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Read Ebook: Huxley and education Address at the Opening of the College Year Columbia University September 28 1910 by Osborn Henry Fairfield
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Ebook has 63 lines and 12354 words, and 2 pages
Although recompenses and punishments may be only secondary means by which men may be led to do good and avoid evil, this should not be their essential office nor their real idea.
Another confusion of ideas which should be equally avoided, and which is very common among men, is that which consists in taking the reward itself for a good, and the punishment for an evil.
It is thus that men are often more proud of the titles and honors they have obtained, than of the real merit through which they have won them. It is thus also that they fear the prison more than the crime, and shame more than vice.
It is for this reason that the greatest courage is needed to bear undeserved punishment.
It is a well-known fact that virtue is not a sufficient shield to protect us against the blows of adversity, and that immorality does not necessarily condemn one to misery and grief. It is evident that a man corrupt and wicked may be born with all the advantages of genius, fortune, health; and that an honest man may have inherited none of these.
There is in this neither injustice nor blind chance; but it proves that the harmony between moral good and happiness is not of this world.
In regard to the pleasures and pains of conscience, it is also evident that they are not sufficient. In fact, the pleasures of the senses may divert and deaden the pangs of remorse; and it must also be said, though it be still more sad, that it sometimes happens that a merciless continuance of misfortune deadens in an honest soul the delight in virtue; and the painful efforts which virtue costs may finally obliterate in a man, tired of life, the calm and sweet enjoyment which it naturally brings with it.
If such is the disproportion and disagreement between the inner pleasures and pains, and the moral merit of him who experiences them, what shall we say of that wholly outward sanction which consists in the rewards and punishments distributed by the unequal justice of man? I do not speak of legal pains alone; it is well known that they often fall upon the innocent, and are spared to the guilty; that they are almost always disproportioned: the law punishing the crime, without taking note of the exact moral value of the action; but I speak also of the pains and rewards of public opinion, esteem, and contempt. Are these always in an exact proportion to merit?
From all these observations it results that the law of harmony between good and happiness is not of this world; that there is always disagreement, or at least disproportion, between moral merit and the pleasures of the senses. Hence the necessity of a superior sanction, the means and time of which are in the hand of God.
DIVISION OF DUTIES--GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL MORALITY.
SUMMARY.
Human actions may then be divided, either in regard to the different beings they have for their object, or in regard to the various faculties to which they relate.
Social morality is by far the most extended in precepts and applications, the various relations of men with each other being extremely numerous
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