ON HUMAN NATURE AND ITS CAPACITIES FOR VIRTUE. Ill 



brotherhood, whoever may live to see it; then the happi- 

 ness of others might, it is just conceivable, be an aim for 

 men in general, and the equal happiness of all an aim for 

 the statesman. But even then the average man would 

 do well to limit his aim and his efforts to the happiness 

 of a few, and the statesman to that of his own nation. 



To sum up this part of our argument : The facts and 

 conditions of modern social and civilized life are not 

 favourable to the cultivation of the virtues required in 

 the love and service of humanity ; and they are possibly 

 still less favourable to the growth of those postulated by 

 the utilitarian ethics of Bentham and Mill, aiming at the 

 greatest happiness of the greatest number. The armed 

 peace, as well as the actual wars, of nations forbid such 

 virtues ; the internal antagonisms of social classes, the 

 struggle for existence between the social individuals, 

 forbid them ; the facts of anger, hatred, repulsion, dislike, 

 which necessarily exist, as well as the opposite and 

 because of the opposite facts of love and good will, all 

 these, added to the innate contradictions of life, as well 

 as to its eternal evil conditions which make it to a certain 

 extent an instinctively selfish struggle as of men in ship- 

 wreck ; nay, our own imperfect virtues in evil sympathy 

 with the general imperfect humanity around us, to which 

 they have reference, forbid them ; and show that the ideal 

 of Bentham and Comte has been pitched too high for our 

 humanity, so far as yet developed ; as also-that the systems 

 are in other respects ill-timed and unsuited to the social 

 and political condition of modern nations in a state of 

 great change and agitation. 



8. And yet we allow that, in a certain sense, love of 

 our species, taken as a whole, is possible, and that admira- 

 tion is justly excited by what it has done and suffered. For 

 all that is great, and worthy, and meritorious, and sacri- 



