LITERATURE. J. S. Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics, bk. iii. chs. iii., iv., v. (3rd ed.) J. Dewey, Outlines of Ethics, parts ii. and iii.; Study of Ethics, ch. ix. J. H. Muirhead, Elements of Ethics, bk. iv. F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, Essays v., vi. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, bk. iv. ch. i. C. F. D'Arcy, Short Study of Ethics, part ii. chs. ix., x., xi. S. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, bk. ii. ch. vi. L. Stephen, Science of Ethics, ch. v. H. Spencer, Principles of Ethics, part iii. Wundt, Ethik, pp. 511-529. Paulsen, System der Ethik, vol. ii. pp. 369-466. 269 CHAPTER II. THE SOCIAL LIFE. I.-The Social Virtues: Justice and Benevolence. 1. The relation of the social to the individual life. Man has social or other-regarding, as well as individual or self-regarding, impulses and instincts. By nature, and even in his unmoralised condition, he is a social being. But this sympathetic or altruistic nature must, equally with the selfish and egoistic, be formed and moulded into the virtuous character; the primary feeling for others, like the primary feeling for self, is only the raw material of the moral life. And the law of the process of moralisation is the same in both cases; the virtuous attitude towards others is essentially the same as the virtuous attitude towards ourselves. For in others, as in ourselves, we are called upon to recognise the attribute of personality. They, too, are ends in themselves; their life, like our own, is one of self-realisation, of selfdevelopment through self-discipline. We must treat them, therefore, as we treat ourselves, as persons. The law of the individual life is also the law of the social life, though in a different and a wider application. Virtue is fundamentally and always personal; and when we have discovered the law of the individual life, we have already discovered that of the social life. Since men are not mere individuals, but the bearers of a common per sonality, the development in the individual of his true selfhood means his emancipation from the limitations of individuality, and the path to self-realisation is through the service of others. Not that we serve others, the better to serve ourselves: we ought not to regard another person as the instrument even of our highest selfdevelopment. They, too, are ends in themselves: to them is set the self-same task as to ourselves, the task of self-realisation. The law of the moral life, the law of personality, covers the sphere of social as well as of individual duty; and that law is: "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of another, always as an end, never as a means to an end." We may use neither ourselves nor others. Truly to serve humanity, therefore, is to realise ourselves, and at the same time to aid others in the same task of selfrealisation. In serving others, we are serving ourselves; in serving ourselves, we are serving others. For, in both cases, we serve that humanity which must ever be served, and which may never serve. The life of virtue, even on its social side, is still a personal, not an impersonal life. This is apt to be overlooked, owing to the illusion of the term 'social' and the antithesis, so commonly emphasised, between the individual and the social life. The individual and the social are in reality two aspects of the one undivided life of virtue, and their unity is discovered with their reduction to the common principle of personality. The social life is, equally with the individual life, personal; and the personal life is necessarily at once individual and social. We must not be misled by the phrase social life,' as if society had a life of its own apart from its individual members; society is the organisation of individuals, and it is they who live, not it. Apart from its individual members, society would be a mere abstraction; but we are too apt, here as elsewhere, to hypostatise abstractions. In reality, society is not an organism, but the ethical organisation of individuals. Obviously, we must not isolate the organisation or the relation from the beings organised or related; this would be a new case of the old Scholastic Realism, or substantiation of the universal. Moral reality, like all finite reality, is, in the last analysis, individual. But while the life of virtue is always individual, it is never merely individual : to be personal, it must be social. If in one sense each lives a separate life, yet in another sense "no man liveth unto himself." A common personality is to be realised in each, and in infinite ways the life of each is bound up with that of all. Only, the individual must never lose himself in the life of others. As a person, he is an end in himself, and has an infinite worth. He has a destiny, to be wrought out for himself; the destiny of society is the destiny of its individual members. The 'progress of the race' is, after all, the progress of the individual. The ethical end is personal, first and last. As the individual apart from society is an unreal abstraction, so is society apart from the individual. The ethical unit is the person. Thus we can see that there is no necessary antagonism between individualism, truly understood, and socialism, truly understood. Nay, the true socialism is the true individualism, the discovery and the development of the person in the individual. Society exists for the individual, it is the mechanism of his personal life. All social progress consists in the perfecting of this mechanism, to the end that the moral individual may have more justice and freer play in the working out of his own individual destiny. The individualism of the mere individual means moral chaos, and is suicidal; such a life is, as Hobbes described it, "poor, nasty, dull, brutish, and short." But the individualism of the person is, in its idea at least, synonymous with the true socialism, and the true democracy with the true aristocracy. For social progress does not mean so much the massing of individuals as the individualisation of the social mass; the discovery, in the masses,' of that same humanity, individual and personal, which had formerly been discerned only in the classes.' The truly social ideal is to make possible for the many-nay, for all, or better for each that full and total life of personality which, to so large an extent, is even still the exclusive possession of the few. Social organisation is never an end in itself, it is always a means to the attainment of individual perfection. 2. Social virtue: its nature and its limit. We have seen that social or altruistic impulse, like individual or egoistic, is only the raw material of virtue, part of that nature which has to be moralised into character. Mere 'good-will' or 'sociality' is not the virtue of benevolence; the natural inclination to help others needs guidance, and may have to be restrained. So true is Kant's contention that natural impulse or inclination has, as such, no ethical value. We have also seen that the law, in the one case as in the other, is found in personality. Each man, being an ego or person, has the right to the life of a person. The true moral attitude of other persons to him, therefore, is the same as his attitude towards himself; and accordingly social, like individual, virtue has two sides, a negative and a positive. The attitude of the virtuous man towards his fellows is first, negatively, the making room for or not hindering their personal life, and secondly, the positive helping of them to such a life, the removing of obstacles from their way, and the bringing about of conditions favourable to their personal development. Here, with the conditions of the moral life in our fellows, we must stop; no man can perform the moral task for another, there is no vicariousness in the moral life. Not even God can make a man good. Goodness, by its very nature, must be the achievement of the individual: each must work out his own salvation. The |