those who have the firmest hold upon the concrete in the sense above defined, are just the people who are most likely to become the victims of abstractions. People, on the other hand, who are sometimes thought of as idealists and dreamers may be just the people who are most likely to be free of them.

Such, at any rate, was the conclusion at which the philosopher Hegel arrived when in a too-little-known pamphlet he addressed himself to this question. "Who," he asks, "thinks abstractly?" And he answers, "Not the man of culture, far less the philosopher, but the uneducated and the so-called practical man." One of his examples is so vivid and so aptly illustrates what is here meant by an abstract idea that I make no apology for quoting it.

A murderer is being dragged to execution. The multitude see only the criminal in him and follow him with their curses. Some fine ladies remark what a powerful, handsome, interesting man he is. The bystanders are scandalised that anyone should be so lost to propriety as to find good looks in a murderer. A priest who stands by and understands the heart explains that it all comes of the corruption of the upper classes. This illustrates one abstraction. These people see only the murderer in the prisoner. They take no account of his upbringing, the traits of character he has inherited, the previous harsh sentence for some trivial offence that embittered him against society. But, besides the common-sense practical people among the crowd, there are the idealists and sentimentalists. They see nothing of the murderer in the unhappy man, but only the scapegoat of an unjust society. They shout in his honour and would fain throw bouquets on the cart that carries him. This illus

trates the opposite abstraction. These people see only what may be alleged in justification of the individual. The outrage on social institutions escapes them. Finally, there is an old woman from the poor-house who is overheard to say as the sunlight strikes upon the prisoner: "See how sweetly God's gracious sunshine falls upon poor Binder's head!" She means it in allusion to the German proverb that a worthless man does not deserve the sun. That was the multitude's view of Binder. God thought otherwise, and the old woman recognises it. She does not, like the sentimentalist, simply cancel his guilt. On the other hand, she does not see in him merely the accursed murderer. He is going to pay-perhaps rightly-the last penalty to human law, but in the judgment passed by society upon him, society itself is judged. This is concrete thinking. The different sides or aspects of the event have grown together or coalesced in a higher and a truer view.

What we are called upon to notice in all this is that the "abstract" idea is not the more remote and difficult to reach, but the first view that strikes uswhich is commonly superficial and onesided. Its opposite is the concrete idea, which in turn is not what first occurs to us, but is further away, and is only to be reached by a gift of insight, as in the case of the old woman, or as in the case of most of us by a strenuous effort of comprehensive thought. Employed as descriptions of different species of ethics, we may call that kind abstract which is in such a hurry to be practical that it turns in distaste from the labour of impartial thinking, and is content with seeing human life in a light which may be as narrow and one-sided as you please, so long as it affords justification for

energetic action. That ethics, on the other hand, is concrete which is determined at all costs to understand before it undertakes and is content to postpone practical results in favour of a clear and comprehensive view of the end that it is sought to attain. It remains to be shown that the latter kind instead of being hostile to practice is really and in the long run the more practical of the two.

But before attempting to show this, let us ask, secondly, in what sense we are to take the word "practical." What is meant by "practical ethics"? The sense that is in the mind of our critic is clear. Practical ethics are ethics which lay down some practical end as a moral duty and exhort to its pursuit. But this overlooks the fact that such ends may be practical in a twofold sense. They may be practical in the sense that they are proposed as aims of conduct. In this sense any idea may be practical. Any idea may be made a motive of action. I have an idea of a world in which everyone is comfortable and happy, and this idea may become practical in being made an end of action. But clearly amongst such ends there will be a difference between those that are really practical and those which are not, between those that we are justified in believing can be realised and those which never can be. However active and enthusiastic a man might be in pursuit of the latter kind, it would require a stretch of language to call him a practical man. The conclusion is that practical ethics in the full sense of the word is not simply the ethics which exhorts to practice, but the ethics which sets before us as worthy ends ideas which are really practical in the sense that they are in harmony with the deeper aspirations of mankind at large, and must

sooner or later be realised in the actual relations of human society. How are we to describe such ideas in terms of the distinction already drawn? Are they abstract or are they concrete ? If the kind we called abstract are the kind that are really practical, then the man who wishes to be practical will do well to suspect the gifts of the ethical society. If, on the other hand, we can succeed in showing that to be practical we must be concrete, we shall have established a presumption in favour of their utility. Let us see.

There is undoubtedly a common prejudice that the ideas that can be realised in practice must be of the kind I have called abstract. We cannot drive six abreast through Temple Bar, and we cannot get everything that we wish. We must cut our coat according to our cloth, and the cloth is never enough for the pattern we should like to cut. It is in the nature of things that we should be content with partial success. Practice is made up of compromises, and blessed is the man who does not expect too much.

Now compromise is a large subject, and I do not propose to enter on it here. It is sufficient to point out that it is one thing to accept the conditions under which our ideal of what is best must be realised, it is another to give up the hope of ever realising it, and settling down contentedly to live from hand to mouth without it. The former is compromise in one sense. The Greeks would have called it practical wisdom. The latter is compromise in another. Modern politicians call it opportunism. The admission that in practical policy we must go a step at a time is therefore in no wise inconsistent with the contention that no noble and lasting work was ever done except under the inspiration of some distant and for the

present unrealisable idea. And such an ideal, if the work is to be really noble and lasting, must be of the kind for which I am contending: it must be a concrete ideal taking in all the elements of the problem to be solved. Anything else, however feasible at the time it may appear, must turn out in the end to be impracticable. The forces of reality are leagued against it. However favourable to it the circumstances may seem to be, there is no sure footing for it in the actual world. With the concrete idea all this is reversed. Let a man but have hold of such an idea, the whole world may be against him; in the end it will come round to him. As Emerson would have said, he has hitched his chariot to a star. He may seem to fail. He may die without seeing the fruit of his labour. But the idea lives, and he may rest in peace. In such an idea he has the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

History will serve us best in illustration. It exhibits abstractions on a large scale. I take one or two almost at random. Everyone is familiar with the part played in the course of the French Revolution by "abstract ideas." Issuing from the brain of that prince of abstract thinkers, Jean Jacques Rousseau, they controlled the whole movement, and had a splendid chance. Founded on the historical examples of Greece and Rome, preached with all the eloquence of the greatest prose writer of his time, dominating a great national uprising, accepted as the creed of the party that finally triumphed over the storm, here, if anywhere, abstract ideas might be expected to succeed. And yet it might with truth be said that not one of Rousseau's positive proposals succeeded in establishing itself as an actual institution.