214 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM 



the pleasure which accompanies eatin<T, and even h've to 

 eat, instead of eat to live. Such is the glutton, the epi- 

 cure or gourmand. I do not mean to say one should 

 never eat anything simply for the pleasure of eating, but 

 it is the aduse of this pleasure which constitutes the moral 

 evil or the vice ; which no wild animal can entertain in 

 thought. 



" Animals, however, having no power of abstract 

 reasoning, cannot abuse natural laws. They cannot be 

 moral or immoral, but remain non-moral, living auto- 

 mata, void of all volition." 



What I have here said of the evolution of man's 

 mental powers from a consciousness of the Concrete only 

 to that of the Abstract, and his passing from being an 

 Automaton only to a Volitional Being, is reproduced in 

 history. Thus Mr. Bussell uses precisely the same terms 

 as the above in his work on the different philosophers of 

 Greece.^ He speaks of the " individual " rebelling against 

 political restraints hitherto borne in a quiescent sub- 

 mission as being " now mature and fully self-conscious," 

 and illustrates it by the Chinese : " We call the Chinese 

 civilisation immature, because the sense of individuality 

 there is not yet awakened, but lies sleeping — buried in 

 the torpor of immemorial traditions, and bound with the 

 fetters of unreflecting civic morality. Man is here almost 

 an automaton, a puppet, guided by the unseen influences 

 of ancestral example, the spirit of the state-inherited 

 tendencies ; he has all but lost his gift of spontaneous 

 initiative." 



This last phrase is equivalent to Volition which is 

 opposed to Automatism. 



But we may go further. Every one of us is more 



1 The School of Plato, p. 66. 



