Humanity as a whole desires its own preservation and advancement, and therefore performs acts which tend to realize the desired end.

We call such acts as tend to promote welfare virtuous, their opposites vicious. We call the will that tends to express itself in virtuous acts a good or virtuous will, its opposite vicious. Acts which ought to be done we call duties, persons who do them dutiful.

Morality is based upon impulses. Because men desire the preservation of themselves and others they are moral. But - and this is an important point an impulse as such is not necessarily a virtue, though it may be fashioned into one. The impulse to preserve your life is not necessarily a virtue. Your desire to preserve yourself may be so irrational as to destroy you. Your desire for food may be so strong as to cause your ruin. Nor is the sympathetic impulse necessarily a virtue. Your sympathy for a person may be so irrational as to injure both you and the person for whom you feel it.

Virtues are rational impulses, i.e., impulses or volitions fashioned in such a manner as to realize moral ends. They are impulses guided by reason, controlled by ideas. Impulses are formed or fashioned or educated by experience with natural and social surroundings. Exaggerated impulses are corrected and weak ones strengthened. Impulses may also be reënforced or defeated by the aid of the moral sentiments or the conscience. An extreme egoistic impulse may be held in check by the feeling of obli

gation; and a weak altruistic impulse intensified in the same way. A person who is exceedingly selfish may be kept within proper bounds by his conscience, by the feeling that he ought not to indulge his desire to advance himself at the expense of others; while an individual lacking altruism may be urged by his conscience to care for others. Or the feeling of obligation may influence a man who cares little for self-advancement to preserve and develop his life, and cause one who is too altruistically inclined to modify his altruism.1

2. Character. -Impulses are fashioned into fixed habits of action, which cannot easily be changed, and a character is formed. "A character," as J. S. Mill

says, "is a completely fashioned will," and by will here is meant "an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon the principal emergencies of life." We may, therefore, say that a character is the combined product of one's natural tendencies or impulses, and the environment acting upon them. In other words, a man's character depends upon his will or nature or disposition, and the influences exerted upon it by the outside world of living and lifeless things. This implies: (1) that the individual starts out with a certain stock in trade, certain impulses or tendencies, or, to state it physiologically, a peculiarly constituted brain and nervous system; (2) that these tendencies or

1 See Paulsen, Ethics, Bk. III, chap. i.

2 See James, Psychology, Vol. I, chap. iv.

impulses, this brain and nervous system, may be influenced and modified, hence that a person may be educated into morality; (3) that what a man will be, must depend, to some extent, upon what he is, that is, upon his native disposition.

A man may have been endowed by nature with bountiful intellectual and physical gifts, but the absence of favorable conditions or the presence of unfavorable ones may hinder these capacities from being realized. A person who might have become an athlete, had he been born in a certain climate and had he received the proper training, may turn out to be physically deficient. So, too, a man who might have become a great artist may find his natural powers weakening from lack of exercise.

In order, then, to form a moral character, we need a natural capacity for goodness, so to speak, and favorable life conditions. We have just seen that the absence of the latter is bound to show its effects. But the former also, the native endowment, is needed. A man with a dwarfed brain can never become an intellectual prodigy. But there are many gradations from a diseased brain and organism to a perfectly healthy and well-developed system, and consequently many gradations in physical excellence. Some persons seem to be utterly devoid of moral impulses, and consequently bound to turn out bad. Some criminals are criminals by nature. They are what has been called by alienists morally insane. Such individuals are usually without the impulses

upon which morality is based. "Modern reformatories have testified to the possibility of the redemption of a large number of criminals from their evil life, but they have shown, nevertheless, that there is a lust of cupidity, a love of meanness, and an animality from which rescue is almost if not quite impossible. The reaction of men whose past opportunities have been about equal, upon effort for their reform, exhibits also very different degrees of readiness. The testimony of reformatories for the young is especially of worth on this point; and I once heard Mrs. Mary Livermore describe the faces of many of the children to be found in a certain institution of this sort as bearing fearful witness to the fact that they had been 'mortgaged to the devil before they were born.' I remember a number of cases cited by the matron of a certain orphan asylum, showing that children taken from their home at too early an age to have learned the sins of their parents by imitation may yet repeat those sins. Out of three children of the same parents, the one of whom was a drunkard and prostitute, the other a thief, one developed, at a very early age, a tendency to dishonesty, another an extreme morbid eroticism, and the third child appeared to have escaped the evil inheritance; but he was still very young when I last heard of him."1 "Whoever is destitute of moral feeling is, to that extent, a defective being; he marks the beginning of race-degeneracy; and if propitious influence do

1 Williams, Evolutional Ethics, Part II, pp. 405 f.

not chance to check or to neutralize the morbid tendency, his children will exhibit a further degree of degeneracy, and be actual morbid varieties. Whether the particular outcome of the morbid strain shall be vice, or madness, or crime, will depend much on the circumstances of life." "When we make a scientific study of the fundamental meaning of those deviations from the sound type which issue in insanity and crime, by searching inquiry into the laws of their genesis, it appears that these forms of human degeneracy do not lie so far asunder as they are commonly supposed to do. Moreover, theory is here confirmed by observation; for it has been pointed out by those who have made criminals their study that they oftentimes spring from families in which insanity, epilepsy, or some allied neurosis exists, that many of them are weak-minded, epileptic, or actually insane, and that they are apt to die from diseases of the nervous system and from tubercular diseases." 1

3. The Freedom of the Will. The preceding statements naturally suggest the problem of the freedom of the will, which we shall now consider. Is the will free or is it determined? Before we can answer this question we must understand the terms. involved in our discussion.

1 Maudsley, Pathology of Mind, pp. 102 ff., quoted by Williams, loc. cit. See also Lombroso, L'homme criminel; Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatrie, Vol. II, p. 65; Strümpell, Pedagogische Pathologie; Williams, Evolutional Ethics, pp. 402 ff.; Paulsen, Ethics, pp. 373 475 ff.

ff.,