ON HUMAN NATURE AND ITS CAPACITIES FOR VIRTUE. 103 



tried the strength of their love and patience, or even 

 demonstrated that a general good disposition towards 

 mankind was compatible with an aversion to many 

 individuals composing it. 



There are also in our own day some who, following 

 the teaching of Comte, would put before us as a moral 

 ideal the love of humanity, and life and labour in its 

 general interest a noble aim and goal, if it were only 

 practicable by the human units ; and there are those in 

 still greater numbers who, adopting the creed of Ben- 

 tham and the elder and younger Mill, tell us that the 

 "greatest happiness of the greatest number" is the right 

 moral aim for men the true ethical aim for all men, 

 and not merely for those in influential or commanding 

 positions, as autocratic rulers, statesmen, legislators, 

 philosophers, for whom the maxim is true and on whom 

 it is obligatory, though in different degrees. The only 

 thing we are here concerned to note with respect to these 

 several systems the humanitarianism of the philan- 

 thropist, the love of humanity of the Comtist, and the 

 utilitarianism of the Benthamite is that all alike dis- 

 regard some of the facts of our actual human nature as 

 far as it has yet been developed, and all ignore not 

 merely the present facts of human nature, but the eternal 

 and necessary conditions of human life and of all life on 

 the earth, at least as disclosed by the ^latest teaching ot 

 science and natural history. They are at variance with 

 science, as interpreted to us by Darwin, Haeckel, and 

 Spencer, and though this is not decisive, it is a presump- 

 tion against them. My own objection to them is that 

 they are impracticable ; they make a demand upon our 

 virtue which it has not strength to sustain ; they postu- 

 late a force of enthusiasm which exists only here and 

 there in individuals, and which even in them is only an 



