Human Nature and Conduct Part 8

The primary fact is that man is a being who responds in action to the stimuli of the environment. This fact is complicated in deliberation, but it certainly is not abolished. We continue to react to an object presented in imagination as we react to objects presented in observation. The baby does not move to the mother's breast because of calculation of the advantages of warmth and food over against the pains of effort. Nor does the miser seek gold, nor the architect strive to make plans, nor the physician to heal, because of reckonings of comparative advantage and disadvantage. Habit, occupation, furnishes the necessity of forward action in one case as instinct does in the other.

We do not act _from_ reasoning; but reasoning puts before us objects which are not directly or sensibly present, so that we then may react directly to these objects, with aversion, attraction, indifference or attachment, precisely as we would to the same objects if they were physically present. In the end it results in a case of direct stimulus and response. In one case the stimulus is presented at once through sense; in the other case, it is indirectly reached through memory and constructive imagination. But the matter of directness and indirectness concerns the way the stimulus is reached, not the way in which it operates.

Joy and suffering, pain and pleasure, the agreeable and disagreeable, play their considerable role in deliberation. Not, however, by way of a calculated estimate of future delights and miseries, but by way of experiencing present ones. The reaction of joy and sorrow, elation and depression, is as natural a response to objects presented in imagination as to those presented in sense. Complacency and annoyance follow hard at the heels of any object presented in image as they do upon its sensuous experience. Some objects when thought of are congruent to our existing state of activity. They fit in, they are welcome. They agree, or are agreeable, not as matter of calculation but as matter of experienced fact. Other objects rasp; they cut across activity; they are tiresome, hateful, unwelcome. They disagree with the existing trend of activity, that is, they are disagreeable, and in no other way than as a bore who prolongs his visit, a dun we can't pay, or a pestiferous mosquito who goes on buzzing. We do not think of future losses and expansions. We think, through imagination, of objects into which in the future some course of action will run, and we are _now_ delighted or depressed, pleased or pained at what is presented. This running commentary of likes and dislikes, attractions and disdains, joys and sorrows, reveals to any man who is intelligent enough to note them and to study their occasions his own character. It instructs him as to the composition and direction of the activities that make him what he is. To know what jars an activity and what agrees with it is to know something important about that activity and about ourselves.

Some one may ask what practical difference it makes whether we are influenced by calculation of future joys and annoyances or by experience of present ones. To such a question one can hardly reply except in the words "All the difference in the world." In the first place, no difference can be more important than that which concerns the nature of the _subject-matter_ of deliberation. The calculative theory would have it that this subject-matter is future feelings, sensations, and that actions and thought are external means to get and avoid these sensations. If such a theory has any practical influence, it is to advise a person to concentrate upon his own most subjective and private feelings. It gives him no choice except between a sickly introspection and an intricate calculus of remote, inaccessible and indeterminate results. In fact, deliberation, as a tentative trying-out of various courses of action, is outlooking. It flies toward and settles upon objective situations not upon feelings. No doubt we sometimes fall to deliberating upon the effect of action upon our future feelings, thinking of a situation mainly with reference to the comforts and discomforts it will excite in us. But these moments are precisely our sentimental moments of self-pity or self-glorification. They conduce to morbidity, sophistication, isolation from others; while facing our acts in terms of their objective consequences leads to enlightenment and to consideration of others. The first objection therefore to deliberation as a calculation of future feelings is that, if it is consistently adhered to, it makes an abnormal case the standard one.

If however an objective estimate is attempted, thought gets speedily lost in a task impossible of achievement. Future pleasures and pains are influenced by two factors which are independent of present choice and effort. They depend upon our own state at some future moment and upon the surrounding circ.u.mstances of that moment. Both of these are variables which change independently of present resolve and action. They are much more important determinants of future sensations than is anything which can now be calculated. Things sweet in antic.i.p.ation are bitter in actual taste, things we now turn from in aversion are welcome at another moment in our career. Independently of deep changes in character, such as from mercifulness to callousness, from fretfulness to cheerfulness, there are unavoidable changes in the waxing and waning of activity. A child pictures a future of unlimited toys and unrestricted sweetmeats. An adult pictures an object as giving pleasure while he is empty while the thing arrives in a moment of repletion. A sympathetic person reckons upon the utilitarian basis the pains of others as a debit item in his calculations. But why not harden himself so that others'

sufferings won't count? Why not foster an arrogant cruelty so that the suffering of others which will follow from one's own action will fall on the credit side of the reckoning, be pleasurable, all to the good?

