"C.S.Lewis. Mere christianity " - читать интересную книгу автора

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human
beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave
in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do
not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it.
These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and
the universe we live in.Some Objections
If they are the foundation, I had better stop to make that foundation
firm before I go on. Some of the letters I have had show that a good many
people find it difficult to understand just what this Law of Human Nature,
or Moral Law, or Rule of Decent Behaviour is. For example, some people wrote
to me saying, 'Isn't what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct
and hasn't it been developed just like all our other instincts?' Now I do
not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by
the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct -
by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that
you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we
sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no
doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help
is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to
or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will
probably feel two desires - one a desire to give help (due to your herd
instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for
self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two
impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse
to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges
between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot
itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music
which tells you, at a given moment, to
play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes
on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our
instincts are merely the keys.
Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our
instincts is this. If two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in
a creature's mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the
two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral
Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two
impulses. You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the
man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same.
And surely it often tells us to try to make the right impulse stronger than
it naturally is? I mean, we often feel it our duty to stimulate the herd
instinct, by waking up our imaginations and arousing our pity and so on, so
as to get up enough steam for doing the right thing. But clearly we are not
acting from instinct when we set about making an instinct stronger than it
is. The thing that says to you, 'Your herd instinct is asleep. Wake it up,'
cannot itself be the herd instinct. The thing that tells you which note on
the piano needs to be played louder cannot itself be that note.
Here is a third way of seeing it. If the Moral Law was one of our
instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which
was always what we call 'good,' always in agreement with the rule of right
behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law