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Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law

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Title: Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law

Author: Joseph Rickaby


        
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MORAL PHILOSOPHY:

ETHICS, DEONTOLOGY AND NATURAL LAW.

BY
JOSEPH RICKABY, S.J.


Nihil Obstat:
JOSEPHUS KEATING, S.J.
_Censor deputatus_

Imprimi potest:
JOANNES H. WRIGHT, S.J.
_Præp. Prov. Angliæ_

Nihil Obstat:
C. SCHUT, D.D.
_Censor deputatus_

Imprimatur:
EDM. CAN. SURMONT
_Vie. Gen._




PREFACE (1905).


For fifteen years this Manual has enjoyed all the popularity that its
author could desire. With that popularity the author is the last
person to wish to interfere. Therefore, not to throw previous copies
out of use, this edition makes no alteration either in the pagination
or the text already printed. At the same time the author might well be
argued to have lapsed into strange supineness and indifference to
moral science, if in fifteen years he had learnt nothing new, and
found nothing in his work which he wished to improve. Whoever will be
at the expense of purchasing my _Political and Moral Essays_
(Benziger, 1902, 6s.) will find in the first essay on the _Origin and
Extent of Civil Authority_ an advantageous substitute for the chapter
on the State in this work. The essay is a dissertation written for the
degree of B. Sc. in the University of Oxford; and represents, I hope,
tolerably well the best contemporary teaching on the subject.

If the present work had to be rewritten, I should make a triple
division of Moral Philosophy, into Ethics, Deontology (the science of
[Greek: to deon], i.e., of what _ought_ to be done), and Natural Law.
For if "the principal business of Ethics is to determine what moral
obligation is" (p. 2), then the classical work on the subject, the
_Nicomachean Ethics_ of Aristotle, is as the play of Hamlet with the
character of Hamlet left out: for in that work there is no analysis of
moral obligation, no attempt to "fix the comprehension of the idea I
_ought_" (ib.). The system there exposed is a system of Eudaemonism,
not of Deontology. It is not a treatise on Duty, but on Happiness: it
tells us what Happiness, or rational well-being, is, and what conduct
is conducive to rational well-being. It may be found convenient to
follow Aristotle, and avow that the business of Ethics is not Duty,
not Obligation, not Law, not Sanction, but Happiness. That fiery
little word _ought_ goes unexplained in Ethics, except in an
hypothetical sense, that a man _ought_ to do this, and avoid that,
_if_ he means to be a happy man: cf. p. 115. Any man who declares that
he does not care about ethical or rational happiness, stands to Ethics
as that man stands to Music who "hath no ear for concord of sweet
sounds."

All that Ethics or Music can do for such a Philistine is to "send him
away to another city, pouring ointment on his head, and crowning him
with wool," as Plato would dismiss the tragedian (_Republic_ III.
398). The author of the _Magna Moralia_ well says (I. i. 13): "No
science or faculty ever argues the goodness of the end which it
proposes to itself: it belongs to some other faculty to consider that.
Neither the physician says that health is a good thing, nor the
builder that a house is a good thing: but the one announces that he
produces health and how he produces it, and the builder in like manner
a house." The professor of Ethics indeed, from the very nature of his
subject-matter, says in pointing out happiness that it is the rational
sovereign good of man: but to any one unmoved by that demonstration
Ethics can have no more to say. Ethics will not threaten, nor talk of
duty, law, or punishment.

Ethics, thus strictly considered on an Aristotelian basis, are
antecedent to Natural Theology. They belong rather to Natural
Anthropology: they are a study of human nature. But as human nature
points to God, so Ethics are not wholly irrespective of God,
considering Him as the object of human happiness and worship,--the
Supreme Being without whom all the aspirations of humanity are at
fault (pp. 13-26, 191-197). Ethics do not refer to the commandments of
God, for this simple reason, that they have nothing to say to
commandments, or laws, or obligation, or authority. They are simply a
system of moral hygiene, which a man may adopt or not: only, like any
other physician, the professor of Ethics utters a friendly warning
that misery must ensue upon the neglect of what makes for health.

Deontology, not Ethics, expounds and vindicates the idea, _I ought_.
It is the science of Duty. It carries the mild suasions of Ethics into
laws, and out of moral prudence it creates conscience. And whereas
Ethics do not deal with sin, except under the aspect of what is called
"philosophical sin" (p. 119, § 6), Deontology defines sin in its
proper theological sense, as "an offence against God, or any thought,
word, or deed against the law of God." Deontology therefore
presupposes and is consequent upon Natural Theology. At the same time,
while Ethics indicate a valuable proof of the existence of God as the
requisite Object of Happiness, Deontology affords a proof of Him as
the requisite Lawgiver. Without God, man's rational desire is
frustrate, and man's conscience a misrepresentation of fact. [Footnote
1]

[Footnote 1: This is Cardinal Newman's proof of the existence of God
from Conscience: see pp. 124, 125, and _Grammar of Assent_, pp.
104-111, ed. 1895. With Newman's, "Conscience has both a critical and
a judicial office," compare Plato, _Politicus_, 260 B, [Greek:
sumpasaes taes gnostikaes to men epitaktikon meros, to de kritikon].
The "critical" office belongs to Ethics: the "judicial," or
"preceptive" office [Greek: to epitaktikon] to Deontology; and this
latter points to a Person who commands and judges, that is, to God.]

In this volume, pp. 1-108 make up the treatise on Ethics: pp. 109-176
that on Deontology.

Aristotle writes: "He that acts by intelligence and cultivates
understanding, is likely to be best disposed and dearest to God. For
if, as is thought, there is any care of human things on the part of
the heavenly powers, we may reasonably expect them to delight in that
which is best and most akin to themselves, that is, in intelligence,
and to make a return of good to such as supremely love and honour
intelligence, as cultivating the thing dearest to Heaven, and so
behaving rightly and well. Such, plainly, is the behaviour of the
wise. The wise man therefore is the dearest to God" (Nic. Eth. X. ix.
13). But Aristotle does not work out the connexion between God and His
law on the one hand and human conscience and duty on the other. In
that direction the Stoics, and after them the Roman Jurists, went
further than Aristotle. By reason of this deficiency, Aristotle,
peerless as he is in Ethics, remains an imperfect Moral Philosopher.



PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION (1918)

1. I have altered the opening pages in accordance with the Preface to
the edition of 1905.

2. I have added a paragraph on Syndicalism (pp. 291-2).

3. Also a new Table of _Addenda et Corrigenda_, and a new Index.

The quotations from St. Thomas may be read in English, nearly all of
them, in the Author's _Aquinas Ethicus_, 2 vols.; 12s. (Burns and
Oates.)



CONTENTS.

PART I.--ETHICS.

CHAPTER I.--OF THE OBJECT-MATTER AND PARTITION OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

CHAPTER II.--OF HAPPINESS.
Section I.--Of Ends.
Section II.--Definition of Happiness.
Section III.--Happiness open to Man.
Section IV.--Of the Object of Perfect Happiness.
Section V.--Of the use of the present life.

CHAPTER III.--OF HUMAN ACTS.
Section I.--What makes a human act less voluntary.
Section II.--Of the determinants of Morality in any given action.

CHAPTER IV.--OF PASSIONS.
Section I.--Of Passions in general.
Section II.--Of Desire.
Section III.--Of Delight.
Section IV.--Of Anger.

CHAPTER V.--OF HABITS AND VIRTUES.
Section I.--Of Habit.
Section II.--Of Virtues in general.
Section III.--Of the difference between Virtues, Intellectual
and Moral.
Section IV.--Of the Mean in Moral Virtue.
Section V.--Of Cardinal Virtues.
Section VI.--Of Prudence.
Section VII.--Of Temperance.
Section VIII.--Of Fortitude.
Section IX.--Of Justice.

PART II.--DEONTOLOGY.

CHAPTER I. (VI.)--OF THE ORIGIN OF MORAL OBLIGATION.
Section I.--Of the natural difference between Good and Evil.
Section II.--How Good becomes bounden Duty, and Evil is advanced to sin.

CHAPTER II. (VII.)--OF THE ETERNAL LAW.

CHAPTER III. (VIII.)--OF THE NATURAL LAW OF CONSCIENCE.
Section I.--Of the Origin of Primary Moral Judgments.
Section II.--Of the invariability of Primary Moral Judgments.
Section III.--Of the immutability of the Natural Law.
Section IV.--Of Probabilism.

CHAPTER IV. (IX.)--OF THE SANCTION OF THE NATURAL LAW.
Section I.--Of a Twofold Sanction, Natural and Divine.
Section II.--Of the Finality of the aforesaid Sanction.
Section III.--Of Punishment, Retrospective and Retributive.

CHAPTER V. (X.)--OF UTILITARIANISM.


PART III.--NATURAL LAW.

CHAPTER I.--OF DUTIES TO GOD.
Section I.--Of the Worship of God.
Section II.--Of Superstitious Practices.
Section III.--Of the duty of knowing God.

CHAPTER II.--OF THE DUTY OF PRESERVING LIFE.
Section I.--Of Killing, Direct and Indirect.
Section II.--Of Killing done Indirectly in Self-defence.
Section III.--Of Suicide.
Section IV.--Of Duelling.

CHAPTER III.--OF SPEAKING THE TRUTH.
Section I.--Of the definition of a Lie.
Section II.--Of the Evil of Lying.
Section III.--Of the keeping of Secrets without Lying.

CHAPTER IV.--OF CHARITY.

CHAPTER V.--OF RIGHTS.
Section I.--Of the definition and division of Rights.
Section II.--Of the so-called Rights of Animals.
Section III.--Of the right to Honour and Reputation.
Section IV.--Of Contracts.
Section V.--Of Usury.

CHAPTER VI.--OF MARRIAGE.
Section I.--Of the Institution of Marriage.
Section II.--Of the Unity of Marriage.
Section III.--Of the Indissolubility of Marriage.

CHAPTER VII.--OF PROPERTY.
Section I.--Of Private Property.
Section II.--Of Private Capital.
Section III.--Of Landed Property.

CHAPTER VIII.--OF THE STATE.
Section I.--Of the Monstrosities called Leviathan and Social Contract.
Section II.--Of the theory that Civil Power is an aggregate
    formed by subscription of the powers of individuals.
Section III.--Of the true state of Nature, which is the
    state of civil society, and consequently of the Divine origin of Power.
Section IV.--Of the variety of Polities.
Section V.--Of the Divine Right of Kings and the Inalienable
Sovereignty of the People.
Section VI.--Of the Elementary and Original Polity.
Section VII.--Of Resistance to Civil Power.
Section VIII.--Of the Right of the Sword.
Section IX.--Of War.
Section X.--Of the Scope and Aim of Civil Government.
Section XI.--Of Law and Liberty.
Section XII.--Of Liberty of Opinion.



ADDENDA ET CORRIGENDA

p. 31. Aristotle calls the end [Greek: _to telos_]; the means, [Greek:
ta pros to telos] (St. Thomas, _ea quae sunt ad finem_); the
circumstances, [Greek: ta ein ois hae praxis].

Observe, both end and means are willed _directly_, but the
circumstances _indirectly_.

The end is _intended_, [Greek: boulaeton]; the means are _chosen_,
[Greek: proaireton]; the circumstances are simply _permitted_, [Greek:
anekton], rightly or wrongly. The _intention_ of the end is called by
English philosophers the _motive_; while the choice of means they call
the _intention_, an unfortunate terminology.

p. 42, §. 3. "As the wax takes all shapes, and yet is wax still at the
bottom; the [Greek: spokeimenon] still is wax; so the soul transported
in so many several passions of joy, fear, hope, sorrow, anger, and the
rest, has for its general groundwork of all this, Love." (Henry More,
quoted in Carey's Dante, _Purgatorio_, c. xviii.) Hence, says Carey,
Love does not figure in Collins's _Ode on the Passions_.

p. 43. For _daring_ read _recklessness_.

p. 44. Plato is a thorough Stoic when he says (_Phaedo_ 83) that every
pleasure and pain comes with a nail to pin down the soul to the body
and make it corporeal. His Stoicism appears in his denunciation of the
drama (_Republic_, x. 604).

p. 47, §. 8. The first chapter of Mill's _Autobiography_, pp. 48-53,
133-149, supplies an instance.

p. 49, §. I, 1. 2, for _physical_ read _psychical_.

P. 52. §. 5. This _serving_, in [Greek: douleuein], St. Ignatius calls
"inordinate attachment," the modern form of idolatry. Cf. Romans vi.
16-22.

p. 79. For _spoiled_ read _spoilt_.

p. 84, foot. For _ways_ read _way_.

p. 85, 1. 6 from foot. Substitute: ([Greek: b]) _to restrain the said
appetite in its irascible part from shrinking from danger_.

p. 94, middle. For _others_ read _other_.

p. 95. For _Daring_ read _Recklessness_.

p. 103, middle. Substitute, _"neither evening star nor morning star is
so wonderful."_

p. 106, §. 6. Aristotle speaks of "corrective," not of "commutative"
justice. On the Aristotelian division of justice see Political and
Moral Essays (P. M. E.), pp. 285-6.

p. 111, §. 4. The _static_ equivalent of the _dynamic_ idea, of
orderly development is that the eternal harmonies and fitnesses of
things, by observance or neglect whereof a man comes to be in or out
of harmony with himself, with his fellows, with God.

p. 133. To the _Readings_ add Plato _Laws_, ix, 875, A, B, C, D.

p. 151. Rewrite the Note thus: _The author has seen reason somewhat to
modify this view, as appears by the Appendix. See P.M.E._ pp. 185-9:
_Fowler's Progressive Morality, or Fowler and Wilson's Principles of
Morals_, pp. 227-248.

p. 181, 1. ii from top. Add, _This is "the law of our nature, that
function is primary, and pleasure only attendant" (Stewart, Notes on
Nicomathean Ethics,_ II. 418).

p. 218, lines 13-16 from top, cancel the sentence, _To this query_,
etc., and substitute: _The reply is, that God is never willing that
man should do an inordinate act; but suicide is an inordinate act, as
has been shown; capital punishment is not _(c. viii. s. viii. n. 7, p.
349).

p. 237. For _The Month for March,_ 1883, read _P.M.E._, pp. 215-233.

p. 251. To the _Reading_ add P.M.E., pp. 267-283.

p. 297, l.6 from foot. After _simply evil_ add: _Hobbes allows that
human reason lays down certain good rules, "laws of nature" which
however it cannot get kept_. For Hobbes and Rousseau see further
_P.M.E_., pp. 81-90.

p. 319, middle. Cancel the words: _but the sum total of civil power is
a constant quantity, the same for all States_.

pp. 322-3. Cancel §. 7 for reasons alleged in _P.M.E_., pp. 50-72.
Substitute: _States are living organizations and grow, and their
powers vary with the stage of their development_.

p. 323, § 8. For _This seems at variance with_, read _This brings us
to consider_.

p. 338. To the _Readings_ add _P.M.E_., pp. 102-113.

p. 347, middle. Cancel from _one of these prerogatives_ to the end of
the sentence. Substitute: _of every polity even in the most infantine
condition._


       *       *       *       *       *


MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

PART I. ETHICS.

CHAPTER I.

OF THE OBJECT-MATTER AND PARTITION OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY.


1. Moral Philosophy is the science of human acts in their bearing on
human happiness and human duty.

2. Those acts alone are properly called _human_, which a man is master
of to do or not to do. A _human act_, then, is an act voluntary and
free. A man is what his human acts make him.

3. A _voluntary_ act is an act that proceeds from the will with a
knowledge of the end to which the act tends.

4. A free act is an act which so proceeds from the will that under the
same antecedent conditions it might have not proceeded.

An act may be more or less voluntary, and more or less free.

5. Moral Philosophy is divided into Ethics, Deontology, and Natural
Law. Ethics consider human acts in their bearing on human happiness;
or, what is the same thing, in their agreement or disagreement with
man's rational nature, and their making for or against his last end.
Deontology is the study of moral obligation, or the fixing of what
logicians call the comprehension of the idea _I ought_. Ethics deal
with [Greek: to prepon], "the becoming"; Deontology with [Greek: to
deon], "the obligatory". Deontology is the science of Duty, as such.
Natural Law (antecedent to Positive Law, whether divine or human,
civil or ecclesiastical, national or international) determines duties
in detail,--the _extension_ of the idea _I ought_,--and thus is the
foundation of Casuistry.

6. In the order of sciences, Ethics are antecedent to Natural
Theology; Deontology, consequent upon it.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., _in Eth_., I., lect. 1, init.; _ib_., 1a 2æ,
q. 1, art. 1, in corp.; _ib_., q. 58, art. 1, in corp.



CHAPTER II.

OF HAPPINESS.

SECTION I.--_Of Ends_.


1. Every human act is done for some end or purpose. The end is always
regarded by the agent in the light of something good. If evil be done,
it is done as leading to good, or as bound up with good, or as itself
being good for the doer under the circumstances; no man ever does evil
for sheer evil's sake. Yet evil may be the object of the will, not by
itself, nor primarily, but in a secondary way, as bound up with the
good that is willed in the first place.

2. Many things willed are neither good nor evil in themselves. There
is no motive for doing them except in so far as they lead to some good
beyond themselves, or to deliverance from some evil, which deliverance
counts as a good. A thing is willed, then, either as being good in
itself and an end by itself, or as leading to some good end. Once a
thing not good and desirable by itself has been taken up by the will
as leading to good, it may be taken up again and again without
reference to its tendency. But such a thing was not originally taken
up except in view of good to come of it. We may will one thing as
leading to another, and that to a third, and so on; thus one wills
study for learning, learning for examination purposes, examination for
a commission in the army, and the commission for glory. That end in
which the will rests, willing it for itself without reference to
anything beyond, is called the _last end_.

3. An end is either _objective_ or _subjective_. The _objective end_
is the thing wished for, as it exists distinct from the person who
wishes it. The _subjective end_ is the possession of the objective
end. That possession is a fact of the wisher's own being. Thus _money_
may be an objective end: the corresponding subjective end is _being
wealthy_.

4. Is there one subjective last end to all the human acts of a given
individual? Is there one supreme motive for all that this or that man
deliberately does? At first sight it seems that there is not. The same
individual will act now for glory, now for lucre, now for love. But
all these different ends are reducible to one, _that it may be well
with him and his_. And what is true of one man here, is true of all.
All the human acts of all men are done for the one (subjective) last
end just indicated. This end is called _happiness_.

5. Men place their happiness in most different things; some in eating
and drinking, some in the heaping up of money, some in gambling, some
in political power, some in the gratification of affection, some in
reputation of one sort or another. But each one seeks his own
speciality because he thinks that he shall be happy, that it will be
well with him, when he has attained that. All men, then, do all things
for happiness, though not all place their happiness in the same thing.

6. Just as when one goes on a journey, he need not think of his
destination at every step of his way, and yet all his steps are
directed towards his destination: so men do not think of happiness in
all they do, and yet all they do is referred to happiness. Tell a
traveller that this is the wrong way to his destination, he will avoid
it; convince a man that this act will not be well for him, will not
further his happiness, and, while he keeps that conviction principally
before his eyes, he will not do the act. But as a man who began to
travel on business, may come to make travelling itself a business, and
travel for the sake of going about; so in all cases there is a
tendency to elevate into an end that which was, to start with, only
valued as a means to an end. So the means of happiness, by being
habitually pursued, come to be a part of happiness. Habit is a second
nature, and we indulge a habit as we gratify nature. This tendency
works itself to an evil extreme in cases where men are become the
slaves of habit, and do a thing because they are got into the way of
doing it, though they allow that it is a sad and sorry way, and leads
them wide of true happiness. These instances show perversion of the
normal operation of the will.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 1, art. 4, in corp.; _ib_., q. 1,
art. 6, 7; _ib_., q. 5, art. 8; Ar., _Eth_., I., vii., 4, 5.


SECTION II.--_Definition of Happiness_.


1. Though all men do all things, in the last resort, that it may be
well with them and theirs, that is, for happiness vaguely apprehended,
yet when they come to specify what happiness is, answers so various
are given and acted upon, that we might be tempted to conclude that
each man is the measure of his own happiness, and that no standard of
happiness for all can be defined. But it is not so. Man is not the
measure of his own happiness, any more than of his own health. The
diet that he takes to be healthy, may prove his poison; and where he
looks for happiness, he may find the extreme of wretchedness and woe.
For man must live up to his nature, to his bodily constitution, to be
a healthy man; and to his whole nature, but especially to his mental
and moral constitution, if he is to be a happy man. And nature, though
it admits of individual peculiarities, is specifically the same for
all. There will, then, be one definition of happiness for all men,
specifically as such.

