200 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



elements in social welfare as fully understood, while the 

 actual fabric of society is a partial or experimental approach 

 to the order required. The realisation of such an order 

 would involve the full development of personal capacity, 

 and such development, when shared in common partner- 

 ship, is the substance of a noble and happy life. The 

 furtherance of such a life has a claim on man through that 

 element in his nature which we may call, indifferently, 

 rational or spiritual. 



(6) The validity of this claim will be briefly examined in 

 Part II. Chapter II. Here we lay stress only on the fact 

 of the clear emergence in modern thought of the concep- 

 tion of the ethical system and with it religious belief and 

 social institutions are bound up as the creation of human 

 impulses and as the servant of human needs. Modern 

 ethics does not, as has sometimes been held, render the 

 State subordinate to the individual. What it does is to 

 subordinate the State system, including therewith the 

 entire mass of traditionary regulation of life, to the needs 

 of life itself, but the life that it contemplates is that of all 

 humanity. Just as on the side of cognition so here the 

 fabric of traditional thought grows up uncritically under the 

 stress of social actions and reactions. Religious idealism 

 holds up against this tradition a higher ethical order, but 

 still without reasoned demonstration. The critical stage, 

 beginning with the demand for a standard of value, cul- 

 minates in the conception of the entire ethical order as 

 emerging historically from the structure of the social mind, 

 and subject rationally to the ascertainable conditions of the 

 mind's development. Here again, as in the spiritual 

 religions, the motive is inherent in the nature of the moral 

 order. But it is more fully impersonal than before, the 

 value of conduct lying not in that which the individual 

 attains for himself, but mainly in his service to the greater 

 whole to which he belongs. But the more ethics is freed 

 from religious dogma as an external authority or sanction 

 the more evident it becomes that the ethical order must 

 itself acquire the full force of a religious appeal. To fill 

 our place, to play our part in the moving life of the world 



