Instinct is altogether too clumsy
and impulse too uncertain. We need a more delicate adjustment; for
this, intelligence and conscience have been developed. Morality is
the way of life that intelligence and conscience oppose to instinct
and impulse. Not to be guided by their wisdom is to forfeit our
birthright, like Esau, for a mere mess of pottage. Some of the main
types of difficulty that necessitate their overruling guidance we may
now note.
(1) Our impulses are often deceptive. What promises keen
pleasure turns flat in the tasting; what threatens pain may prove our
greatest joy. Most men are led astray at one time or other by some
delusory good, some ignis fatuus-whoring, money-making, fame are
among the commonest which has fascinated them, from the thought
of which they cannot tear themselves away, but which brings no
proportionate pleasure in realization, or an evanescent pleasure
followed by lasting regret. "Pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed".
All sorts of insidious consequences follow secretly in the train of
innocent-seeming acts; the value of following a given impulse is
complicated in many ways of which the impulse itself does not inform
us. We are the frequent victims of a sort of inward mirage, and have
to learn to discount our hopes and fears. Morality is the corrector
of these false valuatiens; it discriminates for us between real and
counterfeit goods, teaches us to discount the pictures of our
imagination and see the gnawed bones on the beach where the
sirens sing.
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