348 HUMANISM xvm 



correct so long as the world is not morally perfect ; we 

 cannot wholly exorcize the recurrent dread that, after all, 

 the moral order may of a sudden lapse into chaos before 

 our eyes : but we cannot organize our moral experience 

 without this assumption, and in the course of moral 

 development our confidence in it grows. 



But, it may be said, if there is no essential difference 

 between the assumption of a moral and that of an 

 intellectual order in our experience, how is it that the 

 former appears so much less certain than the latter ? 

 Why are we so much more confident that the world is 

 subject to natural than to mpral law ? Why are moral 

 so much more commoner and more successful than 

 intellectual sceptics ? These facts are not to be disputed, 

 but perhaps they can be explained. Undoubtedly the 

 moral order is not so strong as the scientific, and its 

 principles have not such a hold on human nature. The 

 rebels against the moral order are not all in prison ; our 

 rascals largely run about unhanged. Moral insanity is 

 pleaded in mitigation of the punishment which it should 

 render inexorable. But the difference is due simply to 

 the different amounts of experience behind the two 

 assumptions. Historically man was a knowing being 

 long before he was an ethical being. He had lived long, 

 as Aristotle said, before he had lived well ; both in time 

 and in urgency, perceptual adaptation to the physical 

 order took precedence over ethical adaptation to the 

 social order. Man had to assume, therefore, the principles 

 that constituted the world a knowable cosmos long before 

 he needed to assume a moral order. Hence the beliefs in 

 the uniformity and calculability of Nature and the like 

 have a much greater and more unequivocal mass of racial 

 experience and hereditary instinct behind them than any 

 moral instinct we have yet acquired. But this does not 

 show that the nature of the several assumptions is not 

 essentially the same. 



If the argument of this paper has commended itself so 

 far, there will probably be little difficulty in granting the 

 last point, that the demonstration of Immortality proffered 



