Page:An introduction to ethics.djvu/175

 of prudence. The duties they advise are those which are calculated to make a man "Healthy, wealthy, and wise." Now, health, wealth, and wisdom are all desirable; but they do not constitute the moral end. Duty looks to a far higher ideal than that. And if we pay too much attention to precepts and proverbs, we are apt to discover that it is perilously easy to find precepts to justify any action that is most convenient and profitable to ourselves. It is wonderful how readily we can find particular precepts to support what we want to do, even if we know that what we want to do is really wrong.

(3) But even if we are sincere in seeking the help of precepts, even if we apply to them not to give us good reasons for doing what is wrong, but to guide us in moral perplexities to do what is right, we discover that they are of very little practical assistance. If we think of one precept which advises one course of action, we are pretty sure to remember another which counsels precisely the opposite. It is notorious that precepts, especially those that have become proverbial, contradict one another. "We have a dozen to tell us that honesty is the best policy; a dozen more to say that the children of this world are wiser than the children of light. Some to declare that like draws to like, and others that extremes meet; a host to persuade us that to hesitate is to be lost, and we are almost persuaded—till we remember that second thoughts are best. As many to decide that it is never too late to mend; and as many more to pronounce that as the tree falls so it must lie."