the inner law, of convention and custom by conscience, is the very root and spring of all moral progress. Indeed the breach between the outer and the inner is never entirely healed; the ideal State is never reached.

Its absoluteness and permanence.-The inner demand is absolute, a categorical imperative.' Its unyielding Thou shalt' is the voice of the ideal to the actual man; and the ideal admits of no concession, no 'give and take,' no compromise with the actual. This demand of the rational and ideal self is not to be misinterpreted, as if its absoluteness meant the annihilation of feeling or nature. The demand is for such a perfect mastery of the impulsive and sentient, or natural self, that in it the true self, which is fundamentally rational, may be realised; that it may be the rational or human, and not the merely sentient or animal self, that lives. What produces the constant contradiction between ideal and attainment, is not the presence of feeling as a surd that cannot be eliminated; it is that the harmony of a life in which feeling is subdued to reason must become ever more perfect, the life of the true self must become ever more complete, as moral progress continues.

For the demand of the inner self for realisation is infinite. The self never is fully realised, it remains always an ideal demanding realisation. Here, in the constant ethical conflict, in the perpetual contradiction between ideal and attainment, is the source of the undying moral consciousness of law or obligation. Ever as we attain in any measure to it, the ideal seems to grow and widen and deepen, so that it is still for us the unattained. One mountain-path ascended only reveals height after height in the great Beyond of the moral life. It is those that stay on the plains of a superficial and conventional morality, who think they can see the summits of its hills; those who climb know better. It is those who scale the mountain-tops of duty who know best what

heights are yet to climb, and how far its high peaks penetrate into God's own heaven. It is the infinity of the ideal self that makes it, in its totality, unrealisable, and the life of duty inexhaustible, by a finite being. No improvement in environment, physical or social, can effect the entire disappearance of the contradiction between the ideal and its attainment. For the ideal originates, not without but within ourselves, in the abysmal deeps of personality,' and the fountain of those deeps is never dried up. The ideal is always being realised, it is true, in fuller and richer measure. But to have attained' or 'to be already perfect' would be to have finished the moral life. Such an absolute coincidence of the ideal and the actual is inconceivable, just because the good is the ideal, and not a mere projection of the actual. The latter interpretation of the good would make it finite, and attainable enough by human weakness; but to limit the ideal were to destroy it. The man inspired with a loyal devotion to the good is willing to see the path of his life stretch ever forward and upward, to lift up his eyes unto the eternal hills of the divine holiness itself. For he knows that he has laid the task upon himself, and that, if failure and disappointment come inevitably to him in the attempt to execute it, his is also the dignity of this high calling, and his too a success which, but for the ideal and the failure which faithfulness to it reveals, had been for him impossible. He would not exchange this human life, with all its pain and weariness, with all its humiliation and disappointment, for any lower. Better surely this noble human dissatisfaction than the most perfect measure of animal content. Is not such failure only 'the other side of success'; is not such discontent indeed divine'?

To seek to rise above duty or law is, as Kant said, ‘moral fanaticism.' Duty is the peculiar category of human life, of the life of a being at once infinite and finite; it is the expression of the dualism of form and matter, of

reason and sensibility. Certainly we shall not overcome the dualism by minimising it; rather it must be pressed until, it may be in another life or in prophetic glimpses in the religious life even now, it yields the higher unity and peace for which our spirits crave. Meantime, it is no ignoble bondage; if the spirit is imprisoned, it is ever breaking through the bars of its prison-house. Authority is not coercion. Man lays the law upon himself; it is because he is a citizen of the higher world, that he feels the obligation of its law and the bondage of the lower. And when he recognises the source of the law, it ceases, in a sense, to be a burden; or it becomes one which he is willing and eager to bear, and which becomes lighter the longer and the more faithfully it is borne. The yoke of such a service is indeed easy, and its burden light.

