STONM^ÍURST PHILOSOPHICAL SERIES MORÄL PHILOSOPHY BY JOSEPH. RICKABY, S,J. STONYHURST PHILOSOPHICAL SERIES. MORAL PHILOSOPHY OR ETHICS AND NATURAL LAW BY JOSEPH RICKABY, S.J. THIRD EDITION. LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, AND BOMBAY. 1892. PREFACE. It has been observed that moral and political pbilosopby is the only philosophy that flourished among the Romans of old. It is a study in which the northern nations show to the best advantage. It is also a study especially valued by the Catholic Church, the great Guardian of morals, and Teacher of nations. It is a field on which the Society of Jesus has laboured, " through evil report and good report." These considerations may account for the publi¬ cation, by an English Jesuit and former lecturer in the schools of the Society, of a course of Moral Philosophy in Ënglish, written with studious regard to the mind of the Catholic Church, and to the teaching of St.Thomas. It embodies the substance of a course delivered for eight years in succession to the scholastics of the Society of Jesus at St. Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst. ^ ^ In this Third Edition there appear some alterations, which have commended themselves to the writer by further study of what is indeed an inexhaustible theme. They are to be found principally on pp. gi, 151, 176, 207, 273, 286, 371. The quotations from St. Thomas may be read in English, nearly all of them, in the author's Aquinas Ethicus. CONTENTS. PART I.—ETHICS. MGE Chapter I.—Of the Object-matter and Partition of Moral Philosophy . . . . i Chapter II.—Of Happiness. Section I.—Of Ends ..... 3 „ II.—Definition of Happiness . . .6 „ HI.—Happiness open to Man . . .13 „ IV.—Of the Object of Perfect Happiness . . 21 „ V.—Of the use of the present life . . .26 Chapter III.—Of Human Acts. Section I.-—What makes a human act less voluntary . 27 „ II.—Of the determinants of Morality in any given action . . . . * 3t Chapter IV.—Of Passions. Section I.—Of Passions in general. . . .4t „ II.—Of Desire . . . , .49 „ III.—Of Delight . . . , .54 „ IV.—Of Anger . . . . .61 Chapter V.—Of Habits and Virtues. Section I.—Of Habit . . . , .64 „ II.—Of Virtues in general . . .' .69 „ III.—Of the difference between Virtues, Intellec¬ tual and Moral . . . «73 H IV.—Of the Mean in Moral Virtue , , .77 „ V.—Of Cardinal Virtues . , , .84 „ VI.—Of Prudence . , , , .87 „ VII.—Of Temperance . , , .90 „ VIII.—Of Fortitude . , , , a 94 „ IX.—Of Justice , ^ , , ,102 CONTENTS. vü pagb Chapter VI.—Of the Origin of Moral Obligation. Section I.—Of the natural difference between Good and Evil .... log „ II.—How Good becomes bounden duty, and Evil is advanced to sin . . . .115 Chapter VII.—Of the Eternal Law . . . 126 Chapter VIII.—Of the Natural Law of Conscience. Section I.—Of the Origin of Primaiy Moral Judgments 133 „ II.—Of the invariability of Primary Moral Judg¬ ments ..... 144 n III.—Of the immutability of the Natural Law, and consequent impossibility of evolution in Morals ..... 147 „ IV.—Of Probabilism .... 152 Chapter IX.—Of the Sanction of the Natural Law. Section I.—Of a twofold Sanction, Natural and Divine . 159 „ II.—Of the Finality of the aforesaid Sanction . 164 „ HI.—Of Punishment, Retrospective and Retribu¬ tive ...... 168 Chapter X.—Of Utilitarianism . . . «177 PART II.—NATURAL LAW. Chapter I.—Of Duties to God. Section I.—Of the Worship of God , í . 191 „ II.—Of Superstitious Practices . . . igS „ III.—Of the duty of knowing God . . . 200 Chapter II.—Of the Duty of Preserving Life. Section I.—Of Killing, Direct and Indirect . . 202 „ II.—Of Killing done indirectly in Self-defence . 208 „ III.—Of Suicide . . . 213 „ IV.—Of Duelling .... 219 Chapter III.—Of Speaking the Truth. Section I.—Of the definition of a Lie . . . 224 „ II.—Of the Evil of Lying .... 226 „ III.—Of the keeping of Secrets without Lying . 232 Chapter IV.—Of Charity ..... 237 viii CONTENTS. Chapter V.—Of Rights. Section I.—Of the definition and division of Rights . 244 II.—Of the so-called Rights of Animals . . 248 „ III.—Of the right to Honour and Reputation . 251 „ IV.—Of Contracts ..... 253 „ v.—Of Usury ... .255 Chapter VI.—Of Marriage. Section I.—Of the Institution of Marriage . . 263 „ II.—Of the Unity of Marriage . . . 270 „ III.—Of the Indissolubility of Marriage . . 274 Chapter VII.—Of Property. Section I.—Of Private Property .... 278 „ II.—Of Private Capital .... 282 ,, III.—Of Landed Property - . . . 292 Chapter VIII.—Of the State. Section I.—Of the Monstrosities called Leviathan and Social Contract .... 297 „ II.—Of the theory that Civil Power is an aggre¬ gate formed by subscription of the powers of individuals .... 307 „ III.—Of the true state of Nature, which is the state of civil society, and consequently of the Divine origin of Power . . 310 „ rV.—Of the variety of Polities . . . 31g „ V.—Of the Divine Right of Kings and the In¬ alienable Sovereignty of the People . 326 „ VI.—Of the Elementary and Original Polity . 334 „ VII.—Of Resistance to Civil Power . . 333 „ VIII.—Of the Right of the Sword . . 343 .. IX.—Of War 350 „ X.—Of the Scope and Aim of Civil Government 354 B XI.—Of Law and Liberty .... 359 « XII.—Of Liberty of Opinion • 1 • 364 ETHICS AND NATURAL LAW. Part I. Ethics. CHAPTER I. of the object-matter and partition of moral philosophy. i. Moral Philosophy is the science that considers human acts inasmuch as they befit man's rational nature and make towards man's last end. 2. Those acts alone are properly called human, which a man is master of to do or not to do. A human act, then, is an act voluntary and free. A man is what his human acts make him. 3. A voluntary act is an act that proceeds from the will with a knowledge of the end to which the act tends. 4. A free act is an act which so proceeds from the will that under the same antecedent conditions it might not have proceeded. 5. Human acts, as defined above, are the subject- matter of moral philosophy. The special light in which it considers them is their agreement with, or opposition to, man's rational nature. That agree- B 2 MORAL PHILOSOPHY. ment or opposition is their moral good or evil, and is called morality. 6. Moral Philosophy is divided into Ethics and Natural Law. The principal business of Ethics is to determine what moral obligation is, or to fix what logicians call the comprehension of the idea I ought. It belongs to Natural Law to consider what things are morally obligatory, or to determine the extension of the idea / ought. 7. Ethics stand to Natural Law as Pure Mathem¬ atics to Mixed. Readings.—St. Thos., in Eth., L, lect. i, init.; ib., la aas, q. I, art. I, in corp.; ib,, q. 58, art. i, in corp. CHAPTER II. OF happiness. Section I.—Of Ends. I. Every human act is done for some end or purpose. The end is always regarded by the agent in the light of something good. If evil be done, it is done as leading to good, or as bound up with good, or as itself being good for the doer under the circumstances ; no man ever does evil for sheer evil's sake. Yet evil may be the object of the will, not by itself, nor primarily, but in a secondary way, as bound up with the good that is willed in the first place. 2. Many things willed are neither good nor evil in themselves. There is no motive for doing them except in so far as they lead to some good beyond themselves, or to deliverance from some evil, which deliverance counts as a good. A thing is willed, then, either as being good in itself and an end by itself, or as leading to some good end. Once a thing not good and desirable by itself has been taken up by the will as leading to good, it may be taken up again and again without reference to its tendency. But such a thing was not originally taken up except in view of good to come of it. We 4 OP HAPPINESS. may will one thing as leading to another, and that to a third, and so on; thus one wills study for learning, learning for examination purposes, exami¬ nation for a commission in the army, and the commission for glory. That end in which the will rests, willing it for itself without reference to any¬ thing beyond, is called the last end. 3. An end is either objective or subjective. The objective end is the thing wished for, as it exists distinct from the person who wishes it. The sub¬ jective end is the possession of the objective end. That possession is a fact of the wisher's own being. Thus money may be an objective end : the corre¬ sponding subjective end is being wealthy. 4. Is there one subjective last end to all the human acts of a given individual ? Is there one supreme motive for all that this or that man deliber¬ ately does ? At first sight it seems that there is not. The same individual will act now for glory, now for lucre, now for love. But all these different ends are reducible to one, that it may be well with him and his. And what is true of one man here, is true of all. All the human acts of all men are done for the one (subjective) last end just indicated. This end is called happiness. 5. Men place their happiness in most different things ; some in eating and drinking, some in the heaping up of money, some in gambling, some in political power, some in the gratification of affection, some in reputation of one sort or another. But each one seeks his own speciality because he thinks that he shall be happy, that it will be well with him, OF ENDS. > when he has attained that. All men, then, do all things for happiness, though not all place their happiness in the same thing. 