RATIONAL LIFE 291 



position in Aristotle s Ethics, deliberate preference 

 seems to be a test of character, even more than 

 actions are. 1 The commonest man you find any 

 where; the poet, honoured all the world over; and 

 the profoundest thinkers, in times ancient and 

 modern, are agreed in acknowledging that the great 

 ness of man appears in his regard to sovereign 

 law, securing the rights of all, from the weakest to 

 the mightiest, and calling upon every man to do 

 justly and to love mercy/ 



There is no loss of force for our argument when, 

 passing from this ideal, we are constrained to look into 

 life s dark perplexities. The darkest things are worse 

 than the worst in animal life. There is no attempting 

 of a completed view of man s place in Nature, without 

 giving prominence to this fact, apparent everywhere, 

 and nowhere more glaringly than in the crowded city 

 of our modern civilisation. To some who dwell mainly 

 on the continuity of all life, a baser phase of human 

 society may seem natural, a thing which may be 

 regarded as a survival/ the breaking out of the animal 

 forces, the rumbling echo of the thunderbolt ; and yet 

 in another aspect, when the dignity of manhood is 

 considered, and also the date now reached in the 

 world s history, nothing can seem more unnatural than 

 a low aspect of social life in the core of the most 

 advanced civilisation. Survival is too easy a way of 

 meeting the case. We are dealing with a worse than 

 animal debasement. This is no mere survival or 

 reappearance of what has been. It is a lower and 

 more perplexing order of things than science has 



1 Nicom. Ethics, in. 2. 



