§ 1. PROBLEM OF REASON AND DESIRE =Intelligence and Reason in a Moral Act.=--A voluntary act is one which involves intention, purpose, and thus some degree of deliberateness. It is this trait which marks off the voluntary act from a purely unconscious one (like that of a machine) and from one which yields to the superior urgency of present feeling, one which is pushed on from behind, as an instinctive or impulsive act, instead of being called out by some possibility ahead. This factor of forethought and of preference after comparison for some one of the ends considered, is the factor of intelligence involved in every voluntary act. To be intelligent in action is, however, a far-reaching affair. To know what one is really about is a large and difficult order to fill; so large and difficult that it is the heart of morality.[158] The relevant bearings of any act are subtler and larger than those which can be foreseen and than those which will be _unless_ special care is taken. The tendencies which strongly move one to a certain act are often exactly those which tend to prevent one's seeing the effect of the act upon his own habits and upon the well-being of others. The internal forces and the external circumstance which evoke the idea of an end and of the means of attaining it are frequently also those which deflect intelligence to a narrow and partial view. The demand for a standard by which to regulate judgment of ends is thus the demand not only for intelligence, but for a certain kind of intelligence. In short, a truly moral (or right) act is one which is intelligent in an emphatic and peculiar sense; it is a _reasonable_ act. It is not merely one which is thought of, and thought of as good, at the moment of action, but one which will continue to be thought of as "good" in the most alert and persistent reflection.[159] For by "reasonable" action we mean such action as recognizes and observes all the necessary conditions; action in which impulse, instinct, inclination, habit, opinion, prejudice (as the case may be) are moderated, guided, and determined by considerations which lie outside of and beyond them. Not merely to form ends and select means, but to judge the _worth_ of these means and ends by a standard, is then the distinctive province of reason in morals. Its outcome is _moral knowledge_; that is judgments of right and wrong, both in general, and in the particular and perplexing cases as they arise. This is the topic of the present chapter.