It is the
contradiction that makes the tragedy. Am I, too, not "truly one but
truly two"; am I, too, a Jekyll and a Hyde, both dwelling under the
same skin? The answer is: You are neither the Hyde nor the Jekyll
unless you elect to be. The true self is a principle in you superior
to both these natural characters, a kind of oversoul, as Emerson
puts it.

Sympathy and kindness lend themselves to the building up of a
virtuous character, they are the psychological bases of virtue, but
they must not be confounded with virtue itself. Taken by
themselves, they represent merely a felicitous mixture of the
elements of which we are compounded, no more praiseworthy
than their opposites are blameworthy. Sympathy and kindness
must be governed and regulated by principle, if they are to be rated
as moral qualities. Left uncultivated, they often produce positively
immoral results. Likewise, what is called justice is often no more
than a hard adherence to rules, a love of order in our relations to
others, which must be tempered and softened by the quality of
mercy, before it can be accounted a moral virtue. Again, a
willingness to advance the interests of a class or of a people is
often no more than an enlarged egotism, with most of the defects
of the narrower egotism, and must be regulated by a moral
principle, if it is to attain to the dignity of a moral attribute. It is
only by the conformity of our thoughts, our feelings, and our acts
to principle, that morality is achieved. It is only by such means that
the genial and attractive tendencies of our nature are converted
into genuine virtues, and the way of escape from the double life is
along the line of the moral transformation of our seeming virtues.
_Mend your virtues, and your vices will take care of themselves._

But if the illusion is dispelled that the goodness or badness of
an action as it appears to the eye is the measure of the virtuousness
or viciousness of the agent; if the principle that governs the act and
the effort put forth to conform to the principle be recognized as
the true standard by which we are to judge, then two consequences
will follow with respect to the conduct of life. The first
is that the seemingly petty occasions of life are to be treated
as grand occasions in so far as a moral principle is involved. For
instance, a petty falsehood spoken for the purpose of securing
business advantage or of avoiding business loss may seem to the
average man a trivi