original thinker after Hobbes, and what the other moralists of the eighteenth century have left to us, considering the imperfect state of contemporary science, is wonderful indeed, and would appear still more wonderful if we did not remember that they had the ancient ethics to draw upon-the ethics of Aristotle and Plato, the systems of the Stoics and the Epicureans; and if we did not reflect that, conduct being at all times a necessity for man, some recognized rules of conduct, if not scientific theories, must have at all times existed, whether expressed in current maxims, or drawn from sacred books, or embodied in laws which guarded the general interest of society.

Our past moralists have left us a series of systems of conduct, each one containing some special or important truth overlooked by the others, the later generally embodying the unquestioned truths of the earlier, and being, generally speaking, less open to objection; but nevertheless, none of the systems, nor yet all together, contain the whole. truth nor the fundamental truth, either on the subject of morality or the final ground of our obligation to its practice. From none of them could we obtain a code of ethics suitable for our guidance; for besides that the writers are often at variance with themselves within the limits of their single systems; the systems are wholly opposed to each other with regard to moral obligation, even with regard to the reality of virtue whenever we pass beyond the very elementary virtues which society insists upon as a condition of its own existence. In short, of the many theories of morality and of moral obligation that have been produced in the past, none of them are quite satisfactory to us to-day; and their rules are of little service to us in the way of guidance in critical, or conflicting, or delicate cases of conduct.

§ 2. The masters of morals in the past failed to construct abiding systems because they had an imperfect knowledge of the human subject; they failed to create a science and a code of ethics because, even if human conduct can be reduced to rule and system-a point not without doubt-still the subordinate sciences had not been created or sufficiently far developed to furnish solid principles and reliable clues through the complexities of human nature and human affairs.

They did not know the human subject: they did not know, as we do to-day from the principles of physiology, the close dependence of our mental and even of our moral life upon the bodily material basis-a truth which finds its chief weight and application in the free-will controversy, and the apportionment of moral responsibility, but which is not without its significance or importance here, where the nature and limits of virtue are under consideration. They did not know that thought, emotion, and volition, the trinity in unity that on the inner side make the man and compose the contents of his consciousness, are all, in a certain extremely important though not definitely measurable sense, functions of the brain and nervous system, of the general bodily health and finally of the quality of the blood; that they vary both in degree of perfection and in amount with our varying bodily states, so much so that an impoverishment of the blood will starve simultaneously the thought and emotions, and will weaken or paralyze the strongest will; that a prolonged and sustained strain on the brain and nervous system will make "all the uses of this world" seem "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable," may convert the whole circle and content of consciousness into a perpetual sea of troubles, where virtue and vice are scarcely distinguishable, or seem only matter of opinion, where

nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so;" and that finally, if the nerve exhaustion be pushed sufficiently far, there may result the permanent perverted function of the cerebral organs, which is at once the cause and the physical correlate of that chaos in consciousness which we call insanity-the state where reason and virtue are alike unthroned. Our moralists did not know or did not sufficiently ponder the fact that virtue, as well as reason, may be attacked and destroyed by disorder in the cerebral atoms, or that both may be perverted long before they are destroyed, by prolonged disorder even in the general bodily machinery,―truths which are now becoming the commonplaces of mental physiology, but which have not even yet been taken up by the moralist and assigned their proper place and weight in the sphere of ethical speculation or construction.

Our past philosophers did, indeed, know that man was an animal. This was a very old proposition, that did much service in the various treatises on the school logic; nevertheless, the philosophers by no means dreamt of the full truth and significance of this well-worn and universally accepted proposition. Man is an animal, as Science teaches, and nothing more; and an animal he remains till the latest day of his earthly sojourn. He is an animal all too surely, and descended from a long line of animal ancestors, stretching backwards to the very dawn of life; and however far he may appear in certain directions to have transcended his animal origin, and to have put on spiritual or angelic nature; whatever height he has reached in thought, or art, or virtue;-still the animal sleeps at the bottom of his being, a fundamental, heavy thing, never to be got rid of, which ever and anon wakes into aggressive

and unreasoning life, and which ever pulls him down again to the earth after his most aspiring spiritual flights. There still exists in all of us, as in the Lucretius of Tennyson, "the brute brain within the man's," whose aroused activity troubled the materialist poet and thinker. There are still resident, even within the best, the two natures, each striving for mastery, of which Faust complains; one clinging with clumsy tendrils

To all the fleshly joys the coarse earth yields;

and one that would rise to the contemplation of truth and beauty, and ever aspires to the infinite and the unknown. There is in every man that warfare between the flesh and the spirit, in which the latter is often brought into bondage, as deplored by St. Paul; and this degrading dualism and antagonism must remain a permanent fact in human nature, however much the latter be developed. It is true that evolution philosophers promise a diminished antagonism in the future; and Herbert Spencer in particular—here as elsewhere an optimist for the far future-relying on the general physiological truth of the increase of all organs in proportion to their use, promises a great lessening of the discord between soul and sense by the relatively greater exercise of the brain, the organs of thought, than of those related to the senses and appetites, not to speak of the evercontinuing action of natural selection in picking out, for preferment and for the perpetuation of the species, those individuals with the highest-developed brains. But besides that this alleviation of the strife between the lower and higher natures is only to come at a very distant date, as all evolutionary improvements; and moreover, so long as man is subject to hunger, and desire must always have its limits,

and can never be very complete ;—we do not find that there is much consolation in these assurances for our generation or for the two or three immediately following ours, with which alone science and philosophy, on their practical sides, are concerned. There are, indeed, many and strong reasons to conclude, even on the principles of Herbert Spencer's own philosophy, that the organs which have reference to the continuance of the species will never become rudimentary through disuse, whatever others have become or may yet become so in the course of man's strange metamorphoses. There is every reason to think that the instincts related to the preservation of the individual as well as of the species, as they are the first and strongest, as they are at the bottom of the universal life, so they will continue in nearly undiminished force to the end of man's career. Man will remain an animal with appetites and desires, as well as with affections and a conscience, and the former fact must be accepted and made the best of by the mass of men who can accept it, as well as by economists and philosophers who so much deplore it. Any reduction of the sensual side of our nature that is possible or desirable, must be looked for in a different direction from that indicated by Spencer, or Mill, or Schopenhauer. Meantime, the fact itself of the war between the flesh and the spirit, between the body and the soul, is not without its utility. It is a part of our probation, which disciplines the character like all probation, as it has its wider and deeper uses in the aims and total economy of Nature, even in the promotion and spread of civilization, according to Spencer himself. But so much at least is certain that it will long continue, in spite of the prescriptions of all the philosophers from Buddha to Schopenhauer, and of all political economists from Malthus to Mill,

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