=End Finally at Issue.=--Many questions about ends are in reality questions about means: the artist considers whether he will paint a landscape or a figure; this or that landscape, and so on. The general character of the end is unchanged: it is to paint. But let this end persist and be felt as desirable, as valuable; let at the same time an alternative end presents itself as also desirable (say keeping an engagement), so that the individual does not find any way of adjusting and arranging them into a common scheme (like doing first one and then the other), and the person has a moral problem on his hands. Which shall he decide for, and why? The appeal is to himself; what does _he_ really think the desirable end? What makes the supreme appeal to him? What sort of an agent, of a person, shall he be? This is the question finally at stake in any genuinely moral situation: What shall the agent _be_? What sort of a character shall he assume? On its face, the question is what he shall _do_, shall he act for this or that end. But the incompatibility of the ends forces the issue back into the question of the kinds of selfhood, of agency, involved in the respective ends. The distinctively moral situation is then one in which elements of value and control are bound up with the processes of deliberation and desire; and are bound up in a peculiar way: _viz._, they decide what kind of a character shall control further desires and deliberations. When ends are genuinely incompatible, no common denominator can be found except by deciding what sort of character is most highly prized and shall be given supremacy. =The Moral and Indifferent Situations.=--This criterion throws lights upon our earlier discussion of morally indifferent acts. Persons perform the greater bulk of their activities without any conscious reference to considerations of right and wrong, as any one may verify for himself by recollecting the general course of his activity on any ordinary day from the time he arises in the morning to the time he goes to bed at night. His deliberations and wants are mostly concerned with the ends involved in his regular vocation and recreations. But at any time the question of his character as concerned with what he is doing may arise for judgment. The person may later on realize that the type or kind of character which is to prevail in his further activity was involved in deeds which were performed without any such thought. He _then_ judges them morally, approving or disapproving. On the other hand, a course of action which at the time presented a moral crisis even, may afterwards come to be followed as a matter of course. There is then no _fixed_ line between the morally indifferent and the morally significant. Every act is _potential_ subject-matter of moral judgment, for it strengthens or weakens some habit which influences whole classes of judgments. LITERATURE