law: "So act as if thou couldst will the principle of thine act law universal." Every other person is, as a person, an end-in-himself, equally with me; my attitude to him must therefore be essentially the same as my attitude to myself. The law or formula which expresses both his life and mine is that we are to be regarded, whether by ourselves or by one another, always as ends, never as merely means or instruments. He cannot, any more than I, accept a law which does not find its sanction in his own nature as a rational self. Here we find a common ground and meeting-place: however we may differ in our individuality, yet in our deepest nature-in our rational personality—we are the same. We are the same in the form of our nature, and therefore in the law of our life, however diverse may be the content.

When we submit ourselves to the common law of personality, we cease to be a number of separate, competing or co-operating, individuals; we together constitute a society, a system or kingdom of ends. Individuality separates us; personality unites us with our fellows. It is as persons that we are fellows. It is thought, not 'nature' or feeling, that makes the whole world kin.' Reason is the common element, feeling the particular. The only strictly common or social good is a personal good-the good of persons. The hedonistic or sentient good is subjective and individual-the good of the sentient subject or individual. The common good must be the product of reason, not as excluding feeling, but as containing its regulative form and law; of personality, as including and dominating individuality. Here, in the general as in the individual case, we find the clue to the harmony and co-ordination of sensibility. Feeling, being made organic to rational personality in each, comes under the wider as well as under the narrower law. Since man cannot, as a rational person, separate himself from his fellows, and shut himself up in his own individual being, he cannot do so even as a sentient individual, or as a subject

of sensibility. For he is not two selves, but one; his personality has annexed his individuality. The false and selfish self has been sacrificed to the true self which, as rational, is essentially unselfish. This is the real unity and solidarity of mankind. We are joined to one another, and breathe the same atmosphere, in the deeper things of the rational spirit, and therefore also in the lesser matters of our daily life. Our life is one, because our nature is one. From the true ethical standpoint, there is no cleft between egoism and altruism, as there is none between reason and sensibility. We are at once egoists and altruists in every moral action: each is an ego, and each sees in his brother an alter ego. The dualism and conflict here, as in the individual case, arise from the rebellion of the individual against the person. The claims of individuals conflict, always and necessarily; the claims of persons, never. The moral task, therefore, on its social as well as on its individual side, lies in effecting the subjugation of individuality to personality, or in obeying the law of reason which embraces the lives of our fellows as well as our own:- "Be a person, and respect others as persons; subject your own clamant individuality to your abiding rational personality :

"To thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."

13. The ethical significance of law: the meaning of duty.—The conception of law, prominent in the ethical reflection of Plato and the Stoics, and further emphasised by Christianity, has been made a corner-stone of modern ethical theory by Butler and Kant. Not only in Intuitionism and Transcendentalism, but even in Hedonism and Evolutionism, the conception plays an important part. What significance can we attach to it from the standpoint of personality?

The foregoing discussion has partly anticipated the

answer to this question.

We have seen that the moral

task of man is the co-ordination or organisation of impulse into a system of rational ends, and that the coordinating or organising principle is the idea of rational selfhood or personality. In this idea of true human selfhood is found the law of man's life. It is a law universal; for while the content of these personal ends must vary with the individuality of the sensible subject, and with the stimuli that excite such individual sensibility, their form will be the same in all, being constituted by the common rational self in each. We thus avoid, on the one hand, the formalism of the Intuitional and Kantian ethics, with their insistence upon mere obedience to rational, and therefore universal, law; and, on the other hand, the subjectivity and particularism of Hedonism, which finds the moral criterion in the feeling of the individual subject. The interpretation of personality as including individuality provides for the form of reason a content of sensibility, and thus secures a concrete view of the moral life: it discovers the universal in the particular. I am different from you, for we are both individuals; and since our individuality must colour our respective ideals of life, these ideals are, so far, different. But while it is the individual self that has to be realised, it is the complete self or personality of the individual, in whose common life the individuality of each must be taken up and interpreted as an element; and this secures a common ideal for all.

The peculiar form or category of moral experience is thus seen to be law, duty, or obligation. The difference between moral or spiritual and natural law is just the difference between the life of a being that shares consciously in reason and one that does not. The universe being rational through and through, the law or formula of all phenomena, of all occurrences, is rational. But that law may be expressed consciously or unconsciously, by the being or merely through the being. Now

the law of the life of a rational being must be autonomy: moral self-realisation is 'realisation of self by self.' The law of nature's life is heteronomy; it is part of a larger system, and comes under the law of that system. But a rational being is an end-in-himself, and can find nowhere save in his own nature the law of his life. This is the prerogative of reason to legislate for itself, to be at once sovereign and subject in the moral kingdom, as it is at once teacher and scholar in the intellectual school.

The transition from the innocence, or non-moral condition, of the animal or the child which has not yet broken with nature, but remains in unconscious subjection to its law, to the moral status in which law asserts itself in the very consciousness of a possible and actual disobedience to it-thus creating the distinction between good and evil-has been naïvely represented by the imagination of early man as a 'fall' from a previous state of bliss. A fall, and yet also an ascent in the scale of being; a fall from holiness, but an ascent from innocence -the ascent from compulsion to authority, from might to right. Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil;" "lest they eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and become as one of us." Christianity has touched this yearning after a Golden Age in the past experience of the race, and changed it into a yearning after a future Golden Age. The conception of evolution also teaches us to regard human history as a progress, not a regress. And we have ourselves seen that the consciousness of the breach between the ideal and the actual, of the dualism between nature and spirit, is the essential condition of a finite self-consciousness and self-realisation. It may be that we cannot explain the origin of evil; but, evil being there, we can understand its moral significance. Evil is the shadow cast by the moral ideal upon the actual life. The sense of failure comes with the consciousness of an ideal; nature never fails, man alone does. And so long as the breach continues between the actual and

the ideal, so long must the element of law or obligation enter into the substance of the moral consciousness.

Various forms of law.-Law or obligation assumes different aspects at the successive stages of the moral life of the individual. It is first external, then internal : first Do this,' then 'Be this.' It is first the outer law or command, accompanied by coercion whether of reward or punishment, of the parent, of the State, of social opinion,

-a kind of pressure from his environment, moulding the individual from without. This is the stage of passive and uncritical acquiescence by the individual in the conventional morality in whose atmosphere he has grown up -the reign of Custom. As he advances to moral manhood, the individual passes from this allegiance to the outer law to the severer rule of the law which he finds written in his own heart. This is the stage described by Hegel as that of Moralität, of the reign of the inner law of the individual Conscience, of the assertion of the right of private judgment in the moral sphere; the stage at which the life, become a law unto itself, is full of introspective conscientiousness, and liable, in its revolt from the morality of custom and convention, to become the prey of individual or sectarian enthusiasms and fanaticisms. Necessary as this stage is, and permanent as, in a sense, it may necessarily be for the individual, he must yet seek to escape from its subjectivity and limitation, and to reach the insight into the partial, if not complete, identity of the outer and the inner lawthe stage of ethicality' or Sittlichkeit, the reign of Institutions. Still, the critical point in the moral history of the individual is that at which the law passes from the outer to the inner form. The outer law is always, in truth, from an ethical standpoint, the reflection of the inner: it is the deepest self of humanity that makes its constant claim upon the individual man, and demands its realisation. And the continual criticism of the outer by