seeing God in both, in such wise that nature shall become the instrument and servant of the ethical spirit; or whether nature must remain for man an alien and opposing force which, by its moral indifference, is always liable, if not to defeat, to embarrass and endanger moral ends, -to this question I do not see that we can give more than a tentative answer. Our answer must be rather a speculative guess, a philosophic faith, than a reasoned certainty. Nature in ourselves we may annex, our natural dispositions, instincts, impulses, we may subdue to moral ends; this raw material we may work entirely into the texture of the ethical life. But what of the nature which is without ourselves? What of that 'furniture of fortune' of which Aristotle speaks, which seems to come to us and to be taken away from us without any reference, ofttimes, to our ethical deservings? What of that Fate in which our life is involved, whose issues are unto life and unto death, which disappoints and blights our spiritual hopes, whose capricious favours no merit can secure, whose gifts and calamities descend without discrimination upon the evil and the good? Call it what we will-fortune, circumstance, fate-does there not remain an insoluble and baffling quantity, an x which we can never eliminate, and whose presence destroys all our calculations? Yet the ground of moral confidence is the conviction, inseparable from the moral life, of the supremacy and ultimate masterfulness of the moral order. Professor Huxley himself expresses a sober and measured confidence of this kind: "It may seem an audacious proposal thus to pit the microcosm against the macrocosm, and to set man to subdue nature to his higher ends; but I venture to think that the great intellectual difference between the ancient times . . . and our day lies in the solid foundation we have acquired for the hope that such an enterprise may meet with a certain measure of success.' With the advance of science, man has learned his own power over nature, the power, which increasing knowledge

brings, to subdue Nature to his own ends; and his confidence inevitably grows that he is Nature's master, not her slave. But whether he can ever entirely subdue her, whether the natural order will ever be so filled with the moral order as to be the perfect expression and vehicle of the latter; or whether the natural order must always remain the imperfect expression of the moral, and some new and perfect expression be framed for it, we cannot tell. Only this we can say, that since each is an order, since nature itself is a cosmos, not a chaos, and since they issue from a common source, nature and morality must ultimately be harmonised.

5. The modern statement of the problem.-This, in itself unchanging, problem assumes two different aspects, as it appears in ancient and in modern speculation. It is in the latter of these aspects that we are naturally most familiar with it, and in this form perhaps its most characteristic statement is that of Kant. The ultimate issue of goodness, he contends, must be happiness; the external and the internal fortunes of the soul must in the end coincide. This is the Kantian argument for the existence of God, as moral governor of the universe, distributor of rewards and punishments in accordance with individual desert. For though the very essence of virtue is its disinterestedness, yet the final equation of virtue and happiness is for Kant the postulate of morality. We have seen that the Hedonists, who reduce virtue to prudence and the right to the expedient, find themselves forced, for the sake of the vindication of altruistic conduct, or of that part of virtue which refuses to be resolved into prudence, to make the same postulate in another form. Either the appeal is made to the future course of the evolutionary process, which, it is argued, cannot stop short of the identification of virtue and prudence, individual goodness and individual happiness; or it is maintained, as by Professor Sidgwick, that the gap in ethical

theory must be filled in by a theological hypothesis of the Kantian sort. The Socratic conviction is reasserted, that "if the Rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust, it is better to die than to live." Nor is such a demand the expression of mere self-interest. "When a man passionately refuses to believe that the 'wages of virtue' can be dust,' it is often less from any private reckoning about his own wages than from a disinterested aversion to a universe so fundamentally irrational that Good for the individual' is not ultimately identified with Universal Good.""1 The assumption of

such a moral order, maintained by a moral Governor, is accordingly accepted as "an hypothesis logically necessary to avoid a fundamental contradiction in one chief department of our thought."2 Even in this aspect, the problem is not exclusively modern. The coincidence of outward prosperity with righteousness, individual and national, was the axiom of the Hebrew consciousness-an axiom whose verification in national and individual experience cost the Hebrews much painful thought, and often seemed to be threatened with final disappointment. Even the lesson, learned by bitter experience, that man must be content to serve God for nought,' never carried with it for them the definitive divorce of righteousness and prosperity. Their intense moral earnestness persisted in its demand for an ultimate harmony of external fortune with inward merit; sin and suffering, goodness and happiness, must, they felt, ultimately coincide. And, like our modern Kantians and Evolutionists, they were compelled to adjourn to the future, now of the community, now of the individual, the solution of a problem which their present experience always left unsolved.

