THE MORAL LAW 107 



am free ; I am lord of myself." Translate these 

 phrases into political action and you get a nation 

 like Germany crying out : " I am responsible only 

 to myself ; in pursuing the objects that I think 

 necessary, I need not care what any other nation in 

 the world thinks, what any other nation in the past 

 would have thought, or what any nation in the future 

 will think of my conduct. I am alone ; I am free to 

 do as I think right." And so Germany rushes on to 

 what must be either her own doom, or the doom of 

 the human race. Restrict them even to individual 

 conduct, and you abandon the restraint of Latin 

 discipline for the chaos of Gothic individualism. 



Writing as a hard-shell Darwinian evolutionist, a 

 lover of the scalpel and microscope, and of patient, 

 empirical observation, as one who dislikes all forms 

 of supernaturalism, and who does not shrink from 

 the implications even of the phrase that thought is 

 a secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the 

 liver, I assert as a biological fact that the moral law 

 is as real and as external to man as the starry vault. 

 It has no secure seat in any single man or in any 

 single nation. It is the work of the blood and tears 

 of long generations of men. It is not in man, inborn 

 or innate, but is enshrined in his traditions, in his 

 customs, in his literature and his religion. Its 

 creation and sustenance are the crowning glory of 

 man, and his consciousness of it puts him in a high 

 place above the animal world. Men live and die ; 

 nations rise and fall, but the struggle of individual 

 lives and of individual nations must be measured not 

 by their immediate needs, but as they tend to the 

 debasement or perfection of man's great achievement. 



