The moral life : a study in genetic ethics / by Arthur Ernest Davies.

  • Davies, Arthur Ernest.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The moral life : a study in genetic ethics / by Arthur Ernest Davies. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    common.’ Where we are dealing, as in ethics, with relations, among individuals, this means that thought has for its object a social situation. In thought are expressed not only the position and influence which the members of the socius severally have; but thought reaches a formulation of the individual and personal rela- tions that is intended to bring them into the unity of a system which secures to each its proper field and which presents them as mutually supporting and conditioning factors of the largest freedom. Thought, that is to say, is synthetic, and it tends con- stantly to become a self-thought. The particular kind of unity which, in ethics, thought aims to reach is the unity of a self. Now, thought cannot attain this goal by a tour de force, but only as it gathers its material from the experience in which the unity of a self has been achieved. In other words, we do not first of all think self, and then become a self. Rather, it is by becoming a self that any one can state or realize what the term connotes. If this is true, it falls in line with all that we have said above that the self is a gradual evolution, and the steps we take toward it are marked by the successful harmonizing of the differences which arise in the practical situations of life. We have seen, for example, that mental faculty is developed as the situations in which we are called to act are more complex. The same is consequently true of thought: it is the product of experience,and the instrument for the regulation of experi- ence. Only in the case of thought we have to say that it defines a con- tent which holds the competing or opposed elements of which it is composed in subordination to the larger whole within which, inten- tionally, each reaches its highest development and greatest security. Thought does not create nor does it destroy the differences with which it deals; it formulates a conception which is typical of the way in which all such differences in the future may be overcome. This, then, is what is meant by a self: it is a concept which thought constructs on the basis of experience, and it signifies, as it refers to the past or applies to the future, that actual or possible harmony of the individual and personal relations which are present in all social organizations. I am a self only as what is individual to me has received adjustment to what is personal and common.