550 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



therefore, of that kind of quality in human conduct which we call 

 " moral," I shall distinguish it only by its absoluteness. 



Every act in the conduct of a human being is incident to some 

 one or more of the varied relationships by which his state of being is 

 conditioned. Fundamentally, there are four groups of such relation- 

 ships, subject to which every act of man is performed : 1. His rela- 

 tionships to inanimate Nature, or to the matter, the forces, and tlie 

 routine processes, of his physical environment ; 2. His relationships to 

 the living creatures with which he is associated in existence, that are 

 not of his own kind ; 3. The relationships that exist within himself, 

 between the manifold parts of his own being ; between that, for exam- 

 ple, which is animal on one side and that which is more than animal 

 on the other ; 4. The relationships that exist between himself and his 

 human fellows. 



It might be expected, perhaps, that I should add a fifth relation- 

 ship that of man to the supreme source of being and of law in the 

 universe ; but this lies at the outside of what we are now investigat- 

 ing. It is a relationship to which nothing in human conduct can be 

 incident primarily, however powerful an influence upon conduct may 

 be referred to it secondarily. The emotions of religion, induced by a 

 conscious relationship of responsibility to some supreme, divine gov- 

 ernment in the universe, give a color of their own, it is true, to the 

 quality of human acts, but they do not assume to impart that quality 

 nor to change it. Primarily, they have nothing to do with it it is 

 determined independently of them and Religion has to do with the 

 quality of human actions only by adopting the colder consciousness 

 on which Morality is founded, and suffusing it with the warmth of 

 reverential and impassioned motives. 



Of the four groups of relationships to which all conduct is incident, 

 the one first named does not fall within the region of morals, and 

 the second only touches upon the borders of it. Without entering 

 into the reasons of the fact, it may be seen that the kind of quality we 

 are looking for in human actions cannot exist where the act is entirely 

 conditioned by purely physical laws, as in the case of a man's dealing 

 with the inanimate world. As he stands related to brute creatures, 

 however, one new factor is introduced, which is that of sentiency, on 

 the opposite side of the relationship, as well as on the side of the 

 human actor, and we find in the conduct incident to this a single 

 quality which we recognize as of absolute existence inhering in 

 the very nature of the act to Avhich it pertains. For the positive 

 phase of this quality, which is not exactly kindness and not exactly 

 mercifulness, no name seems to have ever been adopted. In its nega- 

 tive phase we call it cruelty, and it appears to be, among moral traits, 

 the primary one. 



In the third group of relationships, embracing those which are 



