CHARACTER. SHUN passion, fold the hands of thrift, Sit still, and Truth is near; Your eyelids to the sphere: Wait a little, you shall see FOR what need I of book or priest CHARACTER.1 MORALS respects what men call goodness, that which all men agree to honor as justice, truthspeaking, good-will and good works. Morals respects the source or motive of this action. It is the science of substances, not of shows. It is the what, and not the how. It is that which all men profess to regard, and by their real respect for which recommend themselves to each other. There is this eternal advantage to morals, that, in the question between truth and goodness, the moral cause of the world lies behind all else in the mind. It was for good, it is to good, that all works. Surely it is not to prove or show the truth of things, that sounds a little cold and scholastic, no, it is for benefit, that all subsists. As we say in our modern politics, catching at last the language of morals, that the object of the State is the greatest good of the greatest number, so, the reason we must give for the existence of the world is, that it is for the benefit of all being. 1 Reprinted from the North American Review of April, 1866. : Morals implies freedom and will. The will constitutes the man. He has his life in Nature, like a beast but choice is born in him; here is he that chooses; here is the Declaration of Independence, the July Fourth of zoology and astronomy. He chooses, as the rest of the creation does not. But will, pure and perceiving, is not wilfulness. When a man, through stubbornness, insists to do this or that, something absurd or whimsical, only because he will, he is weak; he blows with his lips against the tempest, he dams the incoming ocean with his cane. It were an unspeakable calamity if any one should think he had the right to impose a private will on others. That is the part of a striker, an assassin. All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power but the absence of power. Morals is the direction of the will on universal ends. He is immoral who is acting to any private end. He is moral, we say it with Marcus Aurelius and with Kant, whose aim or motive may become a universal rule, binding on all intelligent beings; and with Vauvenargues, "the mercenary sacrifice of the public good to a private interest is the eternal stamp of vice." All the virtues are special directions of this motive; justice is the application of this good of the whole to the affairs of each one; courage is contempt of danger in the determination to see this |