Future pleasures and pains, even of one's own, are among the things most elusive of calculation. Of all things they lend themselves least readily to anything approaching a mathematical calculus. And the further into the future we extend our view, and the more the pleasures of others enter into the account, the more hopeless does the problem of estimating future consequences become. All of the elements become more and more indeterminate. Even if one could form a fairly accurate picture of the things that give pleasure to most people at the present moment--an exceedingly difficult task--he cannot foresee the detailed circ.u.mstances which will give a decisive turn to enjoyment at future times and remote places. Do pleasures due to defective education or unrefined disposition, to say nothing of the pleasures of sensuality and brutality, rank the same as those of cultivated persons having acute social sensitiveness? The only reason the impossibility of the hedonistic calculus is not self-evident is that theorists in considering it unconsciously subst.i.tute for calculation of future pleasures an appreciation of present ones, a present realization in imagination of future objective situations.

For, in truth, a man's judgment of future joys and sorrows is but a projection of what now satisfies and annoys him. A man of considerate disposition now feels hurt at the thought of an act bringing harm to others, and so he is on the lookout for consequences of that sort, ranking them as of high importance. He may even be so abnormally sensitive to such consequences that he is held back from needed vigorous action. He fears to do the things which are for the real welfare of others because he shrinks from the thought of the pain to be inflicted upon them by needed measures. A man of an executive type, engrossed in carrying through a scheme, will react in present emotion to everything concerned with its external success; the pain its execution brings to others will not occur to him, or if it does, his mind will easily glide over it. This sort of consequence will seem to him of slight importance in comparison with the commercial or political changes which bulk in his plans. What a man foresees and fails to foresee, what he appraises highly and at a low rate, what he deems important and trivial, what he dwells upon and what he slurs over, what he easily recalls and what he naturally forgets--all of these things depend upon his character. His estimate of future consequences of the agreeable and annoying is consequently of much greater value as an index of what he now is than as a prediction of future results.

One has only to read between the lines to see the enormous difference that marks off modern utilitarianism from epicureanism, in spite of similarities in professed psychologies. Epicureanism is too worldly-wise to indulge in attempts to base present action upon precarious estimates of future and universal pleasures and pains. On the contrary it says let the future go, for life is uncertain. Who knows when it will end, or what fortune the morrow will bring? Foster, then, with jealous care every gift of pleasure now allotted to you, dwell upon it with lingering love, prolong it as best you may. Utilitarianism on the contrary was a part of a philanthropic and reform movement of the nineteenth century.

Its commendation of an elaborate and impossible calculus was in reality part of a movement to develop a type of character which should have a wide social outlook, sympathy with the experiences of all sentient creatures, one zealous about the social effects of all proposed acts, especially those of collective legislation and administration. It was concerned not with extracting the honey of the pa.s.sing moment but with breeding improved bees and constructing hives.

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

We are not the creators of heaven and earth; we have no responsibility for their operations save as their motions are altered by our movements.

Our concern is with the significance of that slight fraction of total activity which starts from ourselves. The best laid plans of men as well of mice gang aglee; and for the same reason: inability to dominate the future. The power of man and mouse is infinitely constricted in comparison with the power of events. Men always build better or worse than they know, for their acts are taken up into the broad sweep of events.

