Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law Part 4

_Readings_.--Ar., _Rhet_., ii., 2; _ib_., 4, ad fin.; St. Thos., 1a 2ae, 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 pa.s.sing 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 gla.s.s 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 acc.u.mulation 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 pa.s.ses 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 appet.i.te 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 p.r.o.ne 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 2ae, 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 G.o.d and pardoned, the vice, that is, the evil habit, if any such existed before, still remains, and const.i.tutes 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 circ.u.mstance. Moreover, no act is virtuous that is elicited quite mechanically, or at the blind instance of pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sions 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 const.i.tution.

As Aristotle (_Pol_., I., v., 6) says: "The soul rules the body with a despotic command: but reason rules appet.i.te with a command const.i.tutional and kingly": that is to say, as Aristotle elsewhere (_Eth_., I., xiii., 15, 16) explains, pa.s.sion often "fights and resists reason, opposes and contradicts": it has therefore to be bound by ordinances and inst.i.tutions to follow reason's lead: these inst.i.tutions are good habits, moral virtues, resident there where pa.s.sion itself is resident, in the inferior appet.i.te. 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 pa.s.sions, 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 appet.i.te in both its parts, concupiscible and irascible, so far forth as appet.i.te 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 appet.i.te are called _moral virtues_, and to them the name of _virtue_ is usually confined.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a 2ae, 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 2ae, 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 appet.i.te, rational or sensitive, to good. He says that intellectual virtue does not prompt this determination of the appet.i.te. 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 appet.i.te; and it prompts the act of the intellect, which however is cot always followed by an act of appet.i.te in accordance with it.]

2. Another distinction may be gathered from St. Thomas (1a 2ae, 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 appet.i.te: intellectual habits, acts of intellect. Will and appet.i.te 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 pa.s.sion the sensitive appet.i.te, 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 p.r.o.nouncement, and there is nothing within the man that says otherwise. In the moral error there is a contradiction within, an intestine quarrel. The intellect p.r.o.nounces a thing not good, not to be taken, and the sensitive appet.i.te 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 2ae, q. 58, art. 2, in corp.; Ar., _Eth_., I., xiii., 15-19; St. Thos., 1a 2ae, 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 pa.s.sions. 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 circ.u.mstances. (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 ill.u.s.trated 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 fort.i.tude, 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 fort.i.tude perish in excess and defect, and live in the mean. It is to be noticed in this ill.u.s.tration 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 impa.s.sioned for a great emergency, but the very pa.s.sion should bear the mark of control: in the great master's phrase, you must not "tear a pa.s.sion 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 cla.s.s 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 appet.i.te, 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 fort.i.tude 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 pa.s.sions the right amount for one person would be excessive for another, according to varieties of age, s.e.x, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Nomenta.n.u.s 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 princ.i.p.ally, 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 a.s.syrian 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 pa.s.sion that marked their religion, their inst.i.tutions, 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 h.e.l.lenic race. The Greek hated a thing overdone, a gaudy ornament, a proud t.i.tle, 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 surpa.s.sing 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 unsurpa.s.sed tongue, the [Greek: kairos]. "The right measure (_kairos_) is at the head of all," says Pindar. "b.o.o.by, 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_;