attitude towards these, our animal kinsmen. I fear it may be because in the background we detect the presence of ominous questions.1 Some time ago, however, I thought of asking, What if the horses and cattle were suddenly endowed with self-consciousness and the power of speech? Suppose that the draft-horses became aware of what they contributed in the economic process, or that the food-cattle came to know that they were to be eaten and could tell us that they knew? I fear that after a discussion of this subject with one of the then cultivated and instructed members of this species, we should find that a good beefsteak had lost some of its flavour. On the other hand, I imagine that the cattle would flatly refuse to be eaten. It would be useless to call Dr. Paley to explain to them out of the Bible that God intended them to be food for man; and no less useless to dwell upon the superior importance of human life as compared with theirs. They very properly would never see it. If we threatened coercion, they could, as a last resort (what we should do in their place), threaten race suicide-or possibly immediate, individual suicide. Our only recourse would be to treat them as persons worthy of consideration, i.e., as gentlemen, by offering suitable inducements, though what these inducements would be, I must leave the reader to imagine. But one point is clear : we should be facing a situation distinctively moral, confronted with moral agents whose rights, though newly created, we could upon no ground venture to ignore.

Well, the significance of the fable is that this is precisely the situation confronting the "intelligent classes" in the present crisis of social life. "The masses", so called,

1 In his Autobiography Anthony Trollope offers an amusingly naïve justification of his favourite sport of fox-hunting, based gravely upon a computation of the pain suffered by the fox as compared with the pleasure of a hundred or two hunters. Trollope forgets that the importance attributed by him to the gratification of the hunting-instinct of the hunter places the hunter who chases the fox in the same order of nature with the fox who chases the hare-and then why bother about morality? The fox does not.

"the workers", in present-day terms, have just lately (in the history of the race) acquired self-consciousness and the power of speech. Until yesterday these workers, representing numerically all but an insignificant fraction of the race, remained inarticulate in moral philosophy and nearly so in literature. As pointed out above, all Greek ethics, which continues to set the questions for academic ethics, is the ethics of a leisure class. Classical literature makes us almost forget that, then as now, life was supported by work. In ancient literature the worker, usually a slave, remains unrepresented except as Christianity voices his claim to respect in another world. In the Greek view of life he forms a part, not of the moral world, but of the natural world along with the horses and the cattle. All of our ideas of higher culture are derived from and still are impregnated with this conception of a social situation which involves the distinction of master and servant. So that, in spite of the change of ideas brought about by the industrial revolution, which makes it now possible to give the status of gentleman to a successful business man,1 we do not yet clearly conceive what a really non-servile higher culture would be.

Meanwhile the industrial revolution, built upon the steam-engine, by segregating and massing the workers has made them class-conscious. In the utilitarian school of ethics we have, for the first time I should say in moral philosophy, the expression of an industrial view of life. One of the consequences of this view is now being presented to the world in emphatic and imperative if also somewhat insolent tones (in which, as betraying a sense of power, they are not peculiar) by the labour unions; whose leaders are proving themselves to be men of no mean intelligence, political and administrative. And of late the labour world, while not relaxing its demand for wages, has announced a

1 What this means is shown in Mrs. Gaskell's "North and South", in which that clear-minded woman finds it evidently something of a task to show how the daughter of a very poor Anglican clergyman could be conceived to love, and honourably to marry, a well-to-do manufacturer, although a graduate of Oxford-this, of course, seventy years ago.

The

claim for participation in the direction of industry. claim is doubtless shocking, but viewed calmly it seems that nothing could be more characteristically moral. What it means is personal dignity (dignity in spite of a certain concomitant insolence) is asserting the rights of gentlemen.

Faced with this situation, it is useless to tell them authoritatively where they belong; precisely from the moral standpoint, that remains to be seen. Nor will it avail to refer to the superior wisdom of the intelligent classes. Alas, I fear that, by the side of many of the labour men, the enonomic philosophy of the "intelligent classes" is only too often naïve! And it is rather late in the day for "the fear of God". They have been warned; and it is a peculiarity of the moral world that, although you may perhaps enlighten the unenlightened, you cannot so well dis-enlighten 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.

§ 25

N passing now from what has been mainly a criticism 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 underlie 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 experience-consciousness 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