III
Character and Conduct
The dynamic force of habit taken in connection with the continuity of habits with one another explains the unity of character and conduct, or speaking more concretely of motive and act, will and deed. Moral theories have frequently separated these things from each other. One type of theory, for example, has asserted that only will, disposition, motive counts morally; that acts are external, physical, accidental; that moral good is different from goodness in act since the latter is measured by consequences, while moral good or virtue is intrinsic, complete in itself, a jewel shining by its own light—a somewhat dangerous metaphor however. The other type of theory has asserted that such a view is equivalent to saying that all that is necessary to be virtuous is to cultivate states of feeling; that a premium is put on disregard of the actual consequences of conduct, and agents are deprived of any objective criterion for the rightness and wrongness of acts, being thrown back on their own whims, prejudices and private peculiarities. Like most opposite extremes in philosophic theories, the two theories suffer from a common mistake. Both of them ignore the projective force of habit and the implication of habits in one another. Hence they separate a unified deed into two disjoined parts, an inner called motive and an outer called act.
The doctrine that the chief good of man is good will easily wins acceptance from honest men. For common sense employs a juster psychology than either of the theories just mentioned. By will, common sense understands something practical and moving. It understands the body of habits, of active dispositions which makes a man do what he does. Will is thus not something opposed to consequences or severed from them. It is a cause of consequences; it is causation in its personal aspect, the aspect immediately preceding action. It hardly seems conceivable to practical sense that by will is meant something which can be complete without reference to deeds prompted and results occasioned. Even the sophisticated specialist cannot prevent relapses from such an absurdity back into common sense. Kant, who went the limit in excluding consequences from moral value, was sane enough to maintain that a society of men of good will would be a society which in fact would maintain social peace, freedom and cooperation. We take the will for the deed not as a substitute for doing, or a form of doing nothing, but in the sense that, other things being equal, the right disposition will produce the right deed. For a disposition means a tendency to act, a potential energy needing only opportunity to become kinetic and overt. Apart from such tendency a “virtuous” disposition is either hypocrisy or self-deceit.
Common sense in short never loses sight wholly of the two facts which limit and define a moral situation. One is that consequences fix the moral quality of an act. The other is that upon the whole, or in the long run but not unqualifiedly, consequences are what they are because of the nature of desire and disposition. Hence there is a natural contempt for the morality of the “good” man who does not show his goodness in the results of his habitual acts. But there is also an aversion to attributing omnipotence to even the best of good dispositions, and hence an aversion to applying the criterion of consequences unreservedly. A holiness of character which is celebrated only on holy-days is unreal. A virtue of honesty, or chastity or benevolence which lives upon itself apart from definite results consumes itself and goes up in smoke. The separation of motive from motive-force in action accounts both for the morbidities and futilities of the professionally good, and for the more or less subconscious contempt for morality entertained by men of a strong executive habit with their preference for “getting things done.”
Yet there is justification for the common assumption that deeds cannot be judged properly without taking their animating disposition as well as their concrete consequences into account. The reason, however, lies not in isolation of disposition from consequences, but in the need for viewing consequences broadly. This act is only one of a multitude of acts. If we confine ourselves to the consequences of this one act we shall come out with a poor reckoning. Disposition is habitual, persistent. It shows itself therefore in many acts and in many consequences. Only as we keep a running account, can we judge disposition, disentangling its tendency from accidental accompaniments. When once we have got a fair idea of its tendency, we are able to place the particular consequences of a single act in a wider context of continuing consequences. Thus we protect ourselves from taking as trivial a habit which is serious, and from exaggerating into momentousness an act which, viewed in the light of aggregate consequences, is innocent. There is no need to abandon common sense which tells us in judging acts first to inquire into disposition; but there is great need that the estimate of disposition be enlightened by a scientific psychology. Our legal procedure, for example, wobbles between a too tender treatment of criminality and a viciously drastic treatment of it. The vacillation can be remedied only as we can analyze an act in the light of habits, and analyze habits in the light of education, environment and prior acts. The dawn of truly scientific criminal law will come when each individual case is approached with something corresponding to the complete clinical record which every competent physician attempts to procure as a matter of
