tinguishes the moral from the natural life. The law of man's life is not, like nature's, inevitable-it may be broken as well as kept: this is why we call it a moral law. While a physical law or a law of nature is simply a statement of what always happens, a moral law is that which ought to be, but perhaps never strictly is. So that, while the ethical category has changed from the summum bonum of the ancients to the duty and law of the moderns, the underlying conception is the same, and the logic of the transition from the one category to the other is easily understood. Perhaps the conception of a moral ideal may be taken as combining the classical idea of chief good or end with the modern idea of law, presenting the antithesis of duty and attainment, of the Ought-to-be and the Is.

For both the ancient and the modern conceptions of the moral ideal have a tendency to imperfection; the former is apt to be an external, the latter a mechanical, view. The ancients were inclined to regard the end as something to be acquired or got, rather than as an ideal to be attained, as something to be possessed, rather than as something to become. The ancient view tends to emphasise the material side, or the content, of morality, where the modern view emphasises its ideal and formal side. Accordingly it is the attractiveness, rather than the imperativeness, of morality that chiefly impresses the Greek mind. But, as Aristotle and Kant have both insisted, man must be his own end; he cannot subordinate himself as a means to any further end. The moral ideal is an ideal of character. In ancient philosophy we can trace a gradual progress towards this more adequate view. As the conception of happiness is deepened, it is seen to consist in an inner rather than an outer wellbeing, in a life of activity rather than in a state of dependence on external goods, in a settled condition or habit of will rather than in any outward circumstances or fortune. The true fortune of the soul, it is felt, is in

its own hands, both to attain and to keep. The modern or Christian view is more spiritual and idealistic. "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you;" "take no thought for the morrow." The claims of righteousness become paramount-do the right, though the heavens fall. The danger for this view is the tendency so to exaggerate the notion of law as to conceive of life as mere obedience to a code of rules or precepts-to think of morality as something to do (or not to do) rather than as something to be or to become. Such a view of morality is mechanical. Life according to rule is as inadequate as the pursuit of an external end; and it is only gradually that we have regained the classical conception of ethical good, and have learned once more to think of the moral life as a fulfilment rather than a negation and restraint, and to place law in its true position as a means rather than an end.

The ancient and the modern views of the moral ideal are thus alike inadequate and mutually complementary; they must be harmonised in a deeper view. The end of life is an ideal of character, to be realised by the individual, and his attitude to it is one of obligation or duty to realise it. It is not something to be got or to be done, but to be or to become. It is to be sought not without, but within; it is the man himself, in that true or essential nature, in the realisation of which is fulfilled his duty to others and to God.

6. (b) Ancient ideal political, modern individualistic. -A second characteristic difference between the standpoint of ancient and that of modern moral reflection brings out still more clearly the necessity of such a personal view of morality. The moral ideal of the classical world was a political or social ideal, that of the modern world is individualistic. To the Greek, whether he was philosopher or not, all the in

terests of life were summed up in those of citizenship; he had no sphere of 'private morality.' The conception of the State was so impressive, absorbing even, to the Greek mind, that it seemed adequate to the interpretation of the entire ethical life; and when confidence in its adequacy was shaken by the break-up of the State itself, and recourse was had of sheer necessity to the conception of a life of the individual apart from the State, when the notion of Greek citizenship was abandoned, as in Stoicism and Epicureanism, for that of citizenship of the world, the ethics of the ancient world had already, like its life and thought in general, entered upon its period of decay.

The inadequacy of the classical standpoint has become a commonplace to us; we detect it in even the best products of the moral reflection of Greece, in the ethics of Plato and Aristotle. If modern theory and practice are defective, it is in the opposite extreme. The modern ethical standpoint has been that of the individual life. This change of standpoint is mainly the result of the acceptance of the Christian principle of the infinite value of the individual as a moral person, of what we might almost call the Christian discovery of the significance of personality. The isolation of the moral individual has been made only too absolute; the principle of mere individualism is as inadequate as the principle of mere citizenship. Hence the difficulty of reconciling the claims of self with the claims of society—a difficulty which can hardly be said to have existed for the ancients, who had not yet separated the individual from his society, and to whom, accordingly, the two interests were one and the same. Hence, too, the fantastic and impossible conception of a purely selfish life, which has caused modern moralists such trouble. Hence the ignoring of the importance of ethical institutions, especially that of the State, resulting in the view of the State as having a merely negative or

B

police function, and the Hobbes-Rousseau theory of society itself as a secondary product, the result of contract between individuals who, like mutually exclusive atoms, are naturally antagonists.

For, in reality, these two spheres of life are inseparable. The interests and claims of the social and of the individual life overlap, and are reciprocally inclusive. These are not two lives, but two sides or aspects of one undivided life. You cannot isolate the moral individual; to do so would be to de-moralise him, to annihilate his moral nature. His very life as a moral being consists. in a network of relations which link his individual life with the wider life of his fellows. It is literally true that no man liveth to himself—there is no retiring into the privacy and solitude of a merely individual life. Man is a social or political being. On the other hand, the individual is more than a member of society; he is not the mere organ of the body politic. He too is an organism, and has a life and ends of his own. The good is, for every individual, a social or common good, a good in which he cannot claim such private property as to exclude his fellows; their good is his, and his theirs. Yet the good-the only good we know as absolute-is always a personal, not an impersonal, good, a good of moral persons. The person, not society, is the ultimate ethical unit and reality.

7. Aspects of the ethical problem.-The ethical problem has assumed various aspects, according to the various points of view from which it has been approached. It may be well to indicate here the chief of these aspects, and their relation to one another.

(a) The first is also, as I have tried to show, the most fundamental-viz.: What is the good or the moral ideal? or, as it was frequently put in ancient ethics, What is the summum bonum, or the chief good? What is the good in all good acts, the bad or evil in all bad or evil acts?

(b) The second aspect of the problem is closely connected with the first, as I have also tried to show above (§ 5)-viz.: What is the right? What makes all right acts right, and all wrong acts wrong? The answer must be that the good is the source of the right, that the right is the claim of the good upon the agent. The rightness of an act can only lie in its worth or worthiness. The rightness of justice, for example, lies in the goodness of justice, in its essential value. The ordinary man is content with the conviction of the rightness of the individual act or set of actions, with the knowledge of what is right. The problem of ethics is, Why is the individual act or set of actions right? And the why of the right is found in the what of the good.

(c) Modern moralists have, however, been apt to rest in the notion of right, and it has been part of their ethical theory that the right is irreducible to the good. Accordingly, the right has been regarded, by the Intuitional or Common Sense School, as the expression of final and absolute moral law. This unconditional imperativeness of morality has been regarded sometimes as having its source merely in the fiat of the divine will, but more frequently as emanating from the nature of things'the divine or universal reason. The ethical problem has therefore taken the form of an inventory or, better, a codification of the moral laws. The differentiation of moral laws from the positive laws of any political society has also been undertaken, the differentia being found in the universality and necessity of the former, as contrasted with the particularity and contingency of the latter. But again it will be found that the only clue to the unique nature of moral law, as well as to the system which the several moral laws together constitute, lies in the moral ideal,-the supreme good or chief end of human activity.

(d) What may be called the legalistic view of morality has given rise to a question which is much more pro