Temptation arises when the morally lower impulse possesses the
greater intensity for the subject choosing. It is an inevitable
and lifelong experience.

But temptation is not sin. The volitional consent involved in sin
serves to distinguish sin from temptation, subjection to which
may be entirely involuntary.

Sin, as now fully defined, is not only predicable of the single act or
intention, but also of the character, built up largely of habits
voluntarily formed.

THE original sources of the incentives which prompt
the will to action, we have now seen, are feeling and
the emotional and conative tendencies belonging to
our nature as we receive it. The presence of such
'irrational' native propensities within us along with
reason and moral discernment, we have further found,
is an essential condition of the possibility of morality
of the distinctively human type. For were we possessed
of endowments of disposition alone, without volition
and conscience, we should be but unmoral animals;
and if self-consciousness and cognition exhausted the
functions of our mind, we should be unmoral in-
telligences. Without some occasion for choice between
incentives to actions of different moral worth, without
opportunity to choose the good in the presence of a
possible alternative choice of evil or of lesser good,
moral conduct is precluded ¹. The conflict of impulse,

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