Anthony Trollope - "The Mistletoe Bough"

Sydney G. Fisher - "The Quaker Colonies"

Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne - "Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, V12"

John Martin Crawford, trans. - "The Kalevala (complete)"

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PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: A Handbook of Ethical Theory

G >> George Stuart Fullerton >> A Handbook of Ethical Theory




The striking of a match to light a candle may result in an unforeseen and
disastrous conflagration. The overmastering desire to grow rich may have
its fruit in an excessive application to business, the neglect of the
family and of the duties of citizenship, and in hard and, perhaps,
unscrupulous dealings. These things may be foreseen and accepted as
natural accompaniments of the end chosen. But there may also be entailed
shattered health, overwhelming anxieties, and the distress of seeing
one's sons, brought up in luxury and without incentive to effort, victims
to the dangers which menace the idle rich.

Whether such consequences might have been foreseen and provided against
or not, it is true that they are frequently not foreseen with clearness.
They certainly form no part of the intention of the man who bends his
energies to the attainment of wealth. He does not deliberately intend to
injure his health, to lose the affection of his family, to leave behind
him degenerate children. He does intend to get rich, if he can.

How many of the elements contained in the object chosen, or so bound up
with it that they must be accepted along with it, may fairly be said to
fall within the intention of the chooser? There may easily be dispute
touching the latitude with which the word intention may be used. Some
things a man sees clearly to be inseparably connected with the object of
his choice; some he is less conscious of; some he overlooks altogether.
It does not seem unwarranted to maintain that the first of the three
classes of things, at least, may be said to be intended. When Dr.
Katzenberger, in his desire to get across the road without sinking in the
mire, used as a stepping-stone his old servant Flex, who had fallen down,
his complete intention was not simply to cross the road unmuddied. It was
to cross the road unmuddied by stepping on Flex.

Evidently the intention--the whole object--gives some revelation of the
character of a man. Many men may will to avoid the mud; but not all of
these can will to avoid it by stepping upon a fellow-man.

47. MOTIVE.--The stepping upon a fellow-man with whom one is on good
terms can scarcely be regarded as a thing desirable in itself. If it is
desired, it is because of the complex in which it is an element. Some
other element or elements may exert the whole attractive force which
moves desire and will. In other words, some things are chosen for the
sake of others.

When we have discovered that for the sake of which any object is chosen,
we have come upon the _Motive_. The intention may be said to embrace
the whole object as foreseen. The motive embraces only a part of it, but
the vital part, the part without which the object would not be desired
and willed.

48. ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF INTENTION AND MOTIVE.--There has been much
dispute among moralists as to the ethical significance of intention and
motive. Bentham maintains that "from one and the same motive, and from
every kind of motive, may proceed actions that are good, others that are
bad, and others that are indifferent." He gives the following
illustration: [Footnote: _Principles of Morals and Legislation_,
chapter x, Sec 3.]

"1. A boy, in order to divert himself, reads an inspiring book; the
motive is accounted, perhaps, a good one; at any rate, not a bad one. 2.
He sets his top a-spinning: the motive is deemed at any rate not a bad
one. 3. He sets loose a mad ox among a crowd: his motive is now, perhaps,
termed an abominable one. Yet in all three cases the motive may be the
very same: it may be neither more nor less than curiosity."

In criticizing this citation I must point out that curiosity is not,
properly speaking, an object of choice at all. I have used the word
"object" to indicate what is chosen, not to indicate the psychic fact
present at the time of the choice. And I have said that the motive is the
vital part of the object.

Hence curiosity should not be called the motive. No man chooses curiosity
as an object, either in the abstract or in the concrete. Curiosity is a
fundamental impulse of human nature; we may elect to satisfy the impulse
in any given instance; in other words, we may choose the appropriate
object.

