the desire for the enlargement of my own life through the appropriation of the experience of life of other beings, and of all being. And thus in its more intensive form quite remote from "idle curiosity". Curiosity about your neighbour's household affairs is idle indeed, but especially characteristic of those who are lacking both in imagination and in reverence. But the imagination which makes you wonder deeply about your neighbour's soul, about how life feels and seems to him, is respectful and reverent.

Putting it more academically, I should say that reverence is the belief in significance and the search for significance. It is reverence to thirst to understand what goes on behind the countless faces that pass us day by day, and to believe that something does go on there; and it is lack of reverence —at least an assertion that reverence is unmeaning—to believe that nothing of any consequence goes on there. And it is the culmination of reverence-if only you can carry the assumption of reverence thus far-to believe that something significant goes on behind the face of nature and, with scientists, philosophers, and poets, to struggle to grasp that significance. This is reverence for the divine.

But not, as I conceive, reverence for authority. I have suggested above that the idea of the fatherhood of God implies a moral relation, and thus a moral obligation, while the idea of God the Creator implies, in itself, no obligation. But the fatherhood of God, while implying reverence, contains no implications of authority. In the human relation of parent and child I believe indeed in the exercise of authority, especially in dealing with younger children; not, however, on behalf of their moral character, but as a simple household necessity, which may on occasion be a life-anddeath necessity. But here the parental authority is simply the filial fear. Reverence for the parent-the moral relation between parent and child begins with the child's perception that the parent is his best friend and a person worthy of confidence and trust, a loyal help in difficulty, and a satisfying source of enlightenment in perplexity. But this sense of confidence involves no obligation to obey

Nay, the very fact of confidence means that the obligation has been thus far already loosened.

It is not different with reverence for God. We have to remember that, true or false, the idea of God is logically and necessarily the imaginative development of ideals of human character and of human relationships. Let us admit that Jahveh, the god of Israel, was the expression of a sublime reverence. It is still true that he represented the characteristic Israelitish vices of jealousy and vindictive hatred. So that a pathetically beautiful appeal beginning with, "O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me " may be followed a few verses later by," Do I not hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?" The Greeks likewise attributed their own vices to their gods, making them crafty politicians and free livers. The Greeks were not much afraid of their gods; but it is no less true, I should say, that the Greek mythology, the fruit of an imagination graceful, curious, wistful, was the expression of reverence.

CHAPTER VI

THE ORDERED SOCIETY

§ 20. The order of reverence. § 21. The utility of the reverential order. § 22. The ordered society and the biological species. § 23. Ordered relations vs. social relations. § 24. The decay of reverence and the dawn of morality.

I

§ 20

COME now to the motive of authority as embodied in

the conception of social order. The characteristic

phrase for this motive is "reverence for authority", or "respect for the constituted authorities"; to which the corresponding diagnosis for all social maladjustments is "the decay of reverence". The metaphysical development of the motive of reverence may be found in "The Philosophical Theory of the State", by the late Bernard Bosanquet.

It is, I suppose, an indisputable fact that every child is born with a determinate potential complexion—say, with red hair or black. For Bosanquet it seems to be a fact equally indisputable (and in the last analysis a necessity of the same organic kind) that every child bears at birth the mark of a determinate social class. And therefore it is axiomatic for Bosanquet that the only conceivable social relation is an arrangement of men in classes; which are to be distinguished (as every logic of social classification seems to demand) as higher and lower, and bound together in a system of reverence for authority. This view of the logical necessities seems to be also axiomatic for many other persons; among them (including, strangely, some of the more advanced exponents of democracy) those for whom the social problem is a problem of "leadership"

as if the only conceivable social order were an order of leaders and followers. We have heard much about leadership since the War. But true reverence for authority is expressed in the recognition of "natural" or "right leaders", to be found only among "the intelligent classes", the distinction of classes being referred to the Laws of Nature.

And for a true sentiment of reverence a society thus ordered is the embodiment also of an aesthetic ideal. The ordered society is a thing of beauty; beautiful because in the last analysis its beauty is the beauty of nature. Perhaps it would be better to say that the ordered society is picturesque. Society is made picturesque by the presence of distinctions; and distinctions seem to require that men be graded. The ordered society is again conceived as a society distinctively and exclusively moral. Ideally it seems that there can be neither beauty nor virtue in the relations of men except in a relation of superior and inferior in which benevolence is exchanged for reverence.

The ideally "ordered" society is, accordingly, a society patriarchally or hierarchically ordered, in which men are graded, and ranked, according to a single principle of worth. The type of all such is the society pictured in Plato's "Republic" (presented as the social ideal both by Bosanquet and by T. H. Green), in which a broad distinction is made between a lower class of common-minded men, or artisans, and an upper class of high-minded men, or warriors, the whole being guided and directed by a select uppermost class of philosophers and (in the language of a later period) saints. A more familiar illustration, however, is the picture of English country life presented by the literature of the earlier Victorian period, in which society consists of an upper class of landed gentry, an intermediate class of tenant farmers, with whom are grouped some yeomen, or freeholders, and a lower class of farm labourers, all bound together by the feudal principle of mutual loyalty. The tenant was bound in loyalty to his landlord-woe to the tenant who should vote against his

landlord! But the landlord was bound to the tenant; and especially bound to respect his first right to a lease of the farm which had been held by him and by his fathers before him.

The moral principle governing these relations is the principle defended in F. H. Bradley's essay on "My Station and Its Duties".1 According to this principle the whole duty of each man consists in faithfulness to that station in life to which it hath pleased God to call him. The duties flowing from this principle are substantially those tabulated in the church catechism under the several heads of "my duty to my superiors", "to my equals", and "to my inferiors". In this moral system it was at once the virtue and the pride of any man that he "knew his place". By this indeed he vindicated his claim to self-respect. For the matter of that, it would seem that the two motives of self-respect and respect for superiors were interwoven in a mutual understanding which becomes at times almost democratic. Squire and tenant-farmer might be warm friends and even good fellows; but the tenant never aspired to dine at the squire's table, and he condemned as vulgar those of his fellow-tenants who cherished such aspirations. On the other hand, it seems that for those who lay outside of the system, such as the village shopkeeper, a truly sound morality was out of the question. Honest Hodge, the farm-labourer, achieves dignity by removing his cap in the presence of the squire; Dawkins, the shopkeeper, achieves only servility. The commercial, or calculating, motive could offer doubtless only a hypocritical respect for authority. For this, in the end, was the principle underlying the system, not respect for the person but respect for his rank, and respect for the principle of distinctions involved in the ordered society. Respect for one's betters and condescension to inferiors were the two signs by which, according to circumstances, one indicated a belief in the moral order.

This tradition of reverence survives to trouble us, in

1 F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies.