THE SOLUTION OF PERSONAL PROBLEMS

Personal morality is the way to live the most desirable, the most intrinsically valuable, life-in the long run, and in view of the inescapable needs and conditions of human welfare; the way to avoid the snares and pitfalls of impulse and attain those sweetest goods that come only through effort and sacrifice of lesser goods.  That is what morality is, with reference to the single individual alone, and that is ample justification for it.  A recent writer phrases it as follows:  “I would define goodness as doing what one would wish one had done in twenty years-twenty years, twenty days, twenty minutes, twenty seconds, according to the time the action takes to get ripe Perhaps when we stop teasing people and take goodness seriously. and calmly, and see that goodness is essentially imagination that it is brains, that it is thinking down through to what one really wants goodness will begin to be more coveted.  Except among people with almost no brains or imagination at all, it will be popular.” [Footnote:  Gerald Stanley Lee.  Cf. also G. Lowes Dickinson, The Meaning of Good, p. 141.  Of morality he says:  “Its specific quality consists in the refusal to seize some immediate and inferior good with a view to the attainment of one that is remoter but higher".] The difference between the moral and the immoral man is not that the latter allows himself to enjoy pleasant and exciting phases of experience which the former denies himself for the sake of some good lying outside of experience, but that the latter indulges himself in any agreeable sensation that he chances to desire, while the former conflict with greater, being content not with any goods that may come to hand, but only with the attainable best. [Footnote:  Cf.  G. Santayana, Reason in Science, pp. 252-53:  “Happiness is hidden from a free and casual will; it belongs rather to one chastened by a long education and unfolded in an atmosphere of sacred and perfected institutions.  It is discipline that renders men rational and capable of happiness, by suppressing without hatred what needs to be suppressed to attain a beautiful naturalness.”] What are the inadequacies of instinct and impulse that necessitate morality?  It would seem as if the best way to live should be obvious and irresistible in its appeal.  But in truth we are commonly very blind and foolish about this business of living; we lack wisdom, and we lack motive-power at the right place.  Instinct is altogether too clumsy and impulse too uncertain.  We need a more delicate adjustment; for this, intelligence and conscience have been developed.  Morality is the way of life that intelligence and conscience oppose to instinct and impulse.  Not to be guided by their wisdom is to forfeit our birthright, like Esau, for a mere mess of pottage.  Some of the main types of difficulty that necessitate their overruling guidance we may now note.