he should deliberately choose
to do it and to do it for its own sake, and thirdly that he should do
it as an instance of a fixed and immutable moral state.[1]

[Footnote 1: Aristotle: _Ethics_, book II, p. 42 (Weldon translation).]

Only when the individual is aware of the consequences of
his action, and deliberately chooses those consequences, is
there any individuality, any exhibition of choice--in other
words, any moral value in the act. When an act is prompted
by mere habit and custom, we have an evidence of an individual's
environment rather than of his character. Creatures
thus moved by capricious and arbitrary impulse are hardly
persons, and certainly not personalities. They are played
upon by every whimsicality of circumstance; their own character
makes no difference at all in the world in which they live.
To act reflectively is to be the controlling rather than the
controlled element in a situation. Action guided by intelligence
is freed from the enslavement of passion, prejudice, and
routine. It becomes genuinely free. The individual, emancipated
from emotion, sense, and circumstance, from the accidental
environment in which he happens to be born, is in command
of his conduct. "Though shakes the magnet, steady is
the pole." Morally, at least, he is "the master of his fate, the
captain of his soul."

REFLECTION SETS UP IDEAL STANDARDS. Reflection constantly
sets up ideal standards by which current codes of conduct are
judged and corrected. It is clear that ideals of life, even when
sincerely entertained, are not always possible of immediate
fulfillment. Theory tends continually to outrun practice,
since human reflection tends to set up goals in advance of its
achievement. For many individuals, anxious to attain immediate
self-enhancement, the current cones are not criticized
at all, but are taken for granted, as inevitable and irrefragable
bases of operation.

Many men, perhaps after a first flush of altruistic rebellion
in adolescence, settle down with more or less complacency to
the current moral codes. They do in Rome as the Romans do.
They may have an intellectual awareness of the crassness, the
stupidity, the essential injustice and inadequacy of the codes
by which men in contemporary society live, but they may also,
out of selfish preoccupation with their own interests, let things
go at that. If the established ways are not as they ought to
be, at least they are as they are. And since the current