Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/257

241 of accommodation—in favor of a law set him by an alter, then this very attitude must become to a degree a habit, a tendency to look for a higher law, a moving toward some higher authority. But it is a habit of acting, not a habit of action. It involves the most acutely painful and difficult violations of old habits of action. It is then a habit of violating habits—that is the relation of morality to habit. And it is an interesting side-light on the method of the rise of the successive selves by imitation and submission, that in the lower stages of evolution we find the organism working under the same subtlety. The organism develops only by cultivating the habit of imitating; while the very value of imitation is that by it the organism acquires new accommodations by breaking up habits already acquired. The organism must be ready, by a habit of acting, to undo the habits of action it already has. And the origin of the moral sense by this method shows it to be an imitative function. We do right by imitating a larger self whose injunctions run counter to the tendencies of our partial selves.