“Poor Shaftesbury!”
Meanwhile Shaftesbury’s fame had from the first been pursuing a very different course in France and Germany, for it is the people outside a man’s own country who anticipate the verdict of posterity. Leibnitz, whose vast genius was on some sides akin (Shaftesbury has, indeed, been termed “the Leibnitz of morals”), admired the English thinker, and the universal Voltaire recognised him. Montesquieu placed him on a four-square summit with Plato and Montaigne and Malebranche. The enthusiastic Diderot, seeing in Shaftesbury the exponent of the naturalistic ethics of his own temperament, translated a large part of his chief book in 1745. Herder, who inspired so many of the chief thinkers of the nineteenth century and even of to-day, was himself largely inspired by Shaftesbury, whom he once called “the virtuoso of humanity,” regarding his writings as, even in form, well-nigh worthy of Greek antiquity, and long proposed to make a comparative study of the ethical conceptions of Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Shaftesbury, but unfortunately never carried out that happy idea. Rousseau, not only by contact of ideas, but the spontaneous effort of his own nature towards autonomous harmony, was in touch with Shaftesbury, and so helped to bring his ideals into the general stream of modern life. Shaftesbury, directly or indirectly, inspired the early influential French Socialists and Communists. On the other hand he has equally inspired the moralists of individualism. Even the Spanish-American Rodó, one of the most delicately aristocratic of modern moralists in recent time, puts forth conceptions, which, consciously or unconsciously, are precisely those of Shaftesbury. Rodó believes that all moral evil is a dissonance in the æsthetic of conduct and that the moral task in character is that of the sculptor in marble: “Virtue is a kind of art, a divine art.” Even Croce, who began by making a deep division between art and life, holds that there can be no great critic of art who is not also a great critic of life, for æsthetic criticism is really itself a criticism of life, and his whole philosophy may be regarded as representing a stage of transition between the old traditional view of the world and that conception towards which in the modern world our gaze is turned.[102] As Shaftesbury had stated the matter, however, it was left on the whole vague and large. He made no very clear distinction between the creative artistic impulse in life and critical æsthetic appreciation. In the sphere of morals we must often be content to wait until our activity is completed to appreciate its beauty or its ugliness.[103] On the background of general æsthetic judgment we have to concentrate on the forces of creative artistic activity, whose work it is painfully to mould the clay of moral action, and forge its iron, long before the æsthetic criterion can be applied to the final product. The artist’s work in life is full of struggle and toil; it is only the spectator of morals who can assume the calm æsthetic attitude. Shaftesbury, indeed, evidently recognised this, but it was not enough to say, as he said, that we may prepare ourselves for moral action by study in literature. One may be willing to regard living as an art, and yet be of opinion that it is as unsatisfactory to learn the art of living in literature as to learn, let us say, the art of music in architecture.
Yet we must not allow these considerations to lead us away from the great fact that Shaftesbury clearly realised—what modern psychology emphasises—that desires can only be countered by desires, that reason cannot affect appetite. “That which is of original and pure nature,” he declared, “nothing besides contrary habit and custom (a second nature) is able to displace. There is no speculative opinion, persuasion, or belief, which is capable immediately or directly to exclude or destroy it.” Where he went beyond some modern psychologists is in his Hellenic perception that in this sphere of instinct we are amid the play of art to which æsthetic criteria alone can be applied.
It was necessary to concentrate and apply these large general ideas. To some extent this was done by Shaftesbury’s immediate successors and followers, such as Hutcheson and Arbuckle, who taught that man is, ethically, an artist whose work is his own life. They concentrated attention on the really creative aspects of the artist in life, æsthetic appreciation of the finished product being regarded as secondary. For all art is, primarily, not a contemplation, but a doing, a creative action, and morality is so preëminently.
Shaftesbury, with his followers Arbuckle and Hutcheson, may be regarded as the founders of æsthetics; it was Hutcheson, though he happened to be the least genuinely æsthetic in temperament of the three, who wrote the first modern treatise on æsthetics. Together, also, they may be said to have been the revivalists of Hellenism, that is to say, of the Hellenic spirit, or rather of the classic spirit, for it often came through Roman channels. Shaftesbury was, as Eucken has well said, the Greek spirit among English thinkers. He represented an inevitable reaction against Puritanism, a reaction which is still going on—indeed, here and there only just beginning. As Puritanism had achieved so notable a victory in England, it was natural that in England the first great champion of Hellenism should appear. It is to Oliver Cromwell and Praise-God Barebones that we owe Shaftesbury.
