselves,” he writes, “the spectators of our own behavior, and
endeavor to imagine what effect it would in this light produce in
[212] us.” Our sense of duty is derived wholly from our thus putting
ourselves in the place of others, and inquiring what they would
approve in us. Conscience, then, is a collective and corporate,
not an individual faculty. It is created by the prevalent opinions
of the community. Solitary virtue there cannot be; for without
sympathy there is no self-approval. By parity of reason, the duty
of the individual can never transcend the average conscience of
Chapter XV. Modern History Of Moral Philosophy. 167

the community. This theory describes society as it is, not as

it ought to be. We are, to a sad degree, conventional in our
practice, much more so than in our beliefs; but it is the part of
true manliness to have the conscience an interior, not an external
organ, to form and actualize notions of right and duty for one's
self, and to stand and walk alone, if need there be, as there
manifestly is in not a few critical moments, and as there is not
infrequently in the inward experience of every man who means
to do his duty.
Butler (A. D. 1692-1752), in his “Ethical Discourses,” aims
mainly and successfully to demonstrate the rightful supremacy
of conscience. His favorite conception is of the human being
as himself a household [an economy],—the various propensities,
appetites, passions, and affections, the members,—Conscience,
the head, recognized as such by all, so that there is, when her
sovereignty is owned, an inward repose and satisfaction; when
she is disobeyed, a sense of discord and rebellion, of unrest and
disturbance. This is sound and indisputable, and it cannot be
more clearly stated or more vividly illustrated than by Butler; [213]
but he manifestly regards conscience as legislator no less than
judge, and thus fails to recognize any objective standard of right.
It is evident that on his ground there is no criterion by which
honestly erroneous moral judgments can be revised, or by which
a discrimination can be made between the results of education or
involuntary prejudice, and the right as determined by the nature
of things and the standard of intrinsic fitness.
Of all modern ethical writers since the time of Cudworth and
Clarke, none so much as approaches the position occupied by
Richard Price (A. D. 1723-1791), a London dissenting divine,
a warm advocate of American independence, and the intimate
friend of John Adams. He maintained that right and wrong are
inherent and necessary, immutable and eternal characteristics,
not dependent on will or command, but on the intrinsic nature of
the act, and determined with unerring accuracy by conscience,
 168 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

whenever the nature of the case is clearly known. “Morality,”

he writes, “is fixed on an immovable basis, and appears not to
be in any sense factitious, or the arbitrary production of any
power, human or divine; but equally everlasting and necessary
with all truth and reason.” “Virtue is of intrinsic value and of
indispensable obligation; not the creature of will, but necessary
and immutable; not local and temporary, but of equal extent and
antiquity with the Divine mind; not dependent on power, but the
[214] guide of all power.”23
Paley (A. D. 1743-1805) gives a definition of virtue,
remarkable for its combination of three partial theories. Virtue,
according to him, is “the doing good to mankind, in obedience
to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.”
Of this definition it may be said, 1. The doing good to mankind
is indeed virtue; but it is by no means the whole of virtue. 2.
Obedience to the will of God is our duty; but it is so, because
his will must of necessity be in accordance with the fitting and
right. Could we conceive of Omnipotence commanding what
is intrinsically unfit and wrong, the virtuous man would not
be the God-server, but the Prometheus suffering the implacable
vengeance of an unrighteous Deity. 3. Though everlasting
happiness be the result of virtue, it is not the ground or the reason
for it. Were our being earth-limited, virtue would lose none of its
obligation. Epictetus led as virtuous a life as if heaven had been
open to his faith and hope.—Paley's system may be described in
detail as Shaftesbury's, with an external washing of Christianity;
Shaftesbury having been what was called a free-thinker, while
Paley was a sincere believer in the Christian revelation, and
contributed largely and efficiently to the defence of Christianity
and the illustration of its records. The chief merit of Paley's
treatise on Moral Philosophy is that it clearly and emphatically
23
Price's theory of morals is developed with singular precision and force in
one of the Baccalaureate Addresses of the late President Appleton, of Bowdoin
College.
Chapter XV. Modern History Of Moral Philosophy. 169

recognizes the Divine authority of the moral teachings of the [215]

