Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/346

THE FINAL AIM OF MORAL ACTION. 345 impulse is one of the weakest of all in human nature, and the great problem of ethics is how to strengthen it. If it were the strongest, it would excite men to right action on the mere presentation of opportunity as immediately and natu- rally as the impulse to eat excites to action at the sight of food when one is hungry ; and there would at least be no occasion for making the pleasure of the sense of duty the end of action. This pleasure would be attained without being aimed at. The mere impulse to do right, in the nature of things, precedes the knowledge of the attendant pleasure ; and if it were strong enough by itself always to determine action, possibly aiming at the pleasure consciously might mar the perfect action of the moral nature ; indeed the very thought of aiming at it, once creeping into the fancy, might prove the first occasion to evil. Therefore in reference to beings of a perfectly holy nature it may be true that they would not seek the pleasure of conscience, since so doing might not tend in their case to universal happiness. But the task before us is to apply the standard of right action to men in whom the moral impulse assumes the form of a feeling of obligation and not of mere inclination, a feeling of claim and not of craving. Men do not hunger and thirst after righteousness. And this changes the whole aspect of affairs ; so that to offer men the blessing that comes to those who do righteously might be the very, indeed the only, means of creating the hunger and thirst. This would accord with the psychological law by which deeds done for the sake of the attendant pleasure transform themselves into deeds done for their own sake. One might say that to make the inner moral sanction the aim of conduct would be the last step in the moral education of the race and of every individual man. There is a stage when to set merely legal sanctions as the aim of conduct has a moralising influence and tends to make men love the right for its own sake. A higher stage is reached when only social and religious sanctions are set ; here, as Shaftesbury and Lessing have shown, the transition to a controlling, impulsive love of right is easier and surer. But the highest stage of all is when no other reward is set than to stand unblamed in the light of one's own moral consciousness. And who has ever outgrown this stage of moral education ? Will the human race ever outgrow it ? In the present state of society the consequences that would come of removing even legal and social sanctions from right action are too terrible to bring before the imagination. And as for the thought of removing the incentives which the expectation of self-condemnation and self-approval gives, it