Hence the problem of deliberation is not to calculate future happenings but to appraise present proposed actions. We judge present desires and habits by their tendency to produce certain consequences. It is our business to watch the course of our action so as to see what is the significance, the import of our habits and dispositions. The future outcome is not certain. But neither is it certain what the present fire will do in the future. It may be unexpectedly fed or extinguished. But its _tendency_ is a knowable matter, what it will do under certain circ.u.mstances. And so we know what is the tendency of malice, charity, conceit, patience. We know by observing their consequences, by recollecting what we have observed, by using that recollection in constructive imaginative forecasts of the future, by using the thought of future consequence to tell the quality of the act now proposed.

Deliberation is not calculation of indeterminate future results. The present, not the future, is ours. No shrewdness, no store of information will make it ours. But by constant watchfulness concerning the tendency of acts, by noting disparities between former judgments and actual outcomes, and tracing that part of the disparity that was due to deficiency and excess in disposition, we come to know the meaning of present acts, and to guide them in the light of that meaning. The moral is to develop conscientiousness, ability to judge the significance of what we are doing and to use that judgment in directing what we do, not by means of direct cultivation of something called conscience, or reason, or a faculty of moral knowledge, but by fostering those impulses and habits which experience has shown to make us sensitive, generous, imaginative, impartial in perceiving the tendency of our inchoate dawning activities. Every attempt to forecast the future is subject in the end to the auditing of present concrete impulse and habit. Therefore the important thing is the fostering of those habits and impulses which lead to a broad, just, sympathetic survey of situations.

The occasion of deliberation, that is of the attempt to find a stimulus to complete overt action in thought of some future object, is confusion and uncertainty in present activities. A similar devision in activities and need of a like deliberative activity for the sake of recovery of unity is sure to recur, to recur again and again, no matter how wise the decision. Even the most comprehensive deliberation leading to the most momentous choice only fixes a disposition which has to be continuously applied in new and unforeseen conditions, re-adapted by future deliberations. Always our old habits and dispositions carry us into new fields. We have to be always learning and relearning the meaning of our active tendencies. Does not this reduce moral life to the futile toil of a Sisyphus who is forever rolling a stone uphill only to have it roll back so that he has to repeat his old task? Yes, judged from progress made in a control of conditions which shall stay put and which excludes the necessity of future deliberations and reconsiderations. No, because continual search and experimentation to discover the meaning of changing activity, keeps activity alive, growing in significance. The future situation involved in deliberation is of necessity marked by contingency. What it will be in fact remains dependent upon conditions that escape our foresight and power of regulation. But foresight which draws liberally upon the lessons of past experience reveals the tendency, the meaning, of present action; and, once more, it is this present meaning rather than the future outcome which counts. Imaginative forethought of the probable consequences of a proposed act keeps that act from sinking below consciousness into routine habit or whimsical brutality. It preserves the meaning of that act alive, and keeps it growing in depth and refinement of meaning. There is no limit to the amount of meaning which reflective and meditative habit is capable of importing into even simple acts, just as the most splendid successes of the skilful executive who manipulates events may be accompanied by an incredibly meager and superficial consciousness.

V

The reason for dividing conduct into two distinct regions, one of expediency and the other of morality, disappears when the psychology that identifies ordinary deliberation with calculation is disposed of.

There is seen to be but one issue involved in all reflection upon conduct: The rectifying of present troubles, the harmonizing of present incompatibilities by projecting a course of action which gathers into itself the meaning of them all. The recognition of the true psychology also reveals to us the nature of good or satisfaction. Good consists in the meaning that is experienced to belong to an activity when conflict and entanglement of various incompatible impulses and habits terminate in a unified orderly release in action. This human good, being a fulfilment conditioned upon thought, differs from the pleasures which an animal nature--of course we also remain animals so far as we do not think--hits upon accidentally. Moreover there is a genuine difference between a false good, a spurious satisfaction, and a "true" good, and there is an empirical test for discovering the difference. The unification which ends thought in act may be only a superficial compromise, not a real decision but a postponement of the issue. Many of our so-called decisions are of this nature. Or it may present, as we have seen, a victory of a temporarily intense impulse over its rivals, a unity by oppression and suppression, not by coordination. These seeming unifications which are not unifications of fact are revealed by the event, by subsequent occurrences. It is one of the penalties of evil choice, perhaps the chief penalty, that the wrong-doer becomes more and more incapable of detecting these objective revelations of himself.