2. _Happiness is an act, not a state_. That is to say, the happiness
of man does not lie in his having something done to him, nor in his
being habitually able to do something, but in his actually doing
something. "To be up and doing," that is happiness,--[Greek: en to zaen
kai energein]. (Ar., _Eth._, IX., ix., 5.) This is proved from the
consideration that happiness is the crown and perfection of human
nature; but the perfection of a thing lies in its ultimate act, or
"second act," that is, in its not merely being able to act, but
acting. But action is of two sorts. One proceeds from the agent to
some outward matter, as cutting and burning. This action cannot be
happiness, for it does not perfect the agent, but rather the patient.
There is another sort of act immanent in the agent himself, as
feeling, understanding, and willing: these perfect the agent.
Happiness will be found to be one of these immanent acts. Furthermore,
there is action full of movement and change, and there is an act done
in stillness and rest. The latter, as will presently appear, is
happiness; and partly for this reason, and partly to denote the
exclusion of care and trouble, happiness is often spoken of as _a
rest_. It is also called _a state_, because one of the elements of
happiness is permanence. How the act of happiness can be permanent,
will appear hereafter.

3. _Happiness is an act in discharge of the function proper to man, as
man_. There is a function proper to the eye, to the ear, to the
various organs of the human body: there must be a function proper to
man as such. That can be none of the functions of the vegetative life,
nor of the mere animal life within him. Man is not happy by doing what
a rose-bush can do, digest and assimilate its food: nor by doing what
a horse does, having sensations pleasurable and painful, and muscular
feelings. Man is happy by doing what man alone can do in this world,
that is, acting by reason and understanding. Now the human will acting
by reason may do three things. It may regulate the passions, notably
desire and fear: the outcome will be the moral virtues of temperance
and fortitude. It may direct the understanding, and ultimately the
members of the body, in order to the production of some practical
result in the external world, as a bridge. Lastly, it may direct the
understanding to speculate and think, contemplate and consider, for
mere contemplation's sake. Happiness must take one or other of these
three lanes.

4. First, then, _happiness is not the practice of the moral virtues of
temperance and fortitude_. Temperance makes a man strong against the
temptations to irrationality and swinishness that come of the bodily
appetites. But happiness lies, not in deliverance from what would
degrade man to the level of the brutes, but in something which shall
raise man to the highest level of human nature. Fortitude, again, is
not exercised except in the hour of danger; but happiness lies in an
environment of security, not of danger. And in general, the moral
virtues can be exercised only upon occasions, as they come and go; but
happiness is the light of the soul, that must burn with steady flame
and uninterrupted act, and not be dependent on chance occurrences.

5. Secondly, _happiness is not the use of the practical understanding
with a view to production_. Happiness is an end in itself, a terminus
beyond which the act of the will can go no further; but this use of
the understanding is in view of an ulterior end, the thing to be
produced. That product is either useful or artistic; if useful, it
ministers to some further end still; if artistic, it ministers to
contemplation. Happiness, indeed, is no exercise of the practical
understanding whatever. The noblest exercises of practical
understanding are for military purposes and for statesmanship. But war
surely is not an end in itself to any right-minded man. Statecraft,
too, has an end before it, the happiness of the people. It is a labour
in view of happiness. We must follow down the third lane, and say:

6. _Happiness is the act of the speculative understanding
contemplating for contemplation's sake_. This act has all the marks of
happiness. It is the highest act of man's highest power. It is the
most capable of continuance. It is fraught with pleasure, purest and
highest in quality. It is of all acts the most self-sufficient and
independent of environment, provided the object be to the mind's eye
visible. It is welcome for its own sake, not as leading to any further
good. It is a life of ease and leisure: man is busy that he may come
to ease.

7. Aristotle says of this life of continued active contemplation:

"Such a life will be too good for man; for not as he is man will he so
live, but inasmuch as there is a divine element in his composition. As
much as this element excels the compound into which it enters, so much
does the act of the said element excel any act in any other line of
virtue. If, then, the understanding is divine in comparison with man,
the life of the understanding is divine in comparison with human life.
We must not take the advice of those who tell us, that being man, one
should cherish the thoughts of a man, or being mortal, the thoughts of
a mortal, but so far as in us lies, we must play the immortal [Greek:
athanatizein], and do all in our power to live by the best element in
our nature: for though that element be slight in quantity, in power
and in value it far outweighs all the rest of our being. A man may
well be reckoned to be that which is the ruling power and the better
part in him. . . . What is proper to each creature by nature, is best
and sweetest for each: such, then, is for man the life of the
understanding, if the understanding preeminently is man." (Ar.,
_Eth._, X., vii., 8, 9.)

8. But if happiness is an act in discharge of the function proper to
man as man (n. 3), how can it be happiness to lead a life which
Aristotle says is too good for man? The solution of this paradox is
partly contained in the concluding words of Aristotle above quoted,
and will still further appear presently (s. iv., n. I, p. 21), where
we shall argue that human life is a state of transition in preparation
for a higher life of the soul, to be lived, according to the natural
order, when the compound of soul and body would no longer exist.

9. _The act of contemplation, in which happiness consists, must rest
upon a habit of contemplation, which is intellectual virtue_. An act,
to be perfection and happiness, must be done easily, sweetly, and
constantly. But no act of the intellect can be so done, unless it
rests upon a corresponding habit. If the habit has not been acquired,
the act will be done fitfully, at random, and against the grain, like
the music of an untrained singer, or the composition of a schoolboy.
Painful study is not happiness, nor is any studied act. Happiness is
the play of a mind that is, if not master of, yet at home with its
subject. As the intellect is man's best and noblest power, so is
intellectual virtue, absolutely speaking, the best virtue of man.

10. The use of the speculative understanding is discernible in many
things to which even the common crowd turn for happiness, as news of
that which is of little or no practical concern to self, sight-seeing,
theatre-going, novels, poetry, art, scenery, as well as speculative
science and high literature. A certain speculative interest is mixed
up with all practical work: the mind lingers on the speculation apart
from the end in view.

11. _The act of contemplation cannot be steadily carried on, as is
necessary to happiness, except in the midst of easy surroundings_.
Human nature is not self-sufficient for the work of contemplation.
There is need of health and vigour, and the means of maintaining it,
food, warmth, interesting objects around you, leisure, absence of
distracting care or pain. None would call a man happy upon the rack,
except by way of maintaining a thesis. The happiness of a disembodied
spirit is of course independent of bodily conditions, but it would
appear that there are conditions of environment requisite for even a
spirit's contemplation.

12. _Happiness must endure to length of days_. Happiness is the
perfect good of man. But no good is perfect that will not last. One
swallow does not make a summer, nor does one fine day: neither is man
made blessed and happy by one day, nor by a brief time. The human mind
lighting upon good soon asks the question, Will this last? If the
answer is negative, the good is not a complete good and there is no
complete happiness coming of it. If the answer is affirmative and
false, once more that is not a perfect happiness that rests on a
delusion. The supreme good of a rational being is not found in a
fool's paradise. We want an answer affirmative and true: _This
happiness shall last_.

13. We now sum up and formulate the definition of happiness as
follows: _Happiness is a bringing of the soul to act according to the
habit of the best and most perfect virtue, that is, the virtue of the
speculative intellect, borne out by easy surroundings, and enduring to
length of days--[Greek: energeia psychaes kat aretaen taen aristaen
kai teleiotataen en biph teleio.] (Ar., _Eth._, I., vii., 15, 16.)

14. Man is made for society. His happiness must be in society, a
social happiness, no lonely contemplation. He must be happy in the
consciousness of his own intellectual act, and happy in the
discernment of the good that is in those around him, whom he loves.
Friends and dear ones are no small part of those _easy surroundings_
that are the condition of happiness.

15. Happiness--final, perfect happiness--is not in fighting and
struggling, in so far as a struggle supposes evil present and
imminent; nor in benevolence, so far as that is founded upon misery
needing relief. We fight for the conquest and suppression of evil; we
are benevolent for the healing of misery. But it will be happiness,
_in the limit_, as mathematicians speak, to wish well to all in a
society where it is well with all, and to struggle with truth for its
own sake, ever grasping, never mastering, as Jacob wrestled with God.

_Readings_.--Ar., _Eth._, I., vii. viii., 5 to end; I., x., 8 to end;
I., v., 6; VII., xiii., 3; IX., ix.; X., vii.; X., viii., 1-10; Ar.,
_Pol._, IV. (al. VII.), i., 3-10; IV., iii., 7, 8; St. Thos., la 2ae,
q. 3, art. 2; _ib._, q. 3, art. 5. in corp., ad 3; _ib._, q. 2, art.
6.


SECTION III.--_Happiness open to man_.


"And now as he looked and saw the whole Hellespont covered with the
vessels of his fleet, and all the shore and every plain about Abydos
as full as possible of men, Xerxes congratulated himself on his good
fortune; but after a little while, he wept. Then Artabanus, the King's
uncle, when he heard that Xerxes was in tears, went to him, and said:
'How different, sire, is what thou art now doing from what thou didst
a little while ago! Then thou didst congratulate thyself; and now,
behold! thou weepest.' 'There came upon me,' replied he, 'a sudden
pity, when I thought of the shortness of man's life, and considered
that of all this host, so numerous as it is, not one will be alive
when a hundred years are gone by.' 'And yet there are sadder things in
life than that,' returned the other. 'Short as our time is, there is
no man, whether it be among this multitude or elsewhere, who is so
happy, as not to have felt the wish--I will not say once, but full
many a time--that he were dead rather than alive. Calamities fall upon
us, sicknesses vex and harass us, and make life, short though it be,
to appear long. So death, through the wretchedness of our life, is a
most sweet refuge to our race; and God, who gives us the tastes that
we enjoy of pleasant times, is seen, in his very gift, to be
envious.'" (Herodotus, vii., 45, 46.)

1. It needs no argument to show that happiness, as defined in the last
section, can never be perfectly realized in this life. Aristotle took
his definition to represent an ideal to be approximated to, not
attained. He calls his sages "happy as men" (_Eth._, I., x., 16), that
is, imperfectly, as all things human are imperfect. Has Aristotle,
then, said the last word on happiness? Is perfect happiness out of the
reach of the person whom in this mortal life we call man? However that
may be, it is plain that _man desires perfect happiness_. Every man
desires that it may be perfectly well with him and his, although many
have mistaken notions of what their own well-being consists in, and
few can define it philosophically. Still they all desire it. The
higher a man stands in intellect, the loftier and vaster his
conception of happiness, and the stronger his yearning after it. This
argues that _the desire of happiness is natural to man_: not in the
sense in which eating and drinking are natural, as being requirements
of his animal nature, but in the same way that it is natural to him to
think and converse, his rational nature so requiring. It is a natural
desire, as springing from that which is the specific characteristic of
human nature, distinguishing it from mere animal nature, namely
reason. It is a natural desire in the best and highest sense of the
word.

2. Contentment is not happiness. A man is content with little, but it
takes an immensity of good to satisfy all his desire, and render him
perfectly happy. When we say we are content, we signify that we should
naturally desire more, but acquiesce in our present portion, seeing
that more is not to be had. "Content," says Dr. Bain, "is not the
natural frame of any mind, but is the result of compromise."

3. But is not this desire of unmixed happiness unreasonable? Are we
not taught to set bounds to our desire? Is not moderation a virtue,
and contentment wisdom? Yes, moderation is a virtue, but it concerns
only the use of means, not the apprehension of ends. The patient, not
to say the physician, desires medicines in moderation, so much as will
do him good and no more; but, so far as his end is health, he desires
all possible health, perfect health. The last end, then, is to be
desired as a thing to possess without end or measure, fully and
without defect.

4. We have then these facts to philosophise on: that all men desire
perfect happiness: that this desire is natural, springing from the
rational soul which sets man above the brute: that on earth man may
attain to contentment, and to some happiness, but not to perfect
happiness: that consequently nature has planted in man a desire for
which on earth she has provided no adequate satisfaction.

5. If the course of events were fitful and wayward, so that effects
started up without causes, and like causes under like conditions
produced unlike effects, and anything might come of anything, there
would be no such thing as that which we call _nature_. When we speak
of nature, we imply a regular and definite flow of tendencies, this
thing springing from that and leading to that other; nothing from
nothing, and nothing leading nowhere; no random, aimless proceedings;
but definite results led up to by a regular succession of steps, and
surely ensuing unless something occurs on the way to thwart the
process. How this is reconciled with Creation and Freewill, it is not
our province to enquire: suffice it to say that a _natural_ agent is
opposed to a _free_ one, and creation is the starting-point of nature.
But to return. Everywhere we say, "this is for that," wherever there
appears an end and consummation to which the process leads, provided
it go on unimpeded. Now every event that happens is a part of some
process or other. Every act is part of a tendency. There are no loose
facts in nature, no things that happen, or are, otherwise than in
consequence of something that has happened, or been, before, and in
view of something else that is to happen, or be, hereafter. The
tendencies of nature often run counter to one another, so that the
result to which this or that was tending is frustrated. But a tendency
is a tendency, although defeated; _this_ was for _that_, although that
for which it was has got perverted to something else. There is no
tendency which of itself fails and comes to naught, apart from
interference. Such a universal and absolute break-down is unknown to
nature.

6. All this appears most clearly in organic beings, plants and
animals. Organisms, except the very lowest, are compounds of a number
of different parts, each fulfilling a special function for the good of
the whole. There is no idle constituent in an organic body, none
without its function. What are called _rudimentary_ organs, even if
they serve no purpose in the individual, have their use in the
species, or in some higher genus. In the animal there is no idle
natural craving, or appetite. True, in the individual, whether plant
or animal, there are many potentialities frustrate and made void. That
is neither here nor there in philosophy. Philosophy deals not with
individuals but with species, not with Bucephalus or Alexander, but
with _horse_, _man_. It is nothing to philosophy that of a thousand
seeds there germinate perhaps not ten. Enough that one seed ever
germinates, and that all normal specimens are apt to do the like,
meeting with proper environment. That alone shows that seed is not an
idle product in this or that class of living beings.

7. But, it will be said, not everything contained in an organism
ministers to its good. There is refuse material, only good to get rid
of: there are morbid growths; there is that tendency to decay, by
which sooner or later the organism will perish. First, then, a word on
diseases. Diseases are the diseases of the individual; not of the
race. The race, as such, and that is what the philosopher studies, is
healthy: all that can be imputed to the race is liability to disease.
That liability, and the tendency to decay and die, are found in living
things, because their essence is of finite perfection; there cannot be
a plant or animal, that has not these drawbacks in itself, as such.
They represent, not the work of nature, but the failure of nature, and
the point beyond which nature can no further go.

8. On the preceding observations Aristotle formulated the great
maxim--called by Dr. Thomas Browne, _Religio Medici_, p. i., sect. 15,
"the only indisputable axiom in philosophy,"--_Nature does nothing in
vain_. (Ar., _Pol._, I., viii., 12; _De Anima_, III., ix., 6; _De
part. animal._, I. i., p. 641, ed. Bekker.)

9. _The desire of happiness, ample and complete, beyond what this
world can afford, is not planted in man by defect of his nature, but
by the perfection of his nature, and in view of his further
perfection_. This desire has not the character of a drawback, a thing
that cannot be helped, a weakness and decay of nature, and loss of
power, like that which sets in with advancing years. A locomotive
drawing a train warms the air about it: it is a pity that it should do
so, for that radiation of heat is a loss of power: but it cannot be
helped, as locomotives are and must be constructed. Not such is the
desire of perfect happiness in the human breast. It is not a disease,
for it is no peculiarity of individuals, but a property of the race.
It is not a decay, for it grows with the growing mind, being feeblest
in childhood, when desires are simplest and most easily satisfied, and
strongest where mental life is the most vigorous. It is an attribute
of great minds in proportion to their greatness. To be without it,
would be to live a minor in point of intellect, not much removed from
imbecility. It is not a waste of energy, rather it furnishes the
motive-power to all human volition. It comes of the natural working of
the understanding that discerns good, and other good above that, and
so still higher and higher good without limit; and of the natural
working of the will, following up and fastening upon what the
understanding discerns as good. The desire in question, then, is by no
means a necessary evil, or natural flaw, in the human constitution.

10. It follows that the desire of perfect happiness is in man by the
normal growth of his nature, and for the better. But it would be a
vain desire, and objectless, if it were essentially incapable of
satisfaction: and man would be a made and abiding piece of
imperfection, if there were no good accessible to his intellectual
nature sufficient to meet its proper exigence of perfect happiness.
But no such perfect happiness is attainable in this world. Therefore
there must be a world to come, in which he who was man, now a
disembodied spirit, but still the same person, shall under due
conditions find a perfect good, the adequate object of his natural
desire. Else is the deepest craving of human nature in vain, and man
himself is vanity of vanities.

11. It may be objected that there is no need to go beyond this world
to explain how the desire of perfect happiness is not in vain. It
works like the desire of the philosopher's stone among the old
alchemists. The thing they were in search of was a chimera, but in
looking for it they found a real good, modern chemistry. In like
manner, it is contended, though perfect happiness is not to be had
anywhere, yet the desire of it keeps men from sitting down on the path
of progress; and thus to that desire we owe all our modern
civilization, and all our hope and prospect of higher civilization to
come. Without questioning the alleged fact about the alchemists, we
may reply that modern chemistry has dissipated the desire of the
philosopher's stone, but modern civilization has not dissipated the
desire of perfect happiness: it has deepened it, and perhaps rather
obscured the prospect of its fulfilment. A desire that grows with
progress certainly cannot be satisfied by progressing. But if it is
never to be satisfied, what is it? A goad thrust into the side of man,
that shall keep him coursing along from century to century, like Io
under the gadfly, only to find himself in the last century as far from
the mark as in the first. Apart from the hope of the world to come, is
the Italy of to-day happier than the Italy of Antoninus Pius? Here is
a modern Italian's conclusion: "I have studied man, I have examined
nature, I have passed whole nights observing the starry heavens. And
what is the result of these long investigations? Simply this, that the
life of man is nothing; that man himself is nothing; that he will
never penetrate the mystery which surrounds the universe. With this
comfortless conviction I descend into the grave, and console myself
with the hope of speedy annihilation. The lamp goes out; and nothing,
nothing can rekindle it. So, Nature, I return to thee, to be united
with thee for ever. Never wilt thou have received into thy bosom a
more unhappy being." (_La Nullità della Vita_. By G. P., 1882.)

This is an extreme case, but much of modern progress tends this way.
Civilization is not happiness, nor is the desire for happiness other
than vain, if it merely leads to increased civilization.

_Readings_.--St. Thomas, _C. G._, iii., 48; Newman's _Historical
Sketches--Conversion of Augustine_; Mill's _Autobiography_, pp.
133-149.


SECTION IV.--_Of the Object of Perfect Happiness_.


1. As happiness is an act of the speculative intellect contemplating
(s. ii., n. 6, p. 9), so the thing thus contemplated is the _object of
happiness_. As happiness is the _subjective last end_, so will this
object, inasmuch as the contemplation of it yields perfect happiness,
be the _objective last end_ of man. (s. i., nn. 3, 4, p. 4.) As
perfect happiness is possible, and intended by nature, so is this
objective last end attainable, and should be attained. But attained by
man? Aye, there's the rub. It cannot be attained in this life, and
after death man is no more: a soul out of the body is not man. About
the resurrection of the body philosophy knows nothing. Nature can make
out no title to resurrection. That is a gratuitous gift of God in
Christ. When it takes effect, _stupebit natura_. Philosophy deals only
with the natural order, with man as man, leaving the supernatural
order, or the privileges and _status_ of man as a child of God, to the
higher science of Scholastic Theology. Had God so willed it, there
might have been no supernatural at all. Philosophy shows the world as
it would have been on that hypothesis. In that case, then, man would
have been, as Aristotle represents him, a being incapable of perfect
happiness; but _he who is man_ could have become perfectly happy in a
state other than human, that is, as a disembodied spirit. Peter is
man: the soul of Peter, after separation, is man no longer; but Peter
is not one person, and Peter's soul out of the body another person;
there is but one person there, with one personal history and
liabilities. The soul of Peter is Peter still: therefore the person
Peter, or he _who is Peter_, attains to happiness, but not the man
Peter, as man, apart from the supernatural privilege of the
resurrection. Hence Aristotle well said, though he failed to see the
significance of his own saying, that man should aim at a life of
happiness too good for man. (s. ii., nn. 7, 8, p. 9.)

