THE VALLEY OF DECISION

LAURA BELL EVERETT

If I could know, if I could only see,
Clear-visioned through the mists that gather round,
The one true way! Debatable the ground

I stand upon. If but my way were free

From doubt, from fear of erring, naught to me
What others thought or said, what way they found
Inviting, or on what gay errands bound
They onward fared in their companioned glee.

O happy hero-worshippers who know
Your leader faultless, his antagonist
Fit only for the shafts you long to aim,
Up to the mountain! In the vale below

I see the good that each side aimed and missed;
I cannot praise without a note of blame.

From time to time the contents of the Morality Bottle have been changed. At first it held a rather bitter brew known as Obedience to Authority. Distilled for the trade by enterprising Medicine Men, it was advertised as especially efficacious in regulating the social system. The Authority was understood to be of the Properly Constituted brand, inherent in parents, teachers, masters, rulers, and priests. The consumers were children, pupils, servants, subjects, laymen, and women.

By and by the discovery was made that this panacea, like all soothing-syrups, operated by means of stupefying drugs. Constituted Authority turned out to be self-constituted and spurious. Under the Pure Food Law its dose was transferred to the Autocracy Bottle and partaking of it made to some extent optional.

The empty Morality Flask was thereupon refilled with a mixture secured from the Anthropologists and called Codified Custom or Conformity to Conventions. This was no less stringent than the other but more democratic in its application. No class or rank was excused from taking its share. And, like the other, its effect was to cure rebellion, anarchy, and all other symptoms of that dread contagious disease, Self-assertion.

Still later it was found that this Insubordination was not a disease at all, but your only true health. So once more the stale medicine had to be poured out, this time into the Scientific Jar, and Morality given a fresh content. For this the formula included originality, initiative, decision. The compound was named Intelligence and offered as a specific for servility, imitation, parasitism, and all automatic and mechanical tendencies. It is forcibly fed to none but voluntarily quaffed by all who like the taste and can stand the effects-exhilarating but heady.

The most recent and a most skilled and competent purveyor of this new wine in an old bottle is Professor Fite, of Princeton

University, author of Individualism. The subtitle of his new volume is "The Critical View of Life," and its keynote is the quoted Socratic sentiment as to the worthlessness of the unexamined life. The treatise is really a modern "Essay on Human Understanding," presented with engaging candor and freedom from categorical imperatives.

The author says frankly that his Moral Philosophy is simply a philosophy of life from the personal point of view. He meditates as it were in public and broods aloud. He penetrates with catholic curiosity into the maze of human existence but always holds fast to his clew, Morality as Intelligence. He reiterates this indeed until it becomes a refrain and along with his poignant feeling and pensive air gives a certain lyric quality to his ethical dissertation.

From the meaning of Fite's main proposition there can be no dissent. That morality must be intelligent may be accepted as an axiom. If the moral life is anything it is as he avers the selfconscious, critical, responsible life. But is it anything? That is the question.

To reverse the theorem and put it that intelligence is (in itself) moral would not be a fair test, although good Socratic doctrine, since the converse of any statement is not necessarily true. Yet that is just what the author does. For him it is a rule that works both ways. Since then the terms are identical, why not delete the duplicate and cease going round in a circle?

That, however, is a mere matter of nomenclature. And Professor Fite expressly cautions us against taking phrases too seriously. A more important, perhaps really serious, issue lies in another implication which he blithely disregards. This is not the reciprocal but the negative inference. If intelligence is moral, is stupidity immoral?

The point of this query is not just verbal contentiousness. It pierces into such vital organs as justice and courtesy. By long usage, illogical but influential, the term "immoral" has become an epithet derogative. It is meant to inflict humiliation or at least to puncture self-respect. Nor does it help much to denature the word to "unmoral."

Of course those who are not much concerned with morality can shed this opprobrium and forget it. But those who are deeply * Moral Philosophy. By Professor Warner Fite. Dial Press. 1925. 317 pp. $3.50.

concerned with it and insist on keeping it around must keep its consequences with it. And one consequence is the paradox of repudiating and pronouncing judgments with the same breath.

