"Well, a vast number of our
moral perceptions also are certainly of this secondary and brain‑born kind. They
deal with directly felt fitnesses between things, and often fly in the teeth of
all the prepossessions of habit and presumptions of utility. The moment you get
beyond the coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, the Decalogues and
Poor Richard's Almanacs, you fall into schemes and positions which to the
eye of common‑sense are fantastic and overstrained. The sense for abstract
justice which some persons have is as eccentric a variation, from the
natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or for the higher
philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of others. The feeling of
the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, as peace, serenity,
simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness,
anxiety, egoistic fussiness, etc‑-are quite inexplicable except by an innate
preference of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing
tastes better, and that is all that we can say. “Experience” of consequences
may truly teach us what things are wicked, but what have consequences to
do with what is mean and vulgar?" ....
"The deepest difference, practically, in the
moral life of man is the difference between the easy-going and the strenuous
mood. When in the easy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our ruling
consideration. The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quite indifferent
to present ill, if only the greater ideal be attained. The capacity for the
strenuous mood probably lies slumbering in every man, but it has more difficulty
in some than in others in waking up. It needs the wilder passions to arouse it,
the big fears, loves, and indignations; or else the deeply penetrating appeal of
some one of the higher fidelities, like justice, truth or freedom. Strong
relief is a necessity of its vision; and a world where all the mountains are
brought down and all the valleys are exalted is no congenial place for its
habitation. This is why in a solitary thinker this mood might slumber on
forever without waking. His various ideals, known to him to be mere preferences
of his own, are too nearly of the same denominational value; he can play fast
and loose with them at will. This too is why, in a merely human world without a
God, the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating
power. Life, to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony;
but it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the infinite
scale of values fails to open up. Many of us, indeed--like Sir James Stephen in
those eloquent Essays by a Barrister--would openly laugh at the very idea
of the strenuous mood being awakened in us by those claims of remote posterity
which constitute the last appeal of the religion of humanity. We do not love
these men of the future keenly enough; and we love them perhaps the less the
more we hear of their evolutionized perfection, their high average longevity and
education, their freedom from war and crime, their relative immunity from pain
and zymotic disease, and all their other negative superiorities. This is all
too finite, we say; we see too well the vacuum beyond. It lacks the note of
infinitude and mystery, and may all be dealt with in the don't-care mood. No
need of agonizing ourselves or making others agonize for these good creatures
just at present.
When, however, we believe that a God is there,
and that he is one of the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out. The
scale of the more imperative ideals now begin to speak with an altogether new
objectivity and significance, and to utter the penetrating, shattering,
tragically challenging note of appeal. They ring out like the call of Victory
Hugo's alpine eagle, "qui parle au précipice et que le gouffre entend," and the
strenuous mood awakens at the sound. It saith among the trumpets, ha, hat! it
smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting. Its
blood is up; and cruelty to the lesser claims, so far from being a deterrent
element, does but add to the stern joy with which it leaps to answer to the
greater. All through history, in the periodical conflicts of puritanism with
the don't care temper, we see the antagonism of the strenuous and genial moods,
and the contrast between the ethics of infinite and mysterious obligation from
on high, and those of prudence and the satisfaction of merely finite need.
The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep
down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no
metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate
one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of
existence its keenest possibilities of zest. Our attitude towards concrete
evils is entirely different in a world where we believe there are none but
finite demanders, from what it is in one where we joyously face tragedy for an
infinite demanders' sake. Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and
capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious
faith. For this reason the strenuous type of character will on the battle-field
of human history always outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive
irreligion to the wall.
It would seem, too--and this is my final
conclusion--that the stable and systematic moral universe for which the ethical
philosopher asks is fully possible only in a world where there is a divine
thinker with all-enveloping demands. If such a thinker existed, his way of
subordinating the demands to one another would be the finally valid casuistic
scale; his claims would be the most appealing; his ideal universe would be the
most inclusive realizable whole. If he now exist, then actualized in his
thought already must be that ethical philosophy which we seek as the pattern
which our own must evermore approach. In the interest of our own ideal of
systematically unified moral truth, therefore, we, as would-be philosophers,
must postulate a divine thinker, and pray for the victory of the religious
cause. Meanwhile, exactly what the thought of the infinite thinker may be is
hidden from us even were we sure of his existence; so that our postulation of
him after all serves only to let loose in us the strenuous mood. But this is
what it does in all men, even those who have interest in philosophy. The
ethical philosopher, therefore, whenever he ventures to say which course of
action is the best, is on no essentially different level from the common man.
"See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil;
therefore choose life that thou and thy seed may live"--when this challenge
comes to us, it is simply our total character and personal genius that are on
trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and use of that
also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or incapacity for moral life.
From this unsparing practical ordeal no professor's lectures and no array of
books can save us. The solving word, for the learned and the unlearned man
alike, lies in the last resort in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of
their interior characters, and nowhere else. It is not in heaven, neither is it
beyond the sea; but the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy
hear, that thou mayest do it."
- William James,
The Moral
Philosopher and the Moral Life, 1891
The Taliban jihadists are a more strenuous sort of men,
determined to bring everyone under Allah's Thumb of Saria Law― whether others
want to or not; just like the utopian communistic atheists under Lord Stalin's
brutal thumb, or the Khmer Rouge liberators under Pot Pol in Cambodia, or the
Maoist purists with their Red Book in hand. Strenuous idealists too often
yell a lot, and place their
finger on a rifle's trigger.
We philosophical Daoists, women and men, are more often the tender-minded
and easy-going sorts of fellows. We have a taste
for dealing more peacefully, quietly, constructively, gently, and stoically with the ills of life.