2. The object of happiness,--the objective last end of man,--will be
that which the soul contemplating in the life to come will be
perfectly happy by so doing. The soul will contemplate all
intellectual beauty that she finds about her, all heights of truth,
all the expanse of goodness and mystery of love. She will see herself:
a vast and curious sight is one pure spirit: but that will not be
enough for her, her eye travels beyond. She must be in company, live
with myriads of pure spirits like herself,--see them, study them, and
admire them, and converse with them in closest intimacy. Together they
must explore the secrets of all creation even to the most distant
star: they must read the laws of the universe, which science
laboriously spells out here below: they must range from science to
art, and from facts to possibilities, till even their pure intellect
is baffled by the vast intricacy of things that might be and are not:
but yet they are not satisfied. A point of convergency is wanted for
all these vistas of being, whence they may go forth, and whither they
may return and meet: otherwise the soul is distracted and lost in a
maze of incoherent wandering, crying out, Whence all this? and what is
it for? and above all, whose is it? These are the questions that the
human mind asks in her present condition: much more will she ask them
then, when wonders are multiplied before her gaze: for it is the same
soul there and here. Here men are tormented in mind, if they find no
answer to these questions. Scientific men cannot leave theology alone.
They will not be happy there without an answer. Their contemplation
will still desiderate something beyond all finite being, actual or
possible. Is that God? It is nothing else. But God dwells in light
inaccessible, where no creature, as such, can come near Him nor see
Him. The beauties of creation, as so many streams of tendency, meet at
the foot of His Throne, and there are lost. Their course is towards
Him, and is, so far as it goes, an indication of Him: but He is
infinitely, unspeakably above them. No intelligence created, or
creatable, can arrive by its own natural perception to see Him as He
is: for mind can only discern what is proportionate to itself: and God
is out of proportion with all the being of all possible creatures. It
is only by analogy that the word _being_, or any other word whatever
can be applied to Him. As Plato says, "the First Good is not Being,
but over and beyond Being in dignity and power." (_Rep_. 509, B.)

3. To see God face to face, which is called the beatific vision, is
not the natural destiny of man, nor of any possible creature. Such
happiness is not the happiness of man, nor of angel, but of God
Himself, and of any creature whom He may deign by an act of gratuitous
condescension to invite to sit as guest at His own royal table. That
God has so invited men and angels, revelation informs us. Scholastic
theology enlarges upon that revelation, but it is beyond philosophy.
Like the resurrection of the body, and much more even than that, the
Beatific Vision must be relegated to the realm of the Supernatural.

4. But even in the natural order _the object of perfect happiness_ is
God. The natural and supernatural have the same object, but differ in
the mode of attainment. By supernatural grace, bearing perfect fruit,
man sees God with the eyes of his soul, as we see the faces of our
friends on earth. In perfect happiness of the natural order, creatures
alone are directly apprehended, or seen, and from the creature is
gathered the excellence of the unseen God. The process is an ascent,
as described by Plato, from the individual to the universal, and from
bodily to moral and intellectual beauty, till we reach a Beauty
eternal, immutable, absolute, substantial, and self-existent, on which
all other beauties depend for their being, while it is independent of
them. (Plato, _Symposium_, 210, 211.) Unless the ascent be prosecuted
thus far, the contemplation is inadequate, the happiness incomplete.
The mind needs to travel to the beginning and end of things, to the
Alpha and Omega of all. The mind needs to reach some perfect good:
some object, which though it is beyond the comprehension, is
nevertheless understood to be the very good of goods, unalloyed with
any admixture of defect or imperfection. The mind needs an infinite
object to rest upon, though it cannot grasp that object positively in
its infinity. If this is the case even with the human mind, still
wearing "this muddy vesture of decay," how much more ardent the
longing, as how much keener the gaze, of the pure spirit after Him who
is the centre and rest of all intellectual nature?

5. Creatures to contemplate and see God in, are conditions and
secondary objects of natural happiness. They do not afford happiness
finally of themselves, but as manifesting God, even as a mirror would
be of little interest except for its power of reflection.

6. In saying that God is the object of happiness, we must remember
that He is no cold, impersonal Beauty, but a living and loving God,
not indeed in the order of nature our Father and Friend, but still our
kind Master and very good Lord, who speaks to His servants from behind
the clouds that hide His face, and assures them of His abiding favour
and approving love. More than that, nature cannot look for: such
aspiration were unnatural, unreasonable, mere madness: it is enough
for the creature, as a creature, in its highest estate to stand before
God, hearing His voice, but seeing not His countenance, whom, without
His free grace, none can look upon and live.

_Reading_.--St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 2, art. 8.


SECTION V.--_Of the use of the present life_.


1. Since perfect happiness is not to be had in this mortal life, and
is to be had hereafter; since moreover man has free will and the
control of his own acts; it is evidently most important for man in
this life so to control and rule himself here as to dispose himself
for happiness there. Happiness rests upon a habit of contemplation (s.
ii., n. 9, p. 10), rising to God. (s. iv., n. 4, p. 24.) But a habit,
as will be seen, is not formed except by frequent acts, and may be
marred and broken by contrary acts. It is, then, important for man in
this life so to act as to acquire a habit of lifting his mind to God.
There are two things here, to lift the mind, and to lift it to God.
The mind is not lifted, if the man lives not an intellectual life, but
the life of a swine wallowing in sensual indulgences; or a frivolous
life, taking the outside of things as they strike the senses, and
flitting from image to image thoughtlessly; or a quarrelsome life,
where reason is swallowed up in anger and hatred. Again, however
sublime the speculation and however active the intellect, if God is
not constantly referred to, the mind is lifted indeed, but not to God.
It is wisdom, then, in man during this life to look to God everywhere,
and ever to seek His face; to avoid idleness, anger, intemperance, and
pride of intellect. For the mind will not soar to God when the heart
is far from Him.



CHAPTER III.

OF HUMAN ACTS.

SECTION I.--_What makes a human act less voluntary_.


1. See c. i., nn. 2, 3, 4.

2. An act is more or less voluntary, as it is done with more or less
knowledge, and proceeds more or less fully and purely from the will
properly so called. Whatever diminishes knowledge, or partially
supplants the will, takes off from the voluntariness of the act. _An
act is rendered less voluntary by ignorance, by passionate desire, and
by fear_.

3. If a man has done something in ignorance either of the law or of
the facts of the case, and would be sorry for it, were he to find out
what he has done, that act is _involuntary_, so far as it is traceable
to ignorance alone. Even if he would not be sorry, still the act must
be pronounced _not voluntary_, under the same reservation. Ignorance,
sheer ignorance, takes whatever is done under it out of the region of
volition. Nothing is willed but what is known. An ignorant man is as
excusable as a drunken one, as such,--no more and no less. The
difference is, that drunkenness generally is voluntary; ignorance
often is not. But ignorance may be voluntary, quite as voluntary as
drunkenness. It is a capital folly of our age to deny the possibility
of voluntary intellectual error. Error is often voluntary, and (where
the matter is one that the person officially or otherwise is required
to know) immoral too. A strange thing it is to say that "it is as
unmeaning to speak of the immorality of an intellectual mistake as it
would be to talk of the colour of a sound." (Lecky, _European Morals_,
ii., 202.)

4. There is an ignorance that is sought on purpose, called _affected
ignorance_ (in the Shakspearian sense of the word _affect_), as when a
man will not read begging-letters, that he may not give anything away.
Such ignorance does not hinder voluntariness. It indicates a strong
will of doing or omitting, come what may. There is yet another
ignorance called _crass_, which is when a man, without absolutely
declining knowledge, yet takes no pains to acquire it in a matter
where he is aware that truth is important to him. Whatever election is
made in consequence of such ignorance, is less voluntary, indeed, than
if it were made in the full light, still it is to some extent
voluntary. It is _voluntary in its cause_, that is, in the voluntary
ignorance that led to it. Suppose a man sets up as a surgeon, having
made a very imperfect study of his art. He is aware, that for want of
knowledge and skill, he shall endanger many lives: still he neglects
opportunities of making himself competent, and goes audaciously to
work. If any harm comes of his bungling, he can plead intellectual
error, an error of judgment for the time being; he did his best as
well as he knew it. Doubtless he did, and in that he is unlike the
malicious maker of mischief: still he has chosen lightly and
recklessly to hazard a great evil. To that extent his will is bound to
the evil: he has chosen it, as it were, at one remove.

5. Another instance. A man is a long way on to seeing, though he does
not quite see, the claims of the Church of Rome on his allegiance and
submission. He suspects that a little more prayer and search, and he
shall be a Roman Catholic. To escape this, he resolves to go
travelling and give up prayer. This is _affected ignorance_. Another
has no such perception of the claims of Catholicism. He has no
religion that satisfies him. He is aware speculatively of the
importance of the religious question; but his heart is not in religion
at all. With Demas, he loves the things of this world. Very attractive
and interesting does he find this life; and for the life to come he is
content to chance it. This is _crass ignorance_ of religious truth.
Such a man is not a formal heretic, for he is not altogether wilful
and contumacious in his error. Still neither is it wholly involuntary,
nor he wholly guiltless.

6. _Passionate desire_ is not an affection of the will, but of the
sensitive appetite. The will may cooperate, but the passion is not in
the will. The will may neglect to check the passion, when it might: it
may abet and inflame it: in these ways an act done in passion is a
voluntary act. Still it becomes voluntary only by the influx of the
will, positively permitting or stimulating: it is not voluntary
precisely as it proceeds from passion: for voluntary is that which is
of the will. It belongs to passion to bring on a momentary darkness in
the understanding: where such darkness is, there is so much the less
of a human act. But passion in an adult of sane mind is hardly strong
enough, of itself and wholly without the will, to execute any
considerable outward action, involving the voluntary muscles. Things
are often said and done, and put down to passion: but that is not the
whole account of the matter. The will has been for a long time either
feeding the passions, or letting them range unchecked: that is the
reason of their present outburst, which is voluntary at least _in its
cause_. Once this evil preponderance has been brought about, it is to
be examined whether the will, in calm moods, is making any efforts to
redress the evil. Such efforts, if made, go towards making the effects
of passion, when they come, involuntary, and gradually preventing them
altogether.

7. What a man does _from fear_, he is said to do _under compulsion_,
especially if the fear be applied to him by some other person in order
to gain a purpose. Such _compulsory action_ is distinguished in
ordinary parlance from voluntary action. And it is certainly less
voluntary, inasmuch as the will is hedged in to make its choice
between two evils, and chooses one or other only as being the less
evil of the two, not for any liking to the thing in itself. Still, all
things considered, the thing is chosen, and the action is so far
voluntary. We may call it _voluntary in the concrete_, and
_involuntary in the abstract_. The thing is willed as matters stand,
but in itself and apart from existing need it is not liked at all. But
as acts must be judged as they stand, by what the man wills now, not
by what he would will, an act done under fear is on the whole
voluntary. At the same time, fear sometimes excuses from the
observance of a law, or of a contract, which from the way in which it
was made was never meant to bind in so hard a case. Not all contracts,
however, are of this accommodating nature; and still less, all laws.
But even where the law binds, the penalty of the law is sometimes not
incurred, when the law was broken through fear.

_Readings_.--Ar., _Eth_., III, i.; St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 6, art. 3;
_ib_., q. 6, art. 6, 8; _ib_., q. 77, art. 6.


SECTION II.--_Of the determinants of morality in any given action_.


1. _The morality of any given action is determined by three elements,
the end in view, the means taken, and the circumstances that accompany
the taking of the said means._ Whoever knows this principle, does not
thereby know the right and wrong of every action, but he knows how to
go about the enquiry. It is a rule of diagnosis.

2. In order to know whether what a man does befits him as a man to do,
the first thing to examine is that which he mainly desires and wills
in his action. Now the end is more willed and desired than the means.
He who steals to commit adultery, says Aristotle, is more of an
adulterer than a thief. The end in view is what lies nearest to a
man's heart as he acts. On that his mind is chiefly bent; on that his
main purpose is fixed. Though the end is last in the order of
execution, it is first and foremost in the order of intention.
Therefore the end in view enters into morality more deeply than any
other element of the action. It is not, however, the most obvious
determinant, because it is the last point to be gained; and because,
while the means are taken openly, the end is often a secret locked up
in the heart of the doer, the same means leading to many ends, as the
road to a city leads to many homes and resting-places. Conversely, one
end may be prosecuted by many means, as there are many roads
converging upon one goal.

3. If morality were determined by the end in view, and by that alone,
the doctrine would hold that the end justifies the means. That
doctrine is false, because the moral character of a human act depends
on the thing willed, or object of volition, according as it is or is
not a fit object. Now the object of volition is not only the end in
view, but likewise the means chosen. Besides the end, the means are
likewise willed. Indeed, the means are willed more immediately even
than the end, as they have to be taken first.

4. A good action, like any other good thing, must possess a certain
requisite fulness of being, proper to itself. As it is not enough for
the physical excellence of a man to have the bare essentials, a body
with a soul animating it, but there is needed a certain grace of form,
colour, agility, and many accidental qualities besides; so for a good
act it is not enough that proper means be taken to a proper end, but
they must be taken by a proper person, at a proper place and time, in
a proper manner, and with manifold other circumstances of propriety.

5. The end in view may be either _single_, as when you forgive an
injury solely for the love of Christ: or _multiple co-ordinate_, as
when you forgive both for the love of Christ and for the mediation of
a friend, and are disposed to forgive on either ground separately; or
_multiple subordinate_, as when you would not have forgiven on the
latter ground alone, but forgive the more easily for its addition,
having been ready, however, to forgive on the former alone; or
_cumulative_, as when you forgive on a number of grounds collectively,
on no one of which would you have forgiven apart from the rest.

6. Where there is no outward action, but only an internal act, and the
object of that act is some good that is willed for its own sake, there
can be no question of means taken, as the end in view is immediately
attained.

7. The means taken and the circumstances of those means enter into the
morality of the act, _formally_ as they are seen by the intellect,
_materially_ as they are in themselves. (See what is said of
ignorance, c. iii., s. i., nn. 3-5, p. 27.) This explains the
difference between _formal_ and _material_ sin. A _material_ sin would
be _formal_ also, did the agent know what he was doing. No sin is
culpable that is not _formal_. But, as has been said, there may be a
culpable perversion of the intellect, so that the man is the author of
his own obliquity or defect of vision. When Saul persecuted the
Christians, he probably sinned materially, not formally. When Caiphas
spoke the truth without knowing it, he said well materially, but ill
formally.

8. In looking at the means taken and the circumstances that accompany
those means, it is important to have a ready rule for pronouncing what
particular belongs to the means and what to the circumstances. Thus
Clytemnestra deals her husband Agamemnon a deadly stroke with an axe,
partly for revenge, partly that she may take to herself another
consort; is the deadliness of the blow part of the means taken or only
an accompanying circumstance? It is part of the means taken. The means
taken include every particular that is willed and chosen as making for
the end in view. The fatal character of the blow does make to that
end; if Agamemnon does not die, the revenge will not be complete, and
life with Aegisthus will be impossible. On the other hand, the fact
that Clytemnestra is the wife of the man whom she murders, is not a
point that her will rests upon as furthering her purpose at all; it is
an accompanying circumstance. This method of distinguishing means from
circumstance is of great value in casuistry.

9. It is clear that not every attendant circumstance affects the
morality of the means taken. Thus the blow under which Agamemnon sank
was neither more nor less guiltily struck because it was dealt with an
axe, because it was under pretence of giving him a bath, or because
his feet were entangled in a long robe. These circumstances are all
irrelevant. Those only are relevant which attach some special
reasonableness or unreasonableness to the thing done Thus the
provocation that Clytemnestra had from her husband's introduction of
Cassandra into her house made her act of vengeance less unreasonable:
on the other hand it was rendered more unreasonable by the
circumstance of the dear and holy tie that binds wife to husband. The
provocation and the relationship were two relevant circumstances in
that case.

10. But it happens sometimes that a circumstance only affects the
reasonableness of an action on the supposition of some previous
circumstance so affecting it. Thus to carry off a thing in large or
small quantities does not affect the reasonableness of the carrying,
unless there be already some other circumstance attached that renders
the act good or evil; as for instance, if the goods that are being
removed are stolen property. Circumstances of this sort are called
_aggravating_--or, as the case may be, _extenuating_--circumstances.
Circumstances that of themselves, and apart from any previous
supposition, make the thing done peculiarly reasonable or
unreasonable, are called _specifying_ circumstances. They are so
called, because they place the action in some species of virtue or
vice; whereas _aggravating_ or _extenuating_ circumstances add to, or
take off from, the good or evil of the action in that species of
virtue or vice to which it already belongs.

11. A variety of specifying circumstances may place one and the same
action in many various species of virtue or vice. Thus a religious
robbing his parents would sin at once against justice, piety, and
religion. A nun preferring death to dishonour practises three virtues,
chastity, fortitude, and religion.

12. The means chosen may be of four several characters:--

(a) A thing _evil of itself_ and inexcusable under all conceivable
circumstances; for instance, blasphemy, idolatry, lying.

(b) _Needing excuse_, as the killing of a man, the looking at an
indecent object. Such things are not to be done except under certain
circumstances and with a grave reason. Thus indecent sights may be met
in the discharge of professional duty. In that case indeed they cease
to be indecent. They are then only indecent when they are viewed
without cause. The absence of a good motive in a case like this
commonly implies the presence of a bad one.

(c) _Indifferent_, as walking or sitting down.

(d) _Good of itself_, but liable to be vitiated by circumstances, as
prayer and almsgiving; the good of such actions may be destroyed
wholly or in part by their being done out of a vain motive, or
unseasonably, or indiscreetly.

13. It is said, "If thy eye be single, thy whole body shall be
lightsome." (St. Matt., vi., 22.) The eye is the intention
contemplating the end in view. Whoever has placed a good end before
him, and regards it steadily with a well-ordered love, never swerving
in his affection from the way that reason would have him love, must
needs take towards his end those means, and those only, which are in
themselves reasonable and just: as it is written: "Thou shalt follow
justly after that which is just." (Deut. xvi., 20.) Thus I am building
a church to the glory of God; money runs short: I perceive that by
signing a certain contract that must mean grievous oppression of the
poor, I shall save considerable expense, whereas, if I refuse, the
works will have to be abandoned for want of funds. If I have purely
the glory of God before my eyes, I certainly shall not sign that
contract: for injustice I know can bear no fruit of Divine glory. But
if I am bent upon having the building up in any case, of course I
shall sign: but then my love for the end in view is no longer pure and
regulated by reason: it is not God but myself that I am seeking in the
work. Thus an end entirely just, holy, and pure, purifies and
sanctifies the means, not formally, by investing with a character of
justice means in themselves unjust, for that is impossible,--the
leopard cannot change his spots,--but by way of elimination, removing
unjust means as ineligible to my purpose, and leaving me only those
means to choose from which are in themselves just.

14. With means in themselves indifferent, the case is otherwise. A
holy and pious end does formally sanctify those means, while a wicked
end vitiates them. I beg the reader to observe what sort of means are
here in question. There is no question of means in themselves or in
their circumstances unjust, as theft, lying, murder, but of such
indifferent things as reading, writing, painting, singing, travelling.
Whoever travels to commit sin at the end of his journey, his very
travelling, so far as it is referred to that end, is part of his sin:
it is a wicked journey that he takes. And he who travels to worship at
some shrine or place of pilgrimage, includes his journey in his
devotion. The end in view there sanctifies means in themselves
indifferent.

15. As a great part of the things that we do are indifferent as well
in themselves as in the circumstances of the doing of them, the moral
character of our lives depends largely on the ends that we habitually
propose to ourselves. One man's great thought is how to make money;
what he reads, writes, says, where he goes, where he elects to reside,
his very eating, drinking and personal expenditure, all turns on what
he calls making his fortune. It is all to gain money--_quocunque modo
rem_. Another is active for bettering the condition of the labouring
classes: a third for the suppression of vice. These three men go some
way together in a common orbit of small actions, alike to the eye, but
morally unlike, because of the various guiding purposes for which they
are done. Hence, when we consider such pregnant final ends as the
service of God and the glory of a world to come, it appears how vast
is the alteration in the moral line and colouring of a man's life,
according to his practical taking up or setting aside of these great
ends.

16. We must beware however of an exaggeration here. The final end of
action is often latent, not explicitly considered. A fervent
worshipper of God wishes to refer his whole self with all that he does
to the Divine glory and service. Yet such a one will eat, drink, and
be merry with his friends, not thinking of God at the time. Still,
supposing him to keep within the bounds of temperance, he is serving
God and doing good actions. But what of a man who has entirely broken
away from God, what of his eating, drinking, and other actions that
are of their kind indifferent? We cannot call them sins: there is
nothing wrong about them, neither in the thing done, nor in the
circumstances of the doing, nor in the intention. Pius V. condemned
the proposition: "All the works of infidels are sins." Neither must we
call such actions indifferent in the individual who does them,
supposing them to be true human acts, according to the definition, and
not done merely mechanically. They are not indifferent, because they
receive a certain measure of natural goodness from the good natural
purpose which they serve, namely, the conservation and well-being of
the agent. _Every human act is either good or evil in him who does
it._ I speak of natural goodness only.