In the case of the boy letting loose the bull in the crowd, the object is
to see what will happen under the given circumstances. This is what
appeals to the boy. Something else might have appealed to him in
performing the action. He might have had the deliberate wish to injure
certain persons present against whom he harbored resentment. Or his
sympathies might have been with the bull, which had been the victim of
bad treatment, and to which he wished to grant its liberty. Were the
crowd in question a band of ruffians intent upon lynching, he might have
been moved by the desire to assist, in a somewhat irregular way, in the
re-establishment of law and order. But even if his real object is only to
see what will happen, there is no reason to put it on a par with the
object in view when a boy spins a top. "To see what will happen" is the
vaguest of phrases, and covers a multitude of disparate objects. He who
does things to see what will happen has, at least, a very general
knowledge of the kind of thing likely to happen, if a given experiment is
made. A boy does not hold his finger in the candle-flame to see what will
happen. He who does things to see what will happen, in really complete
ignorance of what is likely to happen, may be set down as too much of a
fool to be the subject of moral judgments.

It is obvious that an act may be done with many different objects in
view--I mean real objects, motives. I give money to a beggar whose case
is one to inspire pity. My motive, my "vital" object, may be to relieve
the man. But it may equally well be to get rid of him, to gratify my
self-feeling by becoming the dispenser of bounty, or to inspire
admiration in the onlooker. The intention, as I have used the word above,
is to relieve the beggar, with such consequences of the act as may be
foreseen at the time. Within the limits of this intention, the motive may
vary widely, and may, in a given instance, be either admirable or
contemptible.

It may be claimed, in answer to this, that the real intention is, in
every case, what I have called the motive; that, in the first case, it
was to relieve suffering; in the second, to get rid of an annoyance; in
the third to satisfy vanity; in the fourth, to be admired.

The word "intention," thus used, is equivalent to "motive." Popular usage
gives some sanction to this confusion of the words. We say of a man who
has done a questionable act: "His intentions were good," or, "His motives
were good." Still, popular usage does not always regard the two
expressions as equivalent. To revert to the case of the unhappy Flex. It
does not seem inappropriate to say that the use of a man as a stepping-
stone was a part of his master's intention. It does appear inappropriate
to call it the motive or a part of the motive of the whole transaction.

Intention and motive are convenient words to designate the whole object
chosen and the part of the object which accounts for the choice of the
whole. That it is important to distinguish between the two is palpable.

The intention gives some indication of character. We know something about
a man when we know what kinds of objects he will probably set before
himself as aims. But we know more when we know why he chooses these
objects rather than others; when we can analyze the complex and can
discover just what elements in it attract him.

With an increase of our knowledge comes an increased power of control.
Until we know a man's motives, we do not really know the man; and until
we know the man, our efforts to influence him must be rather blind.

The search for motives appears to carry us in the direction of the
systematization and simplification of the embarrassing wealth of objects
which are actually the goal of human desires and volitions. Man may
desire a boundless variety of objects. His motives in desiring them may,
conceivably, be comparatively few.

It should be apparent that both intention and motive have ethical
significance. We have our opinion of men capable of harboring certain
intentions. But we recognize that some men may harbor them with better
motives than others. And we can see that a man's intention may be bad,
and yet his motive, considered in itself, be good. How we are to rate the
man, morally, becomes rather a nice question.




CHAPTER XV

FEELING AS MOTIVE


49. FEELING. [Footnote: See the notes on this chapter at the end of this
volume.]--Two men may recognize with equal clearness the presence of a
danger. That recognition may evoke in the one a violent emotion of fear,
and in the other little or no emotion. Two men may be treated with
indignity. The one fumes with rage; the other remains calm. It is well
recognized that men may be susceptible to emotion in general, or to
certain specific emotions, in varying degrees. Knowledge is not always
accompanied by a marked manifestation of emotion. Thoughts may be clear,
but cold. There are, however, natures whose intellectual processes are
steeped in emotion. Such men live in an atmosphere of agitation.

Lists of the emotions which correspond to the instincts and fundamental
impulses of man have been drawn up. In them we find mentioned fear,
disgust, wonder, anger, elation, tender feeling, and so forth; phenomena
which, by earlier writers, were classified as "passions," and to which we
may conveniently give the name "feeling." We constantly speak of our
emotions as our "feelings," and we contrast the man of feeling with the
coldly intellectual mind in which emotion is at a minimum.