6. Just as when one goes on a journey, he need not think of his destination at every step of his way, and yet all his steps are directed towards his destination : so men do not think of happiness in all they do, and yet all they do is referred to happi¬ ness. Tell a traveller that this is the wrong way to his destination, he will avoid it ; convince a man that this act will not be well for him, will not further his happiness, and, while he keeps that conviction principally before his eyes, he will not do the act. But as a man who began to travel on business, may come to make travelling itself a business, and travel for the sake of going about ; so in all cases there is a tendency to elevate into an end that which was, to start with, only valued as a means to an end. So the means of happiness, by being habitually pursued, come to be a part of happiness. Habit is a second nature, and we indulge a habit as we gratify nature. This tendency works itself to an evil ex¬ treme in cases where men are become the slaves oí habit, and do a thing because they are got into the way of doing it, though they allow that it is a sad and sorry way, and leads them wide of true happi¬ ness. These instances show perversion of the normal operation of the will. Readings.—St. Thos., la are, q. i, art. 4, in corp. ; ib., q. I, art. 5, 7; ib., q. 5, art. 8; Ar., Eth., I., vii., 4. 5- 6 OF HAPPINESS. Section II.—Definition of Happiness. 1. Though all men do all things, in the last resort, that it may be well with them and theirs, that is, for happiness vaguely apprehended, yet when they come to specify what happiness is, answers so various are given and acted upon, that we might be tempted to conclude that each man is the measure of his own happiness, and that no standard of happi¬ ness for all can be defined. But it is not so. Man is not the measure of his own happiness, any more than of his own health. The diet that he takes to be healthy, may prove his poison ; and where he looks for happiness, he may find the extreme of wretchedness and woe. For man must live up to his nature, to his bodily constitution, to be a healthy man ; and to his whole nature, but especially to his mental and moral constitution, if he is to be a happy man. And nature, though it admits of individual peculiarities, is specifically the same for all. There will, then, be one definition of happiness for all men, specifically as such. 2. Happiness is an act, not a state. That is to say, the happiness of man does not lie in his having something done to him, nor in his being habitually able to do something, but in his actually doing something. "To be up and doing," that is happi¬ ness,—eV Tw Çrjp Kai èvep7 and ever to seek His face ; to avoid idleness, anger, intemperance, and pride of intellect. For the mind will not soar to God when the heart is far from Him. CHAPTER III. of human acts. Section I.—What makes a human act less voluntary. I See c. i., nn. 2, 3, 4. 2. An act is more or less voluntary, as it is done with more or less knowledge, and proceeds more or less fully and purely from the will properly so called. Whatever diminishes knowledge, or partially sup¬ plants the will, takes off from the voluntariness of the act. An act is rendered less voluntary by ignorance, by passionate desire, and by fear. 3. If a man has done something in ignorance either of the law or of the facts of the case, and would be sorry for it, were he to find out what he has done, that act is involuntary, so far as it is traceable to ignorance alone. Even if he would not be sorry, still the act must be pronounced not voluntary, under the same reservation. Ignorance, sheer ignorance, takes whatever is done under it out of the region of volition. Nothing is willed but what is known. An ignorant man is as excusable as a drunken one, as such,—no more and no less. l8 OF HUMAN ACTS. The difference is, that drunkenness generally is voluntary; ignorance often is not. But ignorance may be voluntary, quite as voluntary as drunkenness. It is a capital folly of our age to deny the possibility of voluntary intellectual error. Error is often voluntary, and (where the matter is one that the person officially or otherwise is required to know) immoral too. A strange thing it is to say that " it is as unmeaning to speak of the immorality of an intellectual mistake as it would be to talk of the colour of a sound." (Lecky, European Morals, ii., 202.) 4. There is an ignorance that is sought on purpose, called affected ignorance (in the Shakspearian sense of the word affect), as when a man will not read begging-letters, that he may not give anything away. Such ignorance does not hinder voluntariness. It indicates a strong will of doing or omitting, come what may. There is yet another ignorance called crass, which is when a man, without absolutely declining knowledge, yet takes no pains to acquire it in a matter where he is aware that truth is important to him. Whatever election is made in consequence of such ignorance, is less voluntary, indeed, than if it were made in the full light, still it is to some extent voluntary. It is voluntary in its cause, that is, in the voluntary ignorance that led to it. Suppose a man sets up as a surgeon, having made a very imperfect study of his art. He is aware, that for want of knowledge and skill, he shall endanger many lives : still he neglects oppor¬ tunities of making himself competent, and goes ACTS LESS VOLUNTARY. «9 audaciously to work. If any harm comes of his bungling, he can plead intellectual error, an error of judgment for the time being ; he did his best as well as he knew it. Doubtless he did, and in that he is unlike the malicious maker of mischief: still he has chosen lightly and recklessly to hazard a great evil. To that extent his will is bound to the evil : he has chosen it, as it were, at one remove. 5. Another instance. A man is a long way on to seeing, though he does not quite see, the claims of the Church of Rome on his allegiance and sub¬ mission. He suspects that a little more prayer and search, and he shall be a Roman Catholic. To escape this, he resolves to go travelling and give up prayer. This is affected ignorance. Another has no such perception of the claims ol Catholicism. He has no religion that satisfies him. He is aware speculatively of the importance of the religious question ; but his heart is not in religion at all. With Demas, he loves the things of this world. Very attractive and interesting does he find this life ; and for the life to come he is content to chance it. This is crass ignorance of religious truth. Such a man is not a formal heretic, for he is not altogether wilful and contumacious in his error. Still neither is it wholly involuntary, nor he wholly guiltless. 6. Passionate desire is not an affection of the will, but of the sensitive appetite. The will may co¬ operate, but the passion is not in the will. The will may neglect to check the passion, when it might : it may abet and inflame it : in these ways an act done in passion is a voluntary act. Still it 30 OF HUMAN ACTS. becomes voluntary only by the influx of the will, positively permitting or stimulating : it is not volun¬ tary precisely as it proceeds from passion : for voluntary is that which is of the will. It belongs to passion to bring on a momentary darkness in the understanding: where such darkness is, there is so much the less of a human act. But passion in an adult of sane mind is hardly strong enough, of itself and wholly without the will, to execute any considerable outward action, involving the voluntary muscles. Things are often said and done, and put down to passion : but that is not the whole account of the matter. The will has been for a long time either feeding the passions, or letting them range unchecked : that is the reason of their present outburst, which is voluntary at least in its cause. Once this evil preponderance has been brought about, it is to be examined whether the will, in calm moods, is making any efforts to redress the evil. Such efforts, if made, go towards making the effects of passion, when they come, involuntary, and gradually preventing them altogether. 7. What a man does from fear^ he is said to do under compiilsion, especially if the fear be applied to him by some other person in order to gain a purpose. Such compulsory action is distinguished in ordinary parlance from voluntary action. And it is certainly less voluntary, inasmuch as the will is hedged in to make its choice between two evils, and chooses one or other only as being the less evil oí the two, not for any liking to the thing in itself. Still, all things considered, the thing is chosen, and the DETERMINANTS OF MORALITY. S» action is so far voluntary. We may call it voluntary in the concrete, and involuntary in the abstract. The thing is willed as matters stand, but in itself and apart from existing need it is not liked at all. But as acts must be judged as they stand, by what the man wills now, not by what he would will, an act done under fear is on the whole voluntary. At the same time, fear sometimes excuses from the obser¬ vance of a law, or of a contract, which from the way in which it was made was never meant to bind in so hard a case. Not all contracts, however, are of this accommodating nature ; and still less, all laws. But even where the law binds, the penalty of the law is sometimes not incurred, when the law was broken through fear. Readings.—Kv.,Eth.,\\l., i.; St.Thos., la 28e, q. 6, art. 3 ; ib., q. 6, art. 6, 8 ; ib., q. 77, art. 6. Section II.—Of the determinants of morality in any given action. 1. The morality of any given action is determined by three elements, the end in view, the means taken, and the circumstances that accompany the taking of the said means Whoever knows this principle, does not thereby know the right and wrong of every action, but he knows how to go about the enquiry. It is a rule of diagnosis. 2. In order to know whether what a man does befits him as a man to do, the first thing to examine is that which he mainly desires and wills in his action. Now the end is more willed and desired than the means. He who steals to commit adultery. 