i68 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 



beauty there is no need of any other motive. What 

 they want is knowledge of the things they may do 

 and must leave undone, if the welfare of society is to 

 be attained. Good people so often forget this that 

 some of them occasionally require hanging almost as 

 much as the bad. 



If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be 

 (under due limitations) obeyed ; why the few who 

 are steered by it move the mass in whom it is weak ? 

 I can only reply by putting another question — Why 

 do the fe^v in whom the sense of beauty is strong — 

 Shakespeare, Raffaele, Beethoven, carry the less 

 endowed multitude away ? But they do, and always 

 will. People who overlook that fact attend neither 

 to history nor to what goes on about them. 



Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent, 

 kindly man. I have great respect for him. The 

 force of genial common-sense respectability could no 

 further go. George Fox was the very antipodes of 

 all this, and yet one understands how he came to 

 move the world of his day, and Franklin did not. 



CCCLXX 



As to whether we can fulfil the moral law, I 

 should say hardly any of us. Some of us are utterly 

 incapable of fulfilling its plainest dictates. As there 

 are men born physically cripples, and intellectually 

 idiots, so there are some who are moral cripples and 

 idiots, and can be kept straight not even by punish- 

 ment. For these people there is nothing but shutting 

 up, or extirpation. 



CCCLXXI 



The cardinal fact in the University questions 

 appears to me to be this : that the student to whose 

 wants the mediaeval University was adjusted, 

 looked to the past and sought book-learning, while 