But it is not alone to such specific emotions as those above-mentioned
that we apply the term feeling. Thoughts are agreeable or disagreeable,
pleasurable or painful. So are emotions. The agreeableness or
disagreeableness, pleasantness or painfulness, which are the
accompaniments of thoughts and emotions, have been called by modern
psychologists their feeling-tone. It is not out of harmony with common
usage to give them the name of feelings. In so doing we contrast them
with knowledge and assimilate them to emotion.

Whether every sensation and every thought gives rise to an emotion of
some sort is matter for dispute, as is also the question whether every
sensation, thought and emotion is tinged with some degree of pleasurable
or painful feeling. In the absence of conclusive evidence, it is open to
us to assume that some feeling is always present where there is mental
activity of any kind. The feeling may be so faint and evanescent as to
escape detection, but this does not prove that it is absent.

50. FEELING AND ACTION.--Emotions and feelings of pleasure and pain are
the normal accompaniments of the exercise of the instincts and impulses
of creatures that desire and will. Within limits, we appear to be able to
take them as an index of the strength of the desire and the vigor of the
effort at attainment.

An act of cruelty is perpetrated. I see it, and it leaves me, perhaps,
cold and unmoved. In such case, it is hardly expected of me that I should
take energetic measures to have the evil-doer punished. The man whose
face flushes, whose brows descend, whose teeth come together, whose fists
clench, whose heart beats thickly, at the recognition of an insult, is,
as a rule, the man from whom we look for vigorous efforts at retaliation.
The apathetic creature who _feels_ no resentment is usually expected
to swallow the indignity. The child who jumps for joy at the sight of a
new doll is supposed to desire it eagerly, and to be ready to make
efforts to obtain it.

But it is only within limits that this relation between feeling and
action holds. Men of little emotion may be resolute and prompt to action.
Their desires, as evinced by their actions, may be persistent and
effective. Nor need the individual fix his choice upon the particular
object that arouses in him the most feeling. A man may see his fellow-
creature destitute, and may shed tears over his pitiable lot. But he will
not bequeath his money to him. He will leave it to his son, for whom,
perhaps, he has no respect and has come to have little affection. And he
may leave it to him with regret, knowing that it will be dissipated in
ways which he cannot approve. It has been pointed out with justice that
the exercise of many instincts may be accompanied with little feeling;
and we are all aware of the fact that, as action becomes habitual,
emotion tends to evaporate and the pleasure of effort and attainment is
apt to be reduced to a minimum.

51. FEELING AS OBJECT.--It is well to keep in mind the distinction
between feeling as a psychic fact present in the mind of the creature
desiring and willing, and feeling as the object of desire and will. A man
in a rage is the victim of a storm of feeling. The thought of the injury
he has received and the desire for retaliation by no means exhaust the
contents of his mind. But the passion which shakes him is not his
_object_; that object is revengeful action.

Nevertheless, feeling may be made the object of desire and will. One may
attend a religious or political meeting with the deliberate view of
arousing in one's self certain complex emotions. Poe's gruesome tales are
read for the sake of the thrill which is produced by the perusal.
Probably the desire for excitement, for the experiencing of certain vivid
emotions, has no little to do with the attraction exercised by certain
criminal professions. The burglar desires the booty, but he may desire
something more.

Emotions have, as we have seen, their "tone" of pleasure or pain. They
are agreeable or the reverse, and it is palpable that men do not, as a
rule, deliberately make them the object of desire and will in
indifference to the fact that they are pleasant or are painful. We do not
normally wish to attain to states of mind in which remorse plays a
prominent part; we do not aim to revel in shame; we do not seek to be
haunted with fear. Pleasurable emotions are desired, where desire is set
on emotions at all; and painful emotions are regarded by the mind as
unwelcome guests. At any rate, this appears to be the rule, and to
characterize the man whom we regard as normal.

This being the case, it seems natural to ask whether, when we embrace the
_intention_ of producing in ourselves a given emotion, our
_motive_ may not be narrower in scope, namely, the attainment of
pleasure? and, when we wish to rid the mind of any emotion, our
_motive_ may not be the avoidance of pain?

