Summary: | "Science subjects all the facts it uses to a controlling law, and by this law binds all its facts into an orderly system. No elements, however abundant, can become a philosophy without their determining principle. Moral Science must conform to this condition, and moreover, must find its principle within the spiritual part of man's being. Nature, through all her successions, can reach no absolute rule, and can bind relatively only, according to her connections as found in experience. With such consequences, it is prudent to take such a direction; for the great revolving wheel will crush those who cross its course. Her highest appeal is to self-interest, and can never awaken the feeling of spiritual worthiness. But the spiritual is the supernatural; and nature must be for this, not this for nature. The moral law is above nature, not taken from nature. The virtuous man must say, "I am thus, and I live thus, because this only is worthy of my spiritual being"; not at all, "I stand here and do this, because otherwise the ongoings of nature would torment me." The following work has been prosecuted under the full conviction of such a twofold demand. Only expediency, and not morality can be, if the ultimate rule of life be taken from natural consequences, and not from spiritual imperatives; and with such spiritual rule there can not even then be science, and in this a system of morals, unless all the elements used are bound up in it. But while the steady design has been to attain and keep prominent the spiritual principle, and also to combine all the parts in this principle, there has been no anxiety to exhaust all the facts which belong to the field of morals, nor is there the pretension that even all the important facts have been here gathered and classified. A wide occasion still remains for extending the application and circumspection of the principle, though it is with great confidence assumed, that the principle here applied will be found adequate to determine every virtue, and to detect every vice, and to give to them their proper arrangement in a system of morals. The science is incomplete, not in its principles, but only in not collecting every fact"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)
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