3« OP HUMAN ACTS. says Aristotle, is more of an adulterer than a thief. The end in view is what lies nearest to a man's heart as he acts. On that his mind is chiefly bent ; on that his main purpose is fixed. Though the end is last in the order of execution, it is first and foremost in the order of intention. Therefore the end in view enters into morality more deeply than any other element of the action. It it not, however, the most obvious determinant, because it is the last point to be gained ; and because, while the means are taken openly, the end is often a secret locked up in the heart of the doer, the same means leading to many ends, as the road to a city leads to many homes and resting-places. Conversely, one end may be prosecuted by many means, as there are many roads converging upon one goal. 3. If morality were determined by the end in view, and by that alone, the doctrine would hold that the end justifies the means. That doctrine is false, because the moral character of a human act depends on the thing willed, or object of volition, according as it is or is not a fit object. Now the object of volition is not only the end in view, but likewise the means chosen. Besides the end, the means are likewise willed. Indeed, the means are willed more immediately even than the end, as they have to be taken first. 4. A good action, like any other good thing, must possess a certain requisite fulness of being, proper to itself. As it is not enough for the physical excel¬ lence of a man to have the bare essentials, a body with a soul animating it, but there is needed a DETERMINANTS OF MORALITY. 33 certain grace of form, colour, agility, and many accidental qualities besides ; so for a good act it is not enough that proper means be taken to a proper end, but they must be taken by a proper person, at a proper place and time, in a proper manner, and with manifold other circumstances of propriety. 5. The end in view may be either single, as when you forgive an injury solely for the love of Christ : or multiple co-ordinate, as when you forgive both for the love of Christ and for the mediation of a friend, and are disposed to forgive on either ground sepa¬ rately; or multiple subordinate, as when you would not have forgiven on the latter ground alone, but forgive the more easily for its addition, having been ready, however, to forgive on the former alone : or cumulative, as when you forgive on a number of grounds collectively, on no one of which would you have forgiven apart from the rest. 6. Where there is no outward action, but only an internal act, and the object of that act is some good that is willed for its own sake, there can be no question of means taken, as the end in view is immediately attained. 7. The means taken and the circumstances of those means enter into the morality of the act, formally as they are seen by the intellect, materially as they are in themselves. (See what is said of ignorance, c. iii., s. i., nn. 3—5, p. 27.) This explains the difference between formal and material sin. A material sin would be formal also, did the agent know what he was doing. No sin is culpable that is not formal. But, as has been said, there may be a cul- D 34 OP HUMAN ACTS. pable perversion of the intellect, so that the man is the author of his own obliquity or defect of vision. When Saul persecuted the Christians, he probably sinned materially, not formally. When Caiphas spoke the truth without knowing it, he said well materially, but ill formally. 8. In looking at the means taken and the circum¬ stances that accompany those means, it is important to have a ready rule for pronouncing what particular belongs to the means and what to the circumstances. Thus Clytemnestra deals her husband Agamemnon a deadly stroke with an axe, partly for revenge, partly that she may take to herself another consort ; is the deadliness of the blow part of the means taken or only an accompanying circumstance ? It is part of the means taken. The means taken include every particular that is willed and chosen as making for the end in view. The fatal character of the blow does make to that end ; if Agamemnon does not die, the revenge will not be complete, and life with Aegisthus will be impossible. On the other hand, the fact that Clytemnestra is the wife of the man whom she murders, is not a point that her will rests upon as furthering her purpose at all ; it is an accompanying circumstance. This method of distin¬ guishing means from circumstance is of great value in casuistry. g. It is clear that not every attendant circum¬ stance affects the morality of the means taken. Thus the blow under which Agamemnon sank was neither more nor less guiltily struck because it was dealt with an axe, because it was under pretence of DETERMINANTS OP MORALITY. 31 giving him a bath, or because his feet were entangled in a long robe. These circumstances are all irrelevant. Those only are relevant which attach some special reasonableness or unreasonableness to the thing done Thus the provocation that Clytemnestra had from her husband's introduction of Cassandra into hei house made her act of vengeance less unreasonable ; on the other hand it was rendered more unreasonable by the circumstance of the dear and holy tie that binds wife to husband. The provocation and the relation¬ ship were two relevant circumstances in that case. 10. But it happens sometimes that a circum¬ stance only affects the reasonableness of an action on the supposition of some previous circumstance so affecting it. Thus to carry off a thing in large or small quantities does not affect the reasonableness of the carrying, unless there be already some other circumstance attached that renders the act good or evil ; as for instance, if the goods that are being removed are stolen property. Circumstances of this sort are called aggravating—or, as the case may be, extenuating—circumstances. Circumstances that of themselves, and apart from any previous supposition, make the thing done peculiarly reasonable or unrea¬ sonable, are called specifying circumstances. They are so called, because they place the action in some species of virtue or vice ; whereas aggravating or extenuating circumstances add to, or take off from, the good or evil of the action in that species of virtue or vice to which it already belongs. 11. A variety of specifying circumstances may place one and the same action in many various 36 OF HUMAN ACTS. species of virtue or vice. Thus a religious robbing his parents would sin at once against justice, piety, and religion. A nun preferring death to dishonour practises three virtues, chastity, fortitude, and religion. 12. The means chosen may be of four several characters :— {a) A thing evil of itself and inexcusable under all conceivable circumstances ; for instance, blas¬ phemy, idolatry, lying. (6) Needing excuse, as the killing of a man, the looking at an indecent object. Such things are not to be done except under certain circumstances and with a grave reason. Thus indecent sights may be met in the discharge of professional duty. In that case indeed they cease to be indecent. They are then only indecent when they are viewed without cause. The absence of a good motive in a case like this commonly implies the presence of a bad one. (c) Indifferent, as walking or sitting down. {d) Good of itself, but liable to be vitiated by circumstances, as prayer and almsgiving ; the good of such actions may be destroyed wholly or in part by their being done out of a vain motive, or unsea¬ sonably, or indiscreetly. 13. It is said, " If thy eye be single, thy whole body shall be lightsome." (St. Matt, vi., 22.) The eye is the intention contemplating the end in view. Whoever has placed a good end before him, and regards it steadily with a well-ordered love, never swerving in his affection from the way that reason would have him love, must needs take towards his DETERMINANTS OF MORALITY. 37 end those means, and those only, which are in them¬ selves reasonable and just : as it is written : " Thou shalt follow justly after that which is just." (Deut. xvi., 20.) Thus I am building a church to the glory of God ; money runs short : I perceive that by signing a certain conti-act that must mean grievous oppression of the poor, I shall save considerable expense, whereas, if I refuse, the works will have to be abandoned for want of funds. If I have purely the glory of God before my eyes, I certainly shall not sign that contract : for injustice I know can bear no fruit of Divine glory. But if I am bent upon having the building up in any case, of course I shall sign : but then my love for the end in view is no longer pure and regulated by reason ; it is not God but myself that I am seeking in the work. Thus an end entirely just, holy, and pure, purifies and sancti¬ fies the means, not formally, by investing with a character of justice means in themselves unjust, for that is impossible,—the leopard cannot change his spots,—but by way of elimination, removing unjust means as ineligible to my purpose, and leaving me only those means to choose from which are in themselves just. 14. With means in themselves indifferent, the case is otherwise. A holy and pious end does formally sanctify those means, while a wicked end vitiates them. I beg the reader to observe what sort of means are here in question. There is no question of means in themselves or in their circumstances unjust, as theft, lying, murder, but of such indif¬ ferent things as reading, writing, painting, singing, 3» OF HUMAN ACTS. travelling. Whoever travels to commit sin at the end of his journey, his very travelling, so far as it is referred to that end, is part of his sin : it is a wicked journey that he takes. And he who travels to worship at some shrine or place of pilgrimage, includes his journey in his devotion. The end in view there sanctifies means in themselves indifferent. 