17. The _effect consequent_ upon an action is distinguishable from the
action itself, from which it is not unfrequently separated by a
considerable interval of time, as the death of a man from poison
administered a month before. The effect consequent enters into
morality only in so far as it is either chosen as a means or intended
as an end (nn. 2, 3, p. 31), or is annexed as a relevant circumstance
to the means chosen (n. 9, p. 34.). Once the act is done, it matters
nothing to morality whether the effect consequent actually ensues or
not, provided no new act be elicited thereupon, whether of commission
or of culpable omission to prevent. It matters not to morality, but it
does matter to the agent's claim to reward or liability to punishment
at the hands of human legislators civil and ecclesiastical.

18. As soul and body make one man, so the inward and outward act--as
the will to strike and the actual blow struck--are one human act. The
outward act gives a certain physical completeness to the inward.
Moreover the inward act is no thorough-going thing, if it stops short
of outward action where the opportunity offers. Otherwise, the inward
act may be as good or as bad morally as inward and outward act
together. The mere wish to kill, where the deed is impossible, may be
as wicked as wish and deed conjoined. It may be, but commonly it will
not, for this reason, that the outward execution of the deed reacts
upon the will and calls it forth with greater intensity; the will as
it were expands where it finds outward vent. There is no one who has
not felt the relative mildness of inward feelings of impatience or
indignation, compared with those engendered by speaking out one's
mind. Often also the outward act entails a long course of preparation,
all during which the inward will is sustained and frequently renewed,
as in a carefully planned burglary.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a 2ae, q. 18, art. 1; _ib_., q. 18, art. 2, in
corp., ad 1; _ib_., q. 18, art. 3, in corp., ad 2; _ib_., q. 18, art.
4-6; _ib_., q. 18, art. 8, in corp., ad 2, 3; _ib_., q. 18, art. 9, in
corp., ad 3; _ib_., q. 18, art. 10, 3; _ib_., q. 18, art. 11, in
corp.; _ib_., q. 20, art. 4, in corp.



CHAPTER IV.

OF PASSIONS.

SECTION I.--_Of Passions in General_.


1. A passion is defined to be: _A movement of the irrational part of
the soul, attended by a notable alteration of the body, on the
apprehension of good or evil._ The soul is made up of intellect, will,
and sensible appetite. The first two are rational, the third
irrational: the third is the seat of the passions. In a disembodied
spirit, or an angel, there are no senses, no sensible appetite, no
passions. The angel, or the departed soul, can love and hate, fear and
desire, rejoice and grieve, but these are not passions in the pure
spirit, they are acts of intellect and will alone. So man also often
loves and hates, and does other acts that are synonymous with
corresponding passions, and yet no passion is there. The man is
working with his calm reason: his irrational soul is not stirred. To
an author, when he is in the humour for it, it is a delight to be
writing, but not a passionate delight. The will finds satisfaction in
the act: the irrational soul is not affected by it. Or a penitent is
sorry for his sin: he sincerely regrets it before God: his will is
heartily turned away, and wishes that that sin had never been: at the
same time his eye is dry, his features unmoved, not a sigh does he
utter, and yet he is truly sorry. It is important to bear these facts
in mind: else we shall be continually mistaking for passions what are
pure acts of will, or _vice versa_, misled by the identity of name.

2. The great mark of a passion is its sensible working of itself out
upon the body,--what Dr. Bain calls "the diffusive wave of emotion."
Without this mark there is no passion, but with it are other mental
states besides passions, as we define them. All strong emotion affects
the body sensibly, but not all emotions are passions. There are
emotions that arise from and appertain to the rational portion of the
soul. Such are Surprise, Laughter, Shame.

There is no sense of humour in any but rational beings; and though
dogs look ashamed and horses betray curiosity, that is only inasmuch
as in these higher animals there is something analogous to what is
reason in man. Moreover passions are conversant with good and evil
affecting sense, but the objects of such emotions as those just
mentioned are not good and evil as such, common parlance
notwithstanding, whereby we are said to laugh at a _bon mot_, or "a
good thing."

3. _Love_ is a generic passion, having for its species _desire_ and
_delight_, the contraries of which are _abhorrence_ and _pain_. Desire
is of absent good; abhorrence is of absent evil; delight is in present
good; pain is at present evil. The good and the evil which is the
object of any passion must be apprehended by sense, or by imagination
in a sensible way, whether itself be a thing of sense or not.

4. Desire and abhorrence, delight and pain, are conversant with good
and evil simply. But good is often attainable only by an effort, and
evil avoidable by an effort. The effort that good costs to attain
casts a shade of evil or undesirableness over it: we may shrink from
the effort while coveting the good. Again, the fact of evil being at
all avoidable is a good thing about such evil. If we call evil black,
and good white, avoidable evil will be black just silvering into grey:
and arduous good will be white with a cloud on it. And if the white
attracts, and the black repels the appetite, it appears that arduous
good is somewhat distasteful, to wit, to the faint-hearted; and
avoidable, or vincible, evil has its attraction for the man of spirit.
About these two objects, good hard of getting and evil hard of
avoidance, arise four other passions, hope and despair about the
former, fear and daring about the latter. Hope goes out towards a
difficult good: despair flies from it, the difficulty here being more
repellent than the good is attractive. Fear flies from a threatening
evil: while daring goes up to the same, drawn by the likelihood of
vanquishing it. _Desire_ and _abhorrence_, _delight_ and _pain_, hope
and despair, fear and daring, with anger and hatred (of which
presently), complete our list of passions.

5. Aristotle and his school of old, called Peripatetics, recommended
the moderation of the passions, not their extirpation. The Stoics on
the other hand contended that the model man, the sage, should be
totally devoid of passions. This celebrated dispute turned largely on
the two schools not understanding the same thing by the word
_passion_. Yet not entirely so. There was a residue of real
difference, and it came to this. If the sensitive appetite stirs at
all, it must stir in one or other of nine ways corresponding to the
nine passions which we have enumerated. Such an emotion as Laughter
affects the imagination and the sensitive part of man, and of course
the body visibly, but it does not stir the sensitive appetite, since
it does not prompt to action. To say then that a man has no passions,
means that the sensitive appetite never stirs within him, but is
wholly dead. But this is impossible, as the Stoic philosopher was fain
to confess when he got frightened in a storm at sea. Having no
passions cannot in any practical sense mean having no movements of the
sensitive appetite, for that will be afoot of its own proper motion
independent of reason: but it may mean cherishing no passions,
allowing none to arise unresisted, but suppressing their every
movement to the utmost that the will can. In that sense it is a very
intelligible and practical piece of advice, that the wise man should
labour to have no passions. It is the advice embodied in Horace's _Nil
admirari_, Talleyrand's "No zeal," Beaconsfield's "Beware of
enthusiasm." It would have man to work like a scientific instrument,
calm as a chronometer, regulated by reason alone. This was the Stoic
teaching, this the perfection that they inculcated, quite a possible
goal to make for, if not to attain. And it is worth a wise man's while
to consider, whether he should bend his efforts in this direction or
not. The determination here taken and acted upon will elaborate quite
a different character of man one way or the other. The effort made as
the Stoics direct, would mean no yielding to excitement, no poetry, no
high-strung devotion, no rapture, no ecstasy, no ardour of love, no
earnest rhetoric spoken or listened to, no mourning, no rejoicing
other than the most conventional, to the persistent smothering of
whatever is natural and really felt, no tear of pity freely let flow,
no touch of noble anger responded to, no scudding before the breeze of
indignation,--all this, that reason may keep on the even tenour of her
way undisturbed.

6. The fault in this picture is that it is not the picture of a man,
but of a spirit. He who being man should try to realize it in himself,
would fall short of human perfection. For though the sensitive
appetite is distinguished from the will, and the two may clash and
come in conflict, yet they are not two wholly independent powers, but
the one man is both will and sensitive appetite, and he rarely
operates according to one power without the other being brought into
corresponding play. There is a similar concomitance of the operations
of intellect and imagination. What attracts the sensitive appetite,
commonly allures also the _affective_ will, though on advertence the
_elective_ will may reject it. On the other hand, a strong affection
and election of the will cannot be without the sensitive appetite
being stirred, and that so strongly that the motion is notable in the
body,--in other words, is a passion. Passion is the natural and in a
certain degree the inseparable adjunct of strong volition. To check
one is to check the other. Not only is the passion repressed by
repressing the volition, but the repression of the passion is also the
repression of the volition. A man then who did his best to repress all
movements of passion indiscriminately, would lay fetters on his will,
lamentable and cruel and impolitic fetters, where his will was bent on
any object good and honourable and well-judged.

7. Again, man's will is reached by two channels, from above downwards
and from below upwards: it is reached through the reason and through
the imagination and senses. By the latter channel it often receives
evil impressions, undoubtedly, but not unfrequently by the former
also. Reason may be inconsiderate, vain, haughty, mutinous, unduly
sceptical. The abuse is no justification for closing either channel.
Now the channel of the senses and of the imagination is the wider, and
in many cases affords the better passage of the two. The will that is
hardly reached by reason, is approached and won by a pathetic sight, a
cry of enthusiasm, a threat that sends a tremor through the limbs.
Rather I should say the affective will is approached in this way: for
it remains with the elective will, on advertence and consultation with
reason, to decide whether or not it shall be won to consent. But were
it not for the channel of passion, this will could never have been
approached at all even by reasons the most cogent. Rhetoric often
succeeds, where mere dry logic would have been thrown away. God help
vast numbers of the human race, if their wills were approachable only
through their reasons! They would indeed be fixtures.

8. Another fact to notice is the liability of reason's gaze to become
morbid and as it were inflamed by unremitting exercise. I do not here
allude to hard study, but to overcurious scanning of the realities of
this life, and the still greater realities and more momentous
possibilities of the world to come. There is a sense of the
surroundings being too much for us, an alarm and a giddiness, that
comes of sober matter-of-fact thought over-much prolonged. Then it
happens that one or more undeniable truths are laid hold of, and
considered in strong relief and in isolation from the rest: the result
is a distorted and partial view of truth as a whole, and therewith the
mind is troubled. Here the kindlier passions, judiciously allowed to
play, come in to soothe the wound and soreness of pure intellect, too
keen in its workings for one who is not yet a pure spirit.

9. Moral good and evil are predicable only of _human acts_, in the
technical sense of the term. (c. i., nn. 2--4, p. 41.) As the passions
by definition (c. iv., s. i., n. 1, p. 41) are not human acts, they
can never be morally evil of themselves. But they are an occasion of
moral evil in this way. They often serve to wake up the slumbering
Reason. To that end it is necessary that they should start up of
themselves without the call of Reason. This would be no inconvenience,
if the instant Reason awoke, and adverted to the tumult and stir of
Passion, she could take command of it, and where she saw fit, quell
it. But Reason has no such command, except in cases where she has
acquired it by years of hard fighting. Passion once afoot holds on her
course against the dictate of Reason. True, so long as it remains mere
Passion, and Reason is not dragged away by it, no consent of the will
given, no voluntary act elicited, still less carried into outward
effect,--so long as things remain thus, however Passion may rage,
there is no moral evil done. But there is a great temptation, and in
great temptation many men fall. The evil is the act of free will, but
the pressure on the will is the pressure of Passion. But Passion
happily is a young colt amenable to discipline. Where the assaults of
Passion are resolutely and piously withstood, and the incentives
thereto avoided--unnatural and unnecessary incentives I mean--Passion
itself acquires a certain habit of obedience to Reason, which habit is
moral virtue. Of that presently.

10. In a man of confirmed habits of moral virtue, Passion starts up
indeed independently of Reason, but then Reason ordinarily finds
little difficulty in regulating the Passion so aroused. In a certain
high and extraordinary condition of human nature, not only has Reason
entire mastery over Passion wherever she finds it astir, but Passion
cannot stir in the first instance, without Reason calling upon it to
do so. In this case the torpor of the will deprecated above (n. 7) is
not to be feared, because Reason is so vigorous and so masterful as to
be adequate to range everywhere and meet all emergencies without the
goad of Passion. This state is called by divines the _state of
integrity_. In it Adam was before he sinned. It was lost at the Fall,
and has not been restored by the Redemption. It is not a thing in any
way due to human nature: nothing truly natural to man was forfeited by
Adam's sin. It is no point of holiness, no guerdon of victory, this
state of integrity, but rather a being borne on angel's wings above
the battle. But one who has no battle in his own breast against
Passion, may yet suffer and bleed and die under exterior persecution:
nay, he may, if he wills, let in Passion upon himself, to fear and
grieve, when he need not. So did the Second Adam in the Garden of
Gethsemane.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a, q. 81, art. 2, in corp.; _id._, 1a 2æ, q.
23, art. 1, in corp.; _ib._, q. 23, art. 2, in corp.; Cicero, _Tusc.
Disp._, iv., cc. 17-26; St. Aug., _De Civitate Dei_, ix., cc. 4, 5;
Ar, _Eth._, III., v., 3, 4; _ib._, I., xiii., 15-17; St. Thos., 3a, q.
15, art. 4; _id._, 1a 2æ, q. 59, art. 5; Plato, _Timaeus_, 69, B, E:
70, A.


SECTION II.--_Of Desire_.


1. Desires are either _physical_ cravings, by moderns called
_appetites_; or _physical_ desires or _tastes_, called _desires_
proper. The appetites have their beginning in bodily uneasiness. They
are felt needs of something required for the animal maintenance of the
individual or of the race. The objects of the several appetites are
Meat and Drink, Warmth or Coolness, Exercise and Repose, Sleep, Sex.
The object of mere appetite is marked by quantity only, not by
quality. That is to say, the thing is sought for in the vague, in a
certain amount sufficient to supply the want, but not this or that
variety of the thing. The cry of a hungry man is, "Give me to eat," if
very hungry, "Give me much:" but so far as he is under the mere
dominion of appetite he does not crave any particular article of food,
vegetable or animal: he wants quantity merely. So of thirst, so of all
the appetites, where there is nothing else but appetite present.

2. But if a thirsty man cries for champagne, or a hungry man fancies a
venison pasty, there is another element beyond appetite in that
demand. On the matter of the physical craving there is stamped the
form of a psychical desire. The psychical element prescribes a quality
of the objects sought. The thirsty man thus prompted no longer wants
drink but wine: the man mewed up within doors no longer calls for
exercise, but for a horse or a bicycle. It is obvious that in man the
appetites generally pass into the further shape of psychical desire.
It is when the appetite is vehement, or the man is one who makes
slight study of his animal wants, that pure appetite, sheer physical
craving, is best shown. Darius flying before his conqueror is ready to
drink at any source, muddy or clear, a drink is all that he wants: it
is all that is wanted by St. Paul the first Hermit. But your modern
lounger at the clubs, what variety of liquors are excogitated to
please his palate!

3. Not all psychical desires are on the matter of appetite; they may
be fixed on any good whatsoever of body or of mind. Many psychical
desires are not passions at all, but reside exclusively in the
superior part of the soul, in the will prompted by the understanding,
and do not affect the body in any sensible way. Such for instance is
the great desire of happiness. Those desires that are passions are
prompted, not by the understanding, but by the imagination or fancy,
imaging to itself some particular good, not good in general, for that
the understanding contemplates. Fancy paints the picture; or if sense
presents it, fancy appropriates and embellishes it: the sensitive
appetite fastens upon the representation: the bodily organs sensibly
respond; and there is the passion of psychical desire.

4. _Physical cravings, or appetites, have limited objects: the objects
of psychical desires may be unlimited._ A thirsty man thirsts not for
an ocean, but for drink _quantum sufficit_: give him that and the
appetite is gone. But the miser covets all the money that he can get:
the voluptuary ranges land and sea in search of a new pleasure: the
philosopher ever longs for a higher knowledge: the saint is
indefatigable in doing good. Whatever a man takes to be an end in
itself, not simply a means, that he desires without end or measure.
What he desires as a means, he desires under a limitation, so far
forth as it makes for the end, so much and no more. As Aristotle says
of the processes of art, "the end in view is the limit," [Greek: peras
to telos] (cf. c. ii., s. iii., n. 3, p. 15) Whatever is desired as an
end in itself, is taken to be a part of happiness, or to represent
happiness. Happiness and the object that gives happiness is the one
thing that man desires for itself, and desires without end or measure.
Unfortunately he is often mistaken in the choice of this object. He
often takes for an end what is properly only a means. They "whose god
is their belly," have made this mistake in regard of the gratification
of appetite. It is not appetite proper that has led to this
perversion, but psychical desire, or appetite inflamed by the
artificial stimulus of imagination. For one who would be temperate, it
is more important to control his imagination than to trouble about his
appetite. Appetite exhausts itself, sometimes within the bounds of
what is good for the subject, sometimes beyond them, but still within
some bounds; but there is no limit to the cravings bred of
imagination.

5. By this canon a man may try himself to discover whether or not a
favourite amusement is gaining too much upon him. An amusement is
properly a means to the end, that a man may come away from it better
fitted to do the serious work of his life. Pushed beyond a certain
point, the amusement ceases to minister to this end. The wise man
drops it at that point. But if one knows not where to stop: or if when
stopped in spite of himself, he is restless till he begin again, and
never willingly can forego any measure of the diversion that comes
within his reach, the means in that case has passed into an end: he is
enslaved to that amusement, inasmuch as he will do anything and
everything for the sake of it. Thus some men serve pleasure, and other
men money.

6. Hence is apparent the folly of supposing that crimes against
property are preventible simply by placing it within the power of all
members of the community easily to earn an honest livelihood, and
therewith the satisfaction of all their natural needs. It is not
merely to escape cold and hunger that men turn to burglary or
fraudulent dealing: it is more for the gratification of a fancy, the
satisfaction of an inordinate desire. Great crimes are not committed
"to keep the wolf from the door," but because of the wolf in the
heart, the overgrown psychical desire, which is bred in many a
well-nourished, warmly clad, comfortably housed, highly educated
citizen. There is a sin born of "fulness of bread."

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 30, art. 3, in corp.; _ib_., q. 30,
art. 4, in corp.; Ar., _Eth_., III., xi., 1-4: Ar., _Pol_., I., ix.,
13; _ib_., II., vii., 11-13.

N.B.--The division of desires into _physical_ and _psychical_ is first
suggested by Plato, who (_Rep._ 558 D to 559 C) divides them as
_necessary_ and _unnecessary_. Unnecessary desires he treats as evil.
What Plato calls a _necessary_, Aristotle calls a _physical_, and St.
Thomas a _natural_ desire. Unfortunately, Aristotle and St. Thomas had
but one word for our English two, _physical_ and _natural_. Desires
that are not physical, not natural nor necessary to man in his animal
capacity, may be highly natural and becoming to man as he is a
reasonable being, or they may be highly unbecoming. These psychical
desires, called by St. Thomas _not natural_, take in at once the
noblest and the basest aspirations of humanity.


SECTION III.--_Of Delight_.


1. Delight like desire may be either physical or psychical. All that
has been said above of desire under this division applies also to
delight, which is the realization of desire. This division does not
altogether fall in with that into _sensual_ delights and
_intellectual_ delights. A professional wine-taster could hardly be
said to find intellectual delight in a bottle of good Champagne, real
_Veuve-Clicquot_: yet certainly his is a psychical delight, no mere
unsophisticated gratification of appetite. Sensual delights then are
those delights which are founded on the gratification of appetite,
whether simple--in which case the delight is physical--or studied and
fancy-wrought appetite, the gratification of which is psychical
delight. Intellectual delights on the other hand are those that come
of the exercise of intellect, not unsupported by imagination, but
where appetite enters not at all, or only as a remote adjunct, albeit
the delight may turn upon some sight or sound, as of music, or of a
fine range of hills. Or the object may be a thing of intellect, pure
and removed from sense as far as an object of human contemplation can
be, for instance, the first elements of matter, freewill, the
immensity of God. The study of such objects yields a purer
intellectual delight than that of the preceding. But this is a high
ground and a keen upper air, where few can tread and breathe.

2. A man has more complacency in himself upon attaining to some
intellectual delight than upon a sensual satisfaction: he is prouder
to have solved a problem than to have enjoyed his dinner. Also, he
would rather forego the capacity of sensual enjoyment than that of
intellectual pleasure; rather lose his sense of taste than his science
or his scholarship, if he has any notable amount of either. Again, put
sensual delight in one scale, and in the other the intellectual
delight of honour, no worthy specimen of a man will purchase the
pleasure at the price of honour. The disgrace attaching to certain
modes of enjoyment is sufficient to make men shun them, very pleasant
though they be to sense. Again, sensual delight is a passing thing,
waxing and waning: but intellectual delight is steady, grasped and
held firmly as a whole. But sensual delight comes more welcome of the
two in this that it removes a pre-existing uneasiness, as hunger,
weariness, nervous prostration, thus doing a medicinal office: whereas
no such office attaches in the essential nature of things to
intellectual delight, as that does not presuppose any uneasiness; and
though it may remove uneasiness, the removal is difficult, because the
uneasiness itself is an obstacle to the intellectual effort that must
be made to derive any intellectual delight. Sensual enjoyment is the
cheaper physician, and ailing mortals mostly resort to that door.