After Shaftesbury it is Arbuckle who first deserves attention, though he wrote so little that he never attained the prominence he deserved.[104] He was a Dublin physician of Scottish ancestry, the friend of Swift, by whom he was highly esteemed, and he was a cripple from boyhood. He was a man of genuine artistic temperament, though the art he was attracted to was not, as with Shaftesbury, the sculptor’s or the painter’s, but the poet’s. It was not so much intuition on which he insisted, but imagination as formative of a character; moral approval seemed to him thoroughly æsthetic, part of an imaginative act which framed the ideal of a beautiful personality, externalising itself in action. When Robert Bridges, the poet of our own time, suggests (in his “Necessity of Poetry”) that “morals is that part of Poetry which deals with conduct,” he is speaking in the spirit of Arbuckle. An earlier and greater poet was still nearer to Arbuckle. “A man to be greatly good,” said Shelley in his “Defence of Poetry,” “must imagine intensely and comprehensively...The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” If, indeed, with Adam Smith and Schopenhauer, we choose to base morals on sympathy we really are thereby making the poet’s imagination the great moral instrument. Morals was for Arbuckle a disinterested æsthetic harmony, and he had caught much of the genuine Greek spirit.
Hutcheson was in this respect less successful. Though he had occupied himself with æsthetics he had little true æsthetic feeling; and though he accomplished much for the revival of Greek studies his own sympathies were really with the Roman Stoics, with Cicero, with Marcus Aurelius, and in this way he was led towards Christianity, to which Shaftesbury was really alien. He democratised if not vulgarised, and diluted if not debased, Shaftesbury’s loftier conception. In his too widely sympathetic and receptive mind the Shaftesburian ideal was not only Romanised, not only Christianised; it was plunged into a miscellaneously eclectic mass that often became inconsistent and incoherent. In the long run, in spite of his great immediate success, he injured in these ways the cause he advocated. He overemphasised the passively æsthetic side of morals; he dwelt on the term “moral sense,” by Shaftesbury only occasionally used, as it had long previously been by Aristotle (and then only in the sense of “natural temper” by analogy with the physical senses), and this term was long a stumbling-block in the eyes of innocent philosophic critics, too easily befooled by words, who failed to see that, as Libby has pointed out, the underlying idea simply is, as held by Shaftesbury, that æsthetic notions of proportion and symmetry depend upon the native structure of the mind and only so constitute a “moral sense.”[105] What Hutcheson, as distinct from Shaftesbury, meant by a “moral sense”—really a conative instinct—is sufficiently indicated by the fact that he was inclined to consider the conjugal and parental affections as a “sense” because natural. He desired to shut out reason, and cognitive elements, and that again brought him to the conception of morality as instinctive. Hutcheson’s conception of “sense” was defective as being too liable to be regarded as passive rather than as conative, though conation was implied. The fact that the “moral sense” was really instinct, and had nothing whatever to do with “innate ideas,” as many have ignorantly supposed, was clearly seen by Hutcheson’s opponents. The chief objection brought forward by the Reverend John Balguy in 1728, in the first part of his “Foundation of Moral Goodness,” was precisely that Hutcheson based morality on instinct and so had allowed “some degree of morality to animals.”[106] It was Hutcheson’s fine and impressive personality, his high character, his eloquence, his influential position, which enabled him to keep alive the conception of morals he preached, and even to give it an effective force, throughout the European world, it might not otherwise easily have exerted. Philosophy was to Hutcheson the art of living—as it was to the old Greek philosophers—rather than a question of metaphysics, and he was careless of consistency in thinking, an open-minded eclectic who insisted that life itself is the great matter. That, no doubt, was the reason why he had so immense an influence. It was mainly through Hutcheson that the more aristocratic spirit of Shaftesbury was poured into the circulatory channels of the world’s life. Hume and Adam Smith and Reid were either the pupils of Hutcheson or directly influenced by him. He was a great personality rather than a great thinker, and it was as such that he exerted so much force in philosophy.[107] With Schiller, whose attitude was not, however, based directly on Shaftesbury, the æsthetic conception of morals, which in its definitely conscious form had up till then been especially English, may be said to have entered the main stream of culture. Schiller regarded the identity of Duty and Inclination as the ideal goal of human development, and looked on the Genius of Beauty as the chief guide of life. Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the greatest spirits of that age, was moved by the same ideas, throughout his life, much as in many respects he changed, and even shortly before his death wrote in deprecation of the notion that conformity to duty is the final aim of morality. Goethe, who was the intimate friend of both Schiller and Humboldt, largely shared the same attitude, and through him it has had a subtle and boundless influence. Kant, who, it has been said, mistook Duty for a Prussian drill-sergeant, still ruled the academic moral world. But a new vivifying and moulding force had entered the larger moral world, and to-day we may detect its presence on every side.