14. Expressions of Eudæmonism: (a) in philosophy. It may help to the understanding, as well as the vindication, of the general position above described, to glance at one or two of the most striking expressions of Eudæmonism in philosophy and in literature. In philosophy, I will select rather from the Greeks than from the moderns, partly because their contribution to ethical theory is less familiar, or at any rate less appreciated, and partly because the modern statements are in a great measure dependent upon the ancient, and can be fully understood only in the light of the latter. Among the moderns, we owe the most adequate expressions of Eudæmonism to Butler1 and to Hegel.

(a) Butler. From the sketch already given of Butler's ethical theory, it will have been observed how much he owes to the Greeks. His leading conceptions of human nature as a civil constitution, of the authoritative rank of the rational or reflective principles, of the harmony which results from the just division of labour among the various elements of our nature, and the discord which comes from 1 In spite of his official Rationalism. Cf. supra, p. 179, Note.

their mutual interference and the insurrection of the lower against the rule of the higher,—all this we already find in Plato. And Aristotle had, like Butler, discovered the secret of human virtue in that reason which is the differentiating attribute of human nature.

(B) Hegel.—It is Hegel who, of all modern philosophers, has given most adequate expression to the essential principle of the ethical life, alike on its negative and on its positive side. With Kant he recognises the full claim of reason, but he insists upon correlating with it the rightful claim of sensibility. In ethics as in metaphysics, Hegel finds the universal in the particular, the rational in the sensible. In the evolution of the moral, as of the intellectual life, he discovers the dialectical movement of affirmation through negation, of life through death; in the one as in the other phase of human experience, 'that is first which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.' The life of natural sensibility is only the raw material of the moral life; to be moralised, it must be rationalised. In the words of Dr Hutchison Stirling:1 "To Hegel, then, even the body, nay, the mind itself, require to be taken possession of, to become in actuality ours. Culture, education, is required for both. The body, in the immediacy of its existence, is inadequate to the soul, and must be made its ready organ and its animated tool. The mind, too, is at first, as it were, immersed in nature, and requires enfranchisement. This enfranchisement is in each subject the hard labour against mere subjectivity of action, and against the immediacy of appetite, as against the subjective variety of feeling and the arbitrariness or caprice of self-will. But through the labour it is that subjective will attains to objectivity, and becomes capable and worthy of being the actuality of the idea. For so particularity is wrought into universality, and through universality becomes the concrete singular." Yet this concrete singular' of the universalised par1 Lectures on The Philosophy of Law, p. 42.

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ticular or the rationalised sensibility is not, for Hegel, the person; for him personality is only a provisional category, not the ultimate category of the moral life. Hegel's 'person' is the legal person, the subject of rights; not the moral person, strictly objective and rational. Hence the principle, "Be a person, and respect others as persons," represents for him only a stage in the ethical life, to be transcended in its perfect development. It is of the essence of his pantheistic metaphysic to sink the personality of man in the universal life of God, and to conceive human life as ultimately modal and impersonal rather than as substantive and personal. Yet Hegel does much for the conception of personality, both in the intellectual and in the moral reference; and even if we disregard his final metaphysical construction, we shall find in his philosophy as striking and adequate ethical statements as are to be found anywhere. Take, for example, this statement of the distinction between the individual and the person: "In personality, indeed, it lies that I, as on all sides of me, in inward desire, need, greed, and appetite, and in direct outward existence, this perfectly limited and finite individual, am yet, as person, infinite, universal, and free, and know myself, even in my finitude, as such." But our indebtedness to Hegel and his school for the position we have reached is so great as to have necessarily forced itself upon the reader's attention, and to render superfluous any further illustrations from that quarter at the present stage. Let us turn, then, to the Greeks, to whom Hegel would be the first to acknowledge his own indebtedness.

(y) Plato.-Whether one takes Plato's psychology or his ethics (and they are inseparable) one is equally surprised at the completeness of his apprehension of the eudæmonistic interpretation of the moral life. He distinguishes three elements in human nature-reason, spirit, and appetite (λόγος, θυμός, τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν). Reason is a unity, so also is spirit; but appetite is manifold. Further,