4. Some such internal moral Idea necessarily exists, along with
all properly human actions. Man feels not only pain and anger, but
indignation and the sentiment of wrong, which feelings imply a moral
idea of right and wrong. Again, what he thinks of as wrong, he tries to
prevent; what he deems right, he attempts to realize. The Idea gives
a character to the Act; the Act embodies the Idea. In the moral world
as in the natural world, the Antithesis is universal and inseparable.
It is an Antithesis of inseparable elements. In human action, there is
ever involved the Idea of what is right, and the external Act in which
this idea is in some measure embodied.
5. But the moral Ideas, such as that of Justice, of Rightness, and
the like, are always embodied incompletely in the world of external
action. Although men's actions are to a great extent governed by the
Ideas of Justice, Rightness and the like; (for it must be recollected
that we include in their actions, laws, and the enforcement of laws;)
yet there is a large portion of human actions which is not governed by
such ideas: (actions which result from mere desire, and violations of
law). There is a perpetual Antithesis of Ideas and Facts, which is the
fundamental basis of moral as of natural philosophy. In the former as
in the latter subject, besides what is ideal, there is an Actual which
the ideal does not include. This Actual is the region in which the
results of mere desire, of caprice, of apparent accident, are found. It
is the region of history, as opposed to justice; it is the region of
what _is_, as distinct from what _ought_ to be.
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