15. As a great part of the things that we do are indifferent as well in themselves as in the circum¬ stances of the doing of them, the moral character of our lives depends largely on the ends that we habitually propose to ourselves. One man's great thought is how to make money ; what he reads, writes, says, where he goes, where he elects to reside, his very eating, drinking and personal expen¬ diture, all turns on what he calls making his fortune. It is all to gain money—quocunque modo rem. Another is active for bettering the condition of the labouring classes : a third for the suppression of vice. These three men go some way together in a common orbit of small actions, alike to the eye, but morally unlike, because of the various guiding purposes for which they are done. Hence, when we consider such pregnant final ends as the service of God and the glory of a world to come, it appears how vast is the alteration in the moral line and colouring of a man's life, according to his practical taking up or setting aside of these great ends. 16. We must beware however of an exaggeration here. The final end of action is often latent, not explicitly considered. A fervent worshipper of God wishes to refer his whole self with all that he does DETERMINANTS OF MORALITY. 39 to the Divine glory and service. Yet such a one will eat, drink, and be merry with his friends, not thinking of God at the time. Still, supposing him to keep within the bounds of temperance, he is serving God and doing good actions. But what of a man who has entirely broken away from God, what of his eating, drinking, and other actions that are of their kind indifferent ? We cannot call them sins : there is nothing wrong about them, neither in the thing done, nor in the circumstances of the doing, nor in the intention. Pius V. condemned the proposition : " All the works of infidels are sins." Neither must we call such actions indifferent in the individual who does them, supposing them to be true human acts, according to the definition, and not done merely mechanically. They are not indifferent, because they receive a certain measure of natural goodness from the good natural purpose which they serve, namely, the conservation and well-being of the agent. Every human act is either good or evil in him who does it. I speak of natural goodness only. 17. The effect consequent upon an action is distin¬ guishable from the action itself, from which it is not unfrequently separated by a considerable interval of time, as the death of a man from poison adminis¬ tered a month before. The effect consequent enters into morality only in so far as it is either chosen as a means or intended as an end (nn. 2, 3, p. 31), or is annexed as a relevant circumstance to the means chosen (n. g, p. 34.). Once the act is done, it matters nothing to morality whether the effect consequent actually ensues or not, provided no new 40 OF HUMAN ACTS. act be elicited thereupon, whether of commission or of culpable omission to prevent. It matters not to morality, but it does matter to the agent's claim to reward or liability to punishment at the hands of human legislators civil and eccle¬ siastical. i8. As soul and body make one man, so tbe inward and outward act—as the will to strike and the actual blow struck—are one human act. The outward act gives a certain physical completeness to the inward. Moreover the inward act is no thorough-going thing, if it stops short of outward action where the opportunity offers. Otherwise, the inward act may be as good or as bad morally as inward and outward act together. The mere wish to kill, where the deed is impossible, may be as wicked as wish and deed conjoined. It may be, but commonly it will not, for this reason, that the outward execution of the deed reacts upon the will and calls it forth with greater intensity; the will as it were expands where it finds outward vent. There is no one who has not felt the relative mildness of inward feelings of impatience or indignation, compared with those engendered by speaking out one's mind. Often also the outward act entails a long course of pre¬ paration, all during which the inward will is sustained and frequently renewed, as in a carefully planned burglary. Readings.St.Thos., la 2ae, q. i8, art. i ; ib., q. i8, art. 2, in corp., ad i ; ib., q. i8, art. 3, in corp., ad 2 ; ib., q. 18, art. 4—6 ; ib., q. 18, art. 8, in corp., ad PASSIONS IN GENERAL. 4« 2, 3; ib., q. 18, art. 9, in corp., ad 3; ib., q. 18, art. jo, 3; ib., q. 18, art. 11, in corp.; ib., q. 20, art. 4, in corp. CHAPTER IV. OF PASSIONS. Section I.—Of Passions in General. I. A PASSION is defined to be : A movement of the irrational part of the soul, attended by a notable altera¬ tion of the body, on the apprehension of good or evil The soul is made up of intellect, will, and sensibiii appetite. The first two are rational, the third irrational: the third is the seat of the passions. In a disembodied spirit, or an angel, there are no senses, no sensible appetite, no passions. The. angel, or the departed soul, can love and hate, feat and desire, rejoice and grieve, but these are not passions in the pure spirit, they are acts of intellect and will alone. So man also often loves and hates, and does other acts that are synonymous with cor¬ responding passions, and yet no passion is there. The man is working with his calm reason : his irrational soul is not stirred. To an author, when he is in the humour for it, it is a delight to be writing, but not a passionate delight. The will finds satisfaction in the act : the irrational soul is not affected by it. Or a penitent is sorry for his sin : he sincerely regrets it before God : his will is heartily turned away, and wishes that that sin had 12 OF PASSIONS. never been : at the same time his eye is dry, his features unmoved, not a sigh does he utter, and yet he is truly sorry. It is important to hear these facts in mind : else we shall he con¬ tinually mistaking for passions what are pure acts of will, or vice versa, misled hy the identity of name. 2. The great mark of a passion is its sensible working of itself out upon the body,—what Dr. Bain calls "the diffusive wave of emotion." Without this mark there is no passion, hut with it are other mental states besides passions, as we define them. All strong emotion affects the body sensibly, hut not all emotions are passions. There are emotions that arise from and appertain to the rational portion of the soul. Such are Surprise, Laughter, Shame. There is no sense of humour in any hut rational beings ; and though dogs look ashamed and horses betray curiosity, that is only inasmuch as in these higher animals there is something analogous to what is reason in man. Moreover passions are conversant with good and evil affecting sense, hut the objects of such emotions as those just mentioned are not good and evil as such, common parlance notwith¬ standing, whereby we are said to laugh at a bon mot, or " a good thing." 3. Love is a generic passion, having for its species desire and delight, the contraries of which are abhorrence and pain. Desire is of absent good ; abhorrence is of absent evil ; delight is in present good; pain is at present evil. The good and the evil which is the object of any passion must be appre- PASSIONS IN GENERAL. 43 hended by sense, or by imagination in a sensible way, whether itself be a thing of sense or not. 4. Desire and abhorrence, delight and pain, are conversant with good and evil simply. But good is often attainable only by an effort, and evil avoidable by an effort. The effort that good costs to attain casts a shade of evil or undesirableness over it : we may shrink from the effort while coveting the good. Again, the fact of evil being at all avoid¬ able is a good thing about such evil. If we call evil black, and good white, avoidable evil will be black just silvering into grey: and arduous good will be white with a cloud on it. And if the white attracts, and the black repels the appetite, it appears that arduous good is somewhat distasteful, to wit, to the faint-hearted; and avoidable, or vincible, evil has its attraction for the man of spirit. About these two objects, good hard of getting and evil hard of avoidance, arise four other passions, hope and despair about the former, fear and daring about the latter. Hope goes out towards a difficult good: despair flies from it, the difficulty here being more repellent than the good is attractive. Fear flies from a threatening £vil : while daring goes up to the same, drawn by the likelihood of vanquishing it. Desire and abhor¬ rence, delight and pain, hope and despair, fear and daring, with anger and hatred (of which presently), complete our list of passions. 5. Aristotle and his school of old, called Peri¬ patetics, recommended the moderation of the passions, not their extirpation. The Stoics on the other hand contended that the model man, the sage, 44 OF PASSIONS. should be totally devoid of passions. This cele¬ brated dispute turned largely on the two schools not understanding the same thing by the word passion. Yet not entirely so. There was a residue of real difference, and it came to this. If the sensitive appetite stirs at all, it must stir in one or other of nine ways corresponding to the nine passions which we have enumerated. Such an emotion as Laughter affects the imagination and the sensitive part of man, and of course the body visibly, but it does not stir the sensitive appetite, since it does not prompt to action. To say then that a man has no passions, means that the sensitive appetite never stirs within him, but is wholly dead. But this is impossible, as the Stoic philosopher was fain to confess when he got frightened in a storm at sea. Having no passions cannot in any practical sense mean having no movements of the sensitive appetite, for that will be afoot of its own proper motion independent of reason : but it may mean cherishing no passions, allowing none to arise unresisted, but suppressing their every movement to the utmost that the will can. In that sense it is a very intelligible and practical piece of advice, that the wise man should labour to have no passions. It is the advice embodied in Horace's Nil admirari, Talleyrand's "No zeal," Beaconsfield's " Beware of enthusiasm." It would have man to work like a scientific instrument, calm as a chronometer, regulated by reason alone. This was the Stoic teaching, this the perfection that they inculcated, quite a possible goal to make for, if not to attain. And it is worth a wise man's while to PASSIONS IN GENERAL. 