such. The rich and cultured are becoming more lordly, haughty, supercilious, and unsympathetic, while the poor and ignorant are made more servile, cowardly, deceitful, and base by the artificial conditions of the times.

It is, however, not true that the world is getting worse, that the original state was a blissful moral state. This conception of a better past is common to many religions and peoples. The Greeks believed in a golden age, the Jews in Paradise. It is characteristic of old age to live in and glorify the past, largely perhaps because it is past. The evils of the present are distinctly before us; the evils of the past we are apt to forget, and to think only of its bright sides. Besides, old age has formed its habits, the habits of the past, and we all know how hard it is to accept new ways of thinking, feeling, and willing. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. The old man often feels out of place in the world with its new habits, and so comes to regard everything in it as wrong. He makes the same objections to the present which his parents made to his past, which was their present.

But is the present really worse than the past? Here again everything depends upon our conception of the better and the worse. If you do not believe in the progress of political and religious freedom, you will condemn the present. If you hate the rabble so called, and find that the plain man of the people is playing a greater rôle in the world than you are

willing he should play, you will find fault with the times. If you regard civilization with its culture and luxury as an absolute evil, you will hate the present. If you believe that men ought to live the lives of mediæval ascetics, that they should despise literature, science, and art, then you cannot contemplate our age with pleasure.

But if you believe with me that the ideal of mankind is to develop the physical and spiritual powers of the race in harmony with each other and in adaptation to the surroundings, to make men more rational and sympathetic, to give them control over themselves and nature, to bring the blessings of civilization within the reach of the humblest and most neglected, then you will have to admit that our times are better than the past. If civilization is better than savagery, then the present is better than the past. If a wider and deeper sympathy with living beings, justice, and truth, are better than hatred, cruelty, prejudice, and injustice, then civilization is better than savagery. The good old times solved their problems in their way; let us solve ours in our way. Let us be thankful that the past is gone, and look with hope to a brighter and better future.1

1 See the excellent chapter on "The Moral Progress of the Race," in Williams, Review of Evolutional Ethics, pp. 466 ff.

CHAPTER XI

CHARACTER AND FREEDOM1

1. Virtues and Vices. We have found that such acts are right as tend to promote welfare, and that such are wrong as tend to do the reverse. We have also found that acts are the outward expressions of inner psychical states, that they are prompted by something on the inner side. Among these inner states we mentioned the so-called egoistic and altruistic impulses and feelings, and the so-called moral sentiments. Morality, therefore, or moral conduct, springs from the human heart; it represents the will of humanity. Moral conduct, like all conduct, is the outward expression of the human will. Men act morally or for the welfare of themselves and others because they desire or will that welfare.

1 Green, Prolegomena, Bk. I, chap. iii, Bk. II, chap. i; Stephen, The Science of Ethics, pp. 264-294; Münsterberg, Die Willenshandlung; Fouillée, La liberté et déterminisme; Sigwart, Der Begriff des Wollens und sein Verhältniss zum Begriff der Causalität; Wundt, Ethics, Part III, chap. i, 1, 2, 3; Paulsen, Ethics, Bk. II, chap. ix; Thilly, "The Freedom of the Will," Philosophical Review, Vol. III, pp. 385-411; Hyslop, Elements, chaps. iv, v; Mackenzie, Manual, chap. viii; Seth, Ethical Principles, Part III, chap. i. For history of the freewill question, see Penzig, Arthur Schopenhauer und die menschliche Willensfreiheit; A. Alexander, Theories of the Will.

Humanity as a whole desires its own preservation and advancement, and therefore performs acts which tend to realize the desired end.

We call such acts as tend to promote welfare virtuous, their opposites vicious. We call the will that tends to express itself in virtuous acts a good or virtuous will, its opposite vicious. Acts which ought to be done we call duties, persons who do them dutiful. Morality is based upon impulses. Because men desire the preservation of themselves and others they are moral. But—and this is an important point - an impulse as such is not necessarily a virtue, though it may be fashioned into one. The impulse to preserve your life is not necessarily a virtue. Your desire to preserve yourself may be so irrational as to destroy you. Your desire for food may be so strong as to cause your ruin. Nor is the sympathetic impulse necessarily a virtue. Your sympathy for a person may be so irrational as to injure both you and the person for whom you feel it.

Virtues are rational impulses, i.e., impulses or volitions fashioned in such a manner as to realize moral ends. They are impulses guided by reason, controlled by ideas. Impulses are formed or fashioned or educated by experience with natural and social surroundings. Exaggerated impulses are corrected and weak ones strengthened. Impulses may also be reënforced or defeated by the aid of the moral sentiments or the conscience. An extreme egoistic impulse may be held in check by the feeling of obli

gation; and a weak altruistic impulse intensified in the same way. A person who is exceedingly selfish may be kept within proper bounds by his conscience, by the feeling that he ought not to indulge his desire to advance himself at the expense of others; while an individual lacking altruism may be urged by his conscience to care for others. Or the feeling of obligation may influence a man who cares little for self-advancement to preserve and develop his life, and cause one who is too altruistically inclined to modify his altruism.1

2. Character. - Impulses are fashioned into fixed habits of action, which cannot easily be changed, and a character is formed. "A character," as J. S. Mill says, "is a completely fashioned will," and by will here is meant "an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon the principal emergencies of life.”2 We may, therefore, say that a character is the combined product of one's natural tendencies or impulses, and the environment acting upon them. In other words, a man's character depends upon his will or nature or disposition, and the influences exerted upon it by the outside. world of living and lifeless things. This implies: (1) that the individual starts out with a certain stock in trade, certain impulses or tendencies, or, to state it physiologically, a peculiarly constituted brain and nervous system; (2) that these tendencies or

1 See Paulsen, Ethics, Bk. III, chap. i.

2 See James, Psychology, Vol. I, chap. iv.