PARTIAL CONCILIATION OF THE NEW AND OLD ETHICS. 403 



lines, but yet the progress is slow, and the ideal goal 

 will never be fully gained. We can hardly even imagine 

 a time when the facts of anger, and envy, and jealousy, 

 and acquisitiveness will be extinguished. " Virtue can- 

 not," as Hamlet tells us, " so inoculate our old stock," but 

 we will relish something of that which diverges there- 

 from. Neither the social, nor the sympathetic, nor the 

 sacrificing virtues can ever be so far developed as to 

 wholly fill up the area of life and exclude all interests 

 antagonistic to others ; and though it is conceivable that 

 a competition having the good of others for its object 

 may become not uncommon, yet such would still subsist 

 side by side with the old egoistic competition for a share 

 of the divisible satisfactions which two cannot possess 

 or enjoy at the same time. This egoistic competition, 

 though with slowly diminishing intensity, this con- 

 flict of interests, though within a slowly lessening- 

 field, evolution and the social sciences assure us must 

 continue ; and this part of the new teaching is so far 

 ethically significant that it lies on the transcendental 

 and ideal morality, either to refute it or to accept it and 

 accommodate its own teaching to it. 



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