Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/193

168 But this mistake is not specially modern. Not only the modern scientific moralists have been guilty of it, but moral preachers of all schools since Socrates have been prone to insist on occasion, for purposes of persuasion, that somehow or other all evil conduct arises from mere ignorance of what one wants. This view is a mistake. One may want anything, and may know it very well. There is no known limit to the caprice and to the instability of the human will. If you find anybody desiring anything, the only tolerably sure and fairly universal comment is, that he will stop desiring it by and by. You can seldom get any ultimate analysis of the motive of such a desire.

But we do not found our moral system on any such analysis. We do not say even that it is physically possible for any of us to get and to keep the moral insight long together. What we affirm can once more briefly be summed up as follows: —

1. Moral insight, whenever, however, to whomsoever it comes, consists in the realization of the true inner nature of certain conflicting wills that are actual in the world.

2. An absolute moral insight, which we can conceive, but which we never fully attain ourselves, would realize the true inner nature of all the conflicting wills in the world.

3. The moral insight involves from its very nature, for those who have it, the will to harmonize, so far as may be possible, the conflicting wills that there are in the world, and that are realized at the moment of insight.