one, the material upon which their action is built; the other, the equilibration in virtue of which the act can be moral. The finished product combines these two elements. It will be convenient to distinguish these two elements by separate names: the element of rightness and the finished product we can call ethical; the material of morality pathological, borrowing a term from Kant, but without the prejudices he attaches to it. All his powers and sentiments, taken along with his opportunities, constitute the pathological individual. Besides varying from man to man, they range in any one individual through many stages of rank. Some are purely physical; some, like pity or sympathy, depend upon social relations; some, like the sense of duty, when it acts as a motive, are capacities which are developed by the growth of morality itself. The pathological individual becomes the ethical individual in so far as he works up the material of his life into a plan of conduct, and he is ethically good when his ideal represents the social order as modified to suit his special vocation. This ideal has a double aspect. In so far as he is a co-operant unit his ideal is one of devotion to society. In so far as he is independent it is an ideal of "conscious and harmonious dignity," 37. The existence of many good individuals, each with an ideal peculiar to himself, which yet reproduces the social ideal, leads to an important conclusion as to the relation of the individual and society. Good men may be said to follow a certain type: but the description is insufficient, for their type is not merely something after which they are fashioned, but something to which they themselves are contributory elements. The social type is the organic combination of individual men, as the 1 A phrase from Mr. John Morley's essay on Carlyle (Misc., vol. i.), to which also I owe the suggestion to use Kant's term 'pathological.' 'Pathological' must not, of course, be confused with 'morbid.' body is the combination of its various organs. Hence the following result. The social ideal is a species of which all good men are the individual instances, while bad men represent ideals which fall outside the species, though they may resemble it closely. But whereas in the animal world a species consists only of an indefinite number of individuals arranged on a certain plan, and the species itself has no existence, except as a conception in the mind of the observer, or as an identical plan upon which the members are organised, in the moral world the species has a definite existence in the social order as a whole, with its institutions. The members of the moral species are not mere numbers, but together they make of the species an organism which is a real individual. Let it not be objected that since no society is in perfect equilibrium, and the ideal exists only in good men, the ideal is therefore as much a creation of the observer's mind as a natural species. An ideal implies no contrast of observer and observed: conduct is something mental: the ideal is a reality of mind, existing in the minds of those who act upon it. The social ideal has thus a concrete existence in the collective action of good men. The phenomena of moral progress will corroborate this conception of society as a species. Strange as the result may appear, it not only accounts for the application to society of the idea of an organism, but also for the repugnance felt by some to that application. Society is felt to be more than an organism, and this feeling has been defended on the ground that in no organism are the parts conscious of the end of the whole, whereas in society they are. This consciousness of the whole, however, I need hardly repeat, is not a permanent, but only an occasional feature of morality. But the feeling that society is more than an organism has its foundation, for the social ideal is not a mere organism like an individual, but is a species in a real and concrete shape. The 38. The central idea of this long inquiry into the meaning of good has been so often repeated that there is little need of more than the briefest summary. The positive results of the analysis are these. The moral judgment passed upon an act or an individual is normative: it measures its subject by a rule or standard which has been described in the two forms in which it presents itself, in the individual considered by himself, and in the society of which he is a unit. In both cases the ideal is a system or organised order, in the one case simply of the individual acts, in the other case of many individuals who participate in the system in virtue of their acts. This order is called so because, dependent as it is upon certain given needs or suggestions which are found in man, every one of them is gratified compatibly with the rest. moral ideal is therefore an equilibrium the actual genesis of which has not been traced, but which evidently implies a compromise or balancing of one element against the other so that an adjustment is attained. The order which represents the good individual, and by which each of his acts can be judged, is identical with the order of society in the sense that it is actually determined for him by the place which he holds in the society, the two things being the result not of independent processes, but of one and the same process, the former being in fact a copy of the latter. The supposed independence of the tendencies towards individualism and universalism has been shown to disappear, for the social order depends upon the identity of the repulsive and attractive tendencies of individualsa true independence being equivalent to true co-operation." 39. Besides these positive results, there is a negative result of the analysis which is of especial importance. It has been shown that the morality of an act or an individual consists in nothing more than adjustment to the order. 1 The same thing, we may observe, might have been indicated with regard to the individual's own activities: each of them is an independent individual act which repels or attracts the rest of the system. There is no new quality which belongs to an act as moral over and above the character it possesses as an act. It consists in drinking a certain amount, or in giving gifts under certain conditions, and the act has no additional quality of goodness. Its goodness merely represents its adjustment to the ideal order. Hence the importance, which moralists and preachers are always ready to teach, of understanding or realising the nature of our acts: for the more we do so, the more we are able to check our inclinations by the control of other sentiments. Το realise to the full that I am about to drink a glass more than is healthy is to think of my act as intemperate and immoral. We therefore need no special faculty of whatever sort to teach us morality-not even do we require a faculty of reason-our morality is an adjustment which is effected by conflict and compromise among the parts of our own nature, or what is the same thing, among ourselves and our fellows. Reason and the conscience have their special part to play in this process, but the process is one of simple conciliation which binds the good together and excludes the bad. It is hardly less necessary to present the same negative result under another form, which does not practically add to the result. The sentiments which correspond to morality, and from which moral action proceeds, are not a new and peculiar order of sentiments, but simply the ordinary active sentiments harmonised and adjusted. Directly moral feelings, like that of duty, may largely enter into the determination of an act that is, feelings which owe their existence to the moral institutions: just as the creation of truth may depend upon the express conceptions of scientific method. But as there are no marks to distinguish true thought from other thoughts but that of adjustment to a system of thoughts, so the feelings and ideas we call moral are but the most various feelings of human nature adjusted to one another, and refined or elevated in the process. CHAPTER III. OBLIGATION AND APPROBATION. I. OBLIGATION. 1. (a.) GOODNESS or rightness means then that an act is adjusted to the total order of conduct. Obligation is but one form in which this fact of goodness appears, and it expresses that an act is the act required. It is that relation in which the single part of the order stands to the whole order, when it is confronted by the whole: whether we are considering the relations of a man's act to the whole of his own character, or of a single individual to the institutions of society. Duty in the abstract is the name which comprehends obligation in all its details. A duty in the concrete is any good act regarded in its relation to the whole. On the other hand, the whole has authority against its parts, and every particular duty is said to have authority just so far as it is backed by the whole mass of duties. The command of a sovereign has authority because it gives expression to the will of the whole society over which he presides. Every particular duty has authority in precisely the same way. Obligation, therefore, is generically on a level with the relation between the parts of a vegetable or animal organism and the whole. It is what corresponds in human affairs to the necessity under which an organism lies of acting in a certain manner in order to conform to its type. Every duty is thus the performance of a function, and conversely every animal or plant function is, |