Yet we cannot help feeling that this is not the most adequate, or the worthiest, statement of the problemi. There is a feeling of externality about such a moral universe as that of the Hebrews, of Kant, or of Pro1 Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, p. 504 (3rd ed.)

2 Ibid., p. 505.

fessor Sidgwick; such a God is a kind of deus ex machina, after all-an agent introduced from outside into a scheme of things which had seemed already complete, to re-adjust an order already adjusted. Especially in Kant we feel that, in spite of all his skilful pleading, there is a fall from the elevated and consistent Stoicism of his ethics to the quasi-Hedonism of his moral theology; the old keynote sounds no longer. Nor is his God much better than 'a chief-of-police of the moral universe.' It seems to me that the ancient Greek statement of the problem was much more adequate than the characteristic modern version of it, and that the Greek solution is also more suggestive of the true direction in which the solution must be sought.

6. Its ancient statement.-The Greek problem was that of an adequate sphere for the exercise of virtue. In general this sphere was found in the State, and Plato held that there was no contradiction more tragic than that of a great nature condemned to live in a mean State; great virtue needs a great sphere for its due exercise. And the Greek State, at its best, did provide for the few a splendid, and to the Greeks a satisfying, sphere for the exercise of human virtue. It enlarged and ennobled, without annulling, the life of the individual citizen. For Aristotle, though the State is still the ideal sphere of virtuous activity, and ethics itself "a sort of political inquiry," the problem has already changed its aspect, and become more directly a problem of the individual life. To him the question is that of the opportunity for the actualisation of the virtue or excellence which exists potentially in every man. The actualisation (vépyɛa) of virtue is for him of supreme importance; and whether any man's potential virtue shall be actualised or not, is determined not by the man himself but by his circumstances his initial and acquired equipment, his furniture of fortune, wealth,

friends, honour, personal advantage, and the like. These things constitute the man's ethical opportunity, and determine the scale of his ethical achievement. A good, or passively virtuous, man might "sleep all his life," might never have a fit opportunity of realising his goodness, never find a sufficient stage for the demonstration of his powers in act, or never find his part in the drama of human history. The tide of fortune might never for him come to the flood, and, as it ebbed away from him, he might well feel that it carried with it all his hopes of high enterprise and achievement. Here Aristotle seems to find a baffling and inexplicable surd in human life-a 'given' element which, in a moment, may wreck men's lives, and which must fill some men from the first with despair, or at best must imprison their lives within the narrowest horizon. In view of this, we are not masters even of our own characters. Character is the result of exercise; it is not the swift, but they who run, that receive the crown of virtue. But we may never be allowed on the course, or we may not have the strength that is needed for the race. The ethical end cannot be compassed, at least it cannot be fully compassed, without the external aid of fortune; and fortune, Aristotle seems to feel almost as irresistibly as Professor Huxley feels about nature, is ethically indifferent. The most a man can do is, he says, to make the best use of the gifts of fortune, such as they are, "just as a good general uses the forces at his command to the best advantage in war, and a good cobbler makes the best shoe with the leather that is given him." 1 But oftentimes the forces available are all too scant for any deed of greatness, and the leather is such that only a very indifferent shoe can be made out of it. So that, after all, it is rather in the noble bearing of the chances of life than in any certainty of actual achievement, that we ought to place our 1 Nic. Eth., i. 10 (13).