8 Moral and Social Significance of Personality

though they could, and necessarily would, live in intercourse with one another: but that this society could not be identified with the State, that the attempts to elevate the State into a moral being higher than any finite individual must fail, and that the divergence between personal development and social duty is in some sense. a real fact however badly ordinary thought may state it. The views thus to be maintained are perhaps 'individualist' rather than 'socialist': some would say 'atomist' rather than philosophical. But in truth whatever may be said of the latter antithesis, the former has long since lost all meaning. Every one knows that individuals imply society, and society implies individuals: the wearisome reiteration of platitudes like these only too frequently enables men to shirk the concrete problems of detail which alone have real value either for the practical politician or for the student of human life and conduct.

I

PERSONALITY AND THE

ELEMENTS OF GOODNESS

IN the first place let us consider how far personality is the necessary basis of morals: or if any goodness can exist except in persons. The question is not to be answered by pointing out that in its original usage person means the legally responsible member of society. Even if that proved law to consider us only as 'persons', it does not follow that morals must accept the limitations

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of law. As a matter of fact law itself allows rights to those who are not yet responsible: to children, for example, and lunatics. Nay further, while law exacts no duties from animals, it punishes those who torture them and in so doing it appears to treat them as creatures with rights to be acknowledged. If the possession of legal rights then constitutes personality we might have to call animals persons; yet this of itself does not constitute a sufficient ground to admit the existence of moral goodness in them; a sceptic on that point might cordially join in condemnation of conduct that inflicts on them needless pain.

To obtain any satisfactory answer to our own problem we must know more clearly what is meant by 'goodness' and by 'person': and if the conceptions are too simple and fundamental to be defined in the logical sense of definition their meaning can perhaps be illustrated in some other way. First as to goodness. To state a summary view, it appears to me that we regard nothing as good in itself except states of consciousness. But within these conscious states there are some which are distinguished by 'moral goodness': these seem to be without exception dispositions of the will and the emotions. There are, however, further elements of ultimate value to be found (1) in knowledge of the truth, and in thought that makes towards it, (2) in the creation and enjoyment of works of art, (3) in the pleasure that is a concomitant both of all these conscious activities and also of bodily processes that need not be the direct result of our impulse or will. Every point in this position would need further defence, and some will receive further elucidation later. Here it needs only to be remarked that the distinction within the valuable of moral good from other kinds of good is made

in virtue of certain facts whose complications have always exercised the moralist. We ought to promote all things that have value as far as we can whether morally good or not, they are all things which the good man aims at bringing into the world: and yet a man would not be called morally good simply because he was wise or artistically gifted or capable of great physical enjoyments, though he would be called morally good if he actively pursued in himself or in others any of these things to which value is attached. If nothing were good but the good will, it is always difficult to understand how the will could find any object for itself: but though there may and must be objects for the good will to set before itself other than its own existence, these objects need not be good in the same sense as the will is good. Philanthropy must aim at a good beyond itself, and when the philanthropist gives little children buns, the pleasure produced in the children must doubtless be a good thing and a proper end for the philanthropic will: but the enjoyment does not make the children morally good as charity makes the charitable.

How then are we to conceive the relation of these elements of value and goodness to personality? Persons are no doubt conscious beings, and we may hope to find in them desirable states of consciousness. But are all conscious beings persons? The most thorny topics of comparative psychology are involved in a reply to this question here we must again consider those aspects of the problem only in which ethics has the greatest interest. The common custom of language as well as the orthodox opinion among philosophers would deny that personality is present wherever there is consciousness. If it is believed that flowers are conscious, that they in some

way perceive the sunlight, the rain, or even desire light or darkness, as some theories of tropisms' would make us think, they are still but seldom called persons. If in the lower animals we suppose definite conscious impulses to exist as well as perceptions, we should still hesitate before allowing that even these had reached the personal level. Not merely to be a self, but to have a developed consciousness of self: to realize definitely the existence of an outer world against which the self acts and reacts: to form deliberate plans in which memory serves to guide, and rational criticism to control the will: powers such as these would seem inseparable from personality, and yet it appears very doubtful whether such autonomy of interest and purpose against the surrounding world is realized in the life of any animal but man himself.

Now to return to our account of the elements of goodness, it is clear that some of these could exist in conscious beings, if there are such, who have not reached the stage of personality. Pleasures of various kinds may be expected to exist wherever there is sentience at all; though the love of knowledge and the love of beauty with their attendant enjoyments could only be expected in self-conscious persons. Similarly in what we called the morally good states of consciousness, deliberate choice, will devoted to a rational plan and purpose seem to be clear marks of personality. But there are impulses and emotions, which some writers attribute to the lower animals as well as men, and considerable difficulty must be felt in deciding whether these too possess moral value.

The difficulty then is twofold. Do these impulses exist even in beings who cannot be considered persons?

And wherever they exist, could moral goodness or badness be attributed to them? On the first question the balance of psychological opinion would seem to answer in the affirmative. Personality demands the continuous life of a self, conscious that it is a unity of diverse states and phases extending over a period of time and contrasted with a world that is not self. How far the continuity extends, how close the unity can be carried would have to be debated at length. And as we have hinted already personality may be regarded as in its full sense an ideal to which the self-conscious beings of actual life are at best only feeble approximations. But even if personality is allowed to be a matter of degree there is doubtless a point below which the term could not properly be employed. If a creature is not self-conscious at all, or at least has a momentary and shadowy self-consciousness incapable of setting before itself definite plans of conduct in which all its desires are co-ordinated together, it would not be a person. Yet a writer like Dr. McDougall would assert emphatically the existence of impulse and emotion in such creatures as these. In forming his list of the primary human instincts and emotions he attaches much importance to the presence or absence of similar dispositions in the higher animals, though he would only allow animals self-consciousness of the most rudimentary kind'.1 It is indeed difficult to interpret the behaviour of a dog without attributing to it such 'primary emotions' as fear and anger with their correlative impulses. But there is obviously a considerable psychological difficulty here in guessing at the precise nature of a conscious state which would seem to be modified when there is intelligence and self-consciousness almost out of recognition. Anger

1 Social Psychology, pp. 49 and 63.