3. "I will omit much usual declamation on the dignity and capacity of
our nature: the superiority of the soul to the body, of the rational
to the animal part of our constitution; upon the worthiness,
refinement, and delicacy of some satisfactions, or the meanness,
grossness, and sensuality of others: because I hold that pleasures
differ in nothing but in continuance and intensity." (Paley, _Moral
Philosophy_, bk. i., c. vi.)

In opposition to the above it is here laid down that _delights do not
differ in continuance and intensity, that is, in quantity, alone, but
likewise in quality_, that is, some are nobler, better, and more
becoming a man than others, and therefore preferable on other grounds
than those of mere continuance and intensity. I wish to show that the
more pleasant pleasure is not always the better pleasure; that even
the pleasure which is more durable, and thereby more pleasant in the
long run, is not the better of the two simply as carrying the greater
_cumulus_ of pleasure. If this is shown, it will follow that pleasure
is not identical with good; or that pleasure is not happiness, not the
last end of man.

4. Delight comes of activity, not necessarily of change, except so far
as activity itself involves change, as it always does in mortal man.
Delight sits upon activity, as the bloom upon youth. Bloom is the
natural sign of maturity; and the delight that we come to take in
doing a thing shows that we are at least beginning to do it well: our
activity is approaching perfection. In this sense it is said that
_delight perfects activity_. As the activity, so will be the delight.
But the activity will be as the power of which it is an exercise.
Powers like in kind will supply like activities, and these again will
yield delights alike in kind. There is no difference of quality in
such delights, they differ in quantity alone. Thus taste and smell are
two senses: the difference between them can hardly be called one of
kind: therefore the delights of smelling and of tasting fall under one
category. We may exchange so much smell for an equal amount of taste:
it is a mere matter of quantity. But between sight and hearing on the
one hand, and taste and smell and touch on the other, there is a wider
difference, due to the fact that intellect allies itself more readily
to the operation of the two former senses.

5. Widest of all differences is that between sense and intellect. To
explain this difference in full belongs to Psychology. Enough to say
here that the object of sense is always particular, bound up in
circumstances of present time and place, as _this horse_: while the
object of intellect is universal, as _horse_ simply. The human
intellect never works without the concurrence either of sense or of
imagination, which is as it were sense at second hand. As pure
intellectual operation is never found in man, so neither is pure
intellectual delight, like that of an angel. Still, as even in man
sense and intellect are two powers differing in kind, so must their
operations differ in kind, and the delights consequent upon those
operations. Therefore, unless Paley would have been willing to allow
that the rational and animal parts of our nature differ only as _more_
and _less_--which is tantamount to avowing that man is but a magnified
brute--he ought not to have penned his celebrated utterance, that
pleasures differ only in continuance and intensity: he should have
admitted that they differ likewise in kind; or in other words, that
pleasures differ in quality as well as in quantity. The goodness of a
pleasure, then, is not the mere amount of it. To repeat St.
Augustine's reflection on the drunken Milanese: "It makes a difference
what source a man draws his delight from." [Footnote 2] As in man
reason is nobler than sense, preferable, and a better good to its
possessor--for reason it is that makes him man and raises him above
the brute--so the use of the reason and the delight that comes thereof
is nobler, preferable, and a better good to him than the pleasure that
is of the mere operation of his animal nature. A little of the nobler
delight outweighs a vast volume of the baser: not that the nobler is
the pleasanter, but because it is the nobler. Nor can it be pretended
that the nobler prevails as being the more durable, and thereby likely
to prove the pleasanter in the long run. The nobler is better at the
time and in itself, because it is the more human delight and
characteristic of the higher species. I have but to add that what is
better in itself is not better under all circumstances. The best life
of man can only be lived at intervals. The lower operations and the
delights that go with them have a medicinal power to restore the
vigour that has become enfeebled by a lengthened exercise of the
higher faculties. At those "dead points" food and fiddling are better
than philosophy.

[Footnote 2: Interest unde quis gaudeat. (S. Aug., Confess., vi., 6.)]

6. This medicinal or restorative virtue of delight is a fact to bear
in mind in debating the question how far it is right to act for the
pleasure that the action gives. It is certainly wrong to act for mere
animal gratification. Such gratification is a stimulus to us to do
that which makes for the well-being of our nature: to fling away all
intention of any good other than the delight of the action, is to
mistake the incentive for the end proposed. But this is a doctrine
easily misunderstood. An example may save it from being construed too
rigidly. Suppose a man has a vinery, and being fond of fruit he goes
there occasionally, and eats, not for hunger, but as he says, because
he likes grapes. He seems to act for mere pleasure: yet who shall be
stern enough to condemn him, so that he exceed not in quantity? If he
returns from the vinery in a more amiable and charitable mood, more
satisfied with Providence, more apt to converse with men and do his
work in the commonwealth, who can deny that in acting in view of these
ends, at least implicitly, he has taken lawful means to a proper
purpose? He has not been fed, but recreated: he has not taken
nourishment, but medicine, preventive or remedial, to a mind diseased.
It is no doubt a sweet and agreeable medicine: this very agreeableness
makes its medical virtue. It is a sweet antidote to the bitterness of
life. But though a man may live by medicine, he does not live for it.
So no man by rights lives for pleasure. The pleasure that a man finds
in his work encourages him to go on with it. The pleasure that a man
finds by turning aside to what is not work, picks him up, rests and
renovates him, that he may go forth as from a wayside inn, or
_diverticulum_, refreshed to resume the road of labour. Hence we
gather the solution of the question as to the lawfulness of acting for
pleasure. If a man does a thing because it is pleasant, and takes the
pleasure as an incentive to carry on his labour, or as a remedy to
enable him to resume it, he acts for pleasure rightly. For this it is
not necessary that he should expressly think of the pleasure as being
helpful to labour: it is enough that he accepts the subordination of
pleasure to work as nature has ordained it; and this ordinance he does
accept, if he puts forth no positive volition the other way, whether
expressly, as none but a wrong-headed theologian is likely to do, or
virtually, by taking his pleasure with such greediness that the motion
of his will is all spent therein as in its last end and terminus, so
that the pleasure ceases to be referable to aught beyond itself, a
case of much easier occurrence. Or lastly, the natural subordination
of pleasure to work may be set aside, defeated, and rendered
impossible by the whole tenour of an individual's life, if he be one
of those giddy butterflies who flit from pleasure to pleasure and do
no work at all. Till late in the morning he sleeps, then breakfasts,
then he shoots, lunches, rides, bathes, dines, listens to music,
smokes, and reads fiction till late at night, then sleeps again; and
this, or the like of this is his day, some three hundred days at least
in the year. This is not mere acting for pleasure, it is living for
pleasure, or acting for pleasure so continuously as to leave no scope
for any further end of life. It may be hard to indicate the precise
hour in which this man's pleasure-seeking passes into sin: still this
is clear, his life is not innocent. Clear him of gluttony and lust,
there remains upon him the sin of sloth and of a wasted existence.

7. Even the very highest of delights, the delight of contemplation, is
not the highest of goods, but a concomitant of the highest good. The
highest good is the final object of the will: but the object of the
will is not the will's own act: we do not will willing, as neither do
we understand understanding, not at least without a reflex effort.
What we will in contemplating is, not to be delighted, but to see.
This is the subjective end and happiness of man, to see, to
contemplate. Delight is not anything objective: neither is it the
subjective last end of humanity. In no sense then is delight, or
pleasure, the highest good.

_Readings_.--Ar., _Eth_., X., iv., 8; _ib_., X., iii., 8-13, _ib_.,
X., v., 1-5; Plato, _Gorgias_, pp. 494, 495; Mill, _Utilitarianism_,
2nd. edit., pp. 11-l6; St. Thos., la 2æ, q. 31, art. 5; _id_., _Contra
Gentiles_, iii., 26, nn. 8, 10, 11, 12.


SECTION IV.--_Of Anger_.


1. Anger is a compound passion, made up of displeasure, desire, and
hope: displeasure at a slight received, desire of revenge and
satisfaction, and hope of getting the same, the getting of it being a
matter of some difficulty and calling for some exertion, for we are
not angry with one who lies wholly in our power, or whom we despise.
Anger then is conversant at once with the good of vengeance and with
the evil of a slight received: the good being somewhat difficult to
compass, and the evil not altogether easy to wipe out. (Cf. s.i., n.4,
p. 43.)

2. Anger is defined: _A desire of open vengeance for an open slight,
attended with displeasure at the same, the slight being put upon self,
or upon some dear one, unbefittingly._ The vengeance that the angry
man craves is a vengeance that all shall see. "No, ye unnatural hags,"
cries Lear in his fury, "I will do such things,--what they shall be
yet I know not, but _they shall be the terror of the earth_." When we
are angry, we talk of "making an example" of the offender. The idea is
that, as all the world has seen us slighted and set at naught, so all
the world, witnessing the punishment of the offending party, may take
to heart the lesson which we are enforcing upon him, namely, that we
are men of might and importance whom none should despise. Whoever is
angry, is angry at being despised, flouted to his face and set at
naught, either in his own person, or in the person of one whom he
venerates and loves, or in some cause that lies near to his heart.
Anger is essentially a craving for vengeance on account of a wrong
done. If then we have suffered, but think we deserve to suffer, we are
not angry. If we have suffered wrong, but the wrong seems to have been
done in ignorance, or in the heat of passion, we are not angry, or we
are not so very angry. "If he had known what he was about," we say,
or, "if he had been in his right mind, he could not have brought
himself to treat me so." But when one has done us cool and deliberate
wrong, then we are angry, because the slight is most considerable.
There is an appearance of our claims to considerations having been
weighed, and found wanting. We call it, "a cool piece of
impertinence," "spiteful malevolence," and the like. Any other motive
to which the wrong is traceable on the part of the wrong-doer, lessens
our anger against him: but the motive of contempt, and that alone, if
we seem to discover it in him, invariably increases it. To this all
other points are reducible that move our anger, as forgetfulness,
rudely delivered tidings of misfortune, a face of mirth looking on at
our distress, or getting in the way and thwarting our purpose.

3. Anger differs from hatred. Hatred is a chronic affection, anger an
acute one. Hatred wishes evil to a man as it is evil, anger as it is
just. Anger wishes evil to fall on its object in the sight of all men,
and with the full consciousness of the sufferer: hatred is satisfied
with even a secret mischief, and, so that the evil be a grievous one,
does not much mind whether the sufferer be conscious of it or no. Thus
an angry man may wish to see him who has offended brought to public
confession and shame: but a hater is well content to see his enemy
spending his fortune foolishly, or dead drunk in a ditch on a lonely
wayside. The man in anger feels grief and annoyance, not so the hater.
At a certain point of suffering anger stops, and is appeased when full
satisfaction seems to have been made: but an enemy is implacable and
insatiate in his desire of your harm. St. Augustine in his Rule to his
brethren says: "For quarrels, either have them not, or end them with
all speed, lest anger grow to hatred, and of a mote make a beam."

4. Anger, like vengeance, is then only a safe course to enter on, when
it proceeds not upon personal but upon public grounds. And even by
this maxim many deceive themselves.

_Readings_.--Ar., _Rhet_., ii., 2; _ib_., 4, ad fin.; St. Thos., 1a
2æ, q. 46, art. 2, in corp.; _ib_., q. 46, art. 3, in corp.; _ib_., q.
46, art. 6; _ib_., q. 47, art. 2.



CHAPTER V.

OF HABITS AND VIRTUES.

SECTION I.--_Of Habit_.


1. _A habit is a quality difficult to change, whereby an agent whose
nature it was to work one way or another indeterminately, is disposed
easily and readily at will to follow this or that particular line of
action_. Habit differs from _disposition_, as disposition is a quality
easily changed. Thus one in a good humour is in a _disposition_ to be
kind. Habit is a part of character: disposition is a passing fit.
Again, habit differs from faculty, or power: as power enables one to
act; but habit, presupposing power, renders action easy and
expeditious, and reliable to come at call. We have a power to move our
limbs, but a habit to walk or ride or swim. Habit then is the
determinant of power. One and the same power works well or ill, but
not one and the same habit.

2. A power that has only one way of working, set and fixed, is not
susceptible of habit. Such powers are the forces of inanimate nature,
as gravitation and electricity. A thing does not gravitate better for
gravitating often. The moon does not obey the earth more readily
to-day than she did in the days of Ptolemy, or of the Chaldean sages.
Some specious claim to habit might be set up on behalf of electricity
and magnetism. A glass rod rubbed at frequent intervals for six
months, is a different instrument from what it would have been, if
left all that time idle in a drawer. Then there are such cases as the
gradual magnetising of an iron bar. Still we cannot speak of
electrical habits, or magnetic habits, not at least in things without
life, because there is no will there to control the exercise of the
quality. As well might we speak of a "tumbledown" habit in a row of
houses, brought on by locomotives running underneath their
foundations. It is but a case of an accumulation of small effects,
inducing gradually a new molecular arrangement, so that the old powers
act under new material conditions. But habit is a thing of life, an
appurtenance of will, not of course independent of material conditions
and structural alterations, in so far forth as a living and volitional
is also a material agent, but essentially usable _at will_, and
brought into play and controlled in its operation by free choice.
Therefore a habit that works almost automatically has less of the
character of a true habit, and passes rather out of morality into the
region of physics. Again, bad habits, vices to which a man is become a
slave against his better judgment, are less properly called habits
than virtues are; for such evil habits do not so much attend on
volition (albeit volition has created them) as drag the will in their
wake. For the like reason, habit is less properly predicable of brute
animals than of men: for brutes have no intelligent will to govern
their habits. The highest brutes are most susceptible of habit. They
are most like men in being most educable. And, of human progeny, some
take up habits, in the best and completest sense of the term, more
readily than others. They are better subjects for education: education
being nothing else than the formation of habits.

3. Knowledge consists of intellectual habits. But the habits of most
consequence to the moralist lie in the will, and in the sensitive
appetite as amenable to the control of the will. In this category come
the virtues, in the ordinary sense of that name, and secondarily the
vices.

4. A habit is acquired by acts. Whereupon this difficulty has been
started:--If the habit, say of mental application, comes from acts of
study, and again the acts from the habit, how ever is the habit
originally acquired? We answer that there are two ways in which one
thing may come from another. It may come in point of its very
existence, as child from parent; or in point of some mode of
existence, as scholar from master. A habit has its very existence from
acts preceding: but those acts have their existence independent of the
habit. The acts which are elicited after the habit is formed, owe to
the habit, not their existence, but the mode of their existence: that
is to say, because of the habit the acts are now formed readily,
reliably, and artistically, or virtuously. The primitive acts which
gradually engendered the habit, were done with difficulty, fitfully,
and with many failures,--more by good luck than good management, if it
was a matter of skill, and by a special effort rather than as a thing
of course, where it was question of moral well-doing. (See c.ii.,
s.ii., n.9, p. 10.)

5. A habit is a living thing: it grows and must be fed. It grows on
acts, and acts are the food that sustain it. Unexercised, a habit
pines away: corruption sets in and disintegration. A man, we will say,
has a habit of thinking of God during his work. He gives over doing
so. That means that he either takes to thinking of everything and
nothing, or he takes up some definite line of thought to the exclusion
of God. Either way there is a new formation to the gradual ruin of the
old habit.

6. _Habit_ and _custom_ may be distinguished in philosophical
language. We may say that custom makes the habit. Custom does not
imply any skill or special facility. A habit is a channel whereby the
energies flow, as otherwise they would not have flowed, freely and
readily in some particular direction. A habit, then, is a
determination of a faculty for good or for evil. It is something
intrinsic in a man, a real modification of his being, abiding in him
in the intervals between one occasion for its exercise and another:
whereas custom is a mere denomination, expressive of frequent action
and no more. Thus it would be more philosophical to speak of a
_custom_ of early rising, and of a _custom_ of smoking, rather than of
a _habit_ of smoking, except so far as, by the use of the word
_habit_, you may wish to point to a certain acquired skill of the
respiratory and facial muscles, and a certain acquired temper of the
stomach, enabling one to inhale tobacco fumes with impunity.

7. Habits are acquired, but it is obvious that the rate of acquisition
varies in different persons. This comes from one person being more
predisposed by _nature_ than another to the acquiring of this or that
habit. By nature, that is by the native temper and conformation of his
body wherewith he was born, this child is more prone to literary
learning, that to mechanics, this one to obstinacy and
contentiousness, that to sensuality, and so of the rest. For though it
is by the soul that a man learns, and by the act of his will and
spiritual powers he becomes a glutton or a zealot, nevertheless the
bodily organs concur and act jointly towards these ends. The native
dispositions of the child's body for the acquisition of habits depend
to an unascertained extent upon the habits of his ancestors. This is
the fact of _heredity_.

8. Man is said to be "a creature of habits." The formation of habits
in the will saves the necessity of continually making up the mind
anew. A man will act as he has become habituated, except under some
special motive from without, or some special effort from within. In
the case of evil habits, that effort is attended with immense
difficulty. The habit is indeed the man's own creation, the outcome of
his free acts. But he is become the bondslave of his creature, so much
so that when the occasion arrives, three-fourths of the act is already
done, by the force of the habit alone, before his will is awakened, or
drowsily moves in its sleep. The only way for the will to free itself
here is not to wait for the occasion to come, but be astir betimes,
keep the occasion at arm's length, and register many a determination
and firm protest and fervent prayer against the habit. He who neglects
to do this in the interval has himself to blame for being overcome
every time that he falls upon the occasion which brings into play the
evil habit.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 49, art. 4, ad 1, 2; _ib_., q. 50,
art. 3, in corp., ad. 1, 2; _ib_., q. 51, art. 1, in corp.; _ib_., q.
53, art. 3, in corp.; Ar., _Eth_., II., i.; _ib_., III., v., 10-14;
_ib_., II., iv., 1, 2, 4.


SECTION II.--_Of Virtues in General_.


1. Virtue in its most transcendental sense means the excellence of a
thing according to its kind. Thus it is the virtue of the eye to see,
and of a horse to be fleet of foot. Vice is a _flaw_ in the make of a
thing, going to render it useless for the purpose to which it was
ordained. From the ethical standpoint, virtue is a habit that a man
has got of doing moral good, or doing that which it befits his
rational nature to do: and vice is a habit of doing moral evil. (See
c. i., n. 5.) It is important to observe that virtue and vice are not
acts but habits. Vices do not make a man guilty, nor do virtues make
him innocent. A man is guilty or innocent according to his acts, not
according to his habits. A man may do a wicked thing and not be
vicious, or a good action and not be virtuous. But no man is vicious
who has not done one, two, aye, many wicked things: and to be
virtuous, a man must have performed many acts of virtue. Children do
right and wrong, but they have neither virtues nor vices except in a
nascent state: there has not yet been time in them for the habits to
be formed. When sin is taken away by God and pardoned, the vice, that
is, the evil habit, if any such existed before, still remains, and
constitutes a danger for the future. The habit can only be overcome by
watchfulness and a long continuance of contrary acts. But vice is not
sin, nor is sin vice, nor a good deed a virtue.

2. The name of virtue is given to certain habits residing in the
intellect, as _intuition_ or _insight_ (into self-evident truths),
_wisdom_ (regarding conclusions of main application), _science_ (of
conclusions in special departments), and _art_. These are called
_intellectual virtues_.

It was a peculiarity of Socrates' teaching, largely shared by Plato,
to make all virtue intellectual, a doctrine expressed in the formula,
_Virtue is knowledge_; which is tantamount to this other, _Vice is
ignorance_, or _an erroneous view_. From whence the conclusion is
inevitable: _No evil deed is wilfully done_; and therefore, _No man is
to blame for being wicked_.

3. Undoubtedly there is a certain element of ignorance in all vice,
and a certain absence of will about every vicious act. There is
likewise an intellectual side to all virtue. These positions we
willingly concede to the Socratics. Every morally evil act is borne of
some voluntary inconsiderateness. The agent is looking the wrong way
in the instant at which he does wrong. Either he is regarding only the
solicitations of his inferior nature to the neglect of the superior,
or he is considering some rational good indeed, but a rational good
which, if he would look steadily upon it, he would perceive to be
unbefitting for him to choose. No man can do evil in the very instant
in which his understanding is considering, above all things else, that
which it behoves him specially to consider in the case. Again, in
every wrong act, it is not the sheer evil that is willed, but the good
through or with the evil. Good, real or supposed, is sought for: evil
is accepted as leading to good in the way of means, or annexed thereto
as a circumstance. Moreover, no act is virtuous that is elicited quite
mechanically, or at the blind instance of passion. To be virtuous, the
thing must be done _on principle_, that is, at the dictate of reason
and by the light of intellect.

