action in regard to them, we wisely turn them over to mechanical
control.



IV

Such is the nature of moral habit. Before goodness can reach
excellence, it must be rendered habitual. Consideration, the mark of
the second stage, disappears in the third. We cannot count a person
honest so long as he has to decide on each occasion whether to take
advantage of his neighbor. Long ago he should have disciplined himself
into machine-like action as regards these matters, so that the
dishonest opportunity would be instinctively and instantly dismissed,
the honest deed appearing spontaneously. That man has not an amiable
character who is obliged to restrain his irritation, and through all
excitement and inner rage curbs himself courageously. Not until
conduct is spontaneous, rooted in a second nature, does it indicate
the character of him from whom it proceeds.

That unconsciousness is necessary for the highest goodness is a
cardinal principle in the teaching of Jesus. Other teachers of his
nation undertook clearly to survey the entirety of human life, to
classify its situations and coolly to decide the amount of good and
evil contained in each. Righteousness according to the Pharisees was
found in conscious conformity to these decisions. Theirs was the
method of casuistry, the method of minute, critical, and instructed
judgment. The fields of morality and the law were practically
identified, goodness becoming externalized and regarded as everywhere
substantially the same for one man as for another. Pharisaism, in