essentially duty to others, is a soul-cramping, funereal notion, and deserves all that Ibsen and his progeny have said of it.[14] Ask the individual to sacrifice himself to the community, and it will not be long before he sacrifices the community to himself. Granted that, in the language of Heraclitus, there is always a majority of fools, and that self-sacrifice can be procured by the simple hypnotic suggestion of post-mortem remuneration: sooner or later come doubt and disillusionment, and the society whose permanence was so easily secured becomes driftwood on the tides of time. History means that if it means anything.

No; the intelligent individual will give allegiance to the group of which he happens to find himself a member, only so far as the policies of the group accord with his own criticised desires. Whatever allegiance he offers will be to those forces, wherever they may be, which in his judgment move in the line of these desires. Even for such forces he will not sacrifice himself,—though there may be times when martyrdom is a luxury for which life itself is not too great a price. Since these forces have been defined in terms of his own judgment and desire, conflict between them and himself can come only when his behavior diverges from the purposes defined and resumed in times of conscious thought,—i.e., only when he ceases to adapt means to his ends, ceases, that is, to be intelligent. The prime moral conflict is not between the individual and his group, but between the partial self of fragmentary impulse and the coördinated self of conscious purpose. There is a group within each man as well as without: a group of partial selves is the reality behind the figment of the unitary self. Every individual is a society, every person is a crowd. And the tragedies of the moral life lie not in the war of each against all, but in the restless interplay of these partial selves behind the stage of action. As a man’s intelligence grows this conflict diminishes, for both means and ends, both behavior and purposes, are being continually revised and redirected in accordance with intelligence, and therefore in convergence towards it. Progressively the individual achieves unity, and through unity, personality. Faith in himself has made him whole. The ethical problem, so far as it is the purely individual problem of attaining to coördinated personality, is solved.

Moral responsibility, then,—whatever social responsibility may be,—is the responsibility of the individual to himself. The social is not necessarily the moral—let the sociological fact be what it will. The unthinking conformity of the “normal social life” is, just because it is unthinking, below the level of morality: let us call it sociality, and make morality the prerogative of the really thinking animal. In any society so constituted as to give to the individual an increase in powers as recompense for the pruning of his liberties, the unsocial will be immoral,—that is, self-destructively unreasonable and unintelligent; but even in such a society the moral would overflow the margins of the social, and would take definition ultimately from the congruity of the action with the criticised purposes of the individual self. This does not mean that all ethics lies compact in the shibboleth, “Be yourself.” Those who make the least sparing use of this phrase are too apt to consider it an excuse for lives that reek with the heat of passion and smack of insufficient evolution. These people need to be reminded—all the more forcibly since the most palatable and up-to-date philosophies exalt instinct and deride thought—that one cannot be thoroughly one’s self except by deliberation and intelligence. To act indeliberately is not to be, but in great part to cancel, one’s self. For example, the vast play of direct emotional expression is almost entirely indeliberate: if you are greatly surprised, your lips part, your eyes open a trifle wider, your pulse quickens, your respiration is affected; and if I am surprised, though you be as different from me as Hyperion from a satyr, my respiration will be affected, my pulse will quicken, my eyes will open a trifle wider, and my lips will part;—my direct reaction will be essentially the same as yours. The direct expression of surprise is practically the same in all the higher animals. Darwin’s classical description of the expression of fear is another example; it holds for every normal human being; not to speak of lower species. So with egotism, jealousy, anger, and a thousand other instinctive reaction-complexes; they are common to the species, and when we so react, we are expressing not our individual selves so much as the species to which we happen to belong. When you hit a man because he has “insulted” you, when you swagger a little after delivering a successful speech, when you push aside women and children in order to take their place in the rescue boat, when you do any one of a million indeliberate things like these, it is not you that act, it is your species, it is your ancestors, acting through you; your acquired individual difference is lost in the whirlwind of inherited impulse. Your act, as the Scholastics phrased it, is not a “human” act; you yourself are not really acting in any full measure of yourself, you are but playing slave and mouth-piece to the dead. But subject the inherited tendencies to the scrutiny of your individual experience, think, and your action will then express yourself, not in any abbreviated sense, but up to the hilt. There is no merit, no “virtue,” no development in playing the game of fragmentary impulses, in living up to the past; to be moral, to grow, is to be not part but all of one’s self, to call into operation the acquired as well as the inherited elements of one’s character, to be whole. So many of us invite ruin by actions which do not really express us, but are the voice of the merest fragment of ourselves,—the remainder of us being meanwhile asleep.[15] To be whole, to be your deliberate self, to do what you please but only after considering what you really please, to follow your own ideals (but to follow them!), to choose your own means and not to have them forced upon you by your ancestors, to act consciously, to see the part sub specie totius, to see the present act in its relation to your vital purposes, to think, to be intelligent,—all these are definitions of virtue and morality.

There is, then, in the old sense of the word, no such thing as morality, there is only intelligence or stupidity. Yes, virtue is calculus, horrible as that may sound to long and timid ears: to calculate properly just what you must do to attain your real ends, to see just what and where your good is, and to make for it,—that is all that can without indecency be asked of any man, that is all that is ever vouchsafed by any man who is intelligent.

Perhaps you think it is an easy virtue,—this cleaving to intelligence,—easier than being harmless. Try it.

VII

“Instinct” and “Reason”

AND now to go back to the refutations.

The strongest objection to the Socratic doctrine is that intelligence is not a creator, but only a servant, of ends. What we shall consider to be our good appears to be determined not by reason, but by desire. Reason itself seems but the valet of desire, ready to do for it every manner of menial service. Desire is an adept at marshalling before intelligence such facts as favor the wish, and turns the mind’s eye resolutely away from other truth, as a magician