ON HUMAN NATURE AND ITS CAPACITIES FOE VIRTUE. 107 



they commonly manifest themselves in men and women, 

 really appear to be to all of us in our cynical or despond- 

 ing moments ! How prudent and calculating ; how safe ; 

 how little sacrificing ! How feeble and timorous of heart 

 their possessors ; how little risk they will run ; how little 

 hardship suffer ! At such moments, be they of deep 

 delusion or of sinister illumination, the masks fall momen- 

 tarily off from the faces of virtue and vice alike, with the 

 startling revelation that there is little essential difference 

 between the two ; an error, indeed, and quickly corrected 

 by the healthy mind, the difference between virtue and 

 vice being real and eternal ; but not so great an error 

 of judgment when applied to conventional virtue and 

 vice, where at times we think that the advantage is in 

 favour of what passes under the name of vice ; nor when 

 applied to that mixture, in various proportions, of the 

 two ingredients with which we are most commonly pre- 

 sented under either name. Not surely, like ours, we 

 think at these moments, were the virtues of past ages, 

 in the days of the martyrs, the heroes, or even the fighting 

 men. They were more boldly pronounced, they were more 

 clearly outlined from vice than our nineteenth-century 

 virtues, " neither cold nor hot," though happily in the 

 course of further improvement, under the fostering care 

 of natural selection, and the breaking in of man to his 

 environment ! Surely, we think, the virtues of our fathers 

 were more virile and more genuine, even if their vices 

 were'grosser than ours. They, at least, believed in the duty 

 of sacrifice. For a cause which they had at heart they 

 would precipitate a quarrel, in which they were ready to 

 spend their lives and fortunes. For what cause, in these 

 days, will men do as much ? Our virtues are often 

 varnished vices ; even those produced by natural selection 

 are merely a calculating prudence, " the reptile virtue " 