New Testament, though in expounding them the author too
frequently dilutes them by considerations of expediency.
Jeremy Bentham (A. D. 1747-1832) is Paley minus
Christianity. The greatest good of the greatest number is,
according to him, the aim and criterion of virtue. Moral rules
should be constructed with this sole end; and this should be
the pervading purpose of all legislation. Bentham's works are
very voluminous, and they cover, wisely and well, almost every
department of domestic, social, public, and national life. The
worst that can be said of his political writings is that they are
in advance of the age,—literally Utopian;24 for it would be well
with the country which was prepared to embody his views. But,
unfortunately, his principles have no power of self-realization.
They are like a watch, perfect in all other parts, but without
the mainspring. Bentham contemplates the individual man as an
agency, rather than as an intellectual and moral integer. He must
work under yoke and harness for ends vast and remote, beyond
the appreciation of ordinary mortals; and he must hold all partial
affections and nearer aims subordinate to rules deduced by sages
and legislators from considerations of general utility. Bentham's
influence on legislation, especially on criminal law, has been
beneficially felt on both sides of the Atlantic. In the department
of pure ethics, there are no essential points of difference between [216]
him and other writers of the utilitarian school.25
24
•PÄyÀ¿Â.
25
The reader who is conversant with the literature of ethics in England and
America will miss in this chapter many names which merit a place by the side
of those that have been given. But within the limits proposed for this manual,
the alternative was to select a few writers among those who have largely
influenced the thought of their own and succeeding times, and to associate
with each of them something that should mark his individuality; or to make
the chapter little more than a catalogue of names. The former is evidently the
more judicious course. Nothing has been said of living writers,—not because
there are none who deserve an honored place among the contributors to this
 170 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

*****
In France there has been a large preponderance of sensualism,
expediency, and selfishness in the ethical systems that have had
the most extensive currency. There was a great deal of elaborate
ethical speculation and theory among the French philosophers
of the last century; but among them we cannot recall a single
writer who maintained a higher ground than Bentham, except
that Rousseau—perhaps the most immoral of them all—who was
an Epicurean so far as he had any philosophy, sometimes soars in
sentimental rhapsodies about the intrinsic beauty and loveliness
of a virtue which he knew only by name.
Malebranche (A. D. 1638-1714), whose principal writings
belong to the previous century, represents entirely opposite views
and tendencies. He hardly differs from Samuel Clarke, except in
phraseology. He resolves virtue into love of the universal order,
[217] and conformity to it in conduct. This order requires that we
should prize and love all beings and objects in proportion to their
relative worth, and that we should recognize this relative worth in
our rules and habits of life. Thus man is to be more highly valued
and more assiduously served than the lower animals, because
worth more; and God is to be loved infinitely more than man, and
to be always obeyed and served in preference to man, because
he is worth immeasurably more than the beings that derive their
existence from him. Malebranche ascribes to the Supreme Being,
not the arbitrary exercise of power in constituting the right, but
recognition, in his government of the world and in his revealed
will, of the order, which is man's sole law. “Sovereign princes,”
he says, “have no right to use their authority without reason.
Even God has no such miserable right.”
At nearly the same period commenced the ethical controversy
between Fénélon (A. D. 1651-1715) and Bossuet (A. D. 1627-
1704), as to the possibility and obligation of disinterested
department of science, but because, were the list to be once opened, we should
hardly know where to close it.
Chapter XV. Modern History Of Moral Philosophy. 171

