which, profiting by past experiences, uses its regrets as guides for fresh exertion. Discontent has sometimes been glorified as the source of all good; but it is only useful when it gives place to or itself produces the strenuousness to reform, and with it cheerfulness and contentment in doing the hard work of the world. 9. Duty is inseparable from these associations, which have gathered round it owing to its negative element of subjection to authority. But our analysis has shown that this negative conception is not the ultimate expression of morality. The highest conception, while it preserves the idea of obligation and its authority, displaces this by the more positive relation of unity between the part and the whole. Morality is the spontaneous outflow of the sentiments which make the good man. The outward order draws the individual to it, not by the authority of sovereignty, but by the spell of affection. A good man's heart goes out, as we say, to the moral law in a free contribution to a whole which expresses his best. The highest conception of his action is this of free service to an order of life, which on the one hand depends upon him for its maintenance, and on the other gives vent to his energies. Already in the family the scheme of such a principle is found in the care of a man for wife and child, prompted not by compulsion but affection, and rendered freely as his part of the domestic life. Morality is an extension of this free service. This idea of free service stands in immediate connection with that of progress; for the right is one stage in the forward movement, the solution of the many interests which it finds to hand, and it stands between an old order which it replaces and a new order by which it is to be succeeded. Hence, to work in the cause of progress is not a new conception, but another and more reflective form of free service in the cause of right. This is so, because to do right does not mean to conform to a standard already made, but to co-operate in the making of a standard. 'Make the world better than you found it,' is identical with Help to produce the right which comes into existence only through your help.' To some, morality will present itself more naturally as making for progress; to others, the idea of free service will make the directest appeal. But there is no such thing as a duty to progress over and above the co-operation in right. There is of course a duty to posterity, no matter where the limits of posterity are drawn; but this duty is included in the ideal of right action, and is different from a duty to progress. A father will wish to give his sons greater advantages than he had himself, but he looks at what he thinks good for them with the eyes of his own time. He cannot see their ideals as they will see them when the world's ideas have moved onwards. When he is dead and gone, his grandsons may think he had limited views of life, and, with the naïve sense for truth of the heroes of the Iliad, will "claim to be much better than their fathers." The only duty to progress lies therefore in doing your duty towards the work of the present, as the present is understood, when it is corrected by care for the future so far as the future and its problems can be foreseen. 10. These two equivalent conceptions of morality have their corresponding sanctions. As to a good man the highest principle is to render his service to his community, so his highest sanction, more bitterly felt than any punishment of the law, is the sense that that service has been neglected and an injury done to his fellows. From the point of view of progress his worst reproach is that he should have been on the side of retrogression, and have done anything to leave the world worse than he might have left it. Viewed in the light of this its highest principle, morality knits up the historic continuity of a people or mankind by the bond of gratitude. Devotion to the right is a debt we discharge to the past, which has made us what we are, able to work according to our gifts for the present and the future— "Here and here did England help me how can I help Nor is it to the purpose to deplore that, for all our efforts, we can never banish evil from the earth, and that the proportion of wickedness to goodness does not greatly vary; that as the removal of old material evils makes us sensible of new, so, as the coarser forms of wickedness are mitigated, they are replaced by others subtler and perhaps more insidious. These are the very factors of our progress, in which what is good comes to light by a process in which it rejects and conquers what, in virtue of this defeat, is bad. Swimming in the trough of a wave, we know that if we mount the next we shall sink down as deep again. Meantime we move onwards. And if, looking back upon the past from the vantage-ground we occupy in the present, we can see that the history of morality is a succession of beneficent and adorable illusions which for men are truths, then common-sense itself and reason, which is but common-sense guided and restrained by reflection, while it expands in the warm light of imagination, alike bid us treat according to the best of our judgment the mischiefs we can feel and can foresee, and leave to the future to cure its own as yet unimagined evils. II. Free service to a whole which is in continual progress is nothing but the analogy of animal life pushed forward one stage further. Why it is applicable and enters into our moral ideas arises from all those causes tending to make the idea of organic life appropriate to human society, of which some sketch was given in the Introduction. One word may be added in explanation. The society to which moral conduct is a contribution may vary in its range from the immediate surroundings to humanity itself. But even when an act is claimed in the name of humanity, it is no less a duty towards a particular person or a limited society. Morality only implies that, however wide or narrow the society, the service should be rendered freely. Hardly any temperament is so ineffectual for progress as that which, because its sympathies are widely diffused, cannot at the same. time intensely love a few. Conversely the greatest goodwill to all may co-exist with extreme incompatibility of tastes and disposition in respect of some. There are some persons whose characters we may respect, and even admire, to whom we should wish all good, but of whom we cannot help feeling that five minutes in their presence are as a thousand years. The second answer And if the principle is thought impracticably high for ordinary life, the reply is twofold. First, there are some people to whom any moral principle would seem too high. But, as we should not go to them for practical advice, so we need not think of them as the sources for a theoretical statement of the highest morality. is to refer to the facts, to ask whether this sentiment is not yielded by an analysis of moral ideas as at present held, and whether it does not animate great movements, even when the actors would be unable to give a definite description of the faith that is in them, and is not avowed, or at least acted upon, by the best men, and especially by good men among those whose testimony is all the more powerful because they reject the higher ideas with which morality is associated in the minds of most. 12. Of another subject which was touched upon in the Introduction we are reminded here-the affinity of present moral ideas to those of Greece. Free service recalls the noble name of piety,' by which classical times, borrowing the name from the relation of a son towards his father, expressed men's highest duty towards 1 Piety is the name which Clifford gives to the moral disposition (Lectures and Essays, vol. ii. p. 112). It is difficult to express in measured terms the loss which English philosophy suffered by Clifford's early death. their country; and its prevailing mood recalls the cheerfulness and geniality which distinguish their ethical ideas. It differs from piety in respect of that conception of free or independent individuality which lies at the basis of progress. While the Greek thought of the state as a great community in which all had their parts to play, he had not yet learnt the true relation of the individual to the whole. The whole was a limited ideal, and in its limitation seemed to be something prior to the individual, which existed as a finished product before him, and was indeed often regarded as the work of a legislator. Along with this contracted view went the absence of the idea of progress in the proper sense. Beyond the notion of a cycle in history, and the idea that after all parallel institutions may be found in earlier times, we find in Aristotle and Plato no account of progress in the sense of an indefinite movement by insensible gradations. The Greek despised the Barbarian or foreigner as below his own standard: we study even the savages, as a clue to our own characters, though some among us profess to be shocked at recognising in their grimaces the germs of our more decorous customs. 13. Piety, therefore, is attachment to an order of life, but differs, in so far as it is no more than this, from cooperation in making an order which is only one stage in the forward movement. In the principle of conduct, which has been described as the highest present conception, we seem to have two ideas combined. We have the idea of piety dignified by such a conception of human nature as admits a movement of progress. On the other hand, we have what may be called the Christian ideas of duty and of the creative originality of the individual, divested of the unrest and discontent which gather round these ideas. As a result, we have here in the domain of ethics that love of man for a higher and larger order than himself, which morality represents as solidarity with society-a continuously progressive society of free indi |