640 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ern people, speak of horses as "fromm" pious, not in the reli- 

 gious, but in the primary and proper sense of the word, meaning 

 thereby kind and docile. The English " gentle " and the French 

 " gentil," which are used in the same connection, refer to good 

 conduct as the result of fine breeding. 



Archdeacon Paley's definition of virtue, to which Dr. Arnold 

 adverts, is essentially anthropocentric and intensely egoistic. 

 " Virtue," he says, " is the doing good to mankind in obedience to 

 the will of God, for the sake of everlasting happiness." In order 

 to be virtuous, according to this extremely narrow and wholly 

 inadequate conception of virtue, we must, in the first place, do 

 good to mankind, our conduct toward the brute creation not 

 being taken into the account ; secondly, our action must be in obe- 

 dience to the will of God, thus ruling out all generous impulses 

 originating in the spontaneous desire to do good; thirdly, we 

 must have an eye single to our own supreme personal advantage 

 in other words, our conduct must be utterly selfish, spring not 

 merely from momentary pleasure or temporary profit, but from 

 far-seeing calculations of the effect it may have in securing our 

 eternal happiness. Thus the virtuous man becomes the incarna- 

 tion of the intensest self-love and self-seeking, and virtue the 

 synonym of excessive venality. From a moral point of view, 

 there is no greater merit in " otherworldliness " than in worldli- 

 ness, and no reason why the endeavor to attain personal happi- 

 ness in a future life should differ in quality from the effort to 

 make everything minister to our personal happiness in the pres- 

 ent life. 



" The whole subject of the brute creation," says Dr. Arnold, 

 " is to me one of such painful mystery that I dare not approach 

 it." The mental distress experienced in such cases arises from 

 the fact that the subject is approached from the wrong side and 

 surveyed from a false point of view. Traditional theology and 

 anthropocentric ethics are brought into conflict with the better 

 impulses of a broad and generous nature and the sharp antag- 

 onism could hardly fail to be a source of perplexity and pain. 

 " Charity," says Lord Bacon, " will hardly water the ground, where 

 it must first fill a pool " ; and of all pools the hardest to fill is that 

 which is dug in the dry, gravelly soil of human egotism. 



Theocritus, the father of Greek idyllic poetry, represents Her- 

 cules as exclaiming, after he had slain the Nemean lion, " Hades 

 received a monster soul " ; and he saw nothing incongruous in 

 the spirit of the dead beast joining the company of the departed 

 spirits of men in the lower world. Sydney Smith says, in speak- 

 ing of the soul of the brute, " To this soul some have impiously 

 allowed immortality." Why such a belief should be deemed im- 

 pious it is difficult to discover. The question which the psychol- 