In quality, the good is never twice alike. It never copies itself. It is new every morning, fresh every evening. It is unique in its every presentation. For it marks the resolution of a distinctive complication of competing habits and impulses which can never repeat itself. Only with a habit rigid to the point of immobility could exactly the same good recur twice. And with such rigid routines the same good does not after all recur, for it does not even occur. There is no consciousness at all, either of good or bad. Rigid habits sink below the level of any meaning at all. And since we live in a moving world, they plunge us finally against conditions to which they are not adapted and so terminate in disaster.

To utilitarianism with all its defects belongs the distinction of enforcing in an unforgettable way the fact that moral good, like every good, consists in a satisfaction of the forces of human nature, in welfare, happiness. To Bentham remains, in spite of all crudities and eccentricities, the imperishable renown of forcing home to the popular consciousness that "conscience," intelligence applied to in moral matters, is too often not intelligence but is veiled caprice, dogmatic _ipse dixitism_, vested cla.s.s interest. It is truly conscience only as it contributes to relief of misery and promotion of happiness. An examination of utilitarianism brings out however the catastrophe involved in thinking of the good to which intelligence is pertinent as consisting in future pleasures and pains, and moral reflection as their algebraic calculus. It emphasizes the contrast between such conceptions of good and of intelligence, and the facts of human nature according to which good, happiness, is found in the present meaning of activity, depending upon the proportion, order and freedom introduced into it by thought as it discovers objects which release and unify otherwise contending elements.

An adequate discussion of why utilitarianism with its just insight into the central place of good, and its ardent devotion to rendering morals more intelligent and more equitably human took its onesided course (and thereby provoked an intensified reaction to transcendental and dogmatic morals) would take us far afield into social conditions and the antecedent history of thought. We can deal with only one factor, the domination of intellectual interest by economic considerations. The industrial revolution was bound in any case to give a new direction to thought. It enforced liberation from other-worldly concerns by fixing attention upon the possibility of the betterment of this world through control and utilization of natural forces; it opened up marvelous possibilities in industry and commerce, and new social conditions conducive to invention, ingenuity, enterprise, constructive energy and an impersonal habit of mind dealing with mechanisms rather than appearances. But new movements do not start in a new and clear field.

The context of old inst.i.tutions and corresponding habits of thought persisted. The new movement was perverted in theory because prior established conditions deflected it in practice. Thus the new industrialism was largely the old feudalism, living in a bank instead of a castle and brandis.h.i.+ng the check of credit instead of the sword.

An old theological doctrine of total depravity was continued and carried over in the idea of an inherent laziness of human nature which rendered it averse to useful work, unless bribed by expectations of pleasure, or driven by fears of pains. This being the "incentive" to action, it followed that the office of reason is only to enlighten the search for good or gain by inst.i.tuting a more exact calculus of profit and loss.

Happiness was thus identified with a maximum net gain of pleasures on the basis of a.n.a.logy with business conducted for pecuniary profit, and directed by means of a science of accounting dealing with quant.i.ties of receipts and expenses expressed in definite monetary units.[6] For business was conducted as matter of fact with primary reference to procuring gain and averting loss. Gain and loss were reckoned in terms of units of money, a.s.sumed to be fixed and equal, exactly comparable whether loss or gain occurred, while business foresight reduced future prospects to definitely measured forms, to dollars and cents. A dollar is a dollar, past, present or future; and every business transaction, every expenditure and consumption of time, energy, goods, is, in theory, capable of exact statement in terms of dollars. Generalize this point of view into the notion that gain is the object of _all_ action; that gain takes the form of pleasure; that there are definite, commensurable units of pleasure, which are exactly offset by units of pain (loss), and the working psychology of the Benthamite school is at hand.

[6] I owe the suggestion of this mode of interpreting the hedonistic calculus of utilitarianism to Dr. Wesley Mitch.e.l.l.