virtue. Fénélon and the Quietists, who sympathized with

him, maintained that the pure love of God, without any self-
reference, or regard for one's own well-being either here or
here-after, is the goal and the test of human perfection, and that
nothing below this—nothing which aims or aspires at anything
less than this—deserves the name of virtue. Bossuet defended
the selfish theory of virtue, attacked his amiable antagonist
with unconscionable severity and bitterness, and succeeded in
obtaining from the court of Rome—though against the wishes of [218]
the Pope—the condemnation of the obnoxious tenet. The Pope
remarked, with well-turned antithesis, that Fénélon might have
erred from excess in the love of God, while Bossuet had sinned
by defect in the love of his neighbor.
Among the recent French moralists, the most distinguished
names are those of Jouffroy and Cousin, who—each with a
terminology of his own—agree with Malebranche in regarding
right and wrong as inherent and essential characteristics of
actions, and as having their source and the ground of their
validity in the nature of things. The aim of Cousin's well-known
treatise on “The True, the Beautiful, and the Good,” is purely
ethical, and the work is designed to identify the three members
of the Platonic triad with corresponding attributes of the Infinite
Being,—attributes which, virtually one, have their counterpart
and manifestation in the order of nature and the government of
the universe.
*****
In Germany, the necessarian philosophers of the Pantheistic
school ignore ethics by making choice and moral action
impossible. Man has no distinct and separate personality. He
is for a little while detached in appearance from the soul of the
universe (anima mundi), but in reality no more detached from
it than is a boulder or a log of drift-wood from the surface on
which it rests. He still remains a part of the universal soul,
the multiform, all-embracing God, who is himself not a self-
 172 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

[219] conscious, freely willing being, but impelled by necessity in

all his parts and members, and, no less than in all else, in
those human members through which alone he attains to some
fragmentary self-consciousness.
According to Kant, the reason intuitively discerns truths that
are necessary, absolute, and universal. The theoretical reason
discerns such truths in the realm of ontology, and in the relations
and laws that underlie all subjects of physical inquiry. In like
manner, the practical reason intuitively perceives the conditions
and laws inherent in the objects of moral action,—that is, as
Malebranche would have said, the elements of universal order,
or, in the language of Clarke, the fitness of things. As the mind
must of necessity contemplate and cognize objects of thought
under the categories intuitively discerned by the theoretical
reason, so must the will be moved by the conditions and laws
intuitively discerned by the practical reason. This intuition is law
and obligation. Man can obey it, and to obey it is virtue. He can
disobey it, and in so doing he does not yield to necessity, but
makes a voluntary choice of wrong and evil.
*****
It will be perceived from the historical survey in this and the
previous chapter, that—as was said at the outset—all ethical
systems resolve themselves into the two classes of which the
Epicureans and the Stoics furnished the pristine types,—those
which make virtue an accident, a variable, subject to authority,
[220] occasion, or circumstance; and those which endow it with
an intrinsic right, immutableness, validity, and supremacy. On
subjects of fundamental moment, opinion is of prime importance.
Conduct results from feeling, and feeling from opinion. We
would have the youth, from the very earliest period of his
moral agency, grounded in the belief that right and wrong are
immutable,—that they have no localities, no meridians,—that,
with a change of surroundings, their conditions and laws vary
as little as do those of planetary or stellar motion. Let him feel
Chapter XV. Modern History Of Moral Philosophy. 173

that right and wrong are not the mere dicta of human teaching,
nay, are not created even by revelation; but let their immutable
distinction express itself to his consciousness in those sublime
words which belong to it, as personified in holy writ, “Jehovah
possessed me from the beginning of his way, before his works
of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or
ever the earth was. When He prepared the heavens, I was there.
When He appointed the foundations of the earth, then was I by
Him.” This conception of the Divine and everlasting sacredness
of virtue, is a perennial fountain of strength. He who has this does
not imagine that he has power over the Right, can sway it by his
choice, or vary its standard by his action; but it overmasters him,
and, by subduing, frees him, fills and energizes his whole being,
ennobles all his powers, exalts and hallows all his affections,
makes him a priest to God, and a king among men.