V V It has often been brought against the conception of morality as an art that it lacks seriousness. It seems to many people to involve an easy, self-indulgent, dilettante way of looking at life. Certainly it is not the way of the Old Testament. Except in imaginative literature—it was, indeed, an enormous and fateful exception—the Hebrews were no “æsthetic intuitionists.” They hated art, for the rest, and in face of the problems of living they were not in the habit of considering the lilies how they grow. It was not the beauty of holiness, but the stern rod of a jealous Jehovah, which they craved for their encouragement along the path of Duty. And it is the Hebrew mode of feeling which has been, more or less violently and imperfectly, grafted into our Christianity.[108] It is a complete mistake, however, to suppose that those for whom life is an art have entered on an easy path, with nothing but enjoyment and self-indulgence before them. The reverse is nearer to the truth. It is probably the hedonist who had better choose rules if he only cares to make life pleasant.[109] For the artist life is always a discipline, and no discipline can be without pain. That is so even of dancing, which of all the arts is most associated in the popular mind with pleasure. To learn to dance is the most austere of disciplines, and even for those who have attained to the summit of its art often remains a discipline not to be exercised without heroism. The dancer seems a thing of joy, but we are told that this famous dancer’s slippers are filled with blood when the dance is over, and that one falls down pulseless and deathlike on leaving the stage, and the other must spend the day in darkness and silence. “It is no small advantage,” said Nietzsche, “to have a hundred Damoclean swords suspended above one’s head; that is how one learns to dance, that is how one attains ‘freedom of movement.’”[110] For as pain is entwined in an essential element in the perfect achievement of that which seems naturally the most pleasurable of the arts, so it is with the whole art of living, of which dancing is the supreme symbol. There is no separating Pain and Pleasure without making the first meaningless for all vital ends and the second turn to ashes. To exalt pleasure is to exalt pain; and we cannot understand the meaning of pain unless we understand the place of pleasure in the art of life. In England, James Hinton sought to make that clear, equally against those who failed to see that pain is as necessary morally as it undoubtedly is biologically, and against those who would puritanically refuse to accept the morality of pleasure.[111] It is no doubt important to resist pain, but it is also important that it should be there to resist. Even when we look at the matter no longer subjectively but objectively, we must accept pain in any sound æsthetic or metaphysical picture of the world.[112] We must not be surprised, therefore, that this way of looking at life as an art has spontaneously commended itself to men of the gravest and deepest character, in all other respects widely unlike. Shaftesbury was temperamentally a Stoic whose fragile constitution involved a perpetual endeavour to mould life to the form of his ideal. And if we go back to Marcus Aurelius we find an austere and heroic man whose whole life, as we trace it in his “Meditations,” was a splendid struggle, a man who—even, it seems, unconsciously—had adopted the æsthetic criterion of moral goodness and the artistic conception of moral action. Dancing and wrestling express to his eyes the activity of the man who is striving to live, and the goodness of moral actions instinctively appears to him as the beauty of natural objects; it is to Marcus Aurelius that we owe that immortal utterance of æsthetic intuitionism: “As though the emerald should say: ‘Whatever happens I must be emerald.’” There could be no man more unlike the Roman Emperor, or in any more remote field of action, than the French saint and philanthropist Vincent de Paul. At once a genuine Christian mystic and a very wise and marvellously effective man of action, Vincent de Paul adopts precisely the same simile of the moral attitude that had long before been put forth by Plotinus and in the next century was again to be taken up by Shaftesbury: “My daughters,” he wrote to the Sisters of Charity, “we are each like a block of stone which is to be transferred into a statue. What must the sculptor do to carry out his design? First of all he must take the hammer and chip off all that he does not need. For this purpose he strikes the stone so violently that if you were watching him you would say he intended to break it to pieces. Then, when he has got rid of the rougher parts, he takes a smaller hammer, and afterwards a chisel, to begin the face with all the features. When that has taken form, he uses other and finer tools to bring it to that perfection he has intended for his statue.” If we desire to find a spiritual artist as unlike as possible to Vincent de Paul we may take Nietzsche. Alien as any man could ever be to a cheap or superficial vision of the moral life, and far too intellectually keen to confuse moral problems with purely æsthetic problems, Nietzsche, when faced by the problem of living, sets himself—almost as instinctively as Marcus Aurelius or Vincent de Paul—at the standpoint of art. “Alles Leben ist Streit um Geschmack und Schmecken.” It is a crucial passage in “Zarathustra”: “All life is a dispute about taste and tasting! Taste: that is weight and at the same time scales and weigher; and woe to all living things that would live without dispute about weight and scales and weigher!” For this gospel of taste is no easy gospel. A man must make himself a work of art, Nietzsche again and again declares, moulded into beauty by suffering, for such art is the highest morality, the morality of the Creator.
