380 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



of right and wrong rest on the hate as much as on the 

 love. The average man learns in church to love his 

 neighbour as himself, but he keeps the lesson for Sundays 

 and holy-days, i.e., days on which he has nothing to do. 

 It does not enter into his practical consciousness of right 

 and wrong. When he sets about to best his neighbour, 

 he has no sense of wrongdoing as he has when he steals or 

 lies. We are not to think of the conception of doing to 

 others as we would be done by as a principle which appeals 

 to the average man in the light of a duty against which 

 he habitually transgresses with a certain sense of remorse. 

 On the contrary, it does not for the most part appeal to 

 him as standing in any relation to practice at all. It is 

 just a pretty formula which he likes to hear repeated, as 

 long as the preacher does not use it to draw uncomfortable 

 conclusions bearing on practical life. Under the veneer 

 of Christian ethics, the average man has a code of his 

 own. It is a mistake in the opposite direction to suppose 

 with the cynic that the natural man recognises no purely 

 moral obligation. On the contrary, he is constantly 

 surprising the attentive observer by showing a regard for 

 some kind of code in quite unexpected ways. But it is 

 a code of his own a code, one may conjecture, differing 

 more or less from class to class and from nation to nation, 

 and based in each case on the realised relations of a man's 

 life, on the nature and exigencies of the particular part 

 which it fails to him to play, the special form which the 

 struggle for existence takes for him. Life remains for 

 the average man a game which he plays against others, 

 and he has the character and the sentiments appropriate 

 to a player. His morality consists essentially in recog- 

 nising the rules of the game. If you condemn the game 

 altogether, in the name of something higher than war and 

 competition, he simply does not understand you, or he 

 classes you with those ministers of religion who preach 

 upon the blessings of peace one day, and the next lead 

 with voices raised to highest sanctimonious pitch the 

 popular howl for war. The average man not only plays 

 his game against others, but in his heart approves of and 



