1 90 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



dations and built over again. We have to get down to the 

 true ethical meanings, the judgments of value which incor- 

 porate themselves in rules of action, in ideals of life and 

 forms of social structure, trace them to their generating 

 conditions, and combine them into an order which lends 

 rational significance to the impulse of life as a whole. Such 

 is the avowed task of ethical philosophy, alike in the Greek 

 and in the modern world. 



Abstract reasoning cannot indeed play the same part in 

 this practical reconstruction as in the world of knowledge. 

 There is needed an impulse from the actual craving of souls 

 and bodies left figuratively or literally starved by the 

 deficiencies of the recognised social order. There is needed 

 the sensitiveness of the sympathetic imagination to lay 

 bare the palpitating fibres hidden and too often bruised 

 and crushed under the weight of the social fabric. Hence> 

 particularly in modern times, we often find the most con- 

 crete and insistent statement of the problem not in philo- 

 sophy but in a social or national movement, or, again, in 

 the literary delineation of life as it really is in contrast to 

 the pictures of life which the unreflective social tradition 

 has built up. The true realism of art and literature and 

 every creative mind is at its best realistic may be con- 

 ceived as dealing with a problem very similar in its essen- 

 tials to the problem of science. Here, on the one hand, is 

 the web woven by society the mass of existing institu- 

 tions, marriage, property, the established religions, the 

 current morality, the recognised ideas and sentiments to 

 which all good men are supposed to subscribe. Conven- 

 tional art accepts this order in disorder, romantic art 

 idealises it. Realistic art has a higher and more difficult 

 task to perform, and it is no wonder if it seldom yields that 

 completeness of aesthetic satisfaction which comes from the 

 contemplation of a nicely rounded whole. Against this 

 screen of traditionally built sentiment it holds up the real 

 man and woman, it seeks to pierce to the heart of their life, 

 to show them as they truly are, and to display the inter- 

 action of those underlying forces with the social tissue in 

 which they find themselves enmeshed. It is true that 

 human forces forces such as these very men and women 



