170 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



experience, which is the general character of the good. 

 Such a harmony, if attainable at all for the individual, is so 

 only because the self is a potential system in which, by a 

 duly proportioned development of each several element, 

 a harmonious working of the whole is possible, and such 

 a development is self-realisation in the strictest sense of 

 that term. But, again, for the rational mind there can be 

 no satisfaction in a harmony that anywhere involves funda- 

 mental discord. The rational impulse is an impulse to 

 harmonise all that is susceptible of harmony, and that is 

 the whole world of sentient mind. Hence, for the rational 

 man there is no harmony within the self unless as a basis 

 of harmony with other centres of experience and feeling, 

 and the realisation of any one self is regarded only as an 

 item in the development of society, that is in a Common 

 Good. This development implies an ideal of Personality 

 in which the moral virtues as well as the intellectual and 

 physical excellences are constituent conditions, and the 

 promotion of which, when it conflicts with any warring 

 impulse or interest, is felt by the individual as a duty. 

 Finally, the instinctive or quasi-instinctive promptings that 

 urge us without reflection to the action generally necessary 

 to such a harmony, form the content of the moral sense, 

 and the summed up judgment of present duty, in which 

 elements of direct feeling and rational reflection blend in a 

 final deliverance which in foro interno is felt to be supreme, 

 is the reality to which the name of conscience has been 

 given. 



We have to follow briefly the development of this system 

 of practical rationality in its point by point correspondence 

 with the general evolution of mind. 



i. The Hereditary Factor. 



Of Ethical as of all conduct the primary psycho-physical 

 basis is instinctive. Nor is there a whit more difficulty 

 in understanding the origin of social instincts that is, of 

 instincts tending to foster a common life and to ensure 

 the maintenance of the species than of instincts directed 

 only to the maintenance of the individual. Whatever the 

 source of variation in the first place, it is evident that varia- 



