GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

OBJECTIVE INTUITIONISM 221
avoids doing wrong; he is rather one who, because of the
inherent goodness ?f his nature, experiences no temptation
to act otherwise than as the dictates of morality demand.
He has, as Aristotle would say, 1 and as Butler agrees, 9
a "settled habit of virtue 19
; or, as popular usage has it,
the habit of acting rightly is, or at any rate has become,
second nature to him. So habitual, so almost instinctive)
would be the virtue of such a man that he might be
described as being almost unconscious of it. For to be
conscious that one is virtuous, is to be complacent, and
complacency at any rate in a mortal who, however near
to perfection he may be, can never quite attain it, is a
defect. It follows that the completely good man will be
an unsclfconscious man, unselfconscious, that is to say,
so far as his own virtue is concerned. The good man, then,
is one who naturally, easily, habitually and unselfcon-
sciously does what is right. So, at least, one would naturally
have thought.
(b) THAT VIRTUE MUST BE ACQUIRED. Yet the paradox
of ethics consists in the fact that what one would naturally
have thought, what in fact on reflection one still does
think, is not the whole of the truth. For on reflection one
sees that the contrary is also true. It is true, that is to say,
that moral experience, as we understand the term, must
involve an element of struggle. Ifwe never felt any temptation
to do wrong, there would be little or no virtue in
doing right. To affirm the contrary, would be to make
the possession of moral virtue a purely natural endowment
for which one could no more take credit than for the
gift of a good eye at games; and that it is such a purely
natural endowment is a view quite obviously at variance
with the judgment of mankind. For the judgment of
mankind holds that, however easily a man's goodness
may sit upon him now, there must have been a time when
he had to struggle to acquire it. The notion of character
formation, in fact; implies precisely this, that a way of
1 See Chapter IV, p. 99.
s See above, p. 200.