There is a certain indefiniteness about the conception of morality as an artistic impulse, to be judged by an æsthetic criterion, which is profoundly repugnant to at least two classes of minds fully entitled to make their antipathy felt. In the first place, it makes no appeal to the abstract reasoner, indifferent to the manifoldly concrete problems of living. For the man whose brain is hypertrophied and his practical life shrivelled to an insignificant routine—the man of whom Kant is the supreme type—it is always a temptation to rationalise morality. Such a pure intellectualist, overlooking the fact that human beings are not mathematical figures, may even desire to transform ethics into a species of geometry. That we may see in Spinoza, a nobler and more inspiring figure, no doubt, but of the same temperament as Kant. The impulses and desires of ordinary men and women are manifold, inconstant, often conflicting, and sometimes overwhelming. “Morality is a fact of sensibility,” remarks Jules de Gaultier; “it has no need to have recourse to reason for its affirmations.” But to men of the intellectualist type this consideration is almost negligible; all the passions and affections of humanity seem to them meek as sheep which they may shepherd, and pen within the flimsiest hurdles. William Blake, who could cut down to that central core of the world where all things are fused together, knew better when he said that the only golden rule of life is “the great and golden rule of art.” James Hinton was for ever expatiating on the close resemblance between the methods of art, as shown especially in painting, and the methods of moral action. Thoreau, who also belonged to this tribe, declared, in the same spirit as Blake, that there is no golden rule in morals, for rules are only current silver; “it is golden not to have any rule at all.”
There is another quite different type of person who shares this antipathy to the indefiniteness of æsthetic morality: the ambitious moral reformer. The man of this class is usually by no means devoid of strong passions; but for the most part he possesses no great intellectual calibre and so is unable to estimate the force and complexity of human impulses. The moral reformer, eager to introduce the millennium here and now by the aid of the newest mechanical devices, is righteously indignant with anything so vague as an æsthetic morality. He must have definite rules and regulations, clear-cut laws and by-laws, with an arbitrary list of penalties attached, to be duly inflicted in this world or the next. The popular conception of Moses, descending from the sacred mount with a brand-new table of commandments, which he declares have been delivered to him by God, though he is ready to smash them to pieces on the slightest provocation, furnishes a delightful image of the typical moral reformer of every age. It is, however, only in savage and barbarous stages of society, or among the uncultivated classes of civilisation, that the men of this type can find their faithful followers.
Yet there is more to be said. That very indefiniteness of the criterion of moral action, falsely supposed to be a disadvantage, is really the prime condition for effective moral action. The academic philosophers of ethics, had they possessed virility enough to enter the field of real life, would have realised—as we cannot expect the moral reformers blinded by the smoke of their own fanaticism to realise—that the slavery to rigid formulas which they preached was the death of all high moral responsibility. Life must always be a great adventure, with risks on every hand; a clear-sighted eye, a many-sided sympathy, a fine daring, an endless patience, are for ever necessary to all good living. With such qualities alone may the artist in life reach success; without them even the most devoted slave to formulas can only meet disaster. No reasonable moral being may draw breath in the world without an open-eyed freedom of choice, and if the moral world is to be governed by laws, better to people it with automatic machines than with living men and women.
