CHAPTER VIII

THE MEANING OF DUTY

Why are there conflicts between duty and inclination?

If virtue is simply conduct that makes most truly for happiness, why are not all but fools virtuous?  The answer is, in a word, because what will bring about the greatest good in the long run, and to the most people, is not always what the individual desires at the moment.  The two great temptations are the lure of the selfish and the lure of the immediate.  To purchase one’s own happiness at the expense of others, and to purchase present satisfaction by an act which will bring less good in the end-these are the cardinal sins, and under these two heads every specific sin can be put.  The root of the trouble is that, in spite of the superposition of conscience upon their primitive impulses, human organisms have not yet motor-mechanisms fully adjusted to their individual or combined needs.  Some instincts are over-strong, others under-developed, none is delicately enough attuned to the changing possibilities of the situation.  Our desires tug toward all sorts of acts which would prove disastrous either to ourselves or others.  Many of our faults we commit “without realizing it”; we follow our impulses blindly, unconscious of their treachery.  Other sins we commit knowingly, because in spite of warning voices we cannot resist the momentary desire.  Readjustment of our impulses is always painful; it is easier and pleasanter to yield than to control.

Duty is the name we give virtue when she is opposed to inclination.  She is the representative at the helm of our conduct of all absent or undeveloped impulses.  The saints have no need of the concept; virtue to them is easy and agreeable; they have learned the beauty of holiness and have no unruly longings.  Sometimes this happy adjustment of desire to need has been won by severe struggle; the dangerous impulses have been trained to come to heel through many a painful sacrifice.  In other cases an approximation to this ideal state is the result of early training; by skillful guidance the growing boy or girl has had his safe impulses fostered and his perilous desires atrophied with disuse.  The proverb, “Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart there from,” has much truth in it.  But no parent and no man himself can ever breathe quite safe; we can never tell when some submerged animal instinct will rise up in us, stun all our laboriously acquired morality into inactivity, and bring on consequences that in any cool headed moment we should have known enough to avoid.  Thus duty, although she is the truest friend and servant of happiness, figures as her foe.  And some moralists, realizing vividly the frequent need of opposing inclination, have generalized the situation by saying that happiness cannot be our end.  “Foolish Word-monger and Motive grinder,” shouts Carlyle, “who