wayward; to enforce general moral laws on the willful and perverse, is not only to maintain the fabric of social order, but also to exercise a potent educational influence on individual character. The whole scope of social law is only reached in this insight, that restraint is training. The little nameless hedges and fences about individual freedom, the curbs on natural impulse that so abound in refined society, these are a discipline and a culture; and the man brought up all his life. in the habits of good society will have a quickness of percep tion and a delicacy of feeling as to what is intrinsically "becoming" unknown to the rustic or the provincial.

The chief error of the ethicist, however, is this: when he identifies "morality" with social expediency, he assumes that this eliminates from it the "ethical" element. This is to beg the question. Such an assumption rests on the notion that human society has no absolute existence, but that its institutions are simply the wise arrangement of men and the fruit of experience. At this point the question turns on the relation between society and the individual. Now it is capable of demonstration that as the relation between character and conduct, between ethics and morals, is not extrinsic but intrinsic, so also is the relation between individuals and society. Society is not an aggregate of individuals whose existence was ever anterior to it or independent of it; it is that universal in which alone. men have their being as men. Not in our individuality, not in our independent self-hood, resides our manhood, but rather in our organic relation to the organic whole. That relation is the common cement of the single structure apart from which men not only fall helplessly asunder, a mere pile of bricks, but their personal humanity itself wells away from them—as the substance escapes from a jelly fish taken from his native element-till they collapse into the animal. Hence to place the individual in opposition to society, and to assume an antithesis between ethics which relate to the one and morals which relate to the other, is a misapprehension and perversion. of the facts of the case. Social standards, rules, customs, habits are not factitious or conventional; they are the outward embodiment of the inward necessity, of the absolute ethic which is fundamental in the nature of man. Use and wont are

the standard of individual action, not because of any arbitrary decree of a majority, but because use and wont only are use and wont because they are also the true ethic.

It is the claim of the ethicist that conscience shall be the supreme arbiter of the individual's action. For him

"Self-contradiction is the only wrong,

For, by the laws of Spirit, in the right
Is every individual's character,

That acts in strict consistence with itself."

This is entirely true if the self, with which consistence is the right, and contradiction the wrong, be the objective self; and certainly this high utterance of self-exaltation seems to have been inspired by at least a glimpse of the truth-the objectivity of self. But it is only a glimpse, and after all self-hood remains subjective to the ethicist's conception, and in this sense the declaration is false; it is indeed the very root of falsehood. In fact the ethicist here is only echoing the well-known cry Place for private judgment! The truth of the cry is a question of accent. Private judgment! subjective reason! exclaim a large number with sufficient noise, but the whole stress of their voice falls on "private" and "subjective;" judgment and reason are hardly heard; about them there is evidently little thought or care. It is the private man, the individual subject, in and for whom they are interested. But let the emphasis fall evenly, and the truth appears. Private, subjective,—that is what is peculiar to me, what is mine and not yours; but judg ment, reason,-is that what is peculiar to me, what is mine and not yours? The watchword of the ethicist really states objectivity as well as subjectivity. Private judgment is self-will; private judgment is free-will. The subject is not my true self; the object is my true self. The rights of the object are paramount over the rights of the subject, or to put it more truly, the rights of the object are the true rights of the subject. Social morals are the deposit of objective reason realized through time in the practical life of mankind, and the sole right of private judgment, of the individual, is to share intelligently in this common heritage, to be present with insight and assent, so as to find his true self, his true freedom, in the social law, and not an alien authority constraining him.

In this view of "morals" the point taken in illustration wears another aspect. Granting that mutual affection is the essence of true marriage, as regards the parties to it, it does not follow that even for them the form is unessential or can be

dispensed with. If form in general is not an independent something, but the form of essence essence's own form-if it lies in the very nature of the inward that it be also outward, then it is plain that the marriage ceremony has its raison d'être not only in grounds of external utility, but in that it completes and fulfills, realizes and substantiates the ethical inward of marriage by supplying its own necessary outwardness. And this truth of reason is confirmed by the facts of experience. No sexual union based on ethic sentiment alone, in disregard of social sanction, has ever been or can ever be ethically satisfactory, serene and lasting. How pure soever, however seemingly sufficient to itself, it has within it the germs of death. The troubled restlessness that comes from disaccord with social law may seem at first to be only the pressure from without, but when retirement from the world's sight, and closest mutual clinging fail to remove the oppression of that nameless dissatisfaction, it is seen to be the pressure from within of a law of the soul's own being violated and renounced. Thus, as in the consideration of nature we find the prevalent error nowadays to be insistance upon the outward, so conversely the error in morals to which the genius of the present, or of the recent past, is most exposed is insistance upon the inward. Yet the latter error is but the distortion of the higher truth of morals. We cannot hold with the rigid conservative that the "ethic," or subjective, view, is merely an outrage upon the common conscience of mankind. There is in it the recognition of a truth, as well as the impulse of high and noble feeling. It is true that the character, the spirit, the inward quality of soul from which the deed proceeds are the supreme concern in conduct. We sympathize with Carlyle's many eloquent utterances on this point. We may even sympathize with the puresouled Shelley, the honest-hearted George Sand, and others of that revolutionary time in their fierce and utterly blind struggle against "the Anarch, Custom." We must agree with them that to be true to oneself, and one's deepest convictions is