The adoption of this view would give to the feelings of pleasure and pain
a unique importance. They would be accepted as the only ultimate objects
of desire and will. By many they have been thus accepted. It has been
insisted that objects of every description are chosen only as they arouse
some feeling; and that those which promise pleasant feeling are sought
and those which entail pain are avoided. The general recognition of the
primacy of pleasure and pain over our other feelings, over the specific
emotions mentioned above, is indicated by the fact that ethical writers
of eminence sometimes make pleasure and pain synonymous with feeling in
general, passing over other feelings, as though it were not important for
the moralist to take them into consideration. The dispute whether the
proper course for human action to take is prescribed by reason or is
dictated by feeling often resolves itself into the problem whether we
should be guided by reason, or by a consideration of pleasure to be
attained or pain to be avoided.

52. FREEDOM AS OBJECT.--The acceptance of pleasure and pain as the
ultimate motives of human action seems, at first sight, to be of
inestimable assistance to us in threading our way through the labyrinth
of diverse choices made by creatures that desire and will.

But only at first sight. Even if it be true that every creature seeks
only to attain pleasure and to avoid pain, and uses the means it finds to
hand in the attainment of these ends, the endless diversity of the means
remains as a thing to reckon with. The knowledge that all men desire
pleasure does not help us a whit in dealing with men, unless we know what
things will give pleasure to this man or to that. All men may desire
pleasure; but it remains true that what gives pleasure to the spendthrift
gives pain to the miser; what appeals to the glutton disgusts a man of
refined tastes. If all men were alike and precisely alike, and if their
natures were very simple and remained unchanged, the problem of the
distribution of pleasures would be vastly simplified.

Whether the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain may be regarded
as the only ultimate ends proper to man will be discussed later.
[Footnote: See chapter xxv.] Here, it is important to insist that so
general a formula gives us little useful information touching the set of
the will either of classes of men or of individuals. This we can attain
to only as a result of the study of the complex nature of man as revealed
in the choices which he actually makes. The ends of man are many and
various; some of these ends are accidental, palpably means for the
attainment of other ends more fundamental, and for them other means of
attaining the same ends may be substituted. But other ends, and they are
by no means to be reduced to a single class, appear to belong to the very
nature of man. In seeking them he is giving expression to the impulses
which make him what he is.

In so far as these impulses find an unimpeded expression the man is free;
otherwise he is under restraint. Without rendering here a final decision
upon the importance of the role played in human life by pleasure and
pain, one feels impelled to ask the question whether the goal of a man's
endeavors may not best be described as _freedom_? Not freedom in the
abstract, freedom to do anything and everything, but freedom to live the
life appropriate to him as man, and as a man of a given type. That this
freedom is limited in a variety of ways, by his material environment, by
the clashing of impulses within himself, by the conflict of his desires
with the will of the social organism in which he finds his place, is
sufficiently palpable.




CHAPTER XVI

RATIONALITY AND WILL


53. THE IRRATIONAL WILL.--As dreams do not consist of an insignificant
medley of elements drawn from the experiences of waking life, but, in
spite of their fantastic character, bear some semblance of ordered
reality, so the impulses of even the most unintelligent and inconsequent
of human beings are not wholly chaotic, but differ only in the degree of
their organization from those of the most rational and far-seeing.

Where there is even a glimmer of intelligence, ends are recognized and
means to their attainment are chosen. Ends are compared, and the
preference is given to some over others. But, with all this, there may be
much incoherence and planlessness. Men can live somehow without looking
far into the future, or keeping well in mind the lessons to be learned
from the past. They can manage to exist in the face of no little short-
sighted impulsiveness and inconsistency. But it is palpable that they
cannot, under such circumstances, live as they might live were they more
truly rational.

The individual deficient in foresight and control may, it is true, be
carried along and defended from disaster by the presence of these
qualities in the greater organism of which he is a part. The infant is a
parasite upon society; it is provided for independently of its own
efforts. The child would soon come to grief were its ends not chosen by
others and its conduct kept under control. And a vast number of persons
not children are in much the same position. There is foresight and
rational purpose somewhere; they profit by it; but of foresight and
rational purpose they themselves possess but a modicum.