4! consider, whether he should bend his efforts in this direction or not. The determination here taken and acted upon will elaborate quite a different character of man one way or the other. The effort made as the Stoics direct, would mean no yielding to excite¬ ment, no poetry, no high-strung devotion, no rapture, no ecstasy, no ardour of love, no earnest rhetoric spoken or listened to, no mourning, no rejoicing other than the most comentional, to the persistent smothering of whatever is natural and really felt, no tear of pity freely let flow, no touch of noble anger responded to, no scudding before the breeze ot indignation,—all this, that reason may keep on the even tenour of her way undisturbed. 6. The fault in this picture is that it is not the picture of a man, but of a spirit. He who being man should try to realize it in himself, would fall short of human perfection. For though the sensi¬ tive appetite is distinguished from the will, and the two may clash and come in conflict, yet they are not two wholly independent powers, but the one man is both will and sensitive appetite, and he rarely operates according to one power without the other being brought into corresponding play. There is a similar concomitance of the operations of intellect and imagination. What attracts the sensitive appetite, commonly allures also the affective will, though on advertence the elective will may reject it. On the other hand, a strong affection and election of the will cannot be without the sensitive appetite being stirred, and that so strongly that the motion is notable in the body,—in other words, is a passion. 4« OF PASSIONS. Passion is the natural and in a certain degree the inseparable adjunct of strong volition. To check one is to check the other. Not only is the passion repressed by repressing the volition, but the repres¬ sion of the passion is also the repression of the volition. A man then who did his best to repress all movements of passion indiscriminately, would lay fetters on his will, lamentable and cruel and impolitic fetters, where his will was bent on any object good and honourable and well-judged. 7. Again, man's will is reached by two channels, from above downwards and from below upwards : it is reached through the reason and through the imagination and senses. By the latter channel it often receives evil impressions, undoubtedly, but not unfrequently by the former also. Reason may be inconsiderate, vain, haughty, mutinous, unduly sceptical. The abuse is no justification for closing either channel. Now the channel of the senses and of the imagination is the wider, and in many cases affords the better passage of the two. The will that is hardly reached by reason, is approached and won by a pathetic sight, a cry of enthusiasm, a threat that sends a tremor through the limbs. Rather I should say the affective will is approached in this way: for it remains with the elective will, on ad¬ vertence and consultation with reason, to decide whether or not it shall be won to consent. But were it not for the channel of passion, this will could never have been approached at all even by reasons the most cogent. Rhetoric often succeeds, where mere dry logic would have been thrown away. God PASSIONS IN GENERAL. 47 help vast numbers of the human race, if their wills were approachable only through their reasons ! They would indeed be fixtures. 8. Another fact to notice is the liability oí reason's gaze to become morbid and as it were inflamed by unremitting exercise. I do not here allude to hard study, but to overcurious scanning of the realities of this life, and the still greater realities and more momentous possibilities of the world to come. There is a sense of the surroundings being too much for us, an alarm,and a giddiness, that comes of sober matter-of-fact thought over-much prolonged. Then it happens that one or more undeniable truths are laid hold of, and considered in strong relief and in isolation from the rest : the result is a distorted and partial view of truth as a whole, and therewith the mind is troubled. Here the kindlier passions, judiciously allowed to play, come in to soothe the wound and soreness of pure intel¬ lect, too keen in its workings for one who is not yet a pure spirit. 9. Moral good and evil are predicable only of human acts, in the technical sense of the term. (c. i., nn. 2—4, p. 41.) As the passions by definition (c. iv., s. i., n. I, p. 41) are not human acts, they can never be morally evil of themselves. But they are an occasion of moral evil in this way. They often serve to wake up the slumbering Reason. To that end it is necessary that they should start up of themselves without the call of Reason. This would be no inconvenience, if the instant Reason awoke, and adverted to the tumult and stir of Passion, she could 48 OF PASSIONS. take command of it, and where she saw fit, quell it. But Reason has no such command, except in cases where she has acquired it by years of hard fighting. Passion once afoot holds on her course against the dictate of Reason. True, so long as it remains mere Passion, and Reason is not dragged away by it, no consent of the will given, no voluntary act elicited, still less carried into outward effect,—so long as things remain thus, however Passion may rage, there is no moral evil done. But there is a great temptation, and in great temptation many men fall. The evil is the act of free will, but the pressure on the will is the pressure of Passion. But Passion happily is a young colt amenable to discipline. Where the assaults of Passion are resolutely and piously withstood, and the incentives thereto avoided—unnatural and unnecessary incentives I mean—Passion itself acquires a certain habit of obedience to Reason, which habit is moral virtue. Of that presently. lo. In a man of confirmed habits of moral virtue. Passion starts up indeed independently of Reason, but then Reason ordinarily finds little diffi¬ culty in regulating the Passion so aroused. In a certain high and extraordinary condition of human nature, not only has Reason entire mastery over Passion wherever she finds it astir, but Passion cannot stir in the first instance, without Reason calling upon it to do so. In this case the torpor of the will deprecated above (n. 7) is not to be feared, because Reason is so vigorous and so masterful as to be adequate to range everywhere and meet all emer- OF DESIRE. 49 gencies without the goad of Passion. This state is called by divines the state of integrity. In it Adam was before he sinned. It was lost at the Fall, and has not been restored by the Redemption. It is not a thing in any way due to human nature : nothing truly natural to man was forfeited by Adam's sin. It is no point of holiness, no guerdon of victory, this state of integrity, but rather a being borne on angel's wings above the battle. But one who has no battle in his own breast against Passion, may yet suffer and bleed and die under exterior persecution ; nay, he may, if he wills, let in Passion upon himself, to fear and grieve, when he need not. So did the Second Adam in the Garden of Gethsemane. Readings.—St. Thos., la, q. 8i, art. 2, in corp. ; id., la 2as, q. 23, art. I, in corp. ; ih., q. 23, art. 2, in corp. ; Cicero, Tusc. Disp., iv., cc. 17—26; St. Aug., De Civitate Dei, ix., cc. 4, 5 ; Ar, Eth., III., v., 3, 4 ; ib., I., xiii., 15—17 ; St. Thos., 3a, q. 15, art. 4; id., I a 226, q. 59, art. 5 ; Plato, Timœns, 69, B, E : 70, A. Section II.—Of Desire. I. Desires are e\th.&Tphysical cravings, by moderns called appetites; or physical desires or tastes, called desires proper. The appetites have their beginning in bodily uneasiness. They are felt needs of some¬ thing required for the animal maintenance of the individual or of the race. The objects of the several appetites are Meat and Drink, Warmth or Coolness, Exercise and Repose, Sleep, Sex. The object of mere appetite is marked by quantity only, not by quality. That is to say, the thing is sought E 50 OF FASSIONS. for in the vague, in a certain amount sufficient to supply the want, but not this or that variety of the thing. The cry of a hungry man is, " Give me to eat," if very hungry, " Give me much : " but so far as he is under the mere dominion of appetite he does not crave any particular article of food, vege¬ table or animal : he wants quantity merely. So of thirst, so of all the appetites, where there is nothing else but appetite present. 