xvi SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 387 



tradition tends to maintain moral rules after the need for 

 them has passed away. Morality is like a plant growing 

 in a confined space, which cannot at once resume its natural 

 form as soon as the confining barriers are removed, 'this 

 obstacle to free development is much aggravated by the 

 tendency of moral conceptions to crystallise into precepts 

 arrogating to themselves a supernatural sanction, and 

 accordingly an absolute fixity. This assumption, which 

 doubtless strengthens moral authority as long as the 

 supernatural basis is firmly believed in, and the ideal 

 preached is thoroughly in harmony with the desires and 

 better tendencies of the time, tends to undermine the hold 

 of morality altogether as soon as the possibility of a wider 

 and completer life is opened out. Religion is a progressive 

 force when it seizes on a new moral truth and presents 

 it convincingly to the popular imagination. It becomes 

 retrogressive when in presence of a still higher truth it 

 obstinately maintains the absolute validity and fixity of 

 the old. 



Against the tendency to bring conceptions of right and 

 wrong to the bar of tradition or of supernatural truth, it has 

 to be said that both tradition and religion have rather to 

 be brought before the bar of human nature. It is out of 

 the needs of common human nature that morality is ori- 

 ginally built up. Could we arrive at a complete conception 

 of human nature and its possibilities, we should possess 

 final moral truth. The humanitarian spirit has at least 

 reached the point of conceiving human nature as an 

 organism with a natural growth of its own. The growth 

 of the individual is limited in morality as in actual fact 

 by the corresponding growth of others. There is as it 

 were a moral struggle for existence, no less than a physical, 

 and the character arrives at maturity at the expense of 

 some loss. Like the individual, the species has also a 

 possible and natural growth, made up necessarily of the 

 growth of its members, but differing in this, that it can 

 go on from generation to generation. The full meaning 

 of the humanitarian principle is to conceive of this growth 

 as a whole as the end and aim of all human effort, and to 

 judge existing conceptions of right and wrong thereby. 



c c 2 



