Page:An introduction to ethics.djvu/135

 their active or executive aspect, may be controlled and developed into desires, which are relatively permanent and pervasive. Again, emotions, which in their origin appear at the instinctive level of life, may be organised into systematic sentiments, which colour the whole moral life. But comprehensive as these desires and sentiments are, they may yet lead to conflict and disharmony in the moral life, unless they are unified in a permanent and self-conscious personality. Only then do we reach the level of formed character, for character is the moral self. We then considered the self or character in relation to practical life, first as willing its actions, and second as judging its own and other people's thoughts and actions. Will and conscience, we saw, are necessarily involved in character. Character is the moral self as a whole, as comprehending and organising, with the help of habit, all the processes that take place within it, and as co-ordinating and harmonising all the actions in which it expresses itself.

§2. The Relation of Character to Conduct. So far we have been concerned with the self and its processes rather than with the actions in which it manifests its activity, with its capacities and tendencies rather than with the actual behaviour in which they are realised. In a word, we have been studying the character of the self rather than its conduct. We must now ask, How is character related to conduct? The relation is a double one.

On the one hand, character determines conduct. Conduct consists of human actions, and these are always regarded as the expressions of the character of the man whose actions they are. A man's actions