2. But if a thirsty man cries for champagne, or a hungry man fancies a venison pasty, there is another element beyond appetite in that demand. On the matter of the physical craving there is stamped the form of a psychical desire. The psychical element prescribes a quality of the objects sought. The thirsty man thus prompted no longer wants drink but wine : the man mewed up within doors no longer calls for exercise, but for a horse or a bicycle. It is obvious that in man the appetites generally pass into the further shape of psychical desire. It is when the appetite is vehement, or the man is one who makes slight study of his animal wants, that pure appetite, sheer physical craving, is best shown. Darius flying before his conqueror is ready to drink at any source, muddy or clear, a drink is all that he wants : it is all that is wanted by St. Paul the first Hermit. But your modern lounger at the clubs, what variety of liquors are excogitated to please his palate 1 3. Not all psychical desires are on the matter of appetite ; they may be fixed on any good whatsoever of body or of mind. Many psychical desires are OF DESIRE. 5» not passions at all, but reside exclusively in the superior part of the soul, in the will prompted by the understanding, and do not affect the body in any sensible way. Such for instance is the great desire of happiness. Those desires that are passions are prompted, not by the understanding, but by the imagination or fancy, imaging to itself some parti¬ cular good, not good in general, for that the under¬ standing contemplates. Fancy paints the picture ; or if sense presents it, fancy appropriates and embel¬ lishes it : the sensitive appetite fastens upon the representation : the bodily organs sensibly respond ; and there is the passion of psychical desire. 4. Physical cravings, or appetites, have limited objects : the objects of psychical desires may be unlimited. A thirsty man thirsts not for an ocean, but for drink quantum sufficit : give him that and the appetite is gone. But the miser covets all the money that he can get : the voluptuary ranges land and sea in search of a new pleasure : the philosopher ever longs for a higher knowledge ; the saint is indefatigable in doing good. Whatever a man takes to be an end in itself, not simply a means, that he desires without end or measure. What he desires as a means, he desires under a limitation, so far forth as it makes for the end, so much and no more. As Aristotle says of the processes of art, " the end in view is the limit," trépaç to reXoç (cf. c. ii., s. iii., n. 3, p. 15). Whatever is desired as an end in itself, is taken to be a part of happiness, or to represent happiness. Happiness and the object that gives happiness is the one thing that man desires for itself, and desires 5» OF PASSIONS. without end or measure. Unfortunately he is often mistaken in the choice of this object. He often takes for an end what is properly only a means. They " whose god is their belly," have made this mistake in regard of the gratification of appetite. It is not appetite proper that has led to this per¬ version, but psychical desire, or appetite inflamed by the artificial stimulus of imagination. For one who would be temperate, it is more important to control his imagination than to trouble about his appetite. Appetite exhausts itself, sometimes within the bounds of what is good for the subject, some¬ times beyond them, but still within some bounds; but there is no limit to the cravings bred of imagination. 5. By this canon a man may try himself to dis¬ cover whether or not a favourite amusement is gain¬ ing too much upon him. An amusement is properly a means to the end, that a man may come away from it better fitted to do the serious work of his life. Pushed beyond a certain point, the amuse¬ ment ceases to minister to this end. The wise man drops it at that point. But if one knows not where to stop : or if when stopped in spite of himself, he is restless till he begin again, and never willingly can forego any measure of the diversion that comes within his reach, the means in that case has passed into an end : he is enslaved to that amusement, inasmuch as he will do anything and eveiy rhing for the sake of it. Thus some men serve pi .r.sure^ and other men money. 6. Hence is apparent the folly of supposing that crimes against property are prevettible simply by OP DESIRE. 53 placing it within the power of all members of the community easily to earn an honest livelihood, and therewith the satisfaction of all their natural needs. It is not merely to escape cold and hunger that men turn to burglary or fraudulent dealing ; it is more for the gratification of a fancy, the satisfaction of an inordinate desire. Great crimes are not com¬ mitted " to keep the wolf from the door," but because of the wolf in the heart, the overgrown psychical desire, which is bred in many a well- nourished, warmly clad, comfortably housed, highly educated citizen. There is a sin born of " fulness of bread." Readings.—St. Thos., la 2ae, q. 30, art. 3, in corp. ; ib., q. 30, art. 4, in corp. ; Ar., Eth., III., xi., I—4: Ar., Pol., I., ix., 13; ib., II., vii., 11—13. N.B.—The division of desires into physical and psychical is first suggested by Plato, who {Rep. 558 D to 559 c) divides them as necessary and un¬ necessary. Unnecessary desires he treats as evil. What Plato calls a necessary, Aristotle calls a physical, and St. Thomas a natural desire. Unfortunately, Aristotle and St. Thomas had but one word for our English two, physical and natural. Desires that are not physical, not natural nor necessary to man in his animal capacity, may be highly natural and becoming to man as he is a reasonable being, or they may be highly unbecoming. These psychical desires, called by St. Thomas not natural, take in at once the noblest and the basest aspirations of humanity. 54 OF PASSIONS. Section III.—Of DeligM. 1, Delight like desire may be either physical or psychical. All that has been said above of desire under this division applies also to delight, which is the realization of desire. This division does not altogether fall in with that into senstial delights and intellectual delights. A professional wine-taster could hardly be said to find intellectual delight in a bottle of good Champagne, real Veuve-Clicquot : yet certainly his is a psychical dèlight, no mere un¬ sophisticated gratification of appetite. Sensual delights then are those delights which are founded on the gratification of appetite, whether simple— in which case the delight is physical—or studied and fancy-wrought appetite, the gratification of which is psychical delight. Intellectual delights on the other hand are those that come of the exercise of intellect, not unsupported by imagination, but where appetite enters not at all, or only as a remote adjunct, albeit the delight may turn upon some sight or sound, as of music, or of a fine range of hills. Or the object may be a thing of intellect, pure and removed from sense as far as an object of human contemplation can be, for instance, the first elements of matter, freewill, the immensity of God. The study of such objects yields a purer intellectual delight than that of the preceding. But this is a high ground and a keen upper air, where few can tread and breathe. 2. A man has more complacency in himself upon attaining to some intellectual delight than upon a OF DELIGHT. 55 sensual satisfaction : he is prouder to have solved a problem than to have enjoyed his dinner. Also, he would rather forego the capacity of sensual enjoy¬ ment than that of intellectual pleasure ; rather lose his sense of taste than his science or his scholar¬ ship, if he has any notable amount of either. Again, put sensual delight in one scale, and in the other the intellectual delight of honour, no worthy specimen of a man will purchase the pleasure at the price of honour. The disgrace attaching to certain modes of enjoyment is sufficient to make men shun them, very pleasant though they be to sense". Again, sensual delight is a passing thing, waxing and waning : but intellectual delight is steady, grasped and held firmly as a whole. But sensual delight comes more welcome of the two in this that it removes a pre-existing uneasiness, as hunger, weariness, nervous prostration, thus doing a medi¬ cinal office : whereas no such office attaches in the essential nature of things to intellectual delight, as that does not presuppose any uneasiness ; and though it may remove uneasiness, the removal is difficult, because the uneasiness itself is an obstacle to the intellectual effort that must be made to derive any intellectual delight. Sensual enjoyment is the cheaper physician, and ailing mortals mostly resort to that door. 3. " I will omit much usual declamation on the dignity and capacity of our nature : the superiority of the soul to the body, of the rational to the animal part of our constitution ; upon the worthi- ness, refinement, and delicacy of some satisfactions. 5« OF PASSIONS. or the meanness, grossness, and sensuality of others; because I hold that pleasures differ in nothing but in continuance and intensity." (Paley, Moral Philo¬ sophy, hk. i., c. vi.) In opposition to the above it is here laid down that delights do not differ in continuance and intcnsityt that is, in quantity, alone, but likewise in quality, that is, some are nobler, better, and more becoming a man than others, and therefore preferable on other grounds than those of mere continuance and inten¬ sity. I wish to show that the more pleasant pleasure is not always the better pleasure; that even the pleasure which is more durable, and thereby more pleasant in the long run, is not the better of the two simply as carrying the greater cumulus of pleasure. If this is shown, it will follow that pleasure is not identical with good; or that pleasure is not happiness, not the last end of man. 4. Delight comes of activity, not necessarily of change, except so far as activity itself involves change, as it always does in mortal man. Delight sits upon activity, as the bloom upon youth. Bloom is the natural sign of maturity ; and the delight that we come to take in doing a thing shows that we are at least beginning to do it well : our activity is approaching perfection. In this sense it is said that delight perfects activity. As the activity, so will be the delight. But the activity will be as the power of which it is an exercise. Powers like in kind will s,upply like activities, and these again will yield delights alike in kind. There is no difference of quality in such delights, they differ in quantity OF DELIGHT. 