and after much deliberation and weighing of the 'pros and cons'; it consists in the formation of grooves along which the activity naturally and habitually runs. He is not, in the highest sense, an honest man who does an honest act with difficulty, and who would rather act dishonestly. The honest man is the man to whom it would be difficult and unnatural to act dishonestly, the man in whom honesty is a 'second nature.' Thus we see how, since character is itself a habit a new and acquired tendency which has supplanted the primary tendencies of the mere animal nature-the difference between nature and character must be a fleeting one. What was at first, and perhaps for long, the hard-won fruit of moral effort, becomes later the spontaneous work of the new nature which has thus been born within us. Effort becomes less and less characteristic of the life of virtue, self-control becomes less difficult, as virtue becomes a second nature. The storm and stress of its earlier struggles is followed by the great calm of settled and established virtue. The main stream of our life, the current of our habitual activity and interest, carries us with it. There is no longer the inhibition, the painful suspense of deliberation, and the anxious choice, but the even flow of the great main stream. The energies of the will, which were formerly so dissipated, are now found in splendid integration, and the whole man seems to live in each individual act. If it were not that the way of virtue is long, as well as difficult, we should be apt to say that the element of effort which characterises its beginning is destined in the end to disappear; if it were not that there are always new degrees of virtue for even the most virtuous to attain, we should be inclined to say that the path of virtue is steep and difficult only at the first. But the ascent reveals ever new heights of virtue yet unattained; and the effort of virtue is measured by the heights of the moral ideal, as well as by the heights of moral attainment. Thus, what at a lower level was character becomes, at the higher, again mere nature, to be in turn transcended and overcome. “We rise on stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things." There is no resting in the life of virtue, -it is a constant growth; to stereotype it, or to arrest it at any stage, however advanced, would be to kill it. There is always an 'old' man and a 'new': the very new becomes old, and has to die, and be surmounted. 6. Limitations of volition.-Certain limitations of the volitional life are suggested by what has already been said. (a) The principle of economy of will power implies the surrender of large tracts of our life to mechanism. Such a surrender is made not only in the case of purely physical activities, but also generally in the case of the routine of daily life. To deliberate and choose about such things as which boot we shall put on first, or which side of the garden-walk we shall take, is an entirely gratuitous assertion of our power of volition it is the mark of a weak or diseased, rather than of a strong and healthy, will. Decision and strength of character are : shown in the choice of certain fixed lines of conduct in such particulars, and in the abiding by the choice once made. Further, a great economy of effort is secured by the choice of ends rather than of means. The means may require deliberation and choice, but, to a very large extent, they are already chosen in the end. And in general we may say that the details of an act which, taken as a whole, is strictly voluntary, may be cases of merely ideo-motor activity; the operation may proceed with perfect smoothness, each step of it suggesting the next in turn, without any intervention of will. (b) The continuity of our moral life also implies a large surrender of its several acts to mechanism or habit. The moral life is not a series of isolated choices, it is a continuous and growing whole. As it proceeds, the sur vey becomes more and more extended; to use a convenient technical term, the individual act is more and more completely apperceived.' The mature moral man does not fight his battles always over again-he brings the individual act under a conception. His life, instead of being a constant succession of fresh choices, becomes a more or less complete system of ends, centring, implicitly or explicitly, in one which is supreme. The deliberation is chiefly about the placing of the individual action in its true relations to the context of this system, about the interpretation of it as a part of this whole. In general, we choose sections of life, rather than the individual details which fill these sections. In other words, all men, even those whom we call 'unprincipled,' have certain principles, of which their life is the expression. Choices are not, I have said, independent; they inevitably crystallise, or rather, they are seeds which develop and bear fruit in the days and years that follow. The moments of our life have not all an equal moral significance. Rather, the significance of our lives, for good or evil, seems to be determined by moments of choice in days and years of even tenor. There are great moments when both good and evil are set before us, and we consciously and deliberately embrace a great end, or, with no less deliberate consciousness, reject it for a lower and less worthy. Every act is implicitly a case of such moral faithfulness or unfaithfulness. But, in such moments as those of which I now speak, the will gives large commissions to habit, and leaves to it the execution. The commission is quickly given, its execution takes long. The moral crises of our lives are few, and soon over; but it seems as if all the strength of our spirit gathered itself up for such supreme efforts, and as if what follows in the long-drawn years were but their consequence. (c) What is generally called fixity of character suggests a third important limitation of the will's activity. The course of moral life, as it proceeds, seems to result in the establishment of certain fixed lines of conduct and character, whether good or evil. Its course becomes more and more settled; law and system, of one kind or another, are more and more visible in it. The formation of character means, as we have seen, the constant handing over to habit of actions which were at first done with deliberation and effort. Association performs the work of intelligence, impulse regains its sway over us, character becomes second nature. We are always forging, by our acts of deliberate choice, the iron chains of habit. Otherwise, there would be no ground gained, no fruit harvested from daily toil of will, no store of moral acquisition laid up for future years. Our life would be a Sisyphus' task, never any nearer its execution. But, as we roll it up, the stone does remain, nay, tends still upwards. Of this gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil ways, the characters of Tito in George Eliot's Romola, and of Markheim in Mr R. L. Stevenson's little story of that name, are impressive illustrations. What is exemplified in such cases is not, I think, loss of will-power so much as fixity of character -itself the creation of will-degradation of the will, a choice, apparently final and irrevocable, of the lower and the evil. This is the tragedy of the story in either case. Is not this, again, the meaning of the weird Faust legend which has so impressed the imagination of Europe? Faust's selling his soul to Mephistopheles, and signing the contract with his life's blood, is no single transaction, done deliberately, on one occasion; rather, this is the lurid meaning of a life which consists of innumerable individual acts,-the life of evil means this. And, at the other extreme of the moral scale, does not holiness mean a great and final exaltation of will, its perfect and established union with the higher and the good, fixity of character once more? These infinite possibilities of evil and of goodness seem to be the implicate of an infinite moral ideal; they are the moral equivalents of the heaven and hell of the religious imagination. What is will itself but just this power or possibility, infinite as our nature, for each of us in the direction either of goodness or of evil? Between these extremes moves the ordinary average life of the comfortable citizen. The strongest and deepest natures are the saints and the sinners; the weaker and more superficial fluctuate irresolute between the poles of moral life. On the side of goodness, at any rate, we readily admit the reality of that moral experience of which fixity of character is the natural interpretation. We have no interest in proving that the saint is potentially a sinner. The condition and attribute of the highest life, we readily admit, is not to hold oneself aloof from good and evil, and free to choose between them. Far rather it is found in the single mind,' in the resolute identification of the whole man or self with the good, in the will of the higher self to live. For, as Aristotle truly said, virtue is not virtue until it has become a habit of the soul, and easy and spontaneous as a habit. Moral progress is a progress from nature and its bondage, through freedom and duty, to that love or second nature which alone is the 'fulfilling of the law.' So that," after all, free-will is not the highest freedom." Free-will implies antagonism and resistance. "But the action of the perfect, so far as they are perfect, is natural. . . . Only it proceeds from a higher nature, in which experience has passed through reason into insight, in which impulse and desire have passed through free-will into love." This is freedom made perfect, the liberty of the children of God. Whether the identification of the will with evil can ever become, in the strict sense, fixed, is a hard and perhaps unanswerable question. The Faust legend seems to express such a belief, and for Tito, as for Esau, there is no place left for repentance. In the impressive little 1 G. A. Simcox, in Mind, O.S., vol. iv. p. 481. |