Page:Ethical Studies (reprint 1911).djvu/228

. But morally considered one morality is not higher than the other.

Personal morality, then, is the process of the assertion of the ideal self, considered not directly as the position of its content, but with respect to the intensity of the process as will. And it must be taken in relation to natural energy, disposition, and all circumstances; and again with respect to the intensity of the negation of the false self, since this negation is an inseparable element. It further includes the willing of psychical changes in the self, in the way of systematization, since these are means to the assertion of the ideal, and the negation of the bad self. And the ground and result of morality is habit or state, which answers to process as its psychical embodiment and basis, and which, as standing will in a man for good, is virtue, just as the habitual will for bad is vice.

Or otherwise, morality is the systematization of the self by the realization therein of the ideal self as will; such ideal taking its content from (1) the objective realized will, (2) the not yet realized objective will, (3) an ideal, the content of which can not (without going beyond morality) be realized as objective will.

It is the process of self-realization from one point of view, i.e. as the negation of the will which has a content other than the true content of the self, and the affirmation of the will whose content is that ideal in which alone the self can look for true realization.

And being a process, involving a contradiction as the sine qua non of its existence, it tries to realize the for ever unreal, and it does desire its own extinction, as mere morality, in desiring the suppression of its finitude.

Morality is approximative; and, before we proceed, we must learn more accurately how this is to be understood. The reader, recalling our criticism of the Hedonistic chief good (p. 89), may now object that the contradiction we discovered there is inherent in all morality: that in all we aim at a mark we do not hit, and endeavour to get nearer to an impossibility. We must try to clear up this matter.

(1) That in morality we fail altogether to realize the end is not