United States or Cuba ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Nothing marks this queer intermediate phase of industrialism more strangely than the fact that, while employers still claim the right to sack him like a stranger, they are already beginning to claim the right to supervise him like a son. Economically he can go and starve on the Embankment; but ethically and hygienically he must be controlled and coddled in the nursery.
Leaving out of view the question as to the exact interpretation of the facts of life, this optimism is ethically useful as giving cheerfulness and enthusiasm to moral life, with power of enduring ills through the conviction of the ultimate triumph of the right.
If the Irishman has been persecuted and tyrannized over, it is in virtue of certain ideals and principles which are ethically and economically inferior to his, and which he has consequently to crush in the very source, as much for his own sake as for those other members of the Empire to which, if it has been a misfortune to belong in the past, it may be an advantage and an honour to belong to-morrow.
Thus unchecked individualism is just as wrong ethically and biologically among men as it would be in the case of insect communities, as pointed out in the preceding chapter; no one has a right to expect service or deference to personal interest from others if he fails to work for them and for the good of all.
The meaning of this is not clear. The reference may be to the complete state which a thing may reach in process of growth. Thus an early stage of a rose-bud may be said to be "lower" than its later stage because it requires a greater transformation before it produces the bloom. But here 'lower' does not mean ethically lower, unless immaturity be confused with evil.
He wrote strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was solely and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt if he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than what was aesthetically bad.
It may pass into a stolid dogmatic ignoring or denial of the existence of evil, and then tends to become inhuman and therefore ethically bad. It is, however, commonly saved from such an unfortunate result by common sense and the instinct of sympathy.
He was though he did not know it ethically and philosophically right in squaring his morals with his occupation, and his had been the good fortune to live in a world whose codes and conventions had been carefully adjusted to the pursuit of that particular brand of happiness he had made his own.
"The ascetic exercise of the monasteries," he says, "inspired by superstitious fear and the hypocritical disesteem of a man's own self, sets to work with self-reproaches, whimpering compunction and a torturing of the body. It is intended not to result in virtue but to make expiation for sins, and by self-imposed punishment the sinners expect to do penance, instead of ethically repenting."
Were she in line ethically, she would have to believe that the sacredness and beauty of family life do not consist in the processes of the separate preparation of food, but in sharing the corporate life of the community, and in making the family the unit of that life.
Word Of The Day