It was essential for Morality to find this whole organic structure ready to its hand before it could become a factor in human life. This structure had been developed and perfected by the organism for its own purposes, for the defence and enrichment of its life, to ward off painful and obtain pleasurable feelings. Morality took possession of it and used it for its own ends, which do not at the first glance coincide with the aims which the individual immediately perceives and imagines, and may indeed be diametrically opposed to these, preventing pleasurable emotions, causing him pain and even endangering his life.
But Morality, which is a creation of society, was only able to dominate the individual and gain control of the organic apparatus of his vital economy, because its purpose is directed towards the same goal as the tendencies of the individual organism, prolonging them beyond the individual's scope, aiming at his preservation, and thus coinciding with his instinct for self-preservation.
Morality limits the individual's vainglory and subordinates him to the community; it is the condition on which the community allows the individual to participate in the mightier and more varied means of protection and the enrichment of existence which it has to offer. But apart from this somewhat remote advantage of Morality, there is another immediate one for the individual: it consists in the continual exercise and consequent strengthening of inhibition; therefore, as we have learnt to see in inhibition the main factor in the development and differentiation of all living creatures, it offers a means of raising the individual to biological perfection. The faculty of inhibition, being in a continual state of strong tension, makes automatic reflexes subject to the will, makes blind impulses obedient to the somewhat less blind reason, and helps man along the path of evolution from the status of a creature of instinct to that of a thinking personality of strong character, capable of judgment and foresight, a personality which does not seek to attain the pleasurable emotions necessary to every living creature by pandering to his senses and satisfying the appetites of the flesh, but achieves them by gratification of a higher order, by the triumph of the intellect over vegetative life, by strengthening the will in relation to the stimuli of the outer world and the organs, by taking pleasure in the fact that the will is content with its sway. These are harsh but subtle pleasures which, when they continue to preponderate in the consciousness, bring about that state of subjective happiness which is in the highest degree beneficial to life.