See his articles in _Journal of Political Economy_, vol. 18.

Compare also his article in _Political Science Quarterly_, vol. 33.

Now admitting that the device of money accounting makes possible more exact estimates of the consequences of many acts than is otherwise possible, and that accordingly the use of money and accounting may work a triumph for the application of intelligence in daily affairs, yet there exists a difference in kind between business calculation of profit and loss and deliberation upon what purposes to form. Some of these differences are inherent and insuperable. Others of them are due to the nature of present business conducted for pecuniary profit, and would disappear if business were conducted primarily for service of needs. But it is important to see _how_ in the latter case the a.s.similation of business accounting and normal deliberation would occur. For it would not consist in making deliberation identical with calculation of loss and gain; it would proceed in the opposite direction. It would make accounting and auditing a subordinate factor in discovering the meaning of present activity. Calculation would be a means of stating future results more exactly and objectively and thus of making action more humane. Its function would be that of statistics in all social science.

But first as to the inherent difference between deliberation regarding business profit and loss and deliberation about ordinary conduct. The distinction between wide and narrow use of reason has already been noted. The latter holds a fixed end in view and deliberates only upon means of reaching it. The former regards the end-in-view in deliberation as tentative and permits, nay encourages the coming into view of consequences which will transform it and create a new purpose and plan.

Now business calculation is obviously of the kind where the end is taken for granted and does not enter into deliberation. It resembles the case in which a man has already made his final decision, say to take a walk, and deliberates only upon what walk to take. His end-in-view already exists; it is not questioned. The question is as to comparative advantages of this tramp or that. Deliberation is not free but occurs within the limits of a decision reached by some prior deliberation or else fixed by unthinking routine. Suppose, however, that a man's question is not which path to walk upon, but whether to walk or to stay with a friend whom continued confinement has rendered peevish and uninteresting as a companion. The utilitarian theory demands that in the latter case the two alternatives still be of the same kind, alike in quality, that their only difference be a quant.i.tative one, of plus or minus in pleasure. This a.s.sumption that all desires and dispositions, all habits and impulses, are the same in quality is equivalent to the a.s.sertion that no real or significant conflict among them is possible; and hence there is no need of discovering an object and an activity which will bring them into unity. It a.s.serts by implication that there is no genuine doubt or suspense as to the meaning of any impulse or habit. Their meaning is ready-made, fixed: pleasure. The only "problem"

or doubt is as to the _amount_ of pleasure (or pain) that is involved.

This a.s.sumption does violence to fact. The poignancy of situations that evoke reflection lies in the fact that we really do not know the meaning of the tendencies that are pressing for action. We have to search, to experiment. Deliberation is a work of discovery. Conflict is acute; one impulse carries us one way into one situation, and another impulse takes us another way to a radically different objective result. Deliberation is not an attempt to do away with this opposition of quality by reducing it to one of amount. It is an attempt to _uncover_ the conflict in its full scope and bearing. What we want to find out is what difference each impulse and habit imports, to reveal qualitative incompatibilities by detecting the different courses to which they commit us, the different dispositions they form and foster, the different situations into which they plunge us.

In short, the thing actually at stake in any serious deliberation is not a difference of quant.i.ty, but what kind of person one is to become, what sort of self is in the making, what kind of a world is making. This is plain enough in those crucial decisions where the course of life is thrown into widely different channels, where the pattern of life is rendered different and diversely dyed according as this alternative or that is chosen. Deliberation as to whether to be a merchant or a school teacher, a physician or a politician is not a choice of quant.i.ties. It is just what it appears to be, a choice of careers which are incompatible with one another, within each of which definitive inclusions and rejections are involved. With the difference in career belongs a difference in the const.i.tution of the self, of habits of thought and feeling as well as of outward action. With it comes profound differences in all future objective relations.h.i.+ps. Our minor decisions differ in acuteness and range, but not in principle. Our world does not so obviously hang upon any one of them; but put together they make the world what it is in meaning for each one of us. Crucial decisions can hardly be more than a disclosure of the c.u.mulative force of trivial choices.