Where breadth of view is lacking, where the future is unforeseen or
ignored and the past is forgotten, where desires arise and impel to
action in relative independence of one another, the man seeks today what
tomorrow he rejects. We can scarcely say that the man chooses. He is the
scene of independent choices, varied and inconsistent. He is the victim
of caprice, and appears to us largely the creature of accident, a prey to
the impulse which happens to be in his mind at the moment. From such a
man we cannot look for an adherence to distant aims, and the marshalling
of the proper means to their attainment. He cannot count upon himself,
and he cannot be counted upon. That he can play no significant role in
such stable organizations as the state and church is obvious. His desires
may be many and varied, but they converge upon no one end. We set him
down as irrational.

54. ONE VIEW OF REASON.--Concerning the part played by reason or
intelligence in the active life of man there has been no little dispute.

It has been maintained, on the one hand, that reason or intelligence
serves its whole purpose in holding before the mind all its impulses and
desires, revealing their interrelations, and making possible an
enlightened and deliberate choice from among them. Where the horizon is
thus extended and mental clarity reigns, the attention can roam unimpeded
over the whole field, consider the objects of desire in their true
relations and compare them with one another. Congruous desires can
reinforce each other; conflicting desires can be brought face to face,
and the one or the other can deliberately be dismissed; fundamental and
dominant desires may assert their supremacy, and give their stamp to far-
reaching decisions which exercise a control over minor decisions and
favor or repress a multitude of desires and volitions.

The attainment of perfect rationality in this sense is an ideal never
completely realized. No man can hold before his mind all his impulses and
desires, see them in their true relations to each other, and come to a
decision which will do complete justice to all. But the ideal may be
approached.

The reason, in this case, resembles the presiding officer of a
deliberative assembly, who insists that all the members shall be heard
from, all proposals seriously considered, and that the ultimate decision
shall justly represent the true will of the deliberative body as a whole.
The specious but fallacious argument is, in the debate, revealed in its
true nature; the obstinate insistence of the individual is not allowed to
prevail; the loud voice is recognized to be a loud voice and nothing
more; fugitive gusts of passion exhaust themselves; the permanent and
fundamental will of the assembly is revealed in the final vote. It is
claimed that, in such a mind, the result is a harmonization and
unification of the multiplicity of the desires and purposes which, in a
mind less rational, jostle one another without control, and refuse to
fall into an ordered system. That the decisions of a rational mind reveal
both a unity and a harmony not evinced by a mind short-sighted and
impulsive cannot be denied. But it is well to understand clearly what is
meant by such unity and harmony.

55. DOMINANT AND SUBORDINATE DESIRES.--Wherever a group of desires fall
into a system and work together toward a common end, we have unity. Such
a system may be short-lived, comparatively poor in content, and of no
great significance for a man's life as a whole. It may come into
competition with another similar system, and be displaced by it. An
interest that has dominated our minds for a time, and controlled our
desires and volitions, may readily give place to different choices. I may
successively bend all my energies upon the winning of a game, the doing
of a successful stroke of business, the defeat of a social rival, the
success of a philanthropic undertaking. There is no normal human being
who does not exhibit such limited volitional units. The most idle and
purposeless of vagrants, the most scatter-brained school-boy, the most
volatile coquette, may, for a time, be dominated by some desire which
calls into its service other desires and thus realizes some chosen end.

Such volitional units do not, however, go far toward unifying the efforts
of a life. It is only when some dominant and deep-seated desire, oft
recurring, not easily displaced by others, sweeps into its train the
other desires of a man, establishing a sovereignty and exacting
subservience, that such an effect is accomplished. Then the lesser units
fall into a significant relation to each other as constituent elements in
the greater unit. The life, as such, may be said to have a purpose; it
strives toward a single goal.

Whatever bears upon the attainment of such a dominant purpose may,
however trivial in itself, acquire a vital importance and be eagerly
desired. To a man of mature mind there can be little interest in hitting
a small ball with a stick, abstractly considered. Nor is the dropping of
a bit of paper into a box with a slit in it an action in itself
calculated to stir profound emotion. But if the hitting of the ball in
the right way marks the critical point in winning an eagerly contested
game of golf, the interest in it may be absorbing. And if the bit of
paper is an offer of marriage committed to the post, the hand may tremble
and the heart leap in the breast. A dominant desire may create or
reinforce other desires to a degree to which it is not easy to set
limits.