INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 63 



perverted by its excessive interest in the middle 

 and manufacturing classes. Its speculative defect 

 of an atomistic psychology combined with this 

 narrowness of vision to make light of the construc 

 tive work that needs to be done by the state, before 

 all can have, otherwise than in name, an equal 

 chance to count in the common good. Thus the 

 age-long subordination of economics to politics was 

 revenged in the submerging of both politics and 

 ethics in a narrow theory of economic profit; and 

 utilitarianism, in its orthodox descendants, prof 

 fered the disjointed pieces of a mechanism, with a 

 monotonous reiteration that looked at aright they 

 form a beautifully harmonious organism. 



Prevision, and to some extent experience, of this 

 failure, conjoined with differing social traditions 

 and ambitions, evoked German idealism, the trans 

 cendental morals of Kant and his successors. Ger 

 man thought strove to preserve the traditions 

 which bound culture to the past, while revising 

 these traditions to render them capable of meeting 

 novel conditions. It found weapons at hand in the 

 conceptions borrowed by Roman law from Stoic 

 philosophy, and in the conceptions by which Prot 

 estant humanism had re-edited scholastic Catholi 

 cism. Grotius had made the idea of natural law, 

 natural right and obligation, the central idea of 

 German morals, as thoroughly as Locke had made 

 the individual desire for liberty and happiness the 



