like never led on to volition, we should have a being which might be pronounced good or bad in the same way as we apply these terms to a plant or lower animal according as it approaches or deviates from the type of its kind. But moral predicates would be inapplicable, because the conditions would be absent upon which they depend.

2. All these various phenomena become moral, as we have shown, when they are made the material of will. In this transformation, to recall the results of a previous inquiry, the suggestion is proposed in ideal distinction. from the mind, which thereupon assimilates or rejects it. We have seen that because in this process the agent is aware of the quality of his act, that quality rises to the dignity of value. But the process is merely the condition of moral value: we have now to show how this value is determined. If, taking the individual life, we ask what is implied in attributing to any act, say an act of temperance, that value for goodness which the epithet temperate expresses, the answer is twofold. The first part of the answer is obvious, and need be mentioned only to be dismissed the act is called for by the circumstances under which it takes place. But it is not necessary to repeat this condition, for a function is never performed except at the suggestion of certain circumstances to which it is appropriate, and its very existence postulates the exciting causes: we cannot eat without food, or be generous when there is no need. The second part of the answer is the vital one, that the act is required by the past and the future needs of the individual, taken as he is with all his faculties. The prudential reasons which are sometimes. given for such a virtue are an indication of this: you must be temperate in order to perform your day's work, or to enjoy the pleasures of intellect. In suppressing at the call of family claims a desire for indulgence (in abstaining from another glass of beer, in order to pay the

1 I shall afterwards discuss the significance of the idea of the adaptation of an act to the conditions which call it forth (Bk. III. ch. i. sec. ii. pp. 271-4).

school-pence of his child), a man acknowledges that each impulse can morally be gratified only if it leaves free room for the other parts of his nature to work when occasion calls. A vice implies a distortion or caricature of the nature, whether in the way of excess or defect, which leaves the complete meaning of the nature undeveloped: vice sins against the dignity of human nature, because it throws the mind off its balance. The measures of praise and blame are determined according to the way in which an action is likely to affect the other capacities of the agent. Benevolence, if gratified beyond a certain point, may cripple the agent's power of making as much of himself as he should, and is then condemned, though up to that point it is approved. The love of honour may be Quixotic, or it may, as in duelling, lead to disregard of those permanent necessities of the individual implied in the right to life and respect for the lives of others. An appetite, harmless in itself, may become an object of censure, if it conflicts with a reasonable amount of consideration for others. It is in this regard, the too much or the too little of a particular kind of activity, which make the bad act. And there will be acts, like cruelty, of which any amount is too much, because they can never be adjusted to the rest of life. Thus a good act implies an order or system of acts which are regulated by reference to each other. By the success with which it attains the standard required by its own place in this system its goodness is decided. The good life as a whole is a system of conscious acts, where each function has its limits prescribed to it by the demands of all other functions, so that no faculty shall perform its functions to the detriment of another.

In speaking of life as an exercise of faculties, I use the word faculty' for convenience sake, and not with a desire to revert to the theory that human nature is composed of a number of faculties. Faculty is a compendious expression for the fact, however it comes into existence,

that there is a permanent mode of activity which the agent exhibits in response to certain conditions which evoke it. It is the acts themselves which constitute the order at whose bar the individual act is summoned for sentence. 3. The goodness of an act, then, appears to depend upon its occupying a definite position in an equilibrated order of action. This definite position it is which gives the action individuality, and at the same time gives it that species of moral value which is expressed by whatever moral epithet (wise, brave, and the like) may be appropriate to it. What is implied in this definite position which the action occupies, and how does it receive its individuality as a contributory element to the total order? The answer is given by bearing in mind that which was shown to be true of all acts of mind, that they were continuous with each other in virtue of what they were, as distinguished from how they happened; that each had a content or character which, being a universal, could connect it with other mental events. Let us apply this to show how the individuality of each act of will is determined by its complex relations of likeness and difference with other actions. For clearness sake I will take a definite example, an act of generosity. The quality of being a free gift which is possessed by the act implies an identity of meaning between itself and acts which resemble it. The quality is universal, and comprehends many resembling though not identical acts within the same formula or law. For things are said to resemble one another which exhibit an identity of character, surrounded with subsidiary characters different in the two cases, but not pertinent to the quality in respect of which they are compared. But in the next place it is implied that the act is included with other and different acts under a more comprehensive law. The general quality of free gift does not exhaust the whole of the act, but there are other elements in the content, namely, the circumstances under which the free gift is made, and these circumstances are themselves universal

in character. Let us say, the gift, or loan, is made to a person who is struggling to maintain an honest existence, but lacks the means of making a start. The will to assist such a person, entering into the composition of the act, places the act in relation with acts which bear the general character of helping to the self-maintenance of human beings. As such it comes under the same head with the will to earn your own livelihood, and because of this can be compared with it, and may conflict with it. But observe that tne act in question is called. generous (with its implied idea of goodness) only if it takes due account of all circumstances. A free gift does not make generosity, but it is generous because it is given to such and such persons, for such and such purposes. It is the whole act which is viewed by the moral judgment, and all this complex of meaning enters into the meaning of the act, or into its quality. By the fact that the quality of generosity includes all these universal characters which make up the nature of the act, the act itself not only resembles all other acts of which the general character is that of free gift to a deserving object, but stands in connection with every other act which arises in the individual's moral life. It is the consideration of the other needs of life, for instance, in our case, what I can afford to give, which carries with it the consequence that a moral act, by the very fact that it is generous, or temperate, or the like, takes due account of all those relations in which it stands to other needs, from which other volitions arise. The good act is thus an act which throws out a thousand feelers to every part of a man's life, doing so, as before explained, in virtue of the universality of the elements which make up its meaning; and if all these relations could be explained in detail, then to know any one act of a good man's life would be to know the whole ideal of goodness, at any one stage of moral progress. By these relations it takes. its definite position in the individual law or scheme which constitutes the agent's character.

4. In this order or system, every member is determined by its relations to the rest; or to speak in conc we have an orderly life in which every requirement of the individual's nature is satisfied so far as is compatible with the rest. The result is an adjustment of the elements of the nature (that is, of the acts summarised under their elements) to one another, so that they mutually limit one another, and every one of them is advanced so far as consists with a like claim to advancement on the part of the others. What is the regulating principle of this order? It is the formula or law of the order itself. It implies the establishment of a proportion between its various members. In this proportion or adjustment consists the reasonableness, the rationality of good conduct (proportion ratio, λóyos); and in this sense reason may be called the regulative principle of morality.

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The proposition is, however, often maintained in a different form, according to which reason as a faculty of the mind is regarded as the author of the moral order. This assertion seems to rest upon a misconception of the true significance of reason, properly so-called. Reason has,

it is true, a very important place in the determination of conduct. It is, first, the instrument of deliberation, and in two ways. It has the office of resolving an end proposed into the means which are needed for its execution. And besides this merely discursive or analytic function of reasoning, it is needed in tracing the bearings of an act upon the rest of the life of the agent himself and of others. It has to combine the contingencies of life together, and to discover the full character of any proposed conduct. Irrespective of deliberation there is, however, a still higher form in which morality depends upon reason, though not different in kind from the use which has last been mentioned. Morality cannot ad

vance beyond a very low stage of complexity without the use of general conceptions, which involve the operation of reason upon moral experience, from the conceptions