welfare is to be praised and loved and sung, and kept before the minds of the young and plastic.

More deeply rooted, perhaps, than the disparagement of praise, is the compassionate revulsion from blame. "He meant well"; "His conscience is clear"; "How could he help sinning with such a bringing-up!" — such pleas pull us up in the midst of our condemnation. And they must have their weight. Conscientiousness must be praised, while in the same breath we blame the folly or fanaticism it led to. And the visibly degrading effects of environment should make us tender toward the erring, even while, for their own sakes and the sake of others, we continue to blame the sin. Society cannot afford to overlook sin because it sees provocation for it. There is always provocation, there are always causes outside the sinner's heart. But there is also always a cause within the heart, an openness to temptation, and acquiescence in the evil impulse, which we must try to reach and influence by our blame and condemnation. No doubt in like circumstances we should do as badly, or worse. But to blame does not mean that we set ourselves up as of finer clay; it means only that we continue to use a .weapon of great value for the advancement of human welfare. A man always "could have helped it" - he could have if his inward aversion to the sin had been strong enough; and it is precisely because blame tends to make that aversion stronger in the sinner and in all who are aware of it, that we must employ it.

Reward and punishment are the materialization of praise and blame and have the same uses. We reward and punish men not because in some unanalyzable sense they "deserve" it, but ultimately in order to foster noble and heroic acts and deter men from crime. The giving of rewards for good conduct has never been systematized (except for Carnegie medals, school prizes, and a few other cases), and the

practical difficulties in the way are probably insuperable. Indeed, the natural outward rewards of fame, position, increased salary, etc., would be spur enough, if they could be made less capricious and more certain. But to restrain its members from injury to one another is so necessary to society, and so difficult, that elaborate systems of punishment have been used since prehistoric times. To a consideration of the contemporary problems concerning punishment we shall return at a later stage in our study.

What is responsibility?

There is one plea which exempts a person from blame when we say he was not responsible. Responsibility means accountability, liability to blame and punishment. We do not hold accountable those classes whom it would do no good to blame or punish. Babies, the feeble-minded, the insane, are not deterred by blame; hence we do not hold them responsible. Beyond these obvious exemptions there are all sorts of degrees of responsibility, carefully worked out in that branch of the law known as "torts." The principle upon which man has instinctively gone, and which the law now recognizes, in holding men accountable in other words, imputing responsibility—is the degree in which they might have been expected to foresee the consequences of their acts. The following set of cases will illustrate the principle:

or,.

(1) We do not hold a man responsible at all for unforeseeable results of his action. If because of turning his cows into pasture a passing dog gets excited and tramples a neighbor's flower-bed, the owner of the cows is not responsible for the damage; it would do no good to exact punishment for what was so indirectly and unexpectedly due to his action.

(2) But if his cows got over the wall and trampled the beds, he would be held responsible, in different degrees,

according to the circumstances. If he had inspected the wall with eyes of experience and honestly thought it would keep the cows in, we deem him only slightly responsible. He could have done nothing more; yet he must learn more accurately to distinguish safe walls from unsafe. It is fairer for him to pay for the damage than for the owner of the flower-bed to suffer the loss; such risks must be assumed as a part of the business of keeping cows.

(3) If he was ignorant of the necessary height or strength of wall, we blame him more. He has no business keeping cows until he knows all aspects of the business.

(4) If there was a gap in the wall which he would have noticed if he had taken ordinary care, we hold him still further to blame, and his punishment must be severer.

(5) If he remembered the gap in the wall and did not take the trouble to repair it, thereby consenting to the damage his cows might do, his case is still worse.

(6) Finally, if he deliberately turned the cows into his field with the hope that they would go through the gap and damage his neighbor's flower-beds, he is the most dangerous type of criminal, of "malice aforethought," and his punishment must be severest of all.

In such ways do we distinguish between traits of character more and more dangerous to society, and adjust our blame and punishment to their different degrees of danger, and the differing degrees of efficacy that the blame and punishment may have. But throughout these are purely utilitarian, an unhappy necessity for the preservation of human welfare.

On goodness of character: Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap. XIII. F. Paulsen, System of Ethics, bk. II, chap. 1, secs. 3, 5. Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics, chap. VII.

The Kantian theory: Kant's Metaphysic of Morality. A good edition in English is Abbott's Kant's Theory of Ethics. There are

many discussions of his theory. An interesting recent one is Felix Adler's, in Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James; see also the chapter of Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, above mentioned; Paulsen, System of Ethics, bk. II, chap. v, secs. 3, 4; American Journal of Psychology, vol. 8, p. 528.

On responsibility: Mezes, op. cit., pp. 29–35. Sutherland, op. cit., vol. II, chap. XVIII. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, bk. III, chap. III, sec. II.

CHAPTER X

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 unescapable 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."1

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 gives up

1 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."