nobler than slavishly to follow the fashions of the herd. We must admit, that is, that ethic principle is higher than moral rule, abstractly viewed. But the error just lies in viewing them abstractly; the error lies in taking either truth to be exclusive of the other; in failing to see the essential correlation in which the two are one. The error of the ethicists is that of high-souled and independent intellects who despise a "Philistinism" of convention which takes all its judgments at second hand from the general average; which regards only appearances, quite satisfied with observance of the proprieties and a clean outside of the cup and platter; which, caring nothing for motive and intention, puts a premium upon hypocrisy while it is correspondingly severe upon conscientious departure from the general rule. Yet it is an error no less intrinsically false than its opposite, and one far more fraught with practical danger; throwing away as it does all safeguards of conduct, throwing open the door to a riot of individualism in which, as in the days when there was no king in Israel, every man shall do that which is right in his own eyes.

III. ART. In the sphere of art the antithesis between inward and outward appears in the rival theories of Idealism and Realism. In so far as these theories are pronounced and extreme-in so far as they urge either the Ideal or the Real as a principle which excludes the other, they are based on a half truth, which, as we have seen, is the general form of error. The truth in art as in philosophy is absolute idealism—that unity of ideal and real in which the one is essential inwardness and the other essential outwardness, and each goes into the other as its ground. The ideal is not by itself, alone, but it is as given in the real; and the real is nothing in itself, but only in that it gives expression to the ideal. The first is the content of the second, and the second is the form of the first. It is the error of abstract idealism that it denies the esthetic quality of the real, and so drives the ideal from its native home and leaves it to wander in a vague beyond. And so nothing is really left it for a principle but the negation of reality. The positive, from the very urgency of our insistence on it, turns into a negative; as in ethics the inward light, or the regenerate heart

turns out to be practically anti-nomianism. This non-realism can only give us a false art. There is loud homage to the socalled classic; correctness of style is insisted on; the "unities" must be observed in the drama, and in painting the pyramidal form of composition; each art has its Medo-Persian laws of time-honored narrowness; it is the despotism of conventionality. In such an atmosphere art degenerates into artificiality. Nature is improved on, dressed up, smoothed down,—as in the French landscape gardening of the last century; rustic life is parodied in the Pastoral; all living, genuine feeling in poem or picture must be toned down to the neutrality, or refined into the euphemism agreeable to polite taste. Such an idealism that disdains reality and spurns earth must find itself in the air. It can have no standard or criterion but subjective conception; and that is to have none, for a standard must be fixed, but subjective conception is just what is variable. Not principles which remain unchangeable through the generations, but the ensemble of opinions, fancies, caprices which make up the dominant mode or fashion of the day-these prescribe the estimate by which a work of art is judged, and condition the spirit in which it is produced. And so art falls into a slavery to pedantry, affectation and conceit in which it quickly perishes.

When realism appears as a reaction from this effete idealism, it will be apt to gather to itself all earnest minds and find a wide acceptance of its call: Let us go back to nature and truth. But what is meant by this summons? We readily admit that only the true is the beautiful, but what is the true? This general question demands a brief consideration.

Average men have a high regard for facts. They tell us with a certain complacency that facts are stubborn things, as if they relied upon these solid tangibilities, which cannot be smoothed, away to protect them against the subtleties of the ingenious theorist. They are practical men, as they are fond of telling us; for their part they have enough to do in dealing with the simple actualities of life, and they intimate pretty dis tinctly that they consider themselves more usefully and sensibly employed than those who spend their time in chasing the rainbows of fancy or spinning cobwebs from the brain. There is a ring to this kind of talk that commends it to our ears, until we stop and think. The practical man wishes to deal with substance,