57 alone. Thus taste and smell are two senses : the difference between them can hardly be called one of kind : therefore the delights of smelling and of tasting fall under one category. We may ex¬ change so much str.ell for an equal amount of taste : it is a mere matter of quantity. But between sight and hearing on the one hand, and taste and smell and touch on the other, there is a wider difference, due to the fact that intellect allies itself more readily to the operation of the two former senses. 5. Widest of all differences is that between sense and intellect. To explain this difference in full belongs to Psychology. Enough to say here that the object of sense is always particular, bound up in circumstances of present time and place, as this horse : while the object of intellect is universal, as horse simply. The human intellect never works without the concurrence either of sense or of imagi¬ nation, which is as it were sense at second hand. As pure intellectual operation is never found in man, so neither is pure intellectual delight, like that of an angel. Still, as even in man sense and intellect are two powers differing in kind, so must their operations differ in kind, and the delights conse¬ quent upon those operations. Therefore, unless Paley would have been willing to allow that the rational and animal parts of our nature differ only as more and less—which is tantamount to avowing that man is but a magnified brute—he ought not to have penned his celebrated utterance, that pleasures differ only in continuance and intensity : he should have admitted that they differ likewise 5» OP PASSIONS. in kind ; or in other words, that pleasures differ in quality as well as in quantity. The goodness of a pleasure, then, is not the mere amount of it. To repeat St. Augustine's reflection on the drunken Milanese : " It makes a difference what source a man draws his delight from." * As in man reason is nobler than sense, preferable, and a better good to its possessor—for reason it is that makes him man and raises him above the brute—so the use of the reason and the delight that comes thereof is nobler, preferable, and a better good to him than the pleasure that is of the mere operation of his animal nature. A little of the nobler delight out¬ weighs a vast volume of the baser : not that the nobler is the pleasanter, but because it is the nobler. Nor can it be pretended that the nobler prevails as being the more durable, and thereby likely to prove the pleasanter in the long run. The nobler is better at the time and in itself, because it is the more human delight and characteristic of the higher species. I have but to add that what is better in itself is not better under all circumstances. The best life of man can only be lived at intervals. The lower operations and the delights that go with them have a medicinal power to restore the vigour that has become enfeebled by a lengthened exercise of the higher faculties. At those " dead points " food and fiddling are better than philosophy. 6. This medicinal or restorative virtue of delight is a fact to bear in mind in debating the question how far it is right to act for the pleasure that the • Initrest unie quis gaudeat. (S. Aug., Confess., vi., 6.) OF DELIGHT action gives. It is certainly wrong to act for mere animal gratification. Such gratification is a stimulus to us to do that which makes for the well-being of our nature : to fling away all intention of any good other than the delight of the action, is to mistake the incentive for the end proposed. But this is a doctrine easily misunderstood. An example may save it from being construed too rigidly. Suppose a man has a vinery, and being fond of fruit he goes there occasionally, and eats, not for hunger, but as he says, because he likes grapes. He seems to act for mere pleasure : yet who shall be stern enough to condemn him, so that he exceed not in quantity ? If he returns from the vinery in a more amiable and charitable mood, more satisfied with Providence, more apt to converse with men and do his work in the commonwealth, who can deny that in acting in view of these ends, at least implicitly, he has taken lawful means to a proper purpose ? He has not been fed, but recreated : be has not taken nourishment, but medicine, preventive or remedial, to a mind diseased. It is no doubt a sweet and agreeable medicine : this very agreeable- ness makes its medical virtue. It is a sweet anti¬ dote to the bitterness of life. But though a man may live by medicine, he does not live for it. So no man by rights lives for pleasure. The pleasure that a man finds in his work encourages him to go on with it. The pleasure that a man finds by turning aside to what is not work, picks him up, rests and renovates him, that he may go forth as firom a wayside inn, or diverticulum, refreshed to 6o OF PASSIONS. resume the road of labour. Hence we gather the solution of the question as to the lawfulness of acting for pleasure. If a man does a thing because it is pleasant, and takes the pleasure as an incentive to carry on his labour, or as a remedy to enable him to resume it, he acts for pleasure rightly. For this it is not necessary that he should expressly think of the pleasure as being helpful to labour: it is enough that he accepts the subordination of pleasure to work as nature has ordained it ; and this ordi¬ nance he does accept, if he puts forth no positive volition the other way, whether expressly, as none but a wrong-headed theologian is likely to do, or virtually, by taking his pleasure with such greedi¬ ness that the motion of his will is all spent therein as in its last end and terminus, so that the pleasure ceases to be referable to aught beyond itself, a case of much easier occurrence. Or lastly, the natural subordination of pleasure to work may be set aside, defeated, .and rendered impossible by the whole tenour of an individual's life, if he be one of those giddy butterflies who flit from pleasure to pleasure and do no work at all. Till late in the morning he sleeps, then breakfasts, then he shoots, lunches, rides, bathes, dines, listens to music, smokes, and reads flction till late at night, then sleeps again ; and this, or the like of this is his day, some three hundred days at least in the year. This is not mere acting for pleasure, it is living for pleasure, or acting for pleasure so continuously as to leave no scope for any further end of life. It may be hard to indicate the precise hour in which this OF ANGER. 6i man's pleasure-seeking passes into sin : still this is clear, his life is not innocent. Clear him of gluttony and lust, there remains upon him the sin of sloth and of a wasted existence. y. Even the very highest of delights, the delight of contemplation, is not the highest of goods, but a concomitant of the highest good. The highest good is the final object of the will; but the object of the will is not the will's own act : we do not will willing, as neither do we understand understanding, not at least without a reflex effort. What we will in contemplating is, not to be delighted, but to see. This is the subjective end and happiness of man, to see, to contemplate. Delight is not any¬ thing objective : neither is it the subjective last end of humanity. In no sense then is delight, or pleasure, the highest good. Readings.—Ar., Eth., X., iv., 8 ; ib., X., iii., 8—13, ib., X., v., I—5 ; Plato, Gorgias, pp. 494, 495 ; Mill, Utilitarianism, 2nd. edit., pp. 11—16 ; St. Thos., la 2as, q. 31, art. 5 ; id., Contra Gentiles, iii., 26, nn. 8, ID, II, 12. Section IV.—Of Anger. I. Anger is a compound passion, made up of displeasure, desire, and hope : displeasure at a slight received, desire of revenge and satisfaction, and hope of getting the same, the getting of it being a matter of some difficulty and calling for some exertion, for we are not angry with one who lies wholly in our power, or whom we despise. Anger then is conversant at once with the good of vengeance ftl OF PASSIONS. and with the evil of a slight received : the good being somewhat difficult to compass, and the evil not altogether easy to wipe out. (Cf. s. i., n. 4, p. 43.) 2. Anger is defined : A desire of open vengeance for an open slight, attended with displeasure at the same, the slight being put upon self, or upon some dear one, nnhefittingly. The vengeance that the angry man craves is a vengeance that all shall see. "No, ye unnatural hags," cries Lear in his fury, " I will do such things,—what they shall be yet I know not, but they shall be the terror of the earth." When we are angry, we talk of " making an example " of the offender. The idea is that, as all the world has seen us slighted and set at naught, so all the world, witnessing the punishment of the offending party, may take to heart the lesson which we are enforcing upon him, namely, that we are men of might and importance whom none should despise. Whoever is angry, is angry at being despised, flouted to his face and set at naught, either in his own person, or in the person of one whom he venerates and loves, or in some cause that lies near to his heart. Anger is essentially a craving for vengeance on account of a wrong done. If then we have suffered, but think we deserve to suffer, we are not angry. If we have suffered wrong, but the wrong seems to have been done in ignorance, or in the heat of passion, we are not angry, or we are not so very angry. " If he had known what he was about," we say, or, " if he had been in his right mind, he could not have brought himself to treat me so." But when one has done us cool and deliberate wrong, then we are OF ANGER. ®3 angry, because the slight is most considerable. There is an appearance of our claims to considera¬ tions having been weighed, and found wanting. We call it, " a cool piece of impertinence," " spiteful malevolence," and the like. Any other motive to which the wrong is traceable on the part of the wrong-doer, lessens our anger against him : but the motive of contempt, and that alone, if we seem to discover it in him, invariably increases it. To this all other points are reducible that move our anger, as forgetfulness, rudely delivered tidings of mis¬ fortune, a face of mirth looking on at our distress, or getting in the way and thwarting our purpose. 