xvi SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 381 



respects them when they play it well against him. Still, 

 he expects them to keep to certain rules. If they hit, it 

 must be above the belt, and if they cheat, it must be 

 all in accordance with the regular tricks of the trade. 

 The average man has, as we say, his code. 



..." What passes as the moral consciousness of mankind is 

 no more purely and unreservedly moral than mankind itself. It 

 is a highly complex product of very various sentiments, many of 

 them beautiful, most of them respectable, but some of them 

 irrational and ugly. To make sure of this, it is only necessary 

 to take the average moral sentiment of workaday life, consider not 

 the phrases which it employs, but the application which it makes 

 of them, and compare it with any well-known example of the 

 genuine ethical spirit, say the Sermon on the Mount, which 

 comes almost as near as is humanly possible to unalloyed ethical 

 truth. The difference resolves itself into this, that whereas . the 

 Sermon on the Mount is an expression of pure love, the average 

 moral sentiment is an expression of regard for others tempered by 

 rivalry and fear. It is a compromise between the primitive 

 struggle for existence and the sense of an identical nature and 

 purpose. Hence, to illustrate by a single point, its regard for 

 success as such, and its contempt and dislike of failure ; its feeble 

 criticism of successful violence and its self-righteous zeal in 

 devising fresh degradation for those who are already disgraced. 

 There can be little doubt that the average moral man thoroughly 

 enjoys the punishment of an offender and feels his own righteous- 

 ness enhanced thereby. Objection to cruelty seems to be a 

 comparatively modern feeling, still in its infancy and limited to 

 a small percentage of people. An unauthorised shot at a rabbit 

 is still a far more serious offence than beating a child with a 

 poker, and pecca farther remains a tolerably safe motto. In the 

 same spirit, when the average man talks of honour he is not really 

 thinking of a moral quality, but of something which makes a man 

 respected and feared by others, which puts him beyond the reach 

 of insult or injury. It is only in this sense that a duei can be 

 called an affair of honour, and it is in just the same sense that a 

 nation's honour is thought to be more seriously menaced by a 

 frank admission that it has done a wrong, than by the most un- 

 scrupulous use of force against the people that it has injured. In 

 short, force, self-assertion, and all that contributes to the market 

 value of man or woman, are natural objects of admiration for the 

 consciousness which is immersed in the struggle for existence, 

 and they remain constantly at strife with the ideas of love, self- 



