peculiarity of the moral world that, although you may perhaps enlighten the unenlightened, you cannot so well disenlighten the enlightened.

How the rights and obligations of the situation are to be analysed, how they are to be adjusted, it is not my purpose to inquire. My interest here lies in the motive and conception of morality. Hence it will suffice to point out that this assertion of rights on the part of the workers, or the masses, so far from marking "the decay of reverence" deplored by worshippers of the ordered society, marks a significant extension-perhaps the most significant in the history of the race of the territory of the moral world.

CHAPTER VII

THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT

§ 25. Morality among the values. § 26. Utility and the system of means and ends.

8 25

N passing now from what has been mainly a criti

I

cism of the orthodox view to a more positive develop

ment of the conception of morality I will begin with a brief statement of the psychological thesis, or motive, which is to underly all of the subsequent chapters, and which may be stated as "the unity of the spirit".

The contrast of morality and utility involves a distinction of "values" which suggests the more recent fashion of treating ethics as a branch of "value-theory". Among the several values we may distinguish economic value, relating to wealth, or more generally to utility; aesthetic value, relating to art and beauty; ethical, or moral value; and logical value, in which knowledge and truth are conceived as a species of value. The sum of these "values", assumed to be so many different kinds of value, is human life. Now among these values what is the place of morality? My answer will be, Everywhere.

To make the meaning of this clearer-it is for me one of the convincing merits of Benedetto Croce's philosophy of beauty that he makes the aesthetic a generic aspect of the human mind, or in his own juster and more graceful terms, of the human spirit. By this it is meant that

creative art is not confined to "men of genius"; to exceptional and abnormal men, capable of a special sort of intoxication; or to exceptional and abnormal states of mind. "Since we all talk," he says, very significantly, "we are all artists." Any one who has ever attempted to talk (or to write) seriously, with a careful sense of responsibility for saying what he means, or who has observed a child struggling pathetically for the fitting word and dissatisfied with any other, who has compared this with that facile use of slang (in polite conversation or commercial correspondence) which is never at a loss and never means much, will see, I think, that serious talking is an experience both of art and of beauty. But then he will see that every experience, so far as it is experienceconsciousness and not habit is as such an aesthetic experience and has, in however slight a measure, the quality of genius-and thus, I maintain, the quality of morality.

It is therefore dismaying to find Croce, in a fashion characteristically Latin, dividing the realm of the spirit into the four seemingly separated "forms" of aesthetic, logic, economic, and ethic; such that, it seems, nothing that is any of these forms, or departments, of the spirit can at the same time be in any other. To be sure the four forms are somehow linked in "the unity of the spirit”; an evolutionary unity in which the spirit, beginning with the aesthetic, passes through the logical and the economic and reaches finally the ethical. But in this "unity" I find the aesthetic and the moral, to me the most intimately related, separated by nearly the whole field of the spirit, and the aesthetic (curiously, the field in which Croce's chief interests lie) degraded to the status of the most primitive form of consciousness. To me this is false

aesthetic and false ethic; and I am led to suspect that Croce, who is a free spirit in the field of aesthetic, has in the field of ethics bowed to a pious convention-the convention, namely, that while art is self-expression morality expresses "the spirit of self-sacrifice"; that while art is individual morality must be "universal".

But my chief objection to these nicely differentiated "forms of the spirit" is that they perpetuate the tradition of the departmented soul; the soul conceived after the analogy of the house, or the factory, in which successive stages in the process of manufacture are distributed spatially among so many rooms, or buildings. The classical illustration is what James calls "the Kantian machineshop", from which we derive the tripartite division of the soul into knowledge, feeling, and will; three rooms, in the first of which we find out what the world has given us (without yet suspecting what we want), in the second how we like it (without suspecting what we shall do about it), and in the third what we are going to do about it. Primitive conceptions of this kind will be found underlying most of the chapter-divisions in the textbooks of psychology. They doubtless enable us to talk about the mind, they hardly enable us to understand it.

Such at least is my prejudice: namely, that the departmented soul is no soul whatever. And therefore I must view somewhat sceptically the multiplicity of separate fields, each guarded by its own standard as by a tutelary deity, into which life, or "value", is divided by science and by common thought. A shopkeeper tells me that this is the right price. If I ask whether he means that the price is moral, I shall learn that prices are determined not by moral laws but by the laws of economics. A teacher of

French tells me that "Sapho" and "Mademoiselle Maupin" are good literature, but hastens to explain that he means, not morally good, but aesthetically good. If I criticize Jones who has just lost his son for his choice of physician, I may be reminded that his fault was at most an error of judgment, and thus not moral but intellectual. Or (to introduce the traditionally most absolute division of moral philosophy) his fault was merely prudential-as if there could be a "merely prudential" in an issue of life and death! Other standards might be mentioned, such as the standards of manners (assumed to be independent of morals) and of correct dress.

In this common view morality appears to be only one of the many departments of life. And in the mind of the average man it seems to be somewhat apart from life's main business. The business man dismisses moral considerations on the ground that "business is business", calmly certain that morality belongs somewhere else. For the artist art is art. The statesman is convinced that morality should not obtrude upon diplomacy. He may even take pride in the reflection that he has allowed no moral scruples (all very well in their place) to qualify his pursuit of the national prestige. It seems indeed that among the departments of life morality is the least important. So that the common man may be forgiven for supposing that morality comes into play only on Sunday, that it is concerned mainly with domestic relations, and perhaps exclusively with the relations between men and women.

It is against this departmental view of life (common indeed but far from distinctively vulgar) that I hold that among the several "values" of life morality is everywhere.