Chapter II: =The Sources of Moral Weakness=

304. Under this head five main points come up for consideration:--

(1) Tendencies of the child’s will impulses.
(2) Ethical judgments and their absence.
(3) Formation of maxims.
(4) Organization of maxims.
(5) Application of organized maxims.

305. (1) Where training has not provided for occupation and for the distribution of time, we must always expect to encounter an activity which has no aim, and which forgets its own purposes. From such a state of affairs arise a craving for liberty averse to all control, and, where several pupils are grouped together, contention, either for the possession of something or for the sake of showing off. Each wants to be first; recognition of the just equality of all is deliberately refused. Mutual ill-will intrenches itself and stealthily waits for an opportunity to break forth. Here is the fountain head of many passions; even those which spring from excessive sensuousness must be classed under this first head, in so far as they are promoted by lack of regulated activity. The havoc caused by passions is a pervading element in the discussion of all of the remaining topics.

306. (2) It is true that education usually counteracts the tendency to indolence and to unruliness, not only by the use of the spur and the bridle, but also through guidance in the direction of the proprieties; giving rise to the thought “what will others say,” it shows existing conditions as mirrored in the minds of others. But when these others are compelled to remain silent, or when the pupil is sure of their partiality, or is exposed to their errors of judgment, the effect is to vitiate rather than to arouse the ethical judgment.

Nevertheless, calling attention to the judgment of others, and not merely of particular individuals, is very much better than waiting for the spontaneous awakening of ethical judgment. In most cases the waiting would be in vain. Matters of ethical import are either too close to the ordinary human being, and so, of course, to the boy left entirely to himself, or they are too remote, _i.e._, either they have not as yet passed outside the pale of affection or aversion, or else they are already fading from the field of vision. In neither case can an ethical judgment be formed with success. At any rate, it will vanish before it can produce an effect.

In order to reach those ethical judgments on which morality rests, the child must see will images, see them without the stirring of his own will impulse.

These will images, moreover, must embrace relations, the single members of which are themselves wills, and the beholder is to keep such members equally in sight, until the estimate of value rises spontaneously within him. But such contemplation implies a keenness and calmness of apprehension not to be looked for in unruly children. Hence it may be inferred how necessary training is--serious, not to say severe, training. Unruliness must have been tamed and regular attention secured. The preliminary condition fulfilled, it is further essential that there shall be no lack of sufficiently distinct presentations of the foregoing will images. And even then the ethical judgment often matures so tardily that it has to be pronounced in the name of other persons--persons higher in authority.

307. In this connection the instances of one-sidedness of ethical judgment must not be overlooked, such as occur when one of the practical ideas stands out more prominently than another, or when that which is outwardly proper rises above them all.

308. (3) All desires persistently operative and productive of fluctuating states of emotional excitement, therefore rightly called passions, lead to experiential knowledge of the beneficial and the injurious. The beneficial suggests frequent repetition in the future, the injurious continued avoidance. Accordingly rules of life take shape, and the resolution always to observe them is made. In other words, maxims result.

From simple resolution to actual observance is still, to be sure, a far cry. But the claim for the universal validity of the rule, so that the individual may regard it as applicable to others as well as to himself, enters the mind far more directly by way of desires which point forward to similar cases in the future, than it does under the guidance of ethical judgments whose universal element is abstracted from given single instances with difficulty. In fact, this difficulty is often so great that the ethical judgment itself may be missed in the search for the universal.

309. Now, the promptness and loyalty of obedience to the sum total of duties, once recognized as such and fixed through the maxims adopted, are passed upon by the moral judgment. Correct moral judgment, therefore, presupposes true insight into the value of will, which insight again can be obtained only through the ethical estimate as a whole. But in view of the circumstances pointed out a moment ago, we must expect to come upon maxims that are false or at least inaccurate. Under the latter head fall points of honor, social obligations, fear of ridicule.

310. (4) Maxims ought to form a unit, but in youth they are not fully determined even singly, much less are they closely united into a definite whole. The proviso of exceptions still clings to them, so also that of future tests through experience.

The maxims arising out of the desires and pleasures can never be brought into perfect union with those springing from ethical judgments. Accordingly the wrong subordination takes place, or, at all events, a contamination of the latter by the former.

311. (5) In the application of maxims more or less unified, the volition of the moment is apt to prove stronger than the previous resolves. Hence, man becomes only too prone to condone and fall in with discriminations between theory and practice. The consequence is a certain moral empiricism, which, if nothing else will do to justify its disregard of moral law, falls back upon pious feelings. Plans of action are formed without regard to maxims, but with the apparent compensation of another kind of morally regular life.

Such contempt of moral judgment gains ground and spreads ruin all the more, the farther the ethical judgments on which morality must rest fall short of the clearness that ought to mark them, and the cruder the pupil’s knowledge is of the antithesis between them and maxims of utility or pleasure.

312. The natural aid to the formation and union of maxims is the system of practical philosophy itself. But the teaching of it involves difficulties. One of them is that such marked differences occur among young men in the relation of systematic exposition to the grade of culture which they have attained. For observations of this nature, religious instruction prior to confirmation provides an early opportunity. How such instruction is to be given, is, of course, by no means immaterial, but, after all, the moral sentiments, which it gathers together and strengthens, must, in substance, already exist.

Again, if the end sought were more strictly scientific form for the moral sentiments, there would have to be ground for presuming that the student is able to appreciate that form and has acquired skill in the use of logical methods. The study of logic, together with appropriate exercises, would obviously be a necessary preliminary step. Prerequisites like these need to be borne in mind, especially in the case of lower schools and all other institutions that do not, as a rule, lead to the university.

313. Erroneous systems of ethics, moreover, might occasion the adoption of very absurd measures, concerning which, on account of the importance of the subject, at least something has to be said. Everything would be turned upside down, if, instead of bringing together and uniting maxims under the concept virtue, the attempt were made to deduce from some one formula of the categorical imperative a multiplicity of maxims and from these, rather than from the original ethical judgments, the estimates of will values, the final undertaking being, perhaps, to divert the will itself by such operations.

On the contrary, the will must early have been given such direction by government and training, that its lines of tendency will of themselves coincide as nearly as possible with the paths disclosed later, when the pupil is being shown the way through ethical judgments. Those beginnings of evil noted above (305) must not be permitted to appear at all, for their consequences usually prove ineradicable. But even so, it is not certain that a way can be hewn through the errors of others to truer judgments. When, however, both ends have been gained, experience and history and literature must next be called in, in order to show clearly the confusion into which the maxims based upon pleasure and passion plunge human beings. Not until now has the time come for more or less systematic lectures, or for the study of suitable classical writers. Lastly, there will still be need of frequent appeals to moral obedience, and it will be found necessary to reinforce these appeals by reflections of a religious character.