390 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



this respect again it contrasts with the fragmentary and 

 more or less inconsistent rules which satisfy unscientific 

 thought. But it is worth adding that a transition from 

 the lower or fragmentary to the higher or systematic 

 ethics may be seen at the point at which without any 

 scientific analysis, some general conception arises, compre- 

 hending and subordinating to itself all minor rules of 

 conduct. Such a conception may be social or religious ; 

 the end that it proposes may be the welfare of society, or 

 it may be obedience to the will of God. In either case, 

 though with very different results, such a conception 

 endows life for the first time with real unity of purpose, 

 and under its guidance a man's every action comes to be 

 devoted to a single end. Such an end, however, rarely 

 includes within it the whole of human nature. Those 

 who consecrate their lives to a single cause tend, as we are 

 often tragically made aware, to limit themselves in pro- 

 portion to their success in concentration. There are very 

 few men who can be as ardent in their patriotism as 

 Mazzini, and yet at the same time conceive of their 

 country as the servant rather than the mistress of 

 humanity. The ordinary patriotism is, if made the 

 highest end of life, a narrow, exclusive, and in the long 

 run a self-destructive idea. Conversely the greatest 

 modern statesmen in our own country have been noted 

 for qualifying the insular by the " European " view. 

 Nor need we waste words in describing how religion often 

 tends to narrow as well as to elevate. A man's God is 

 a crystallisation of certain elements of his own nature. It 

 is therefore a limited being, narrower than the man him- 

 self. To find the true God is to understand the Spirit 

 which moves and works in all things and strives towards 

 realisation, and it is only this God whose service is the 

 perfect freedom which consists in following the plan which 

 is at once natural and divine. 



The ideal of moral philosophy is also to bring the con- 

 duct of life under the unity of a single comprehensive 

 purpose. But this unity, it is suggested, is formed by a 

 deliberate synthesis of the divergent but not necessarily 

 conflicting possibilities of human development. Nothing, 



