Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/352

 THE FINAL AIM OF MORAL ACTION. 351 beginning of the process to the end the form is never unfinished. The beginning and the end meet in one and the same moment of time. The activity and the joy, the deed and the sanction, are the alpha and omega of the moral life. No longer can the future be for ever looming up before the imagination in exaggerated shapes and colours, since the aim of life does not lie there. And at the same time a man will be freed from the spectre of his past self. Neither his past nor his future but his present activity will be the source of his moral pleasures and pains. Herein we find the ethical correlative of the Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sins ; in complete consecration to present duty one feels and knows one's self freed from one's past transgressions. And naturally when a man's past self vanishes, it takes with it the personal hopes and dreads which it had cast over his future. Again, when the moral aim of life is to be attained each moment afresh, the attention and interest naturally turn upon the actual duties and relationships immediately at hand. This gives the pleasures and pains of the moral sense something of the vividness of perceptions and physical sensations. The moral emotions have been weakened and the moral energies dissipated by association, in the imagina- tion, with the distant past and future as if there were no real cause for these emotions in the contemplation of one's actual, immediate conduct and motives, and no immediate demand for moral energy in the present sufferings of men. But by increasing the moral dignity of each passing moment the inner sanction as aim would increase the worth of all kinds of thought and feeling at the same time. It would moralise the whole man. As might be expected from the true final aim, it would so predispose a man to all virtue at once, that all the subordinate duties of life would, as it were, fall into order of themselves. In the first place, it would induce reflection upon one's own conduct. This reflection is one of the highest of mental activities, and thus the pur- suit of the approval of conscience would have a directly rationalising effect. It would tend, without a special con- scious effort on the part of the doer, to the exercise of the mental side of life, as opposed to the physical. Further, it would develop directly a man's consciousness of his own moral individuality, and with that the love of personal liberty on the one hand, and the sense of personal, moral responsibility on the other. Every man would come to feel himself, as Kant would desire, a moral and rational end in himself. Again, to make the inner moral sanction one's