x THE WILL IN DEVELOPMENT 187 



here need be insisted on is that throughout the group- 

 formation dominates ethics and law. Man must be loyal, 

 honourable, just in his dealings with his own. As to 

 others that is another matter. He must, moreover, be 

 ready to fight for himself and his own and against all else. 

 There is wheel within wheel, group within group family, 

 kindred, trade or profession, class or caste, the community 

 as a whole. There arise many groups and many loyalties 

 and many degrees of legitimate enmity. But as a whole 

 the life of common-sense ethics is a life of blended co- 

 operation and hostility, of justice and aggression, of love 

 and hate, of self-surrender and self-assertion. All these 

 elements are written deep in the code of common sense, in 

 the personal character that it admires and the system of law 

 that it supports, and if the origin of this code lies in early 

 times, does it need anything but the bare description of it 

 to show that, however much overlaid and held in check by 

 a higher law, it persists to the highest stage which civilisa- 

 tion has yet reached ? The ethical judgment is there, but 

 its meaning is not ascertained, and it is allowed to flout 

 itself through mazes of contradiction. 



(3) Idealism and Religion. 



Before logical analysis has displayed the contradictions 

 of common-sense ethics the insight of prophets and seers 

 has penetrated the web, and had sight of a deeper truth. 

 A succession of gifted men, or indeed several schools of 

 such men, working in their different ways in Greece, Pales- 

 tine, India and China, seize for the first time the nature of 

 certain of the fundamental conditions that underlie the life 

 of the individual and his relations to his fellows. They 

 reach down to the life of the soul and the spiritual order, 

 in which the relation of soul to soul is the unitary fact. In 

 form their teaching for the most part is an exposition not 

 merely of the nature of man, but of the being of God or of 

 the laws of existence. In this respect it is largely deter- 

 mined by the general intellectual level of their time, the 

 prevailing interpretation of nature, scientific or meta- 

 physical. But they have certain things in common, 

 whether they work from a theistic basis, like the Hebrew 



