On the other hand, the most empirical mode of representing the moral ideal, even if it tends to abate some exaggerated and ill-founded expectations, enables a truer determination to be reached of the relation between theory and practice in morals. The true and valuable theoretical discussion of an ethical notion is concrete in character, based on a consideration of the way in which the ideas and feelings it summarises have operated when carried out in action upon human life, and on the attempt to follow out in strictly logical fashion the possible effects of modification either in the inner disposition or in the complex of interchanging relations in which that must be displayed. There is no a priori method applicable to the tangled web of circumstance in human life. A moral ideal is not the symbol of a mere afflatus of moral emotions, but the representation of a highly involved set of human relations, on which only experience of the actual and skill in eliminating the unimportant can enable a judgment to be formed. Whoever regards the moral code, with its accompanying sentiments and judgments, not as a supernatural gift, but as the natural product of the human factors which lie at the root of all change in life, and there is no other opposition of view in philosophical ethics, must regard the improvement of practice as essentially dependent on theory or knowledge. The Platonic or Socratic maxim that virtue is knowledge is indeed inadequate, but only because of the material implication; only because there was involved in that maxim a special view of the object to be known. Knowledge is not form merely, though even on that assumption its significance for practice might be defended, for it is the form in which human consciousness most clearly expresses itself, the way in which thought attains completion. But knowing can never be separated from its concrete material, and in that intimate union it is not the inevitable mode of organising or systematising experience.

It is perhaps in the familiar severance of knowledge from practice, a severance altogether illegitimate, that there may be found the root of that paradoxical opposition between theoretical acknowledgment of a law and reluctance to con

form to it which has always exercised moralists. Human thinking has no royal road to morality. If the race is but slowly moralising itself, it is inevitable that the individual's moral notions should be largely abstract, devoid of the full concreteness of content that would come from a larger power of thought and insight. Thinking is not a process that can be isolated from the content of the inner life. That it should appear in more or less close dependence on appetite and feeling, and but gradually and imperfectly obtain control over these, is the analogue in the individual soul of the slow, halting progress of morality in the race. It is of extreme importance to bear in mind how small relatively is the function of thought, how indirect its operation on the actual course of individual life. Strata upon strata, from acquired habit, through deep-seated hereditary instincts down to the vital energies of the body, lie underneath the clearer, thinner atmosphere of thinking, and he is a poor psychologist who does not recognise the enduring influence of these lower layers. Nay, even in what we call the thoughts of an individual, how little there is due to definite reflection, how much is custom and the unconscious result of the pursuit of circumstance.

What is true of the individual holds good, with no important qualification, of the community, for these are inseparables. In this also, ethical notions-for I call the ideas of law, political forms, and national aspirations, ethical-are throughout concrete and determinable only by empirical methods. There is no royal a priori method by which we can deduce a form of constitution from the supreme ideal of life. Each has to be considered on its own merits as a way in which humanity has tried or may try to carry on its business of conjoint life. Democracy or Aristocracy, each must be taken as a definable method of organising the national life, as a form of government, with a history from which something may be gathered, with a general nature from which something may be conjectured. And to all such forms of government there must be applied the reflection made on individual life. Just in so far as they express and embody the more abstract determinations of thought, they may tend

Q

to fall out of accord with the deeper lying strata of customary feeling and action by which the collective mind is most influenced, and so far they express ignorance rather than knowledge. The standard by which they are to be criticised is undoubtedly the ethical; but the ethical taken in its large and concrete sense.

WHO

LITERATURE AND LIFE

CHRISTIAN COLLIN

I

HO would care for literature, if he could read the Book of Life in the original text? But for each of us it is opened only at a random page, where our own little person appears, in the middle of a chapter, to disappear in the same or a following chapter, while the story goes on without break.

Not unlike the fragment of a novel, picked up in a stray number of a newspaper: "To be continued" in a following number. Yes; but that number will be read by a following generation!

The hieroglyphic text is marvellously vivid, with moving figures, but not easy to decipher by means of our little human key. How many thousands of years it has taken to grasp the fact that the sun does not stand for a shooter of golden shafts and a charioteer, but rather for a flying juggler keeping hundreds of balls spinning round him in space, himself, in truth, no more than a lifeless ball, though huger and more fiery than the others!

Life is simply unique as a story-teller, but perhaps a little apt to lose itself in long digressions, to explore many a curious wrong track, and map out in detail the roads to ruin. Life is fond of parentheses within parentheses. It has thousands upon thousands of years to spend. But we, unfortunately, have not always the time to wait for a full stop, being liable to die in the middle of a parenthesis.

Life is a poet, and Shakespeare himself is poor compared with life's wealth of vivid images. But we are these same vivid

images. And it often makes our bones and our souls ache to illustrate the august laws of life.

Shakespeare modestly laughs at his own attempt to compete with the art of life:

But the wooden oval of Shakespeare's little Globe theatre was infinitely more suited to our human power of vision than the world globe, "whose centre is everywhere, its circumference nowhere."

Science has a manly passion for revealing the inhuman monstrosity of space and time. Astronomy and Geology are millionaires, never tired of increasing and counting their ciphers. Zoology, too, is insatiable, especially after having discovered the endless riches of the realm of microbes.

The real world is getting too large, and yet too crowded. At the banquet of life we are beginning to doubt whether the party was meant to be given for our sake. The hostess has invited so many guests whom we scarcely know, or wish to be introduced to.

The most uncomfortable truth which the men of science have treasured, is the enormous length during which the feast has been going on, before we arrived; and the enormous length of time during which it will continue after we have left. I understand that Helmholtz has calculated that the sun, our sun, has light enough left for another nineteen million years. Our sun, to be sure!

While science has thus been making a fortune by extending Space and Time, and by always increasing their population, the poets seem to have been doing their utmost to make the world small enough for human habitation. Shakespeare