This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 Excerpt: ...and calculate the results of the action, and can accordingly recognise and adopt the suitable means; and I am equally able to perceive and clearly understand the consequences of my completed action. With those considerations in view of an aim for the future, and with these reflections on the consequences of the past, ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 Excerpt: ...and calculate the results of the action, and can accordingly recognise and adopt the suitable means; and I am equally able to perceive and clearly understand the consequences of my completed action. With those considerations in view of an aim for the future, and with these reflections on the consequences of the past, are connected the feelings of approbation and disapprobation, of pleasure and dissatisfaction, which influence and determine the will. My conceptions and thoughts thus themselves become motives; my own action being quite clear and comprehensible to me, I can make a stand in aid of those impulses of my own nature and of society which combat and repress egotism; I can, by means of conscious reflection, strengthen the motives arising from these impulses, and consequently also myself decide what is for the interest of the common welfare. The function of thought is critical in moral matters also; to recognise the true welfare of man, and to distinguish it from what is only seeming and plausible. But if I consciously do what is objectively in accordance with the principle of the common welfare, then I am subjectively a morally good agent. In establishing this principle, in whatever form, in my consciousness, --in taking it for the guiding motive of my action, for the principle of my will, --it becomes for me a rule, a precept, an ideal. Consecrated by education, religion, state, society; consecrated by practice and habit; and consecrated, indeed purified, by my own critical insight and by my own conscious assent, --this ideal is the aim of my efforts, the guide and leading star of my life, at once the origin and the goal of my action--a high thought of which I am at once conscious and convinced, which I both recognise and acknowledge, an ever-present Mo
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