In our human world the precision of mechanism is for ever impossible. The indefiniteness of morality is a part of its necessary imperfection. There is not only room in morality for the high aspiration, the courageous decision, the tonic thrill of the muscles of the soul, but we have to admit also sacrifice and pain. The lesser good, our own or that of others, is merged in a larger good, and that cannot be without some rending of the heart. So all moral action, however in the end it may be justified by its harmony and balance, is in the making cruel and in a sense even immoral. Therein lies the final justification of the æsthetic conception of morality. It opens a wider perspective and reveals loftier standpoints; it shows how the seeming loss is part of an ultimate gain, so restoring that harmony and beauty which the unintelligent partisans of a hard and barren duty so often destroy for ever. “Art,” as Paulhan declares, “is often more moral than morality itself.” Or, as Jules de Gaultier holds, “Art is in a certain sense the only morality which life admits.” In so far as we can infuse it with the spirit and method of art, we have transformed morality into something beyond morality; it has become the complete embodiment of the Dance of Life.
Footnote 89: Footnote 89: What we call crime is, at the beginning, usually an effort to get, or to pretend to get, into step, but, being a violent or miscalculated effort, it is liable to fail, and the criminal falls to the rear of the social army. “I believe that most murders are really committed by Mrs. Grundy,” a woman writes to me, and, with the due qualification, the saying is worthy of meditation. That is why justice is impotent to prevent or even to punish murder, for Mrs. Grundy is within all of us, being a part of the social discipline, and cannot be hanged.
Footnote 90: Herbert Spencer, writing to a correspondent, once well expressed the harmlessness—if we choose so to regard it—of moral teaching: “After nearly two thousand years’ preaching of the religion of amity, the religion of enmity remains predominant, and Europe is peopled by two hundred million pagans, masquerading as Christians, who revile those who wish them to act on the principles they profess.”
Footnote 91: Footnote 91: But later asceticism was strictly the outcome of a Greek tendency, to be traced in Plato, developed through Antisthenes, through Zeno, through Epictetus, who all desired to liberate the soul from the bonds of matter. The Neo-Platonists carried this tendency further, for in their time, the prevailing anarchy and confusion rendered the world and society less than ever a fitting haven for the soul. It was not Christianity that made the world ascetic (and there were elements of hedonism in the teaching of Jesus), but the world that made Christianity ascetic, and it was easy for a Christian to become a Neo-Platonist, for they were both being moulded by the same forces.
Footnote 92: Maurice Croiset devotes a few luminous critical pages to Plotinus in the Croisets’ _Histoire de la Littérature Grecque_, vol. V, pp. 820-31. As an extended account of Plotinus, from a more enthusiastically sympathetic standpoint, there are Dr. Inge’s well-known Gifford Lectures, _The Philosophy of Plotinus_ (1918); I may also mention a careful scholastic study, _L’Esthétique de Plotin_ (1913), by Cochez, of Louvain, who regards Plotinus as the climax of the objective æsthetics of antiquity and the beginning of the road to modern subjective æsthetics.
Footnote 93: _Ennead_, bk. III, chap. VI. I have mostly followed the translation of Stephen McKenna.
Footnote 94: St. Augustine, _De Civitate Dei_, bk. IV, chap. XXI.
Footnote 95: Kant was habitually cold and calm. But he was very fond of dried fruits and used to have them specially imported for him by his friend Motherby. “At one time he was eagerly expecting a vessel with French fruits which he had ordered, and he had already invited some friends to a dinner at which they were to be served. The vessel was, however, delayed a number of days by a storm. When it arrived, Kant was informed that the provisions had become short on account of the delay, and that the crew had eaten his fruit. Kant was so angry that he declared they ought rather to have starved than to have touched it. Surprised at this irritation, Motherby said, ‘Professor, you cannot be in earnest.’ Kant answered, ‘I am really in earnest,’ and went away. Afterwards he was sorry.” (Quoted by Stuckenberg, _The Life of Kant_, p. 138.) But still it was quite in accordance with Kantian morality that the sailors should have starved.
Footnote 96: Georg von Gizycki, _Die Ethik David Hume’s_, p. 11.
Footnote 97: Footnote 98: Shaftesbury held that Locke swept away too much and failed to allow for inborn instincts (or “senses,” as he sometimes called them) developing naturally. We now see that he was right.