3. Anger differs from hatred. Hatred is a chronic affection, anger an acute one. Hatred wishes evil to a man as it is evil, anger as it is just. Anger wishes evil to fall on its object in the sight of all men, and with the full consciousness of the sufferer : hatred is satisfied with even a secret mischief, and, so that the evil be a grievous one, does not much mind whether the sufferer be conscious of it or no. Thus an angry man may wish to see him who has offended brought to public confession and shame : but a hater is well content to see his enemy spending his fortune foolishly, or dead drunk in a ditch on a lonely wayside. The man in anger feels grief and annoyance, not so the hater. At a certain point of suffering anger stops, and is appeased when full satisfaction seems to have been made : but an enemy is implacable and insatiate in his desire of your harm. St. Augustine in his Rule to his brethren says : " For quarrels, either have them not, or end «4 OF HABITS AND VIRTUES. them with all speed, lest anger grow to hatred, and of a mote make a beam." 4. Anger, like vengeance, is then only a safe course to enter on, when it proceeds not upon personal but upon public grounds. And even b}' this maxim many deceive themselves. Readings.—Ar., Rhet., ii., 2 ; ib., 4, ad fin. ; St. Thos., la 2£e, 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. I. 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 passing 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 deter¬ minant of power. One and the same power works well or ill, but not one and the same habit. OF HABIT. 65 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 gravi¬ tation 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 glass 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 " tumble¬ down " habit in a row of houses, brought on by locomotives running underneath their foundations. It is but a case of an accumulation 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 lifb, an appur¬ tenance 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 passes rather out of morality into the region of physics. Again, bad habits, vices to which a man is become F 66 OF HABITS AND VIRTUES. 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, ol 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 o) habits. 3. Knowledge consists of intellectual habits. But the habits of most consequence to the moralist lie in the will, and in the sensitive appetite 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 OF HABIT. «7 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 artis¬ tically, 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. g, p. lo.) 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 God 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 God. 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 68 OF HABITS AND VIRTUES. 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 prone to literary learning, that to mechanics, this one to obstinacy and contentious¬ ness, 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 OF VIRTUES IN GENERAL. 69 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-foürths 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., la 2ae, q. 49, art. 4, ad 1,2; ib., q. 50, art. 3, in corp., ad. i, 2 ; ib., q. 51, art. i, in corp. ; ib., q. 53, art. 3, in corp. ; Ar., Eth., II., i. ; ib., III., v., 10—14; ilh, II., iv., I, 2, 4. Section II.—Of Virtues in General. I. 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 stand¬ point, 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 7» OF HABITS AND VIRTUES. 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 God and pardoned, the vice, that is, the evil habit, if any such existed before, still remains, and constitutes 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 mtuition 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 know¬ ledge ; 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 OF VIRTUES IN GENERAL. ?* 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 under¬ standing 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 circumstance. Moreover, no act is virtuous that is elicited quite mechanically, or at the blind instance of passion. 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.* " 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 • Video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor. (Ovid, Metamorph., vii., 21.) 7a OF HABITS AND VIRTUES. what is right : but the will must be habituated to embrace it, and the passions 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. {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 constitution. As Aristotle {Pol., I., v., 6) says: "The soul rules the body with a despotic command : but reason rules appetite with a com¬ mand constitutional and kingly " : that is to say, as Aristotle elsewhere {Eth., I., xiii., 15, 16) explains, passion often " fights and resists reason, opposes and contradicts " : it has therefore to be bound by ordinances and institutions to follow reason's lead : these institutions are good habits, moral virtues, resident there where passion itself is resident, in the inferior appetite. 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 passions, he will in such a conjuncture act incon¬ siderately 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 VIRTUES INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL. 73 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 hear 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 he good, as in the sensitive appetite in both its parts, concupiscible and irascible, so far forth as appetite is amenable to the control of the will, that it may he so con¬ trolled and promptly obey the better guidance. These habits in the will and in the sensitive appetite are called moral virtues, and to them the name of virtiie is usually confined. Readings.—St. Thos., la 2as, q. 71, art. i, in corp.; ib., q. 58, art. 2; ib., q. 58, art. 3, in corp., ad 3; ih., q. 56, art. 4, in corp., ad i—3. Section III.—Of the Difference between Virtues Intellectual and Moral. I. St. Thomas* (la 2as, q. 56, art. 3, in corp.) 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, * By doing good St. Thomas means the determination of the appetite, rational or sensitive, to good. He says that intellectual virtue does not prompt this determination of the appetite. 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 appetite ; and it prompts the act of the intellèct, which however is not always followed by an act of appetite in accordance with it. 74 OF HABITS AND VIRTUES. he says, enables one readily to speak correctly, but does not ensure that one always shall speak cor¬ rectly, 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. i, 2, 8, pp. 64, 58.) 2. Another distinction may be gathered from St.Thomas (laaœ, q. 2i,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 sen¬ sitive appetite : intellectual habits, acts of intellect. VIRTUES INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL. 75 Will and appetite may act against what the agent knows to be best : hut intellect cannot contradict intellect. It cannot judge that to he true and beautiful which it knows to he false and foul. If a musician strikes discords on purpose, or a gram¬ marian 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 safe¬ guard to keep a man from going against his in¬ telligent self. No such safeguard is needed : the thing is impossible, in the region of pure intellect. In a region where no temptation could enter, in¬ tellectual 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 reason¬ ings sway the will, and fits of passion the sensitive appetite, 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 under¬ standing. Such disobedience is more irrational than any mere intellectual error. In an error purely intellectual, where the will has no part, the 76 OF HABITS AND VIRTUES. 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 pronounce¬ ment, and there is nothing within the man that says otherwise. In the moral error there is a contra¬ diction within, an intestine quarrel. The intellect pronounces a thing not good, not to he taken, and the sensitive appetite 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, intel¬ lectual 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 develop¬ ment 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 OF THE MEAN IN MORAL VIRTUE. 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 oj the life to come. Readings.—St. Thos., la 2ae, q. 58, art. 2, in corp. ; Ar., Eth., I., xiii., 15—19 ; St. Thos., la 2£e, q. 66, art. 3. Section IV.—Of the Mean in Moral Virtue. I. Moral virtue isa habit of doing the right thing in the conduct of the will and the government of the passions. 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 circum¬ stances. (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 illustrated 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 fortitude, and all varieties of moral virtue. He who fights shy of everything, and never stands his ground, bec