[221]
Index.
Abstinence, when to be preferred to temperance, 175

Academy, the New, 205

Action, defined, 1
springs of, 10
governing principles of, 30

Affections, the, 22

Anger, 26

Anonymous publications, 123

Appetites, the, 10

Aristotle, character of, 197

Beneficence, 143

Bentham, Jeremy, 215

Bossuet, controversy of, with Fénélon, 217

Brotherhood, human, in its ethical relations, 56

Butler, 212

Capital punishment, 66

Casuistry, 187
Index. 175

Children, duties of, 121

Christianity, a source of knowledge, 55

exhibiting moral perfection in the person of its Founder, 68
compared, as to its ethics, with other religions, 59
as a motive power, 81

Cicero, philosophical relations of, 206

Clarke, Samuel, 210

Conscience, a judicial faculty, 41

educated by use, 44
relation of knowledge to, 45

Contracts, 128
[222]

Courage, defined, 158

physical, 159
moral, 160

Cousin, 218

Cudworth, 209

Desire, defined, 12
of knowledge, 13
of society, 15
of esteem, 17
of power, 18
of superiority, 19

Duties, conflict of, 190

Duty, limit of, 189

Enemies, love of, possible, 149

176 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

Envy, 27

Epictetus, character of, 203

Epicureanism, 198

Example, ethical value of, 111

Expediency, an insufficient rule of conduct, 31

when to be consulted, 33

Extreme cases in morals, 125

Falsehood, 151

Family, duties of the, 118

Fénélon, controversy of, with Bossuet, 217

Fitness, the ground of right, 36

Foreknowledge, Divine, consistent with human freedom, 8

Freedom of the will, arguments for, 2

objections to, 4

Government, the essential function of, 180

obedience to, how limited, 182
when to be opposed, 184

Gratitude, 24

Habit, 84

Hatred, 28

Hobbes, 208
Index. 177

Home-life, order requisite in, 169

Homicide, justifiable, 64

Honesty, 134

Horace, the poet of Epicureanism, 200

Ignorance, sins of, 39

Immortality, ethical relations of, 57

Intemperance, 170

Jouffroy, 218

Justice, 113

Kant, ethical system of, 219

Kindness, 25

Knowledge, attainment of, a duty, 102

Law, the result of experience, 50

an educational force, 51

Liberty, the right to, 69

Love, 22

Lucretius, philosophy of, 201

Malebranche, 216

Manners, a department of morals, 177

 178 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

Marcus Aurelius, character of, 204

Marriage, 120

Measure, duties appertaining to, 170

Military service, 68

Moral philosophy, defined, 34

Motive, 79

Oaths, 129

Observation, a source of ethical knowledge, 46

Order, 164

Paley, 215

Pantheism, ethics of, 218

Parents, duties of, 121

Passion, 82

Patience, 152
[224]

Pauperism, 144

Peripatetics, the, 193

Piety toward God, 113

Pity, 25

Place, duties appertaining to, 168

Plato, as a teacher of ethics, 193

Index. 179

Politeness, 178

Positive duties, 117

Price, Richard, 214

Promises, 126

Prudence, 98

Punctuality, 167

Resentment, 27

Revenge, 28

Reverence, 23

Revolution, when justifiable, 185

Right, the, 35
absolute and relative, 37

Rights, defined, 61
how limited, 62
personal, 64
of property, 72
of reputation, 76

Sabbath, the, 16

Sceptical school of philosophy, 204

Schoolmen, ethics of the, 207

Self-control, 106

Self-culture, moral, 109

 180 A Manual of Moral Philosophy

Self-preservation, 99
Seneca, writings and character of, 203
Shaftesbury, 210
Slavery, 70
Smith, Adam, 211
Socrates, as a teacher of ethics, 195
Speculation in business, when legitimate, 138
when dishonest, 140
Spinoza, 209
Stoics, philosophy of the, 201
[225]
eminent Roman, 203
Submission, 155
Sympathy, 25
Taxation, 75
Temperance, 173
Time, duties appertaining to, 165
Usury, 142
Veracity, 122
Virtue, defined, 88
connection of, with piety, 91
Virtues, the, 94
cardinal, 96
Worship, public, 115
Zeno, character of, 202
Footnotes
***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A
MANUAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY***
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