4. Within the whole fabric of right or realised will, the element which naturally asserts itself by antagonism to the letter of the law is the morality of conscience, conscientiousness, or the idea of the Good Will. It is connected with the letter of the law, as Hegel puts it, by the various degrees of wrong. The will, that is to say, finds itself at variance in or with [1] the order of law and property which it has created as its direct and necessary step to freedom. Its realised theory, so to speak, is found to break down at a certain point, by being in contradiction with the needs which it was created to meet. “_Summum jus, summa injuria_”. We may object that the anti-legal will is simply wrong. This may be so, and again it may not be so. What the will has awakened to, whether right or wrong, is { 263} that it can acquiesce in nothing which does not come home to it as fulfilling its own principle. What so comes home to it is what it calls “good,” and it cannot accept any order or necessity which it cannot will as good, _i.e._ as satisfying its own idea.
[1] “In it,” when my will does not conflict with right as such, but claims the right in an object A to be mine and not yours--a civil dispute. “With it,” when my will rebels, and by its act, so far as in it lies, denies and destroys the whole fabric of right, _e.g._ takes the object A, without alleging a right to it--theft, a criminal offence, cf. p. 230.
When this phase of reaction is pushed to its logical extreme, we have the modern doctrine of my conscience and my pure will. It is the conflict of the inner self with the outer world, expressed in history through the Stoic and through some forms of the Christian consciousness (especially the Protestant consciousness), and in philosophy through the Kantian doctrine of the good will, uttered in the famous sentence, “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world or out of it which can be called good without qualification except a good will.” [1] Nothing is worth doing but _what_ one ought, and _because_ one ought.
[1] Kant, _Grundlegung zur Metaphysik d. Sitten_, sect. I.
The criticism to which this principle has been subjected is familiar to students of ethics. Its point is, in brief, that there is no way of connecting any particular action with the mere idea of a pure will. The forms assumed by evasions of this difficulty, which we fall into when we desire wholly to separate the inner from the outer, or the “ought” from the “is,” are treated by Hegel with unsurpassable vigour and subtlety, as indeed the annihilating criticism of this conception is primarily due to him. The essence of the matter is that the pure will directed towards good for the sake of good, having no real connection with any detailed conduct, may be alleged by self-deception in support of any behaviour whatever, and out of this may spring the { 264} whole sophistry and hypocrisy of “pure intention.” He makes the shrewd observation, [1] which is still of interest, that the extreme Protestant doctrine of conscience may take the form of ethical vacuity or instability, and that this had in his time been the cause of many Protestants going over to Rome, to secure some sort of moorings, if not precisely the stability of thought.