will, which show themselves in so-called moral weakness, should leave their mark on the character of the scientific or artistic work. Weakness of will impairs clearness of insight, not because insight itself is a matter of will, but because an effort of will is needed to keep a faculty at its highest strain.

22. Hence what is ordinarily called goodness, viz., the practical dealings of mankind with one another, forms only one portion of the ideal of morality. The broad and well recognised virtues of chastity, temperance, ourage, wisdom, are only the foundations of good conduct in certain departments. Being the most salient parts of life, and moreover those in which temptations are most frequent, they have monopolised the name of virtue, just as the old word purity is in process of being restricted to the one virtue on which most obviously the social fabric is built. But the ideal of goodness includes the conduct which wills other ends than the obviously social rela tions, first health, and then art and science. The care of health is dismissed as the object of prudence, art and science are supposed to be intellectual or imaginative excellences. In reality they all enter into the content of the end. Accordingly, if we affirm that truth, goodness, beauty, are the end of life, we must remember that we are not speaking of goodness as a whole, but only of that part of it which is concerned with specially practical as distinguished from productive conduct.

23. It is more important to observe that art and science, though they occupy a special and limited place in the end, stand upon the same footing as the rest of conduct. We have only to revert to the conditions on which conduct is based-the various affections of human nature, the physical functions, the feelings, egoistic or altruistic, imagination, thought. Some of these, like the sentiment of duty itself, could not exist except for morality itself. Upon the impulses arising out of them all conduct is built; but these impulses, though they are very unequally

distributed, stand on the same level. They all arise in the individual according to what he is and to his circumstances: they are not yet conduct: they belong to what I have called the pathological as distinguished from the ethical man. Though the impulse to investigate a body of facts or to make a statue is rarer and more elevated than the desire for exercise or pity for distress, they all stand on the same level in relation to morality. Thinking and drinking are alike in its eyes. The conduct of the artist is only the special conduct required in a person of special and not widely diffused gifts.

24. Hence we can understand how lives of devotion to other than obviously social functions, lives different from the ordinary citizen's, can be morally judged. We have to concede to the special duties which such a one owes to the cultivation of his special gifts the same claim to being moral as to his other functions. Persons of different capacities and different positions have by the very nature of the moral order a different ideal, a different specialisation of the common system. The lives of some great thinkers and artists have been a puzzle to the moral consciousness, which reprobates their excesses, though it acknowledges their achievements. Sometimes it allows their greatness, but denies their goodness. In the view here taken their goodness must be measured not merely by the measure with which they attain the ordinary standard, but by their devotion to their special duties as well, and we must judge them as a whole. We may, indeed, endeavour to palliate their lives by minimising the importance due to the commoner virtues in these exceptional characters, by dwelling on the temptations to which their passionate natures are exposed. This may explain their actions: whether it excuses them is a matter for the moral judgment, and the question seems to be decided in the negative. There is no reason to suppose that these special gifts confer a dispensation, and do not rather impose a higher responsibility. To palliate their sins

But in

is really to dishonour the persons we defend. dealing with such cases we are often the most partial and pharisaical of judges. We know from our experience that most good men are only good on the whole. But men of genius we estimate by a rigid standard, and are struck with horror because we sometimes find them failing. It is right that a defect in a more highly endowed nature should appear greater by contrast. But why conclude that such men are worse than others? Their publicity brings upon them a scrutiny under which few lives would be found faultless. But granting that they are no more saints than the average of good men, we have to reckon their failings in one direction against their loyalty in others, and we can then ask whether in the life of any ordinary man, without their special gifts or special temptations, the proportion of goodness to evil is greater?

25. The supremacy of morality, in this view, lies in this, that morality is not subordinate to a good consisting in the attainment of certain ideal states, but comprehends them. Knowledge and beauty might well seem ends which the will to attain them subserves, but which rank higher than the mere process of attainment; and the same might be thought of those states attained by ordinary good conduct. But just as it is by the test of good conduct itself that we determine which of our practical satisfactions are a legitimate portion of the end, so truth and beauty belong to the end of life only when they are limited and defined according to the ideal of conduct. There are cases where a man must leave a gift uncultivated at the call of other claims, or where he can only pursue his tastes up to a certain point. Unless we are to hold the monstrous doctrine that such a person really fails to attain his end, and that there is some other end different from the end which we approve, his end, we must hold, is settled as consisting of those states which come in the way of right conduct. It is not the cultivation.

of his talent which is the end of his life, but such cultivation as he wills, if he wills it in the manner prescribed by morality. Good conduct itself, as involving the equilibrium of his powers, itself supplies the test by which his satisfactions are to be judged worthy.

In this way, morality is the supreme concern of life, not merely the process of attaining some higher condition. All goods run up into good practice-everything is grist to that mill. The end of all life is good character. But the conceptions of practice and character we enlarge so as to include more than those activities, which have usurped the names. Art and science are practice equally with benevolence. And in character we reckon not merely that which issues in beneficence or courage, but that which is bent on intellectual or imaginative results. All the powers of human nature find thus their ultimate significance in the use to which they are put in conduct or character, the highest expression of human life.

CHAPTER V.

THE ELEMENTS OF THE END.

I. PERFECTION AND MERIT.

1. (a.) PERFECTION conveys different ideas which may be classed together under two heads. Either it is a positive or absolute conception implying the highest possible standard, or it implies a comparison with what by contrast is imperfect, and this contrast of high and low, perfect and imperfect, has been already introduced. The position of this conception among the elements of the good we have now to discuss. Let us first see, however, that perfection of itself is not sufficient to determine the end, and in considering the question we may put aside whatever difficulties arise from regarding perfection as a perfect state rather than a perfect activity. Obviously, we have only to deal with the absolute notion of perfection, and the argument will be similar to that employed in the last section. Perfect, then, is that which is the best possible: perfection is equivalent to the best possible conduct. Can we accept this as the law of the end? Only when the best possible conduct is understood as the best which is possible under circumstances determined by morality itself. Otherwise understood the conception of perfection is either unmeaning or false. It is unmeaning supposing it implies a similar standard of perfection for all: for even if the highest perfection, say of an emotion or a talent, could be known, it would be unattainable for men of lower powers. It is positively false and contra