Studies of good and evil : a series of essays upon problems of philosophy and life / by Josiah Royce.

  • Royce, Josiah, 1855-1916.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of good and evil : a series of essays upon problems of philosophy and life / by Josiah Royce. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    some things and also to hate other things, he conies to love his own hates and to hate his own loves in an endlessly complex hierarchy of superposed interests in his own in- terests. Now it is easy to say that such states of inner tension, where our conscious lives are full of a warfare of the self with itself, are contradictory or absurd states. But it is easy to say this only when you dwell on the words and fail to observe the facts of experience. As a fact, not only our lowest but our highest states of activity are the ones which are fullest of this crossing, conflict, and complex interrela- tion of loves and hates, of attractions and repugnances. As a merely physiological fact, we begin no muscular act with- out at the same time initiating acts which involve the in- nervation of opposing sets of muscles, and these opposing sets of muscles hinder each other's freedom. Every sort of control of movement means the conflicting play of opposed muscular impulses. We do nothing simple, and we will no complex act without willing what involves a certain meas- ure of opposition between the impulses or partial acts which go to make up the whole act. If one passes from single acts to long series of acts, one finds only the more obviously this interweaving of repugnance and of acceptance, of pursuit and of flight, upon which every complex type of conduct depends. One could easily at this point spend time by dwelling upon numerous and relatively trivial instances of this inter- weaving of conflicting motives as it appears in all our life. I prefer to pass such instances over with a mere mention. There is, for instance, the whole marvelous consciousness of play, in its benign and in its evil forms. In any game that fascinates, one loves victory and shuns defeat, and yet as a loyal supporter of the game scorns anything that makes victory certain in advance ; thus as a lover of fair play pre- ferring to risk the defeat that he all the while shuns, and