It was essential for Morality to find this whole organic structure ready
to its hand before it could become a factor in human life. This
structure had been developed and perfected by the organism for its own
purposes, for the defence and enrichment of its life, to ward off
painful and obtain pleasurable feelings. Morality took possession of it
and used it for its own ends, which do not at the first glance coincide
with the aims which the individual immediately perceives and imagines,
and may indeed be diametrically opposed to these, preventing pleasurable
emotions, causing him pain and even endangering his life.
But Morality, which is a creation of society, was only able to dominate
the individual and gain control of the organic apparatus of his vital
economy, because its purpose is directed towards the same goal as the
tendencies of the individual organism, prolonging them beyond the
individual's scope, aiming at his preservation, and thus coinciding with
his instinct for self-preservation.
Morality limits the individual's vainglory and subordinates him to the
community; it is the condition on which the community allows the
individual to participate in the mightier and more varied means of
protection and the enrichment of existence which it has to offer. But
apart from this somewhat remote advantage of Morality, there is another
immediate one for the individual: it consists in the continual exercise
and consequent strengthening of inhibition; therefore, as we have learnt
to see in inhibition the main factor in the development and
differentiation of all living creatures, it offers a means of raising
the individual to biological perfection. The faculty of inhibition,
being in a continual state of strong tension, makes automatic reflexes
subject to the will, makes blind impulses obedient to the somewhat less
blind reason, and helps man along the path of evolution from the status
of a creature of instinct to that of a thinking personality of strong
character, capable of judgment and foresight, a personality which does
not seek to attain the pleasurable emotions necessary to every living
creature by pandering to his senses and satisfying the appetites of the
flesh, but achieves them by gratification of a higher order, by the
triumph of the intellect over vegetative life, by strengthening the will
in relation to the stimuli of the outer world and the organs, by taking
pleasure in the fact that the will is content with its sway. These are
harsh but subtle pleasures which, when they continue to preponderate in
the consciousness, bring about that state of subjective happiness which
is in the highest degree beneficial to life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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