Page:Ethical Studies (reprint 1911).djvu/204

 The reader will feel that, to a certain extent, the regulation of the times and fields of amusements, &c., and, to a still larger extent, the choice of trifling details therein, involves no reflection, no deliberate choice, is not made a matter of conscience, is in a word done naturally; and he may find a difficulty in seeing how, if this is so, it can be said to fall within the moral sphere. Morality, he may feel, does tell me it is good to amuse myself, and more decidedly that I may not amuse myself beyond certain limits; but within those limits it leaves me to my natural self. In this, it seems to us, there is a twofold misapprehension, a mistake as to the limits, and a mistake as to the character of the moralized self. It is, first, an error to suppose that in what is called human life there remains any region which has not been moralized. Whatever has been brought under the control of the will, it is not too much to say, has been brought into the sphere of morality; in our eating, our drinking, our sleeping, we from childhood have not been left to ourselves; and the habits, formed in us by the morality outside of us, now hold of the moral will which in a manner has been their issue. And so in our lightest moments the element of control and regulation is not wanting; it is part of the business of education to see that it is there, and its absence, wherever it is seen to be absent, pains us. The character shows itself in every trifling detail of life; we can not go in to amuse ourselves while we leave it outside the door with our dog; it is ourself, and our moral self, being not mere temper or inborn disposition, but the outcome of a series of acts of will. Natural it is indeed well to be; but that is because by this time morality should be our nature, and good behaviour its unreflecting issue; and to be natural in any sense which excludes moral habituation is never, so far as I know the world, thought desirable. In a good and amiable man the good and amiable self is present throughout, and that self is for us a moral self. This brings us to the second mistake, which also rests on the same misapprehension of the cardinal truth that what is natural can not be moral, nor what is moral natural. ‘What is natural does not reflect, and without reflection there is no morality. Hence, where we are natural because we do not reflect, there we can not be moral.’ So runs the perversion. But here it is forgotten that we