predestined for conquering and circumventing others." But it is not easy for us of this day to forget the others; it is the cost to them that galls our conscience. We cannot sincerely applaud a heroism in which life is condemned to feed on itself. Shall the only enemy that never fails, the condition that is always indifferent if not unfavorable, namely, the perpetual wear and drag of nature, be forgotten in order that men may fall on one another? Has man no more lordly task than that of destroying what he holds to be good? Is there no more of "creative plenipotence" in man than killing and robbing?

I am convinced that it needs only enlightenment to reduce Nietsche's circumventer of others to the proportions of a burglar; and to enlarge to truly heroic proportions him who circumvents the blindness of nature, brings up the weak or faint-hearted who lag behind, and throws himself bravely into the enterprise of steady constructive civilization. Nietsche is beguiled by a love of melodrama. He forgets the real war for the pageantry of an era that will pass. As a misleader of youth he conspires with the writers of dime-novels to fix the imagination on false symbols. The small boy who would run away from home for the glory of fighting Indians is deceived; both because there are no longer any Indians to fight, and because there are more glorious bat

tles to be fought at home. War between man and man is an obsolescent form of heroism. There is every reason, therefore, why it should not be glorified as the only occasion capable of evoking the great emotions. The general battle of life, the first and last battle, is still on; and it has that in it of danger and resistance, of comradeship and of triumph, that can stir the blood.

But I have not undertaken to make morality picturesque. I shall leave that to other hands. In an age when it has been somewhat out of literary fashion, Chesterton " has found it possible even to proclaim morality as the latest and most enlivening paradox. But I propose to leave it clad in its own sobriety. Its appeal in the last analysis must be to a sense for reality, and to an enlightened practical wisdom. Morality is that which makes man, "naked, shoeless, and defenceless" in body, the master of the kingdom of nature. Morality in this sense has never been more simply and eloquently justified than in the words which Plato puts into the mouth of Protagoras. He first describes the arts with which men contrived barely to sustain themselves, in a condition no better than the beasts which preyed on them in their helplessness. It is then that through the gift of Zeus they are rescued from their degradation and invested with the forms of civilization.

After a while the desire of self-preservation gathered them into cities; but when they were gathered together, having no art of government, they evil-intreated one another, and were again in process of dispersion and destruction. Zeus feared that the entire race would be exterminated, and so he sent Hermes to them, bearing reverence and justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship and conciliation."

But reverence and justice are more even than the ordering principles of cities. They are the conditions of the maximum of attainment, whether this be conceived as that supreme excellence which Plato divined, or as that all-saving good which is the object of a Christian devotion to humanity. Morality is the law of life, from its bare preservation to its supreme fruition. There is a high pretension in morality which is the necessary consequence of its motive. But man is not, on that account, in need of those reminders of failure which are so easy to offer, and which are so impotently true; he needs rather new symbols of faith, through which his heart may be renewed, and his courage fortified to proceed with an undertaking of which he cannot see the end. Faith and courage have brought him thus far:

"Till he well-nigh can tame

Brute mischiefs and control

Invisible things and turn

All warring ills to purposes of good."

CHAPTER II

THE LOGIC OF THE MORAL APPEAL

I

THERE is a phrase, "liberty of conscience," which well expresses the modern conception of moral obligation. It recognizes that duty in the last analysis is imposed upon the individual neither by society nor even by God, but by himself; that there is no authority in moral matters more ultimate than a man's own rational conviction of what is best.

1

We meet here with the application to morality of the motive which underlies the whole modern reaction against mediævalism, the motive which John Locke so aptly summarized when he said, "We should not judge of things by men's opinions, but of opinions by things." This is individualism of the positive temper, the protest against convention and authority; in behalf, not of license, but of knowledge. Mediævalism is condemned, not for its universalism, but for its arbitrariness and untruth; for its mistaking of the weight of collective opinion, or of institutional prestige, for the weight of evidence.

This is the characteristic temper of the modern

individualism, whether it be dominated by a bias for sense or a bias for reason. Locke, like his forerunner, Bacon, is an individualist because it is the individual in his detachment from society that alone can be open-eyed and open-minded; who is qualified to carry on that "proper business of the understanding," "to think of everything just as it is in itself." Descartes, although

in habit of mind and speculative instinct he has so little in common with the Englishman, nevertheless finds in the individual's self-discipline and concentration the only hope of preserving the savor of the salt of knowledge. Thus he says:

I thought that the sciences contained in books, (such of them at least as are made up of probable reasonings, without demonstrations), composed as they are of the opinions of many different individuals massed together, are farther removed from truth than the simple inferences which a man of good sense using his natural and unprejudiced judgment draws respecting the matters of his experience.'

Spinoza, who both abandoned the world and was abandoned by it, sought an individual philosophy of life that should be more universal than the opinion of the world on account of its greater truth. "Further reflection convinced me, that if I could really get to the root of the matter I should be leaving certain evils for a certain good."

This was the impulse in which modern tolerance of individual opinion and appeal to indi