A radical distinction thus exists between deliberation where the only question is whether to invest money in this bond or that stock, and deliberation where the primary decision is as to the _kind_ of activity which is to be engaged in. Definite quant.i.tative calculation is possible in the former case because a decision as to kind or direction of action does not have to be made. It has been decided already, whether by persistence of habit, or prior deliberation, that the man is to be an investor. The significant thing in decisions proper, the course of action, the kind of a self simply, doesn't enter in; it isn't in question. To reduce all cases of judgment of action to this simplified and comparatively unimportant case of calculation of quant.i.ties, is to miss the whole point of deliberation.[7]

[7] So far as I am aware Dr. H. W. Stuart was the first to point out this difference between economic and moral valuations in his essay in _Studies in Logical Theory_.

It is another way of saying the same thing to note that business calculations about pecuniary gain never concern direct use in experience. They are, as such, not deliberations about good or satisfaction at all. The man who decides to put business activity before all other claims whatsoever, before that of family or country or art or science, does make a choice about satisfaction or good. But he makes it as a man, not as a business man. On the other hand, what is to be _done_ with business profit when it accrues (except to invest it in similar undertakings) does not enter at all into a strictly business deliberation. Its use, in which alone good or satisfaction is found, is left indeterminate, contingent upon further deliberation, or else is left matter of routine habit. We do not eat money, or wear it, or marry it, or listen for musical strains to issue from it. If by any chance a man prefers a less amount of money to a greater amount, it is not for economic reasons. Pecuniary profit in itself, in other words, is always strictly instrumental, and it is of the nature of this instrument to be effective in proportion to size. In choosing with respect to it, we are not making a significant choice, a choice of ends.

We have already seen, however, there is something abnormal and in the strict sense impossible in mere means, in, that is, instruments totally dissevered from ends. We may view economic activity in abstraction, but it does not _exist_ by itself. Business takes for granted non-business uses to which its results are to be put. The stimuli for economic activity (in the sense in which business means activity subject to monetary reckoning) are found in non-pecuniary, non-economic activities.

Taken by itself then economic action throws no light upon the nature of satisfaction and the relation of intelligence to it, because the whole question of satisfaction is either taken for granted or else is ignored by it. Only when money-making is itself taken as a good does it exhibit anything pertinent to the question. And when it is so taken, then the question is not one of future gain but of present activity and its meaning. Business then becomes an activity carried on for its own sake.

It is then a career, a continuous occupation in which are developed daring, adventure, power, rivalry, overcoming of compet.i.tors, conspicuous achievement which attracts admiration, play of imagination, technical knowledge, skill in foresight and making combinations, management of men and goods and so on. In this case, it exemplifies what has been said about good or happiness as incorporating in itself at _present_ the foreseen future consequences that result from intelligent action. The problem concerns the quality of such a good.

In short the attempt to a.s.similate other activities to the model of economic activity (defined as a calculated pursuit of gain) reverses the state of the facts. The "economic man" defined as a creature devoted to an enlightened or calculating pursuit of gain is morally objectionable because the conception of such a being empirically falsifies empirical facts. Love of pecuniary gain is an undoubted and powerful fact. But it and its importance are affairs of social not of psychological nature. It is not a primary fact which can be used to account for other phenomena.

It depends upon other impulses and habits. It expresses and organizes the use to which they are put. It cannot be used to define the nature of desire, effort and satisfaction, because it embodies a socially selected type of desire and satisfaction. It affords, like steeple-chasing, or collecting postage stamps, seeking political office, astronomical observation of the heavens, a special case of desire, effort, and happiness. And like them it is subject to examination, criticism and valuation in the light of the place it occupies in the system of developing activities.

