PARTIAL CONCILIATION OF THE NEW AND OLD ETHICS. 397 



to bear them. On the social side, the claims of the great 

 social virtues veracity, justice, charity will be more 

 than ever imperatively recognized and enforced, both by 

 conscience and opinion. Sympathy, not merely with the 

 sorrows, but with the general mental states of others, 

 will be more and more felt as a pressing want of human 

 nature, both as a mitigation of sorrow and as a multipli- 

 cation of satisfactions ; while sympathy, in the form of 

 pity for the misery and want around, including an 

 active disposition to relieve it, will long continue, in 

 spite alike of the depressing economic and sociological 

 doctrine, to rank amongst the holiest feelings and the 

 best springs of virtuous conduct in human nature. 



Virtue, then, will not be destroyed. Morality, as well 

 as religion, will remain. It will remain as an eternal 

 necessity of our social nature and of our condition in the 

 world. Its field may, indeed, as already implied, be 

 contracted in some directions, but it will receive a more 

 than equivalent augmentation in others, so that a larger 

 total area of life will pass under the sway of morality. 

 A greater number of our actions will become moralized, 

 to use the new and significant term ; that is to say, we 

 shall come to feel, with regard to them, that the doing or 

 not doing them is not a matter of indifference, but of 

 some degree of moral obligation. But the obligation to 

 these new virtues will be of a lighter kind than to the 

 older ones shown to be necessary through a longer and 

 a universal experience; so that, though morality may 

 increase extensively, it may still become a less costly 

 intensive effort to the doer. It will be so because there 

 will be less real sacrifice asked or needed in future, since 

 action in behalf of others, owing to men's widened 

 sympathies, will become more easy and even pleasurable, 

 and since also, if the sacrifice is of a more serious 