4. Still, virtue is not knowledge. There are other than intellectual
habits needed to complete the character of a virtuous man. "I see the
better course and approve it, and follow the worse," said the Roman
poet. [Footnote 3] "The evil which I will not, that I do," said the
Apostle. It is not enough to have an intellectual discernment of and
preference for what is right: but the will must be habituated to
embrace it, and the passions too must be habituated to submit and
square themselves to right being done. In other words, a virtuous man
is made up by the union of enlightened intellect with the moral
virtues. The addition is necessary for several reasons.

[Footnote 3: Video meliora proboque,/Deteriora sequor. (Ovid,
_Metamorph_., vii., 21.)]

(a) Ordinarily, the intellect does not necessitate the will. The will,
then, needs to be clamped and set by habit to choose the right thing
as the intellect proposes it.

(b) Intellect, or Reason, is not absolute in the human constitution.
As Aristotle (_Pol_., I., v., 6) says: "The soul rules the body with a
despotic command: but reason rules appetite with a command
constitutional and kingly": that is to say, as Aristotle elsewhere
(_Eth_., I., xiii., 15, 16) explains, passion often "fights and
resists reason, opposes and contradicts": it has therefore to be bound
by ordinances and institutions to follow reason's lead: these
institutions are good habits, moral virtues, resident there where
passion itself is resident, in the inferior appetite. It is not enough
that the rider is competent, but the horse too must be broken in.

(c) It is a saying, that "no mortal is always wise." There are times
when reason's utterance is faint from weariness and vexation. Then,
unless a man has acquired an almost mechanical habit of obeying reason
in the conduct of his will and passions, he will in such a conjuncture
act inconsiderately and do wrong. That habit is moral virtue. Moral
virtue is as the fly-wheel of an engine, a reservoir of force to carry
the machine past the "dead points" in its working. Or again, moral
virtue is as discipline to troops suddenly attacked, or hard pressed
in the fight.

5. Therefore, besides the habits in the intellect that bear the name
of _intellectual virtues_, the virtuous man must possess other habits,
as well in the will, that this power may readily embrace what the
understanding points out to be good, as in the sensitive appetite in
both its parts, concupiscible and irascible, so far forth as appetite
is amenable to the control of the will, that it may be so controlled
and promptly obey the better guidance. These habits in the will and in
the sensitive appetite are called _moral virtues_, and to them the
name of _virtue_ is usually confined.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 71, art. 1, in corp.; _ib_., q. 58,
art. 2; _ib_., q. 58, art. 3, in corp., ad 3; _ib_., q. 56, art. 4, in
corp., ad 1-3.


SECTION III.--_Of the Difference between Virtues, Intellectual and
Moral_.


1. St. Thomas (1a 2æ, q. 56, art. 3, in corp.) [Footnote 4] draws this
difference, that an intellectual virtue gives one a facility in doing
a good act; but a moral virtue not only gives facility, but makes one
put the facility in use. Thus a habit of grammar he says, enables one
readily to speak correctly, but does not ensure that one always shall
speak correctly, for a grammarian may make solecisms on purpose:
whereas a habit of justice not only makes a man prompt and ready to do
just deeds, but makes him actually do them. Not that any habit
necessitates volition. Habits do not necessitate, but they facilitate
the act of the will. (s. i., nn. 1, 2, 8, pp. 64, 68.)

[Footnote 4: By _doing good_ St. Thomas means the determination of the
appetite, rational or sensitive, to good. He says that intellectual
virtue does not prompt this determination of the appetite. Of course
it does not: it prompts only the act of the power wherein it resides:
now it resides in the intellect, not in the appetite; and it prompts
the act of the intellect, which however is cot always followed by an
act of appetite in accordance with it.]

2. Another distinction may be gathered from St. Thomas (1a 2æ, q. 21,
art. 2, ad 2), that the special intellectual habit called _art_
disposes a man to act correctly towards some particular end, but a
moral habit towards the common end, scope and purpose of all human
life. Thus medical skill ministers to the particular end of healing:
while the moral habit of temperance serves the general end, which is
final happiness and perfection. So to give a wrong prescription
through sheer antecedent ignorance, is to fail as a doctor: but to get
drunk wittingly and knowingly is to fail as a man.

3. The grand distinction between intellectual and moral habits seems
to be this, that moral habits reside in powers which may act against
the dictate of the understanding,--the error of Socrates, noticed
above (c. v., s. ii., n. 2, p. 70), lay in supposing that they could
not so act: whereas the power which is the seat of the intellectual
habits, the understanding, cannot possibly act against itself. Habits
dispose the subject to elicit acts of the power wherein they reside.
Moral habits induce acts of will and sensitive appetite: intellectual
habits, acts of intellect. Will and appetite may act against what the
agent knows to be best: but intellect cannot contradict intellect. It
cannot judge that to be true and beautiful which it knows to be false
and foul. If a musician strikes discords on purpose, or a grammarian
makes solecisms wilfully, he is not therein contradicting the
intellectual habit within him, for it is the office of such a habit to
aid the intellect to judge correctly, and the intellect here does
correctly judge the effect produced. On the other hand, if the
musician or grammarian blunders, the intellect within him has not been
contradicted, seeing that he knew no better: the habit of grammar or
music has not been violated, but has failed to cover the case.
Therefore the intellectual habit is not a safeguard to keep a man from
going against his intelligent self. No such safeguard is needed: the
thing is impossible, in the region of pure intellect. In a region
where no temptation could enter, intellectual habits would suffice
alone of themselves to make a perfectly virtuous man. To avoid evil
and choose good, it would be enough to know the one and the other. But
in this world seductive reasonings sway the will, and fits of passion
the sensitive appetite, prompting the one and the other to rise up and
break away from what the intellect knows all along to be the true good
of man. Unless moral virtue be there to hold these powers to their
allegiance, they will frequently disobey the understanding. Such
disobedience is more irrational than any mere intellectual error. In
an error purely intellectual, where the will has no part, the
objective truth indeed is missed, but the intelligence that dwells
within the man is not flouted and gain-sayed. It takes two to make a
contradiction as to make a quarrel. But an intellectual error has only
one side. The intellect utters some false pronouncement, and there is
nothing within the man that says otherwise. In the moral error there
is a contradiction within, an intestine quarrel. The intellect
pronounces a thing not good, not to be taken, and the sensitive
appetite will throw a veil over the face of intellect, and seize upon
the thing. That amounts to a contradiction of a man's own intelligent
self.

4. It appears that, absolutely speaking, intellectual virtue is the
greater perfection of a man: indeed in the act of that virtue, as we
have seen, his crowning perfection and happiness lies. But moral
virtue is the greater safeguard. The breach of moral virtue is the
direr evil. Sin is worse than ignorance, and more against reason,
because it is against the doer's own reason. Moral virtue then is more
necessary than intellectual in a world where evil is rife, as it is a
more vital thing to escape grievous disease than to attain the highest
development of strength and beauty. And as disease spoils strength and
beauty, not indeed always taking them away, but rendering them
valueless, so evil moral habits subvert intellectual virtue, and turn
it aside in a wrong direction. The vicious will keeps the intellect
from contemplating the objects which are the best good of man: so the
contemplation is thrown away on inferior things, often on base things,
and an overgrowth of folly ensues on those points whereupon it most
imports a man to be wise.

To sum up all in a sentence, not exclusive but dealing with
characteristics: _the moral virtues are the virtues for this world,
intellectual virtue is the virtue of the life to come_.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 58, art. 2, in corp.; Ar., _Eth_.,
I., xiii., 15-19; St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 66, art. 3.


SECTION IV.--_Of the Mean in Moral Virtue_.


1. Moral virtue is a habit of doing the right thing in the conduct of
the will and the government of the passions. Doing right is opposed to
overdoing the thing, and to underdoing it. Doing right is taking what
it suits a rational nature to desire, and eschewing what is unsuitable
under the circumstances. (c. i., n. 5.)

But a thing may be unsuitable in two ways, by excess, and by defect:
the rational choice is in the mean between these two. The moral order
here is illustrated from the physical. Too much exercise and too
little alike impair the strength; so of meat and drink in regard to
health; but diet and exercise in moderation, and in proportion to the
subject, create, increase, and preserve both health and strength. So
it is with temperance, and fortitude, and all varieties of moral
virtue. He who fights shy of everything, and never stands his ground,
becomes a coward; while he who never fears at all, but walks boldly up
to all danger, turns out rash. The enjoyer of every pleasure, who
knows not what it is to deny himself aught, is a libertine and loose
liver; while to throw over all the graces and delicious things of
life, not as St. Paul did, who counted all things dross, that he might
gain Christ, but absolutely, as though such things were of themselves
devoid of attraction, is boorishness and insensibility. Thus the
virtues of temperance and fortitude perish in excess and defect, and
live in the mean. It is to be noticed in this illustration that the
mean of health is not necessarily the mean of virtue. What is too
little food, and too much exercise, for the animal well-being of a
man, may be the right amount of both for him in some higher relation,
inasmuch as he is more than a mere animal; as for a soldier in a hard
campaign, where a sufficiency of food and rest is incompatible with
his serving his country's need.

2. The taking of means to an end implies the taking them in
moderation, not in excess, or we shall overshoot the mark, nor again
so feebly and inadequately as to fall short of it. No mere instrument
admits of an unlimited use; but the end to be gained fixes limits to
the use of the instrument, thus far, no more, and no less. Wherever
then reason requires an end to be gained, it requires a use of means
proportionate to the end, not coming short of it, nor going so far
beyond as to defeat the purpose in view. The variety of good that is
called the Useful lies within definite limits, between two
wildernesses, so to speak, stretching out undefined into the distance,
wilderness of Excess on the one side, and wilderness of Defect on the
other.

3. A true work of art cannot be added to or taken from without
spoiling it. A perfect church would be spoiled by a lengthening of the
chancel or raising the tower, albeit there are buildings, secular and
ecclesiastical, that might be drawn out two miles long and not look
any worse. The colouring of a picture must not be too violent and
positive; but artistic colouring must be chaste, and artistic
utterance gentle, and artistic action calm and indicative of
self-command. Not that voice and action should not be impassioned for
a great emergency, but the very passion should bear the mark of
control: in the great master's phrase, you must not "tear a passion to
tatters." It is by moderation sitting upon power that works of art
truly masculine and mighty are produced; and by this sign they are
marked off from the lower host of things, gorgeous and redundant, and
still more from the order of "the loose, the lawless, the exaggerated,
the insolent, and the profane."

4. On these considerations Aristotle framed his celebrated definition
of moral virtue: _the habit of fixing the choice in the golden mean in
relation to ourselves, defined by reason, as a prudent man would
define it_. All virtue is a _habit_, as we have seen--a habit of doing
that which is the proper act of the power wherein the habit resides.
One class of moral virtues is resident in the will, the act of which
power is properly called _choice_. The rest of the moral virtues
reside in the sensitive appetite, which also may be said to _choose_
that object on which it fastens. Thus moral virtue is a habit of
_fixing the choice_. The _golden mean_ between two extremes of excess
and defect respectively has been already explained, and may be further
shown by a review of the virtues. Besides fortitude and temperance,
already described, _liberality_ is a mean between prodigality and
stinginess; _magnificence_ between vulgar display and pettiness:
_magnanimity_ between vainglory and pusillanimity; _truthfulness_
between exaggeration and dissimulation; _friendship_ between
complaisance, or flattery, and frowardness,--and so of the rest. The
golden mean must be taken _in relation to ourselves_, because in many
matters of behaviour and the management of the passions the right
amount for one person would be excessive for another, according to
varieties of age, sex, station, and disposition. Thus anger that might
become a layman might be unbefitting in a churchman; and a man might
be thought loquacious if he talked as much as a discreet matron.
[Footnote 5] The golden mean, then, must be _defined by reason_
according to the particular circumstances of each case. But as Reason
herself is to seek where she is not guided by Prudence, the mean of
virtue must be defined, not by the reason of the buffoon Pantolabus,
or of Nomentanus the spendthrift, but _as a prudent man_ would define
it, given an insight into the case.

[Footnote 5: Ar., _Pol_., III., iv., 17, says just the converse, which
marks the altered position of woman in modern society.]

5. The "golden mean," as Horace named it (_Od_., ii., 10), obtains
principally, if not solely, in living things, and in what appertains
to living things, and in objects of art. A lake, as such, has no
natural dimensions: it may be ten miles long, it may be a hundred; but
an elephant or an oak-tree cannot go beyond a certain growth. There is
a vast range between the temperature of a blast-furnace and the
temperature of the ice-pack on the Polar Sea, but very limited is the
range possible in the blood of a living man. Viewed artistically, a
hill may be too low, or a lake want width, for man's eye to rest upon
it with perfect satisfaction. The golden mean, then, is an artistic
conception, and what I may call an _anthropological_ conception: it
suits man, and is required by man, though Nature may spurn and
over-ride it. The earthquake, the hurricane, and the angry ocean are
not in the golden mean, not at least from a human point of view. If
man chooses to personify and body forth the powers of nature, he
creates some monstrous uncouth figure, like the Assyrian and Egyptian
idols; but if man makes a study of man, and brings genius and patient
elaboration to bear on his work, there emerges the symmetry and
perfect proportion of the Greek statue. No people ever made so much of
the beauty of the human form as the ancient Greeks: they made it the
object of a passion that marked their religion, their institutions,
their literature, and their art. Their virtues and their vices turned
upon it. Hence the golden mean is eminently a Greek conception, a
leading idea of the Hellenic race. The Greek hated a thing overdone, a
gaudy ornament, a proud title, a fulsome compliment, a high-flown
speech, a wordy peroration. _Nothing too much_ was the inscription
over the lintel of the national sanctuary at Delphi. It is the
surpassing grace of Greek art of the best period, that in it there
shines out the highest power, with _nothing too much_ of straining
after effect. The study of Greek literary models operates as a
corrective to redundancy, and to what ill-conditioned minds take to be
fine writing. The Greek artist knew just how far to go, and when to
stop. That point he called, in his own unsurpassed tongue, the [Greek:
kairos]. "The right measure (_kairos_) is at the head of all," says
Pindar. "Booby, not to have understood by how much the half is more
than the whole," is the quaint cry of Hesiod. Aeschylus puts these
verses in the mouth of his _Furies_;

  The golden mean is God's delight:
  Extremes are hateful in His sight.
  Hold by the mean, and glorify
  Nor anarchy nor slavery.

Characteristic of Socrates was his _irony_, or way of understating
himself, in protest against the extravagant professions of the
Sophists. In the reckoning of the Pythagoreans, the Infinite, the
Unlimited, or Unchecked, was marked as evil, in opposition to good,
which was the Limited. From thence, Plato, taking up his parable,
writes: "The goddess of the Limit, my fair Philebus, seeing insolence
and all manner of wickedness breaking loose from all limit in point of
gratification and gluttonous greed, established a law and order of
limited being; and you say this restraint was the death of pleasure; I
say it was the saving of it." Going upon the tradition of his
countrymen, upon their art and philosophy, their poetry, eloquence,
politics, and inmost sentiment, Aristotle formulated the law of moral
virtue, to hold by the _golden mean_, as discerned by the prudent in
view of the present circumstances, between the two extremes of excess
and defect.

6. There is only one object on which man may throw himself without
reserve, his last end, the adequate object of his happiness, God. God
is approached by faith, hope, and charity; but it belongs not to
philosophy to speak of these supernatural virtues. There remains to
the philosopher the natural virtue of religion, which is a part of
justice. Religion has to do with the inward act of veneration and with
its outward expression. To the latter the rule of the mean at once
applies. Moderation in religion is necessary, so far as externals are
concerned. Not that any outward assiduity, pomp, splendour, or
costliness, can be too much in itself, or anything like enough, to
worship God with, but it may be too much for our limited means, which
in this world are drawn on by other calls. But our inward veneration
for God and desire to do Him honour, can never be too intense:
"Blessing the Lord, exalt Him as much as you can: for He is above all
praise." (Ecclus. xliii. 33.)

7. The rule of the mean, then, is a human rule, for dealing with men,
and with human goods considered as means. It is a Greek rule: for the
Greeks were of all nations the fondest admirers of man and the things
of man. But when we ascend to God, we are out among the immensities
and eternities. The vastness of creation, the infinity of the
Creator,--there is no mode or measure there. In those heights the
Hebrew Psalmist loved to soar. Christianity, with its central dogma of
the Incarnation, is the meeting of Hebrew and Greek. That mystery
clothes the Lord God of hosts with the measured beauty, grace, and
truth, that man can enter into. But enough of this. Enough to show
that the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean is a highly suggestive and
wide-reaching doctrine beyond the sphere of Morals. It throws out one
great branch into Art, another into Theology.

8. The vicious extremes, on this side and on that of a virtue, are not
always conterminous with the virtue itself, but sometimes another and
more excellent virtue intervenes; as in giving we may pass from
justice to liberality, and only through passing the bounds of
liberality, do we arrive at the vicious extreme of prodigality. So
penitential fasting intervenes between temperance in food and undue
neglect of sustenance. But it is to be noted that the _central
virtue_, so to speak, as justice, sobriety, chastity, is for all
persons on all occasions: the more excellent _side-virtue_, as
liberality, or total abstinence, is for special occasions and special
classes of persons.

_Readings_.--Ar., _Eth_., II., ii., 6, 7; _ib_., II., cc. 6-9; Hor.,
_Odes_, II., 10; Ruskin, _Modern Painters_, p. 3, s. i., c. x.


SECTION V.--_Of Cardinal Virtues_.


1. The enumeration of cardinal virtues is a piece of Greek philosophy
that has found its ways into the catechism. Prudence, justice,
fortitude, and temperance are mentioned by Plato as recognised heads
of virtue. They are recognised, though less clearly, by Xenophon,
reporting the conversations of Socrates. It does not look as though
Socrates invented the division: he seems to have received it from an
earlier source, possibly Pythagoras. They are mentioned in Holy
Scripture (Wisdom viii., 7, which is however a Greek book), and
Proverbs viii., 14. They make no figure in the philosophies of India
and China.

2. The cardinal virtues are thus made out.--Virtue is a habit that
gives a man readiness in behaving according to the reason that is in
him. Such a habit may be fourfold. (a) It may reside in the reason, or
intellect itself, enabling it readily to discern the reasonable thing
to do, according to particular circumstances as they occur. That habit
is the virtue of _prudence_. (b) It may reside in the rational
appetite, otherwise called the will, disposing a man to act fairly and
reasonably in his dealings with other men. That is _justice_. (c) It
may reside in the irrational, or sensitive, appetite, and that to a
twofold purpose; (a) to restrain the said appetite in its
concupiscible part from a wanton and immoderate eagerness after
pleasure; that is _temperance_: (b) to incite the said appetite in its
irascible part not to shrink from danger, where there is reason for
going on in spite of danger; that is _fortitude_.

3. Plato compares the rational soul in man to a charioteer, driving
two horses: one horse representing the concupiscible, the other the
irascible part of the sensitive appetite. He draws a vivid picture of
the resistance of the concupiscible part against reason, how madly it
rushes after lawless pleasure, and how it is only kept in restraint by
main force again and again applied, till gradually it grows
submissive. This submissiveness, gradually acquired, is the virtue of
temperance. Clearly the habit dwells in the appetite, not in reason:
in the horse, not in the charioteer. It is that habitual state, which
in a horse we call _being broken in_.

The concupiscible appetite is _broken in_ to reason by temperance
residing within it. Plato lavishes all evil names on the steed that
represents the concupiscible part. But the irascible part, the other
steed, has its own fault, and that fault twofold, sometimes of
over-venturesomeness, sometimes of shying and turning tail. The habit
engendered, in the irascible part, of being neither over-venturesome
nor over-timorous, but going by reason, is termed fortitude. [Footnote
6]

[Footnote 6: It will help an Englishman to understand Plato's
comparison, if instead of _concupiscible part_ and _irascible part_,
we call the one steed Passion and the other Pluck. Pluck fails, and
Passion runs to excess, till Pluck is formed to fortitude, and Passion
to temperance.]

4. As the will is the rational appetite, the proper object of which is
rational good, it does not need to be prompted by any habit to embrace
rational good in what concerns only the inward administration of the
agent's own self. There is no difficulty in that department, provided
the sensitive appetite be kept in hand by fortitude and temperance.
But where there is question of external relations with other men, it
is not enough that the sensitive appetite be regulated, but a third
virtue is necessary, the habit of justice, to be planted in the will,
which would otherwise be too weak to attend steadily to points, not of
the agent's own good merely, but of the good of other men.

5. Thus we have the four cardinal virtues: prudence, a habit of the
intellect; temperance, a habit of the concupiscible appetite;
fortitude, a habit of the irascible appetite; and justice, a habit of
the will. Temperance and Fortitude in the Home Department; Justice for
Foreign Affairs; with Prudence for Premier. Or, to use another
comparison, borrowed from Plato, prudence is the health of the soul,
temperance its beauty, fortitude its strength, and justice its wealth.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 61, art. 2, in corp.; _ib_., q. 56,
art. 4, in corp., ad 1-3; _ib_., q. 56, art. 6, in corp., ad 1, 3;
_ib_., q. 59, art. 4, in corp., ad 2; Plato, _Laws_, 631 B, C.


