THE MORAL STANDARD. 7 



The moral motive, tlieref ore, arises not by contemplation of tlie 

 gratification given by a certain line of conduct to God, or by rec- 

 ollection of superimposed pleasures, secular or supernatural, pres- 

 ent or future ; or by any reference to the social habits or conven- 

 tions with which the said line of conduct may or may not accord. 

 Such moral motive has nothing to do with obedience to the re- 

 vealed will of God, or with the extraneous conceptions of heaven 

 and hell, or with punishment or reward from earthly rulers, or 

 with the favor or disfavor of public opinion. It arises from the 

 vivid ideal representation of the relation between action and life. 

 The compulsion of morality, therefore, is inner and not outer 

 compulsion, its authority inner and not outer authority, its re- 

 straints those arising from the connection of cause and effect, its 

 sanctions natural, not supernatural, essential and not fortuitous. 

 The foundations of the moral code thus belong to the very nature 

 of sentient life itself, and its dictates therefore possess a validity, 

 a reach, a significance, a sacredness, to which no others can con- 

 ceivably lay claim. 



And here, perhaps, to prevent possibility of misconception, 

 something should be said about the relation of the moral to the 

 cosmic process. Briefly, then, I accept in the main the position 

 adopted by the late Prof. Huxley in his Romanes Lecture on Evo- 

 lution and Ethics. That there is a fundamental distinction be- 

 tween the " state of Nature " brought about by uninterrupted cos- 

 mic forces, and the " state of art," produced with partial success 

 by the rational power of man, working sometimes with but often 

 athwart those forces, and that reason and sympathy the latter 

 constituting by all odds the most important element in the social 

 tissue have brought entirely new dynamic factors into play 

 upon the arena of life, are propositions from which I see no way 

 of escape. It can not be too frequently asserted that what we 

 call the order of Nature is not an ethical order at all that the 

 laws of Nature, as such, have nothing to do with morality. The 

 ethical element begins, I think, faintly to emerge with the rela- 

 tion of seutiency to those laws, though the establishment of a 

 moral order depends entirely upon the " artificial " factors intro- 

 duced by the consciousness of man. It is, of course, true that 

 these " artificial " factors are themselves products of cosmic pro- 

 cesses, and that the order out of which they have grown itself im- 

 poses limitations of the severest, and often the narrowest, kind to 

 man's intelligent reaction against it. 



This is the art which does mend Nature, but 

 The art itself is Nature. 



Nevertheless, for the sake of clearness, the contrast of the 

 "natural "and the "artificial," of the workings of Nature apart 



