Page:Ethical Studies (reprint 1911).djvu/55

 react alters, but the character does not alter; and further, nothing falls outside the character; it includes the whole individual. And this being so, we might have a stimulus, if not perfectly indistinguishable, yet so much the same that we can say, what has solicited once may solicit again; and, if so, what has been willed once must be willed again. I do not deny that there are some facts on the side of this view, but we must reject it; since, apart from the metaphysical and psychological objections to which it lies open, it is impossible to reconcile it with the palpable fact that characters at least sometimes do alter.

On the above view our abstract statement was as near fact as general statements need be. But let us suppose the opposite view to be true. If character is not fixed at all, if it alters perpetually, then if you have what would have been the same stimulus, you may always have a different reaction. Here the doctrine, ‘same character, same stimulus, same act,’ is not positively incorrect, but is quite idle, and tells you nothing worth knowing. But this second view, again, is in collision with plain facts, since more or less you can count on human action. Indeed on this view there would be no such thing as character at all.

What facts point to is, however, a third view; and that we may express by saying ‘Character is relatively fixed.’ Having once been formed from the disposition and circumstances, it may alter so little, and so unessentially, that we have a right to say it remained the same. Facts tell us that with many men there is a system of principles, conscious or unconscious, from which most of their acts proceed, and which we can presume upon. Again, others alter so much that, as to the man you counted on some years ago, you know not what he will do in such or such a case. And then there are persons who undergo ‘conversions,’ and we have to say, ‘Since such a time he is quite another man.’

On this view, ‘Same character and stimulus, same act’ is again more than not positively incorrect. It stands for something more or less real, and holds good more or less as characters are more or less fixed. But it never loses its hypothetical nature.

Nay more, unless regarded as standing for the abstraction of an element which really is inseparable from other elements, it is positively false. Here we come back to the second question we asked. Are we not forced to recognize something beside character