The reason that it is so easy and for specific purposes so useful to select economic activities and subject them to separate scientific treatment is because the men who engage in it are men who are also more than business men, whose usual habits may be more or less safely guessed at. As human beings they have desires and occupations which are affected by social custom, expectation and admiration. The uses to which gains will be put, that is the current scheme of activities into which they enter as factors, are pa.s.sed over only because they are so inevitably present. Support of family, of church, philanthropic benefactions, political influence, automobiling, command of luxuries, freedom of movement, respect from others, are in general terms some of the obvious activities into which economic activity fits. This context of activities enters into the real make-up and meaning of economic activity.

Calculated pursuit of gain is in fact never what it is made out to be when economic action is separated from the rest of life, for in fact it is what it is because of a complex social environment involving scientific, legal, political and domestic conditions.

A certain tragic fate seems to attend all intellectual movements. That of utilitarianism is suggested in the not infrequent criticism that it exaggerated the role of rational thought in human conduct, that it a.s.sumed that everybody is moved by conscious considerations and that all that is really necessary is to make the process of consideration sufficiently enlightened. Then it is objected that a better psychology reveals that men are not moved by thought but rather by instinct and habit. Thus a partially sound criticism is employed to conceal the one factor in utilitarianism from which we ought to learn something; is used to foster an obscurantist doctrine of trusting to impulse, instinct or intuition. Neither the utilitarians nor any one else can exaggerate the proper office of reflection, of intelligence, in conduct. The mistake lay not here but in a false conception of what const.i.tutes reflection, deliberation. The truth that men are not moved by consideration of self-interest, that men are not good judges of where their interests lie and are not moved to act by these judgments, cannot properly be converted into the belief that consideration of consequences is a negligible factor in conduct. So far as it is negligible in fact it evinces the rudimentary character of civilization. We may indeed safely start from the a.s.sumption that impulse and habit, not thought, are the primary determinants of conduct. But the conclusion to be drawn from these facts is that the need is therefore the greater for cultivation of thought. The error of utilitarianism is not at this point. It is found in its wrong conception of what thought, deliberation, is and does.

VI

Our problem now concerns the nature of ends, that is ends-in-view or aims. The essential elements in the problem have already been stated. It has been pointed out that the ends, objectives, of conduct are those foreseen consequences which influence present deliberation and which finally bring it to rest by furnis.h.i.+ng an adequate stimulus to overt action. Consequently ends arise and function within action. They are not, as current theories too often imply, things lying beyond activity at which the latter is directed. They are not strictly speaking ends or termini of action at all. They are terminals of deliberation, and so turning points _in_ activity. Many opposed moral theories agree however in placing ends beyond action, although they differ in their notions of what the ends are. The utilitarian sets up pleasure as such an outside-and-beyond, as something necessary to induce action and in which it terminates. Many harsh critics of utilitarianism have however agreed that there is some end in which action terminates, a final goal. They have denied that pleasure is such an outside aim, and put perfection or self-realization in its place. The entire popular notion of "ideals" is infected with this conception of some fixed end beyond activity at which we should aim. According to this view ends-in-themselves come before aims. We have a moral aim only as our purpose coincides with some end-in-itself. We _ought_ to aim at the latter whether we actually do or not.

When men believed that fixed ends existed for all normal changes in nature, the conception of similar ends for men was but a special case of a general belief. If the changes in a tree from acorn to full-grown oak were regulated by an end which was somehow immanent or potential in all the less perfect forms, and if change was simply the effort to realize a perfect or complete form, then the acceptance of a like view for human conduct was consonant with the rest of what pa.s.sed for science. Such a view, consistent and systematic, was foisted by Aristotle upon western culture and endured for two thousand years. When the notion was expelled from natural science by the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century, logically it should also have disappeared from the theory of human action. But man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis. So the doctrine of fixed ends-in-themselves at which human acts are--or should be--directed and by which they are regulated if they are regulated at all persisted in morals, and was made the cornerstone of orthodox moral theory. The immediate effect was to dislocate moral from natural science, to divide man's world as it never had been divided in prior culture. One point of view, one method and spirit animated inquiry into natural occurrences; a radically opposite set of ideas prevailed about man's affairs. Completion of the scientific change begun in the seventeenth century thus depends upon a revision of the current notion of ends of action as fixed limits and conclusions.