Validity of judgment depends on source of responsibility. Whose fault is it if I was born a moron and belong to the herd of dumb driven cattle? It is not that I was offered a high I. Q. and waved it away as Caesar his thrice-presented crown. "Call ignorance my sorrow, not my sin." And do not add insult to injury by calling me immoral. "The moral process," says Fite, "is analysis without end." But even the beginning of analysis requires brains. What can I do with my slanted brow and baser clay but take my rule and routine as I find them, and gape vacuously at the universe if I happen to look beyond my own treadmill? My dull life must remain forever unexamined, uncriticized, and unmoral. It is no encouragement to me to hear the professor declare, "If you know what you are doing, it is right." Because I don't know and it is wrong.

But, objects the intellectual moralist, you don't count so much, for you are below par and out of the reckoning. That may be, but I belong to the great majority, and any reckoning that leaves me out is as exclusive as Plato's aristocratic communism. Most of us literally "know not what we do" and what is worse, we do not want to know.

Professor Fite does us too much honor when he asserts that "in the desire to know we have the central and fundamental fact of human nature." It is to suspect that he made this deduction when his mind's eye was on his academic colleagues and he had for the moment blissfully forgotten his athletic students together with the whole world outside the school-yard fence. We may achieve greatness, but reflection, from Job on down, has been thrust upon us.

In

At the present time it is a question whether it hurts worse to be called knave or fool. As we grow in knowledge, and wisdom becomes of better repute, folly will increasingly be put on the defensive. And when intellect has finally gained enough prestige to be in the fashion, folly will be acknowledged as unwise. the meanwhile can we not find enough cleanly descriptive terms to tag ourselves with, and rid us of the unfortunately connotative? Professor Fite admits that "If morality is based on authority, the term might as well be abandoned." Why not just as well, if based on the intelligence test? He grants too that his moralist

is really a naturalist of souls who might in fact be identified with the mere psychologist, except that the moralist is less mere than the psychologist by virtue of his insight. What there is distinctively moral about insight is not explained.

Suppose then, instead of expounding at length what we don't mean by morality and encroaching on another domain for what we do mean, we quietly clear our lexicons of useless lumber, and our minds of cant. What the result? Have we deprived our speech of a symbol, our intellect of an idea, our life of a factor, for which there is no substitute just as good? And particularly if we come right out and say that "ought" is obsolete and "duty" defunct, do we thereby put all brakes out of commission, polish up the Primrose Path, fly the red flag, and induce fatty degeneration of all the virtues?

On the contrary we have only ousted a futile mawkish "Should" in favor of the stern inexorable irrefutable "Must-If." Docile Inertia and erratic Revolt alike have been geared up by the change into a self-starting and self-stopping condition, difficult and expensive to maintain but with infinite capacities for development. Obligation depends for its very existence on being recognized as such. Pious plea and scandalized rebuke are alike paralyzed in the presence of a supercilious smile. But there is nothing dubious or apologetic about necessity. Its "you must do so and so if you wish such and such" is a detached and serene oracle, calmly signifying the way things are. Flout them at your peril. Wisdom is a wonderful life-saver but has no occasion to be decorated with a row of moral medals.

"Given the examined life," concludes Professor Fite, "I say that nothing else is needed." Needed for what? Well, for morality. But what is morality needed for? Whatever it may be, is it an end in itself or the means to another end? What is the chief end of man, according to the revised secular catechism? It would seem to be the justified life. But justified how and by whom? Is justification by virtue or wisdom or beauty or joy? There is no arbiter of values, unless it be a consensus of enlightened opinion. Fite's own vote is for Hedonism, though he uses the more restricted term Epicurean, and warns us against the fallacy of a "simple" happiness,—as delusive as "simple" honesty.

This happiness, that is, the highest and finest satisfaction, he finds in the personal life and its intimate ties, those affections and loyalties that create all our emotional and spiritual wealth.