We thus sum up the constituents of man's moral nature: intelligence,
the conscience, free-will, and capacities for affection and doing.
Where these are united the subject is organized for knowing duty
and fulfilling it. But a final fact, of profound import, needs yet
to be added, not as a further faculty, but rather as a consequence
resultant from the union and co-action of these endowments, viz.:
that this organism of faculties presents not simply a capacity as a
possibility of the moral life, but a positive, vital motive adjustment
and organic pre-disposition toward it. It is not simply framed to it
as an articulation of dead timber, but is adapted to it as a complex
of living forces for normal movement. The moral constitution, if not
disordered or wrecked, carries thus a living trend or impulse toward
knowing duty and doing it. This impulse, seemingly pervading, if
not standing behind, the whole mental activity, as a sub-conscious
pre-disposition, appears as an original aptitude or incorporated
purpose in the total human psychical organization. Hence human nature,
if normal, is not indifferent to right and wrong. Its true life is
one of positive affinity for the good. If, under internal disorder
or particular circumstances, counter-tendencies appear and prevail,
this does not disprove the fundamental and normal set of humanity for
the moral life. Man is made for the right as he is made for God. This
conception of the positiveness of his total moral organization is
necessary to complete the view of man as a moral agent.[32]
CHAPTER VII.
THE REALITY OF RIGHT AND WRONG.
In this chapter we pass the dividing line between the two great
parts of ethics. Thus far we have considered only the facts and
manifestations of our moral nature. We have traced the unquestionable
phenomena of moral distinctions and obligation in human thinking,
feeling, and conviction. We have found the explanation of these
phenomena in the action of a faculty or complex of faculties of the
human soul, that discerns and affirms these distinctions. We have
studied this power and marked its data from its initial perception of
the ethical distinction through its further discernments, emotions and
judgments to its full assertion of moral responsibility. We have seen
its unique authority explained by the supremacy of the law of right
and duty which it reveals, and have noted the aggregate of endowments
belonging to man's moral agency.
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