Truth: so, also, in this all-inclusive sphere of the Moral Life, the aim of the aspirant is to achieve an analogous rectification and organisation of Conduct. This, if it could be attained, would make of our Practical Life a Moral Order, where no duty should finally conflict with any other: where, again, every right action should so fall into its fitting place as not to clash with any other, but each, in this case also, contribute something, be it little or much, to that perfected Obedience of the Will, which answers as the subjective element to its great Objective-the perfect Righteousness.

NOTE 33, PAGE 134.

We must leave it to the psychologist to track out for us the gradual process with its several stages and occasional crises, by which out of instinctive propensions and desires this autonomy of life may be at length evolved. Our immediate concern is with the fact too often overlooked, that Will, like Intellect, needs its materials, so to speak, before it can exercise its autocratic function, and that these materials are gradually provided for it, as they are also for the Intellect, out of that early sensational experience which is for all of us our starting point in life. As it has been well put, neither Intellect nor Will can act in vacuo: as the one needs its sense-imagery to enable it to exert its proper office of discriminating what is different, and of putting together what is judged to be alike, in this way carrying forwards those analytic and synthetic processes which have created for us the worlds of Science and of Philosophy: so in this all-important sphere of Voluntary Conduct, that which we name abstractly our Will, but which is in truth our very selves in free activity, can originate nothing. Its office is that of choosing, selecting, deciding between contending claimants on our motor activity. Thus its materials are accumulated little by little, as the whole series of organic wants, appetites, instincts, and the

rest-all in fact that make up our impulse to act-are brought into play. Then it is, and in a manner closely analogous to that apparent in the related sphere of purely mental operation, that it finds its opportunity, and enters as a sovereign among them. Yet here also it finds within itself clear evidence that it is, after all, a delegated authority with which it is invested that like the Centurion in the gospels itself also is under Authority, though it have its ministers and servants under it to whom it can say 'Come, and he cometh' or 'Do this, and he doeth it.' Thus the man who has attained that perfect autonomy which was the lofty ideal of the noblest Stoicism, discovers that he is related as a subject to some mysterious Authority which speaks down to him from a height supreme. And, again, one is tempted to anticipate and ask, 'Whence does this Voice speak? Where on high is seated an Authority which thus claims that highest power we know in this our human life, a free human will?'

NOTE 34, PAGE 135.

It is inevitable, doubtless, that ultimately that larger claim which lies in the Revelation of Christ will assume into itself the Ethics of the Christian, and in so doing will inspire and transfigure them. But it is still the part of a Christian thinker not to allow this great fact to interfere with his serious endeavour to obtain some clear and satisfying conception of Morals, of Ethics, in general.

NOTE 35, PAGE 136.

This extraordinary diversity has always given large occasion to the scoffers to deceive themselves and others with the notion that this sacred principle of Duty is, after all, a very chameleon in its shifting hues: a matter indeed almost altogether of climate, of age, of that relative civilisation or relative barbarism which sums up the normal

condition of human life in this world. Yet, spite of all that can be urged on this score, and allowing for every conceivable variety of embodiment and interpretation of this principle, there must surely be discoverable some one generative and supporting idea which shall give to Ethics an essential identity of meaning and authority, and which no possible change of circumstances or advance of Social Evolution need ever compel us to abandon. Failing this would be indeed to lay the foundations of morality in the shifting sands and would issue in its virtual abolition and extinction. And in this direction has been the tendency, from the age of the Sophists to the present time, of all attempts to construct an Ethical System upon the basis of Sensational Psychology.

NOTE 36, PAGE 136.

The principle we are in search of must show itself competent to meet the successive insensible changes of evolutionary progress in both these ranges, else the claim to universality must be abandoned. That separate unity of sphere which gives to the Ethical its own high place in the total life of man, co-ordinate with, and yet claiming authority over those other provinces of the Intellectual and Aesthetic we have passed in review, must also be abandoned. Truth no longer conflicting with Truth, but making harmony with it: Beauty, which is but the aesthetic aspect of Truth, ridding itself of all jarring notes in all ranges and grades of artistic conception and production: Duty, which is but the moral aspect of that same Truth, in like manner no more making tragic war with Duty, when out of the discordant chaos of our life of conduct shall have been wrought out a veritable Cosmos, a world of moral order, beauty, and truth in the life of humanity: this must stand beyond question for ever as the Ideal of a perfected human life.

In some such way must one etch the outline of a future Perfection; and it is certain that any attempt to make any

steps towards it from out this confused tumultuous Present implies that there exists a constitutive principle in Ethics which is universal, and because it is universal must combine an absolute fixity of base with an infinite flexibility of application to all the detail in every stage of the life of man.

NOTE 37, PAGE 145.

'Dogma is a Source of Division: Ritual preserves Esprit de Corps.' So writes Bernez, quoted by Rénan, and with no disparagement of Dogma there is some truth in the statement. For Ritual is interpreted mainly by Feeling lending itself to Aesthetic accessories, and, though it embodies Ideas, yet it allows a far larger scope for differences of intellectual conception and interpretation than Dogmatic Statement can do. Its symbolism is of larger range, and gives far more freedom for the Conscience than the intellectualised 'Symbolic' of Creeds. May it not be possible that this lies deeply operative at the root of that strange, and, as it seems, abnormal revival of Ritual in the Anglican Church in these days? The reaction which long since set in against the narrow positivism of the Scientific Spirit has swept masses of people back to seek some share in Religion, such at least as shall preserve among them something of that 'Esprit de Corps' which, in their chill secularism, they had painfully felt they had lost. Moreover, there is that in the Ritual of high Anglicanism which in some respects is fitted to meet those spiritual sensibilities which are an integral part of human nature, and which claim their satisfaction in acts of worship and communion with the Unseen. And this although they still find they cannot revert to the dogmatic beliefs from which they have long broken away.

See an interesting article in the Quarterly Review for January, 1899. 'The Ethics of Religious Conformity.'

LECTURE VI.

NOTE 38, PAGE 151.

There is no need to spend time here upon concrete illustration of a principle which the experience of every day is enough to exhibit and verify. For the blindness of Passion, of excited feeling in any of its multiform phases: the misjudgments thence arising: the revulsions of Remorse: these, alas, rank with us among the commonest experiences of life, and require no further enlargement. Compare Sir W. Hamilton's illustration in various ranges of our experience of the dictum enunciated by Kant: 'Knowledge and Feeling, Perception and Sensation, though always co-existent, are always in the inverse ratio of each other.' Hamilton's Lectures on Metaphysics, vol. ii., Lecture xxiv.

NOTE 39, PAGE 152.

All that is possible is some approximation, more or less. This is conspicuous enough on the surface of every civilised community. An imposing Judiciary bulks large among its institutions, and the Majesty of Law is everywhere in evidence. Yet it is readily perceived that such presentation and vindication of the august Universality of Morality as is here apparent is in the main narrowed down to the fulfilment of the Law's great utilitarian function of keeping Society tolerably together. Thus, none but the flagrant offender is ever likely to be an object for judicial decision; while, further, the necessarily generalised form of such enactments as there are, makes it impossible to secure any such just proportion between Judgment and Conduct as the moral nature implanted within us still ever claims. Moreover, there are cases not a few where 'Summa lex, summa injuria' is hardly an exaggeration of the facts.