202 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



nises social salvation as the greater, and including personal 

 salvation within it, and it finds in justice, or what is right in 

 the relation of man to man, a higher spiritual achievement 

 than any virtue of the soul in which the individual can 

 wrap himself in moral warmth. 



Lastly, in proportion as the spiritual order is defined in 

 terms of experience its points of contrast with the order of 

 reality become impossible to ignore. The moral indiffer- 

 ence of nature forces itself upon us, and it becomes evident 

 that the real as such is not spiritual nor the creation of 

 anything which is purely spiritual, just, or good in our 

 human sense. Reality then is not spiritual, but the spiritual 

 is an element in Reality. It is moreover, if our account 

 of development is just, an element which grows and gathers 

 strength as it attains unity and clearness of purpose. If 

 this is so, we may say that from a Being or Law from which 

 humanity has woefully turned aside the spiritual becomes 

 a life or a principle which is coming into force through 

 humanity, giving unity and rationality to the toil of human 

 beings and through the life of man to the whole world 

 process that leads up to and supports his life. More 

 briefly the Spiritual may be defined as the moving force in 

 ethical development. As such it is an object of positive 

 knowledge, and the entire stream of orthogenic evolution 

 is the revelation of certain phases of its growth. 



Ethico-religious progress is not continuous, but we can 

 recognise the principal steps by which the idea of a spiritual 

 order has been attained, purified, enlarged and brought into 

 relation to ethical experience. Nor is the advance con- 

 tinuous in the domain of ethics proper. But it is untrue 

 to say that there have been no discoveries in the ethical 

 field. On the contrary, there have been four such dis- 

 coveries of capital importance leading mankind through 

 the stages here distinguished. The first is the establish- 

 ment of the impartial rule, the foundation of common- 

 sense morality. The second is the establishment of the 

 principle of universalism, the foundation of religious ideal- 

 ism. The third is the social personality (if we may use a 

 modern phrase to express the real centre of the Greek doc- 

 trine), which governs the first stage of philosophic ethics. 



