x THE WILL IN DEVELOPMENT 185 



law of vengeance. Whatever their source, the moral laws 

 have a validity which does not depend on retaliation, and 

 is not confined to the weak. The moral law is now as 

 impartial as the king's law endeavours to be. Yet in the 

 face of temptation the moral law must have something to 

 say. The reasons for conforming to it, at other times 

 neglected, must at length come into the foreground, and 

 at the present stage these are of two kinds. There are the 

 temporal penalties attaching to the breach of public law, 

 and there are spiritual penalties attaching to every breach 

 of the moral law, seen or unseen of men. These spiritual 

 penalties may take the form of misfortune in this life, or 

 of punishment after death, whether by reincarnation in 

 the form of a loathsome animal or by being cast into 

 hell. Their points of agreement and difference from 

 the punishments of magic and animism are equally instruc- 

 tive. Like them they are non-moral in that they base the 

 motives of conduct not on the inherent ethical consequences 

 of action, but on external and prudential considerations. 

 Unlike them they are so far ethical that they are applied in 

 general by the impartial judgment of a just God, and fall 

 accordingly on the offender alone, and on him only so far 

 as his sin is deliberate and unrepented. 



This common-sense morality which underlies all the 

 higher religions and philosophies, then, is closely analogous 

 in its successes and its failures to the thought which we also 

 attribute to common sense. It gets on very well until it 

 is asked for reasons. Its rules are felt as rules of morality, 

 as something to which the conscious intelligent being is 

 bound, the breach of which cannot therefore be visited on 

 anyone but the deliberate offender. They are for the same 

 reason impartial. They may, indeed, be very unequal, but 

 that is a different matter. The rights of A or B may differ 

 widely, but whatever they are C is bound to respect both 

 alike. A may have privileges which B has not, but be his 

 privileges great or small, A, like B, must keep within them. 

 The common-sense moral judgment is in this sense as 

 impartial as it is categorical. These are distinctive features 

 of the ethical judgment, and it is only when we reach the 

 grounds of the judgment that the relapse occurs. The 



