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

may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes
tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses -
say mother love or patriotism - are good, and others, like sex or the
fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the
fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more
frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism. But there are
situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual
impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also
occasions on which a mother's love forher own children or a man's love for
his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness
towards other people's children or countries. Strictly speaking, there are
no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has
not got two kinds of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong; ones.
Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law
is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a
kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the
instincts.
By the way, the point is of great practical consequence. The most
dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and
set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of
them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute
guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not.
If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and
faking evidence in trials 'for the sake of humanity', and become in the end
a cruel and treacherous man.
Other people wrote to me saying, 'Isn't what you call the Moral Law
just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?' I
think there is a misunderstanding here. The people who ask that question are
usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents
and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. But, of
course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A
child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it
does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention,
something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made
different if they had liked? I fully agree that we learn the Rule of Decent
Behaviour from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn
everything else. But some of the things we learn are mere conventions which
might have been different -we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it
might just as well have been the rule to keep to the right - and others of
them, like
mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the Law of
Human Nature belongs.
There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as
mathematics. The first is, as I said in the first chapter, that though there
are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of
another, the differences are not really very great - not nearly so great as
most people imagine - and you can recognise the same law running through
them all: whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of
clothes people wear, may differ to any extent. The other reason is this.
When you think about these differences between the morality of one people