Footnote 99: There is no need to refer to the value of salt, and therefore the appreciation of the flavour of salt, to primitive people. Still to-day, in Spain, _sal_ (salt) is popularly used for a more or less intellectual and moral quality which is highly admired.
Footnote 100: Dr. C. S. Myers has touched on this point in _Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. II, part II, chap. IV; also “The Taste-Names of Primitive Peoples,” _British Journal of Psychology_, June, 1904.
Footnote 101: Dr. Georg von Gizycki, _Die Philosophie Shaftesbury’s_ (1876); and the same author’s _Die Ethik David Hume’s_ (1878).
Footnote 102: It should be added that Croce is himself moving in this direction, and in, for instance, _Il Carattere di Totalità della Espressione Artistica_ (1917), he recognises the universality of art.
Footnote 103: Stanley Hall remarks in criticising Kant’s moral æsthetics: “The beauty of virtue is only seen in contemplating it and the act of doing it has no beauty to the doer at the moment.” (G. Stanley Hall, “Why Kant is Passing,” _American Journal of Psychology_, July, 1912.)
Footnote 104: See article on Arbuckle by W. R. Scott in _Mind_, April, 1899.
Footnote 105: See a helpful paper by M. F. Libby, “Influence of the Idea of Æsthetic Proportion on the Ethics of Shaftesbury,” _American Journal of Psychology_, May-October, 1901.
Footnote 106: We find fallacious criticism of the “moral sense” down to almost recent times, in, for instance, McDougall’s _Social Psychology_, even though McDougall, by his insistence on the instinctive basis of morality, was himself carrying on the tradition of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. But McDougall also dragged in “some prescribed code of conduct,” though he neglected to mention who is to “prescribe” it.
Footnote 107: See W. R. Scott, _Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy_. (1900.)
Footnote 108: It is noteworthy, however, that the æsthetic view of morals has had advocates, not only among the more latitudinarian Protestants, but in Catholicism. A few years ago the Reverend Dr. Kolbe published a book on _The Art of Life_, designed to show that just as the sculptor works with hammer and chisel to shape a block of marble into a form of beauty, so Man, by the power of grace, the illumination of faith, and the instrument of prayer, works to transform his soul. But this simile of the sculptor, which has appealed so strongly alike to Christian and anti-Christian moralists, proceeds, whether or not they knew it, from Plotinus, who, in his famous chapter on Beauty, bids us note the sculptor. “He cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a living face has grown upon his work. So do you also cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, make all one glow of beauty, and never cease chiselling your statue until the godlike splendour shines on you from it, and the perfect goodness stands, surely, in the stainless shrine.”
Footnote 109: Footnote 109: “They who pitched the goal of their aspiration so high knew that the paths leading up to it were rough and steep and long,” remarks A. W. Benn (_The Greek Philosophers_, 1914, p. 57); “they said ‘the beautiful is hard’—hard to judge, hard to win, hard to keep.”
Footnote 110: Footnote 111: Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _James Hinton_, 1918.
Footnote 112: This has been well seen by Jules de Gaultier: “The joys and the sorrows which fill life are, the one and the other,” he says (_La Dépendance de la Morale et l’Indépendance des Mœurs_, p. 340), “elements of spectacular interest, and without the mixture of both that interest would be abolished. To make of the representative worth of phenomena their justification in view of a spectacular end alone, avoids the objection by which the moral thesis is faced, the fact of pain. Pain becomes, on the contrary, the correlative of pleasure, an indispensable means for its realization. Such a thesis is in agreement with the nature of things, instead of being wounded by their existence.”
CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION I LIFE, we have seen, may be regarded as an art. But we cannot help seeking to measure, quantitatively if not qualitatively, our mode of life. We do so, for the most part, instinctively rather than scientifically. It gratifies us to imagine that, as a race, we have reached a point on the road of progress beyond that vouchsafed to our benighted predecessors, and that, as individuals or as nations, it is given to us, fortunately,—or, rather, through our superior merits,—to enjoy a finer degree of civilisation than the individuals and the nations around us. This feeling has been common to most or all branches of the human race. In the classic world of antiquity they called outsiders, indiscriminately, “barbarians”—a denomination which took on an increasingly depreciative sense; and even the lowest savages sometimes call their own tribe by a word which means “men,” thereby implying that all other peoples are not worthy of the name.