SECTION VI.--_Of Prudence_.


1. Prudence is _right reason applied to practice_, or more fully it
may be defined, the habit of intellectual discernment that enables one
to hit upon the golden mean of moral virtue and the way to secure that
mean. Thus prudence tells one what amount of punishment is proper for
a particular delinquent, and how to secure his getting it. It is to be
observed that prudence does not will the golden mean in question, but
simply indicates it. To will and desire the mean is the work of the
moral virtue concerned therewith: as in the case given it is the work
of vindictive justice.

2. From the definition of moral virtue above given (c. v., s. iv., n.
4, p. 79), it is clear that no moral virtue can come into act without
prudence: for it is the judgment of the prudent man that must define
in each case the _golden mean_ in relation to ourselves, which every
moral virtue aims at. Thus, without prudence, fortitude passes into
rashness, vindictive justice into harshness, clemency into weakness,
religion into superstition.

3. But may not one with no prudence to guide him hit upon the _golden
mean_ by some happy impulse, and thus do an act of virtue? We answer,
he may do a good act, and if you will, a virtuous act, but not an act
of virtue, not an act proceeding from a pre-existent habit in the
doer. The act is like a good stroke made by chance, not by skill; and
like such a stroke, it cannot be readily repeated at the agent's
pleasure. (See c. v., s. i., n. 4, p. 66; and Ar., _Eth_., II., iv.,
2.)

4. Prudence in its essence is an intellectual virtue, being a habit
resident in the understanding: but it deals with the subject-matter of
the moral virtues, pointing out the measure of temperance, the bounds
of fortitude, or the path of justice. It is the habit of intellectual
discernment that must enlighten every moral virtue in its action.
There is no virtue that goes blundering and stumbling in the dark.

5. He is a prudent man, that can give counsel to others and to himself
in order to the attainment of ends that are worthy of human endeavour.
If unworthy ends are intended, however sagaciously they are pursued,
that is not prudence. We may call it _sagacity_, or _shrewdness_,
being a habit of ready discernment and application of means to ends.
Napoleon I. was conspicuous for this sagacity. It is the key to
success in this world. But prudence discovers worthy ends only, and to
them only does it provide means. The intellect is often blinded by
passion, by desire and by fear, so as not to discern the proper end
and term to make for in a particular instance and a practical case.
The general rules of conduct remain in the mind, as that, "In anger be
mindful of mercy:" but the propriety of mercy under the present
provocation drops out of sight. The intellect does not discern the
golden mean of justice and mercy in relation to the circumstances in
which the agent now finds himself. In other words, the habit of
prudence has failed; and it has failed because of the excess of
passion. Thus prudence is dependent on the presence of the virtues
that restrain passion, namely, fortitude and temperance. A like
argument would hold for the virtue of justice, that rectifies
inordinate action in dealing with another. The conclusion is, that as
the moral virtues cannot exist without prudence, so neither can
prudence exist without them: for vice corrupts the judgment of
prudence.

6. Hence we arrive at a settlement of the question, whether the
virtues can be separated, or whether to possess one is to possess all.
We must distinguish between the rudimentary forms of virtue and the
perfect habit. The rudimentary forms certainly can exist separate:
they are a matter of temperament and inherited constitution: and the
man whom nature has kindly predisposed to benevolence, she has perhaps
very imperfectly prepared for prudence, fortitude, or sobriety. But
one perfect habit of any one of the four cardinal virtues, acquired by
repeated acts, and available at the call of reason, involves the
presence, in a matured state, of the other three habits also. A man
who acts irrationally upon one ground, will behave irrationally on
other grounds also: or if his conduct be rational there, it will not
be from regard for reason, but from impulse, temperament, or from some
other motive than the proper motive of the virtue which he seems to be
exercising.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 54, art. 4; _ib_., q. 58, art. 5, in
corp.; _ib_., 2a 2æ, q. 47, art. 7, 12, 13; Ar., _Eth_., VI., v.;
_ib_., VI., xii., 9, 10; _ib_., VI., xiii., 6; St. Francis of Sales,
_Of the Love of God_, bk. xi., c. vii.


SECTION VII.--_Of Temperance_.


1. Temperance is a virtue which regulates by the judgment of reason
those desires and delights which attend upon the operations whereby
human nature is preserved in the individual and propagated in the
species. Temperance is the virtue contrary to the two deadly sins of
Gluttony and Lust. As against the former, it represents Abstinence, or
moderation in solid food, and Sobriety, which is moderation in drink.
As against the latter, it is the great virtue of Chastity. The student
must bear in mind that, to a philosopher, Temperance does not mean
Total Abstinence, and Abstinence is quite independent of Fridays and
flesh-meat. Temperance then is made up of Abstinence, Sobriety, and
Chastity.

Aristotle writes: "Cases of falling short in the taking of pleasure,
and of people enjoying themselves less than they ought, are not apt to
occur: for such insensibility is not human: but if there be any one to
whom nothing is pleasant, and all comes alike in the matter of taste,
he must be far from the state and condition of humanity: such a being
has no name, because he is nowhere met with." This is true, because
where there is question of a virtue, such as Temperance, resident in
the concupiscible appetite, we are not concerned with any sullenness
or moroseness of will, nor with any scrupulosity or imbecility of
judgment, refusing to gratify the reasonable cravings of appetite, but
with the habitual leaning and lie of the appetite itself. Now the
concupiscible appetite in every man, of its own nature, leans to its
proper object of delectable good. No virtue is requisite to secure it
from too little inclination that way: but to restrain the appetite
from going out excessively to delight is the function, and the sole
function, of Temperance. The measure of restraint is relative, as the
golden mean is relative, and varies with different persons and in view
of different ends. The training of the athlete is not the training of
the saint.

3. Besides the primary virtue of Temperance, and its subordinate
species (enumerated above, n. 1), certain other virtues are brought
under Temperance in a secondary sense, as observing in easier matters
that moderation and self-restraint which the primary virtue keeps in
the matter that is most difficult of all. St. Thomas calls these
_potential parts_ of Temperance. There is question here of what is
most difficult to man as an animal, not of what is most difficult to
him as a rational being. To rational man, as such, ambition is harder
to restrain than sensuality: which is proved by the fact that fewer
men, who have any ambition in them, do restrain that passion than
those who restrain the animal propensities that are common to all. But
to man as an animal (and vast numbers of the human race rise little
above the animal state), it is hardest of all things to restrain those
appetites that go with the maintenance and propagation of flesh and
blood. These then are the proper matter of Temperance: other virtues,
potential parts of Temperance, restrain other cravings which are less
animal. Of these virtues the most noticeable are humility, meekness,
and modesty. [Footnote 7]

[Footnote 7: This is St. Thomas's arrangement, placing Humility under
Temperance. The connection of Humility with Magnanimity, and thereby
with Fortitude, is indicated pp. 100, 101.]

4. There is a thirst after honour and preeminence, arising from
self-esteem, and prevalent especially where there is little thought of
God, and scant reverence for the present majesty of heaven. A man who
thinks little of his Maker is great in his own eyes, as our green
English hills are mountains to one who has not seen the Alpine heights
and snows. Apart from the consideration of God there is no humility;
and this is why Aristotle, who treats of virtues as they minister to
the dealings of man with man, makes no mention of this virtue. There
are certain outward manifestations in words, acts, and gestures, the
demeanour of a humble man, which is largely identified with modesty
and with submission to others as representing God.

5. Modesty is that outward comportment, style of dress, conversation,
and carriage, which indicates the presence of Temperance, "set up on
holy pedestal" (Plato, _Phaedr_., 254 B) in the heart within.

6. Meekness is moderation in anger, and is or should be the virtue of
all men. Clemency is moderation in punishment, and is the virtue of
men in office, who bear the sword or the rod.

7. As regards the vices opposite to Temperance, an important
distinction is to be drawn between him who sins by outburst of passion
and him whose very principles are corrupt. [Footnote 8] The former in
doing evil acknowledges it to be evil, and is prone to repent of it
afterwards: the latter has lost his belief in virtue, and his
admiration for it: he drinks in iniquity like water, with no
after-qualms; he glories in his shame. The former is reclaimable, the
latter is reprobate: his intellect as well as his heart is vitiated
and gone bad. If there were no miracles, he would be a lost man: but
God can work miracles in the moral as in the physical order: in that
there is hope for him.

[Footnote 8: See the note in _Aquinas Ethicus_, Vol. I., pp. 170,
171.]

8. A nation need not be virtuous in the great bulk of her citizens, to
be great in war and in dominion, in laws, in arts, and in literature:
but the bulk of the people must possess at least the sense and
appreciation of virtue in order to such national greatness. When that
sense is lost, the nation is undone and become impotent, for art no
less than for empire. Thus the Greece of Pericles and of Phidias fell,
to be "living Greece no more."

9. As in other moral matters, no hard and fast line of division exists
between sinning from passion and sinning on principle, but cases of
the one shade into cases of the others, and by frequent indulgence of
passion principle is brought gradually to decay.

_Readings_.--Ar., _Eth._, III., x.; St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 141, art. 2;
_ib._, q. 141, art. 3, in corp.; _ib._, q. 142, art. 1; _ib._, q. 143,
art. 1, in corp., ad 2, 3; _ib._, q. 161, art. 1, ad 5; _ib._, q. 161,
art. 2, in corp.; _ib._, q. 161, art. 6, in corp., ad 1; _ib._, q.
157, art. 1, in corp., ad 3; _ib_, q. 156, art. 3; Ar., _Eth._, VII.,
viii.


SECTION VIII.--_Of Fortitude_.


1. As Temperance is a curb, restraining animal nature in the pursuit
of the good to which it goes out most eagerly, namely, life and the
means of its continuance, so Fortitude also is a curb, withholding
that nature from irrational flight from the evil which it most dreads.
Aristotle tells us what that evil is: "Most dreadful of all things is
death, for it is the limit, and for the dead man there appears to be
no further good nor evil left." (_Eth._, III, vi., b.) Death is truly
the limit to human existence: for, though the soul be immortal, the
being of flesh and blood, that we call man, is dissolved in death,
and, apart from supernatural hope of the resurrection, extinct for
ever. Death therefore is the direst of all evils in the animal
economy; and as such, is supremely abhorred by the sensitive appetite,
which is the animal part of man. Fortitude moderates this abhorrence
and fear by the dictate of reason. Reason shows that there are better
things than life, and things worse than death, for man in his
spiritual capacity as an intellectual and immortal being.

2. Fortitude is a mean between Cowardice and Rashness, to which
opposite extremes we are carried by the contrary passions of Fear and
Daring respectively. Fortitude thus is a two-sided virtue, moderating
two opposite tendencies: while Temperance is one-sided, moderating
Desire alone. Life, rationally considered, bears undoubtedly a high
value, and is not to be lightly thrown away, or risked upon trivial or
ignoble objects. The brave man is circumspect in his ventures, and
moderate in his fears, which implies that he does fear somewhat. He
will fear superhuman visitations, as the judgments of God. He will
dread disgrace, and still more, sin. He will fear death in an unworthy
cause. And even in a good cause, it has well been said: "The truly
brave man is not he who fears no danger, but the man whose mind
subdues the fear, and braves the danger that nature shrinks from." The
Duke of Marlborough is said to have quaked in the saddle as he rode
into action, saying: "This poor body trembles at what the mind within
is about to do." Fortitude then is the virtue that restrains fear and
regulates venturesomeness by the judgment of reason, in danger
especially of a grand and glorious death.

3. To the ancients, there was no grander object of devotion than the
State, their native city: no direr misfortune than its dissolution, or
the loss of its self-government: no nobler death than to die in arms
in its defence. As old Tyrtæus sang:

  A noble thing it is to lie dead, fallen in the front ranks,
  A brave man in battle for his country. [Footnote 9]

[Footnote 9:
  [Greek: tethnamenai gar kalon, eni promachoisi pesonta,
  andr' agathon peri hae patridi marnamenon.]
([Greek: Tyrtaeus apud Lycurg])]

Such a death was taken to be the seal and stamp of the highest
fortitude. Nor has Christianity dimmed the glory that invests a
soldier's death. Only it points to a brighter glory, and a death in a
still nobler cause, the death of the martyr who dies for the faith,
and becomes valiant in battle for what is more to him than any earthly
city, the Church, the City of God. Nor must the martyr of charity, who
dies in succouring his neighbour, go without the praise of fortitude:
nor, in short, any one who braves death, or other heavy affliction, in
the discharge of duty, or when forwarding a good cause.

4. A man may brave death in a good cause, and not be doing an act of
fortitude. So he may subscribe a large sum to a charitable purpose
without any exercise of the virtue of charity. A virtue is then only
exercised, when its outward act is performed from the proper motive of
the virtue, and not from any lower motive. Thus the proper motive of
Fortitude is the conviction that death is an evil, the risk of which
is to be left out of count as a circumstance relatively
inconsiderable, when there is question of the defence of certain
interests dearer to a good man than life. An improper motive would be
anger, which, however useful as an accessory, by itself is not an
intellectual motive at all, and therefore no motive of virtue. The
recklessness of an angry man is not Fortitude. It is not Fortitude to
be brave from ignorance or stupidity, not appreciating the danger: nor
again from experience, knowing that the apparent danger is not real,
at least to yourself. The brave man looks a real danger in the face,
and knows it, and goes on in spite of it, because so it is meet and
just, with the cause that he has, to go on.

5. We may notice as _potential_ parts of Fortitude (s. vii., n. 3, p.
92), the three virtues of Magnificence, Magnanimity, and Patience. It
is the part of Patience, philosophically to endure all sufferings
short of death. It is the part of the former two, to dare wisely, not
in a matter of life and death, but in the matter of expense, for
Magnificence, and of honour, for Magnanimity. Magnificence,
technically understood, observes the right measure in the expenditure
of large sums of money. As being conversant with large sums, it
differs from Liberality. A poor man may be liberal out of his little
store, but never magnificent. It is a virtue in the rich, not to be
afraid of spending largely and lavishly on a great occasion, or a
grand purpose. The expense may be carried beyond what the occasion
warrants: that is one vicious extreme. The other extreme would be to
mar a costly work by sordid parsimony on a point of detail. It is not
easy to be magnificent: in the first place, because not many are rich;
and then because riches are seldom united with greatness of soul and
good judgment. Something analogous to the virtue of Magnificence is
shown in the generous use of great abilities, or, in the supernatural
order, of great graces. The destinies of the world lie with those men
who have it in their power to be magnificent.

6. We are come to Magnanimity and the Magnanimous Man, the great
creation of Aristotle. As Magnanimity ranks under Fortitude, there
must be some fear to which the Magnanimous Man rises superior, as the
brave man rises superior to the fear of death. What Magnanimity
overcomes is the fear of undeserved dishonour. The Magnanimous Man is
he who rates himself as worthy of great honours, and is so worthy
indeed. When honour is paid to such a one, he makes no great account
of it, feeling that it is but his due, or even less than his due. If
he is dishonoured and insulted, he despises the insult as an
absurdity, offered to a man of his deserts. He is too conscious of his
real worth to be much affected by the expression of his neighbour's
view of him. For a man is most elated, when complimented on an
excellence which he was not very sure of possessing: and most sensibly
grieved at an insult, where he half suspects himself of really making
a poor figure, whereas he would like to make a good one. It is
doubtless the serene and settled conviction that Englishmen generally
entertain of the greatness of their country, that enables them to
listen with equanimity to abase of England, such as no other people in
Europe would endure levelled at themselves.

7. _Proud_ is an epithet pretty freely applied to Englishmen abroad,
and it seems to fit the character of the Magnanimous Man. He seems a
Pharisee, and worse than a Pharisee. The Pharisee's pride was to some
extent mitigated by breaking out into that disease of children and
silly persons, vanity: he "did all his works to be seen of men." But
here the disease is all driven inwards, and therefore more malignant.
The Magnanimous Man is so much in conceit with himself as to have
become a scorner of his fellows. He is self-sufficient, a deity to
himself, the very type of Satanic pride. These are the charges brought
against him.

8. To purify and rectify the character of the Magnanimous Man, we need
to take a leaf out of the book of Christianity. Not that there is
anything essentially Christian and supernatural in what we are about
to allege: otherwise it would not belong to philosophy: it is a truth
of reason, but a truth generally overlooked, till it found its
exponent in the Christian preacher, and its development in the
articles of the Christian faith. The truth is this. There is in every
human being what theologians have called _man and man_: man as he is
of himself, man again as he is by the gift and gracious mercy of God.
The reasonably Magnanimous Man is saved from pride by this
distinction. Of himself, he knows that he is nothing but nothingness,
meanness, sinfulness, and a walking sore of multitudinous actual sins.
"I know that there dwelleth not in me, that is, in my flesh, any
good." (Rom. vii. 18.) If he is insulted, he takes it as his due, not
any questionable due, for then he would resent the insult, but as
being undoubtedly what he deserves. If he is honoured, he smiles at
the absurdity of the compliments paid to him. It is as if an old
gentleman, a prey to gout and rheumatism, were lauded for his
fleetness of foot. He is then truly magnanimous on this side of his
character by a kind of obverse magnanimity, that bears insults
handsomely, as deserved, and honours modestly, as undeserved.

9. But let us go round to the other side of the reasonably Magnanimous
Man. He was defined to be, "one that deems himself worthy of great
honours, and is so worthy indeed." Now, nothing is truly worthy of
honour but virtue. He must then be a good man, full of all virtues;
and all this goodness that he has, he recognises as being in him of
God. He has "received God's Spirit"--or something analogous in the
natural order to the gift of the Holy Ghost--"that he may know the
things that are given him of God." (2 Cor. ii. 12.) It is told of St.
Francis of Assisi, the humblest of men, that on one occasion when he
and his companions received from some persons extraordinary marks of
veneration, he, contrary to his usual wont, took it not at all amiss:
and said to his companions, who wondered at his behaviour, "Let them
alone: they cannot too much honour the work of God in us." This
magnanimity bears honours gracefully, and insult unflinchingly, from a
consciousness of internal worth, which internal worth and goodness
however it takes not for its own native excellence, but holds as
received from God, and unto God it refers all the glory.

10. Thus the genuine Magnanimous Man is a paradox and a prodigy. He
despises an insult as undeserved, and he takes it as his due. He is
conscious of the vast good that is in him; and he knows that there is
no good in him. Highly honoured, he thinks that he gets but his due,
while he believes that vials of scorn and ignominy may justly be
poured upon him. He will bear the scorn, because he deserves it, and
again, because it is wholly undeserved. The Magnanimous Man is the
humble man. The secret of his marvellous virtue is his habit of
practical discernment between the abyss of misery that he has within
himself, as of himself, and the high gifts, also within him, which
come of the mercy of God. Aristotle well says, "Magnanimity is a sort
of robe of honour to the rest of the virtues: it both makes them
greater and stands not without them: therefore it is hard to be truly
magnanimous, for that cannot be without perfect virtue." We may add,
that in the present order of Providence none can be magnanimous
without supernatural aid, and supernatural considerations of the life
of Christ, which however are not in place here.

_Readings_.--Ar., _Eth_., III., vii.; St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 123, art 3,
in corp.; Ar., _Eth_., III., viii.; St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 123, art. i,
ad 2; Ar., _Eth_., III., vi.; St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 123, art. 4, 5. For
the Magnificent and Magnanimous Man, Ar., _Eth_., IV., ii., iii.; St.
Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 129, art. 3, ad 4, 5.


SECTION IX.--_Of Justice_.


1. Justice is a habit residing in the will, prompting that power
constantly to render unto everyone his own. The fundamental notion of
Justice is some sort of equality. Equality supposes two terms,
physically distinct, or capable of existing separately, one from the
other. Between such terms alone can equality be properly predicated.
Any less distinction than this leaves room only for equality
improperly so called, and therefore no room for what is properly
termed Justice. When therefore Plato, going about to find a definition
of Justice, which is a main object in his _Republic_, acquiesces in
this position, that Justice consists in every part of the soul,
rational, irascible, and concupiscible, fulfilling its own proper
function, and not taking up the function of another, he fails for this
reason, that all Justice is relative to another, but the different
parts of one soul are not properly _other_ and _other_, since all go
to make up one man: therefore, however much Justice may be identical
with doing your own business, and leaving your neighbour free to do
his, yet this relation obtaining among the various parts of the soul
cannot properly be called Justice. What Plato defines is the beauty,
good order, and moral comeliness of the soul, but not Justice in any
sense, inasmuch as it is not referred to any being human or divine,
collective or individual, outside of the man himself.