In fact, ends are ends-in-view or aims. They arise out of natural effects or consequences which in the beginning are hit upon, stumbled upon so far as any purpose is concerned. Men _like_ some of the consequences and _dislike_ others. Henceforth (or till attraction and repulsion alter) attaining or averting similar consequences are aims or ends. These consequences const.i.tute the meaning and value of an activity as it comes under deliberation. Meantime of course imagination is busy.

Old consequences are enhanced, recombined, modified in imagination.

Invention operates. Actual consequences, that is effects which have happened in the past, become possible future consequences of acts still to be performed. This operation of imaginative thought complicates the relation of ends to activity, but it does not alter the substantial fact: Ends are foreseen consequences which arise in the course of activity and which are employed to give activity added meaning and to direct its further course. They are in no sense ends _of_ action. In being ends of _deliberation_ they are redirecting pivots _in_ action.

Men shoot and throw. At first this is done as an "instinctive" or natural reaction to some situation. The result when it is observed gives a new meaning to the activity. Henceforth men in throwing and shooting think of it in terms of its outcome; they act intelligently or have an end. Liking the activity in its acquired meaning, they not only "take aim" when they throw instead of throwing at random, but they find or make targets at which to aim. This is the origin and nature of "goals"

of action. They are ways of defining and deepening the meaning of activity. Having an end or aim is thus a characteristic of _present_ activity. It is the means by which an activity becomes adapted when otherwise it would be blind and disorderly, or by which it gets meaning when otherwise it would be mechanical. In a strict sense an end-in-view is a _means_ in present action; present action is not a means to a remote end. Men do not shoot because targets exist, but they set up targets in order that throwing and shooting may be more effective and significant.

A mariner does not sail towards the stars, but by noting the stars he is aided in conducting his present activity of sailing. A port or harbor is his objective, but only in the sense of _reaching_ it not of taking possession of it. The harbor stands in his thought as a significant point at which his activity will need re-direction. Activity will not cease when the port is attained, but merely the _present direction_ of activity. The port is as truly the beginning of another mode of activity as it is the termination of the present one. The only reason we ignore this fact is because it is empirically taken for granted. We know without thinking that our "ends" are perforce beginnings. But theories of ends and ideals have converted a theoretical ignoring which is equivalent to practical acknowledgment into an intellectual denial, and have thereby confused and perverted the nature of ends.

Even the most important among all the consequences of an act is not necessarily its aim. Results which are objectively most important may not even be thought of at all; ordinarily a man does not think in connection with exercise of his profession that it will sustain him and his family in existence. The end-thought-of is uniquely important, but it is indispensable to state the respect in which it is important. It gives the decisive clew to the act to be performed under the existing circ.u.mstances. It is that particular foreseen object that will stimulate the act which relieves existing troubles, straightens out existing entanglements. In a temporary annoyance, even if only that caused by the singing of a mosquito, the thought of that which gives relief may engross the mind in spite of consequences much more important, objectively speaking. Moralists have deplored such facts as evidence of levity. But the remedy, if a remedy be needed, is not found in insisting upon the importance of ends in general. It is found in a change of the dispositions which make things either immediately troublesome or tolerable or agreeable.

When ends are regarded as literally ends to action rather than as directive stimuli to present choice they are frozen and isolated. It makes no difference whether the "end" is "natural" good like health or a "moral" good like honesty. Set up as complete and exclusive, as demanding and justifying action as a means to itself, it leads to narrowness; in extreme cases fanaticism, inconsiderateness, arrogance and hypocrisy. Joshua's reputed success in getting the sun to stand still to serve his desire is recognized to have involved a miracle. But moral theorists constantly a.s.sume that the continuous course of events can be arrested at the point of a particular object; that men can plunge with their own desires into the unceasing flow of changes, and seize upon some object as their end irrespective of everything else. The use of intelligence to discover the object that will best operate as a releasing and unifying stimulus in the existing situation is discounted.