Anger, for example, as prohibited by the moral law, is not a mere feeling of displeasure awakened by some injury, real or supposed, perpetrated by another. This state, on the other hand, consists in the surrendering of the Will to the control of that feeling, and thus acting from malign impulse. Pride also is not the mere desire of esteem. It consists in voluntary subjection to that propensity, seeking esteem and admiration as the great end of existence. Ambition, too, is not mere desire of power, but the voluntary surrendering of our being to the control of that propensity. The same, I repeat, holds true in respect to all the propensities. No mere excitement of the Sensibility, irrespective of the action of the Will, has any moral character. In the action of the Will in respect to such states—action which must arise in some direction under such circumstances—moral guilt, or praiseworthiness, arises.

I might here adduce other cases in illustration of the same principle; as, for example, the fact that intemperance in food and drink does not consist, as a moral act or state, in the mere strength of the appetite—that is, in the degree in which it is excited in the presence of its appropriate objects. Nor does it consist in mere excess in the quantity partaken of—excess considered as an external act. It consists, on the other hand, in the surrendering of the voluntary power to the control of the appetite. The excess referred to is the consequent and index of such voluntary subjection. The above examples, however, are abundantly sufficient to illustrate the principle.