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Morals & Emotions
From Out of My Later Years, Philosophical Library,
New York, 1950, pp. 15 - 20.
We all know, from what we experience with and within ourselves, that
our conscious acts spring from our desires and our fears. Intuition tells
us that that is true also of our fellows and of the higher animals. We all
try to escape pain and death, while we seek what is pleasant. We all are
ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that
our actions in general serve for our self-preservation and and that of the
race. Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which rule
the individual's instinct for self-preservation. At the same time, as
social beings, we are moved in the relations with our fellow beings by
such feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for power, pity, and so on.
All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs
of man's actions. All such action would cease if those powerful elemental
forces were to cease stirring within us. Though our conduct seems so very
different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts are much
alike in them and in us. The most evident difference springs from the
important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of
imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it by language and
other svmbolical devices. Thought is the organizing factor in
man:intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resuIting
actions. In that way imagination and intelligence enter into our existence
in the part of servants of the primary instincts. But their intervention
makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our
instincts. Through them the primary instinct attaches itself to ends which
become ever more distant. The instincts bring thought into action, and
thought provokes intermediary actions inspired by emotions which are
likewise related to the ultimate end. Through repeated performance, this
process brings it about that ideas and beliefs acquire and retain a strong
effective power even after the ends which gave them that power are long
forgotten. In abnormal cases of such intensive borrowed emotions, which
cling to objects emptied of their erstwhile effective meaning, we speak of
fetishism. Yet
the process which I have indicated plays a very important part also in
ordinary life. Indeed there is no doubt that to this process-which one may
describe as a spiritualizing of the emotions and of thought-that to it man
owes the most subtle and refined pleasures of which he is capable: the
pleasure in the beauty of artistic creation and of logical trains of
thought. As far as I can see, there is one consideration which stands at
the threshold of all moral teaching. If men as individuals surrender to
the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking
satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken
together must be a state of insecurity, of fear, and of promiscuous
misery. If, besides that, they use their intelligence from an
individualist, i.e., a selfish standpoint, building up their life on the
illusion of a happy unattached existence, things will be hardly better. In
comparison with the other elementary instincts and impulses, the emotions
of love, of pity and of friendship are too weak and. too cramped to lead
to a tolerable state of human society. The solution of this problem, when
freely considered, is simple enough, and it seems also to echo from the
teachings of the wise men of the past always in the same strain: All men
should let their conduct be guided by the same principles; and those
principles should be such, that by following them there should accrue to
all as great a measure as possible of security, satisfaction, and as small
a measure as possible of suffering.
Next Article Segment
The 1941 photograph of Einstein playing the violin was taken at
concert appearance on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee for
Refugee Children. It comes from Einstein by Louie de Broglie,
Louis Armand, and Pierre-Henri Simon, et al., Peebles Press, New York
1979. Last revision: Jan 18, 1999
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