2. Going upon the principle that all Justice is of the nature of
_equality_, and is therefore relative to _another_, we arrive at the
definition of _general justice_, which is all virtue whatsoever,
inasmuch as it bears upon another person than him who practises it.
This Justice is perfect social virtue, the crown and perfection of all
virtue from a statesman's point of view; and in that aspect, as
Aristotle says, "neither morning star nor evening star is so
beautiful." Whoever has this virtue behaves well, not by himself
merely, but towards others--a great addition. Many a one who has done
well enough as an individual, has done badly in a public capacity:
whence the proverb, that office shows the man. This Justice may well
be called _another man's good_: though not in the sense of the
sophists of old, and the altruists of our time, that virtue is a very
good thing for everyone else than its possessor. Virtue, like health,
may be beneficial to neighbours, but the first benefit of it flows in
upon the soul to whom it belongs: for virtue is the health of the
soul.

3. Another elementary notion of Justice connects it with Law, taking
Justice to be conformity to Law. This notion exhibits _legal justice_,
which is the same thing, under another aspect, as the _general
justice_ mentioned above, inasmuch as _general justice_ includes the
exercise of all virtues in so far as they bear upon the good of
others: and the law, to which _legal justice_ conforms a man, enjoins
acts of all virtues for the common good. It must be observed, however,
that though there is no natural virtue of which the law of man may not
prescribe some exercise, still no human law enjoins all acts of all
virtues, not even all obligatory acts. A man may fail in his duty
though he has kept all the laws of man. In order then that _legal
justice_ may include the whole duty of man, it must be referred to
that natural and eternal law of God, revealed or unrevealed, of which
we shall speak hereafter. By being conformed to this divine law a man
is a _just man_, a _righteous man_. It is this sense of Justice that
appears in the theological term, _justification_. In this sense,
Zachary and Elizabeth "were both just before God, walking in all the
commandments of the Lord without blame." (St. Luke i. 6.)

4. _General_, or _legal, justice_ is not the cardinal virtue so
called, but is in one point of view identical with all virtue.
Distinguished from the other three cardinal virtues is _particular
justice_, which is divided into _distributive_ and _commutative
justice_. _Distributive justice_ is exercised by the community through
its head towards its individual members, so that there be a fair
distribution of the common goods, in varying amount and manner,
according to the various merits and deserts of the several recipients.
The matters distributed are public emoluments and honours, public
burdens, rewards, and also punishments. _Distributive justice_ is the
virtue of the king and of the statesman, of the commander-in-chief, of
the judge, and of the public functionary generally. It is violated by
favouritism, partiality, and jobbery. _Distributive justice_ is the
Justice that we adore in the great Governor of the Universe, saying
that He is "just in all His works," even though we understand them
not. When it takes the form of punishing, it is called _vindictive
justice_. This is what the multitudes clamoured for, that filled the
precincts of the Palace of Whitehall in the days of Charles I. with
cries of Justice, Justice, for the head of Strafford.

5. Neither legal nor distributive justice fully answers to the
definition of that virtue. Justice disposes us to give _to another his
own_. The party towards whom Justice is practised must be wholly other
and different from him who practises it. But it is clear that the
member of a civil community is not wholly other and different from the
State: he is partially identified with the civil community to which he
belongs. Therefore neither the tribute of _legal justice_ paid by the
individual to the State, nor the grant of _distributive justice_ from
the State to the individual, is an exercise of Justice in the
strictest sense. Again, what the individual pays to the State because
he is legally bound to pay it, does not become the _State's own_ until
after payment. If he withhold it, though he do wrong, yet he is not
said to be keeping any portion of the public property in his private
hands: he only fails to make some of his private property public,
which the law bids him abdicate and make over. If this be true of
money and goods, it is still more evidently true of honour and
services. In like manner, in the matter of _distributive justice_, the
emoluments which a subject has a claim to, the rewards which he has
merited of the State, does not become _his_ till he actually gets them
into his hands. It may be unfair and immoral that they are withheld
from him, and in that case, so long as the circumstances remain the
same, the obligation rest with and presses upon the State, and those
who represent it, to satisfy his claim: still the State is not keeping
the individual from that which is as yet his own. In the language of
the Roman lawyers, he has at best a _jus ad rem_, a right that the
thing be made his, but not a _jus in re_; that is, the thing is not
properly his before he actually gets it.

6. _Commutative justice_ alone is Justice strictly so called: for
therein alone the parties to the act are perfectly other and other,
and the matter that passes between them, if withheld by one of the
parties, would make a case of keeping the other out of that which he
could still properly call by right his own. _Commutative justice_ runs
between two individuals, or two independent States, or between the
State and an individual inasmuch as the latter is an independent
person, having rights of his own against the former. This justice is
called _commutative_, from being concerned with _exchanges_, or
contracts, _voluntary_ and _involuntary_. The idea of voluntary
contract, like that between buyer and seller, is familiar enough. But
the notion of an _involuntary contract_ is technical, and requires
explanation. Whoever, then, wrongfully takes that which belongs to
another, enters into an involuntary contract, or makes an involuntary
exchange, with the party. This he may do by taking away his property,
honour, reputation, liberty, or bodily ease and comfort. This is an
involuntary transaction, against the will of the party that suffers.
It is a contract, because the party that does the damage takes upon
himself, whether he will or no, by the very act of doing it, the
obligation of making the damage good, and of restoring what he has
taken away. This is the obligation of _restitution_, which attaches to
breaches of _commutative justice_, and, strictly speaking, to them
alone. Thus, if a minister has not promoted a deserving officer in
face of a clear obligation of _distributive justice_, the obligation
indeed remains as that of a duty unfulfilled, so long as he remains
minister with the patronage in his hands: but the promotion, if he
finally makes it, is not an act of restitution: it is giving to the
officer that which was not his before. And if the opportunity has
passed, he owes the officer nothing in compensation. But if he has
insulted the officer, he owes him an apology for all time to come: he
must give back that honour which belonged to the officer, and of which
he has robbed him. This is restitution. In a thousand practical cases
it is important, and often a very nice question to decide, whether a
particular offence, such as failure to pay taxes, be a sin against
_commutative justice_ or only against some more general form of the
virtue. If the former, restitution is due: if the latter, repentance
only and purpose of better things in future, but not reparation of the
past.

7. The old notion, that Justice is minding your own business, and
leaving your neighbour to mind his, furnishes a good rough statement
of the obligations of _commutative justice_. They are mainly negative,
to leave your neighbour alone in his right of life and limb, of
liberty and property, of honour and reputation. But in two ways your
neighbour's business may become yours in justice. The first way is, if
you have any contract with him, whether a formal contract, as that
between a railway company and its passengers, or a virtual contract,
by reason of some office that you bear, as the office of a bishop and
pastor in relation to the souls of his flock. The second way in which
commutative justice binds you to positive action, is when undue damage
is likely to occur to another from some activity of yours. If, passing
by, I see my neighbour's house on fire, not having contracted to watch
it for him, and not having caused the fire myself, I am not bound in
strict justice to warn him of his danger. I am bound indeed by
charity, but that is not the point here. But if the fire has broken
out from my careless use of fire, _commutative justice_ binds me to
raise the alarm.

8. The most notable potential parts of Justice--Religion, Obedience,
Truthfulness--enter into the treatise of Natural Law.

_Readings_.--Ar., _Eth_., V., i.; Plato, _Rep_., 433 A; _ib_., 443 C,
D, E; St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 58, art. 2, in corp; _ib_., q. 58, art. 5;
_ib_., q. 58, art. 6, in corp; _ib_., q. 58, art. 7; _ib_., q. 58, art
9, in corp.; _ib_., q. 61, art. 1, in corp.; _ib_., q. 61, art. 3, in
corp.; Ar., _Eth_., V., ii., 12, 13; St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 62, art. 1,
in corp., ad 2.


       *       *       *       *       *


PART II. DEONTOLOGY.

CHAPTER VI.

OF THE ORIGIN OF MORAL OBLIGATION.

SECTION I.--_Of the natural difference between Good and Evil_.


1. A granite boulder lying on an upland moor stands indifferently the
August sun and the January frost, flood and drought. It neither blooms
in spring, nor fades in autumn. It is all one to the boulder whether
it remain in the picturesque solitude where the glacier dropped it, or
be laid in the gutter of a busy street. It has no growth nor
development: it is not a subject of evolution: there is no goal of
perfection to which it is tending by dint of inward germinal capacity
seconded by favourable environment. Therefore it does not matter what
you do with it: all things come alike to that lump of rock.

2. But in a cranny or cleft of the same there is a little flower
growing. You cannot do what you will with that flower. It has its
exigencies and requirements. Had it a voice, it could say, what the
stone never could: "I must have this or that: I must have light, I
must have moisture, a certain heat, some soil to grow in." There is a
course to be run by this flower and the plant that bears it, a
development to be wrought out, a perfection to be achieved. For this
end certain conditions are necessary, or helpful: certain others
prejudicial, or altogether intolerable. In fact, that plant has a
_progressive nature_, and therewith is a subject of good and evil.
Good for that plant is what favours its natural progress, and evil is
all that impedes it.

3. All organic natures are progressive: that is, each individual of
them is apt to make a certain progress, under certain conditions, from
birth to maturity. But man alone has his progress in any degree in his
own hands, to make or to mar. Man alone, in the graphic phrase of
Appius Claudius, is _faber fortunæ suæ_, "the shaper of his own
destiny." Any other plant or animal, other than man, however miserable
a specimen of its kind it finally prove to be, has always done the
best for itself under the circumstances: it has attained the limit
fixed for it by its primitive germinal capacity, as modified by the
events of its subsequent environment. The miserable animal that howls
under your window at night, is the finest dog that could possibly have
come of his blood and breeding, nurture and education. But there is no
man now on earth that has done all for himself that he might have
done. We all fall short in many things of the perfection that is
within our reach. Man therefore needs to stir himself, and to be
energetic with a free, self-determined energy to come up to the
standard of humanity. It is only his free acts that are considered by
the moralist. Such is the definition of Moral Science, that it deals
with _human acts_; acts, that is, whereof man is master to do or not
to do. (c. i., nn. 1, 2.)

4. We have it, then, that a morally good act is an act that makes
towards the progress of human nature in him who does it, and which is
freely done. Similarly, a morally evil act is a bar to progress, or a
diversion of it from the right line, being also a free act. Now, that
act only can make for the progress of human nature, which befits and
suits human nature, and suits it in its best and most distinctive
characteristic. What is best in man, what characterises and makes man,
what the old schoolmen called the _form_ of man, is his reason. To be
up to reason is to be up to the standard of humanity. Human progress
is progress on the lines of reason. To make for that progress, and
thereby to be morally good, an act must be done, not blindly,
brutishly, sottishly, or on any impulse of passion, however beneficial
in its effects, but deliberately, and in conscious accordance with the
reasonable nature of the doer.

5. Whatever be man's end and highest good, he must go about to compass
it reasonably. He must plan, and be systematic, and act on principle.
For instance, if the public health be the highest good, the laws which
govern it must be investigated, and their requirements carried out,
without regard to sentiment. If pleasure be the good, we must be
artists of pleasure. If, however, as has been seen (c. ii.) the
highest good of man is the highest play of reason herself in a life of
contemplation, to be prepared for, though it cannot be adequately and
worthily lived, in this world, then it is through following reason,
through subjecting appetite to reason by temperance, and the will to
reason by justice, and reason herself by a "reasonable service" to
God, that this end and consummation must be wrought out. Thus, in
Plato's phrase (_Rep._, 589 B), the moral man acts so that "the inner
man within him, the rational part of his nature, shall be strongest;
while he watches with a husbandman's care over the many-headed beast
of appetite, rearing and training the creature's tame heads, and not
letting the wild ones grow; for this purpose making an ally of the
lion, the irascible part of his nature, and caring for all the parts
in common, making them friends to one another and to himself." In this
way he will meet the true exigency of his nature _as a whole_, with
due regard to the proper order and subordination of the parts. He who
lives otherwise, acts in contradiction to his rational self. (c. v.,
s. iii., n. 3, p. 74).

6. The result of the above reasoning, if result it has, should be to
explain and justify the Stoic rule, _naturae convenienter vivere_, to
live according to nature. But some one will say: "That is the very
ideal of wickedness: all good in man comes of overcoming nature, and
doing violence to natural cravings: live according to nature, and you
will go straight to the devil." I answer: "Live _according to a part
of your nature_, and that the baser and lower, though also the more
impetuous and clamorous part, and you will certainly go where you say:
but live _up to the whole of your nature_, as explained in the last
paragraph, and you will be a man indeed, and will reach the goal of
human happiness." But again it may be objected, that our very reason,
to which the rest of our nature is naturally subordinate, frequently
prompts us to do amiss. The objection is a just one, in so far as it
goes upon a repudiation of the old Platonic position, that all moral
evil comes of the body, wherein the soul is imprisoned, and of the
desires which the body fastens upon the soul. Were that so, all sins
would be sins of sensuality. But there are spiritual sins, not
prompted by any lust or weakness of the body, as pride and mutiny,
self-opinionatedness, rejection of Divine revelation. The objection
turns on sins such as these. The answer is, that spiritual sins do not
arise from any exigency of reason, but from a deficiency of reason;
not from that faculty calling upon us, as we are reasonable men, to
take a certain course, in accordance with a just and full view of the
facts of the case, but from reason failing to look facts fully in the
face, and considering only some of them to the neglect of others, the
consideration of which would alter the decision. Thus a certain proud
creature mentioned in Scripture thought of the magnificence of the
throne above the stars of God, on the mountain of the covenant, on the
sides of the north: he did not think how such a pre-eminence would
become him as a creature. He had in view a rational good certainly,
but not a rational good for him. Partial reason, like a little
knowledge, is a dangerous thing.

7. As it is not in the power of God to bring it about, that the angles
of a triangle taken together shall amount to anything else than two
right angles, so it is not within the compass of Divine omnipotence to
create a man for whom it shall be a good and proper thing, and
befitting his nature, to blaspheme, to perjure himself, to abandon
himself recklessly to lust, or anger, or any other passion. God need
not have created man at all, but He could not have created him with
other than human exigencies. The reason is, because God can only
create upon the pattern of His own essence, which is imitable, outside
of God, in certain definite lines of possibility. These possibilities,
founded upon the Divine essence and discerned by the Divine
intelligence, are the Archetype Ideas, among which the Divine will has
to choose, when it proceeds to create. The denial of this doctrine in
the Nominalist and Cartesian Schools, and their reference to the
arbitrary will of God of the eternal, immutable, and absolutely
necessary relations of possible things, is the subversion of all
science and philosophy.

8. Still less are moral distinctions between good and evil to be set
down to the law of the State, or the fashion of society. Human
convention can no more constitute moral good than it can physical
good, or mathematical or logical truth. It is only in cases where two
or more courses are tolerable, and one of them needs to be chosen and
adhered to for the sake of social order, that human authority steps in
to elect and prescribe one of those ways of action, and brand the
others as illegitimate, which would otherwise be lawful. This is
called the making of a _positive law_.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 18, art. 5, in corp.; 1a 2æ, q. 71,
art. 2; Plato, _Rep_., 588 B to end of bk. ix.; Ar., _Eth_., IX., iv.,
nn. 4-10; Suarez, _De Legibus_, II., vi., nn. 4, 11; Cicero, _De
Legibus_, i., cc. 15-17.


SECTION II.--_How Good becomes bounden Duty, and
Evil is advanced to Sin_.


1. The great problem of Moral Philosophy is the explanation of the
idea, _I ought_, (c. i., n. 6). We are now come close up to the
solution of that problem. The word _ought_ denotes the necessary
bearing of means upon end. To every _ought_ there is a pendent _if_.
The means _ought_ to be taken, _if_ the end is to be secured. Thus we
say: "You _ought_ to start betimes, _if_ you are to catch your train."
"You _ought_ to study harder, _if_ you are to pass your examination."
The person spoken to might reply: "But what if I do miss my train, and
fail in my examination?" He might be met with another _ought_: "You
_ought_ not to miss the one, _if_ you are to keep your appointment: or
to fail in the other, _if_ you are to get into a profession." Thus the
train of _oughts_ and _ifs_ extends, until we come finally to a
concatenation like the following: "You _ought_ not to break your word,
or to give needless pain to your parents, _if_ you don't want to do
violence to that nature which is yours as a reasonable being," or "to
thwart your own moral development,"--and so on in a variety of phrases
descriptive of the argument of the last section. Here it seems the
chain is made fast to a staple in the wall. If a person goes on to
ask, "Well, what if I do contradict my rational self?" we can only
tell him that he is a fool for his question. The _oughts_, such as
those wherewith our illustration commenced, Kant calls the
_hypothetical imperative_, the form being, "You must, unless:" but the
_ought_ wherein it terminated, he calls the _categorical imperative_,
the alternative being such as no rational man can accept, and
therefore no alternative at all.

2. This doctrine of the Categorical Imperative is correct and valuable
so far as it goes. But then it does not go far enough. The full notion
of what a man _ought_, is what he _must do under pain of sin_. Sin is
more than folly, more than a breach of reason. It is mild reproach to
a great criminal to tell him that he is a very foolish person, a
walking unreasonableness. If he chooses to contradict his rational
self, is not that his own affair? Is he not his own master, and may he
not play the fool if he likes? The answer is, "No, he is not his own
master; he is under law, and his folly and self-abuse becomes criminal
and sinful, by being in contravention of the law that forbids him to
throw himself away thus wantonly."

3. Kant readily takes up this idea, shaping it after his own fashion.
He contends,--and herein his doctrine is not merely deficient, but
positively in error,--that the Categorical Imperative, uttered by a
man's own reason, has the force of a law, made by that same reason; so
that the legislative authority is within the breast of the doer, who
owes it obedience. This he calls the _autonomy of reason_. It is also
called Independent Morality, inasmuch as it establishes right and
wrong without regard to external authority, or to the consequences of
actions, or to rewards and punishments. The doctrine is erroneous,
inasmuch as it undertakes to settle the matter of right and wrong
without reference to external authority; and inasmuch as it makes the
reason within a man, not the promulgator of the law to him, but his
own legislator. For a law is a precept, a command: now no one issues
precepts, or gives commands, to himself. To command is an act of
jurisdiction; and jurisdiction, like justice (see c. v., s. ix., n. 1,
p. 102) requires a distinction of persons, one ruler, and another
subject. But the reason in a man is not a distinct subject from the
will, appetites, or other faculties within him, to which reason
dictates: they are all one nature, one person, one man; consequently,
no one of them can strictly be said to command the rest; and the
dictate of reason, as emanating from within oneself, is not a law. But
without a law, there is no strict obligation. Therefore the whole
theory of obligation is not locked up in the Categorical Imperative,
as Kant formulated it.

4. The above argumentation evinces that God is not under any law; for
there is no other God above Him to command Him. As for the ideas of
what is meet and just in the Divine intelligence, though the Divine
will, being a perfect will, is not liable to act against them, yet are
those ideas improperly called a law to the Divine will, because
intellect and will are identified in one God. Kant's doctrine makes us
all gods. It is a deification of the human intellect, and
identification of that intellect with the supreme and universal
Reason; and at the same time a release of the human will from all
authority extraneous to the individual. This amounts to a putting off
of all authority properly so called, and makes each man as sovereign
and unaccountable as his Maker. "Thy heart is lifted up, and thou hast
said: I am God, and sit in the chair of God: and hast set thy heart as
if it were the heart of God: whereas thou art a man and not God."
(Ezech. xxviii. 2.) Kant is thus the father of the pantheistic school
of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

5. But it has been contended that this phrase about a man who does
wrong _breaking a law_, is only a metaphor and figure of speech,
unless it be used with reference to the enactment of some civil
community. Thus John Austin says that a _natural law_ is a law which
is not, but which he who uses the expression thinks ought to be made.
At this rate _sin_ is not a transgression of any law, except so far as
it happens to be, in the lawyer's sense of the word, a _crime_, or
something punishable in a human court of justice. There will then be
no law but man's law. How then am I _obliged_ to obey man's law? Dr.
Bain answers: "Because, if you disobey, you will be _punished_." But
that punishment will be either just or unjust: if unjust, it
originates no obligation: if just, it presupposes an obligation, as it
presupposes a crime and sin, that is, an obligation violated. There
seems to be nothing left for John Austin but to fall back upon Kant
and his Categorical Imperative, and say that whoever rebels against
the duly constituted authority of the State in which he lives, is a
rebel against the reason that dwells within his own breast, and which
requires him to behave like a citizen. So that ultimately it is not
the State, but his own reason that he has offended; and the State has
no authority over him except what his own reason gives.

6. If this were true, there would be no sin anywhere except what is
called _philosophical sin_, that is, a breach of the dignity of man's
rational nature; and the hardest thing that could be said in
reprobation of a wrongdoer, would be that he had gone against himself,
and against his fellow-men, by outraging reason, the common attribute
of the race.

7. Far worse than that has the sinner done. He has offended

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