With the evolution of society, made possible by institutions
maintaining order, and associating in men's minds the sense of
obligation with prescribed acts and with desistances from forbidden
acts, there arose opportunities for seeing the bad consequences
naturally flowing from the conduct interdicted and the good
consequences from the conduct required. Hence eventually grew up
moral aversions and approvals: experience of the intrinsic effects
necessarily here coming later than experience of the extrinsic effects,
and therefore producing its results later.
The thoughts and feelings constituting these moral aversions and
approvals, being all along closely connected with the thoughts and
feelings constituting fears of political, religious, and social
penalties, necessarily came to participate in the accompanying sense
of obligation. The coercive element in the consciousness of duties at
large, evolved by converse with external agencies which enforce duties,
diffused itself by association through that consciousness of duty,
properly called moral, which is occupied with intrinsic results instead
of extrinsic results.
But this self-compulsion, which at a relatively high stage becomes more
and more a substitute for compulsion from without, must itself, at a
still higher stage, practically disappear. If some action to which
the special motive is insufficient, is performed in obedience to the
feeling of moral obligation, the fact proves that the special faculty
concerned is not yet equal to its function--has not acquired such
strength that the required activity has become its normal activity,
yielding its due amount of pleasure. With complete evolution then, the
sense of obligation, not ordinarily present in consciousness, will be
awakened only on those extraordinary occasions that prompt breach of
the laws otherwise spontaneously conformed to.
And this brings us to the psychological aspect of that conclusion
which, in the last chapter, was reached under its biological aspect.
The pleasures and pains which the moral sentiments originate will,
like bodily pleasures and pains, become incentives and deterrents so
adjusted in their strengths to the needs that the moral conduct will be
the natural conduct.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW.
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