It is desirable for that purpose to express, in somewhat sharper terms than I have yet ventured to do, the general character of the idea with which, as the result of reflexion on what has worked best in the past history of society, what has contributed most potently to its development, we may approach the question of changes to be effected. Our aim, it appears to me, may be defined as the establishment of such a state of social relations that each shall have full opportunity for development, for the kind of life that gives the amplest scope to his capacities and powers, and that each shall have the fullest opportunity possible for enjoying that improvement in social conditions which is our heritage from the past.

Now, undoubtedly, the existing social structure in any state is far from corresponding even to such a humble aim. The earlier, less enlightened, types of civilisation have all of them left their traces on human character and on human institutions. The strong sense of the indebtedness of the individual to society, and admission therefore of the obligation to accept such rules as may be deemed best for the common weal, are products of modern civilisation; and it is the clearness of perception of these ideas, the strength of feeling accompanying them, not any deterioration in the condition of some classes of the community, that have given such prominence in modern times to social questions. But it would be a great error to suppose that the solution of such questions is to be had by a violent transformation of the social structure. The true solution is the utilising of the means possessed by the community in such a way as to secure, on the one hand, that the obligations which each bears to the whole-obligations generally measured by the advantage his position yields him-shall be recognised and discharged; and that, on the other hand, the resources of the community shall be employed so as to render possible for all the kind of life we accept as desirable.

Let me take rapidly one or two examples of what I mean. Inequality has long been recognised as the condition at the root of many of the most acute social questions. It is perfectly certain that no known mechanism can remove inequality, just as certain that it is not desirable to attempt to remove all inequalities. Inequalities of natural ability, acquired skill, social status, are irremovable. Inequalities of position or of advantage are equally irremovable. But it does not follow because these are irremovable that therefore we should, without modification, accept the results now following from them. I see no reason whatsoever why the benefits which are thus derived from working in the favourable medium of the community should not be made to bear their proportionate share in supplying the means for any well devised scheme of social amelioration. In principle, a graduated tax on the returns to industry (or on incomes generally) seems to me thoroughly defensible.

Health and education are equally necessary conditions for a vigorous, prosperous, and moral community. We have already accepted, with some limitations, the principle that under existing circumstances it is necessary that education, which might not attract by its inherent advantages, shall be, for the elementary stages, the concern of the community, and shall be compulsory. Not only should I desire to go further on that line, but I feel strongly that the same principle should be applied in the case of our hospitals. I do not think that these should be dependent on the contingency of private charity. It is, in the long run, for the common welfare that the conditions of health, so far as these can be secured by the maintenance of hospitals, should be satisfied, and I do not think there are insuperable difficulties in the way of carrying out such a principle.

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VI.

THE BASIS OF MORALITY.1

THE basis or principle of morality is certainly no new problem. It has been a theme of discussion since reflexion first turned upon the facts of experience in the hope and with the intention of reducing them to some kind of intelligible system. Such reflexion, the source of science and of philosophy, is obviously, as its very name implies, no primitive direct exercise of thought. There is always presupposed in it a certain material, such detailed knowledge of facts as has been acquired, and a certain formal element, those uniting ideas in which thought has found satisfaction for its attempt at explanation. The two factors which we thus distinguish are not independent of one another. With every increase in the one, nay, even with the change in our views of the one consequent on the explanations we attempt of it, there is given the possibility of an alteration in the other; and so intimately do the two work into one another that after a certain time it becomes an almost hopeless task to disentangle the facts from our theories about them, or to secure that our theories are, so to speak, disinterested, that is, are not infected by certain concrete prejudices of our own. The degree to which any portion of our reflexion attains such disinterestedness is perhaps measurable roughly

1 [Read to the London School of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 28th January 1900.]

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by the distance of the facts involved from our practical interests, that is, by the extent to which, in treating them, abstraction can be made of the very complex factor, human life and thinking. Mathematics, for example, is and has long been free from such intrusion. Its facts can be defined; its explanations spring directly from the nature of these facts, and can be seen to express no more than the unities which bind them together. On the other hand, a theory of morality is most of all exposed to the confusion that arises from real indeterminateness of the facts themselves, and from the foreign character of the explanatory ideas brought to bear upon them. It is of all difficulties the hardest to keep the facts and the hypothetical explanations of morality apart from one another; and yet, without clearness in this respect, no scientific determination of the principle of morality can ever be achieved.

The difficulty referred to is of course that which has always presented itself in efforts at constructive philosophy. Round the vaguely known facts which constitute the material there grows up such a thicket of fanciful interpretations that any clear vision of the actual things becomes impossible. From time to time there comes forward some resolute thinker who, impatient of the obstacles, prepares to attain clear insight by sweeping away every intervening theory and getting straight to the facts. A new method is characteristic of every great advance in philosophical thinking, and the new method requires the dismissal of all prejudices that perturb the view of real fact. Such clearings-out have generally had but little success, so far at least as they have concerned the concrete and complex region of human life. The reforming thinker is too ready to suppose that his zealous cutting down gives him the power of seeing the facts and no more, too ready to forget that he least of all comes to their treatment with no bias of acquired ideas.

The history of such philosophical endeavours is itself a problem which we may seek to explain, and no one can take into consideration even the relatively simplest of its stages, say the development of early Greek speculation, without discovering how largely the general theoretical conceptions which these first thinkers employed are but the abstract expression of concrete pictorial representations drawn from sources altogether foreign to the facts they were applied to explain. It is much more in such concrete pictures, oftentimes so vague that they hardly deserve to be called more than feelings, than in the abstractions based upon them that we find the true inwardness of the philosophical view. The abstractions, indeed, may fatally deceive us, for their attenuated generality may show no points of obvious difference from the corresponding thoughts employed by us, and we may therefore expound a Plato or an Aristotle in such fashion as to give his speculations all the air of a modern view, ignoring the real and profound difference of spirit that makes him a Greek of two thousand years ago. It is not necessary, in order to do justice to the continuity of thought, that one should neglect the element of difference; on the contrary, only by giving full weight to it does the continuity become real.

These general remarks I put forward only by way of a defence in limine for the slenderness of such contribution as I feel able to make towards the discussion of so complicated a problem as that of the basis or principle of morality. I am far more deeply convinced of the difficulty of seeing exactly what we want as principle or basis than of any power of throwing light upon it, not to say of reaching a satisfactory answer to it. At the same time, something may be done for the substance of the question by a treatment which concerns rather the form and method of reaching a principle than the principle itself. For I incline to think there is consider