A CRITICISM OF MORALITY. 



43 



however here, and the matter is not one which renders itself up at once. 

 Though, vaguely speaking, some passions seem nobler and more dignified 

 than others, we find it very difficult, in fact, impossible, to draw any strict 

 line which shall separate one class, the virtuous, from the other class, the 

 vicious. On the whole we place Prudence, Generosity, Chastity, Rever- 

 ence, Courage, among the virtues and their opposites, as rashness, Miser^ 

 liness, Incontinence, Arrogance, Timidity, among the vices ; yet we do 

 not seem able to say that Prudence is always better than Rashness, Chas- 

 tity than Incontinence, or Reverence than Arrogance. There are situa- 

 tions in which the less honored quality is the most in place ; and if the 

 extreme of this is undesirable, the extreme of its opposite is undesirable 

 too. Courage, it is commonly said, must not be carried over into fool- 

 hardiness ; Chastity must not go so far as the monks of the early Church 

 took it ; there is a limit to the indulgence of the instinct of Reverence. 

 In fact the less dignified passions are necessary sometimes as a counter- 

 balance and set-off to the more dignified, and a character devoid of them 

 would be very insipid : just as among the members of the body, the less, 

 honored have their place as well as the more honored, and could not well 

 be discarded. 



Hence a number of writers, abandoning the attempt to draw a fixed 

 line between virtuous and vicious passions, have boldly maintained that 

 vices have their place as well as virtues, and that the true salvation lies in 

 the golden mean. The eTtisiKEia and d&typodvn? of the Greeks seems to 

 have pointed to the idea of a blend or harmonious adjustment of all the 

 powers as the perfection of character. On a Greek memorial tablet at 

 Naples (in the Museum, I think) is the following inscription : 



iyv ' Atirrj rods JdcpviS erev^E, ndi ^6av tfre'pcaS u 

 "To Aste, for a memorial of her gentleness, Daphnis framed this 

 having loved her dearly in life, and longing for her now she is dead. " 



The English word " gentleman " seems to have once conveyed a sim- 

 ilar idea. And Emerson, among others, maintains that each vice is only 

 the " excess or acridity of a virtue," and says " the first lesson of history 

 is the good of evil." 



According to this view Tightness or wrongness cannot be predicated of 

 the passions themselves, but should rather be applied to the use of them, 

 and to the way they are proportioned to each other and to circumstances. 

 As, farther back, we left the region of actions to look for morality in the 

 passions that lie behind action, so now we leave the region of the pas- 

 sions to look for it in the power that lies behind the passions and gives 

 them their place. This is a farther move in the same direction as before, 

 and possibly will bring us to a more satisfactory conclusion. There are 

 still difficulties, however the chief ones lying in the want of definiteness 

 which necessarily attaches to our dealings with these remoter tracts of 

 human nature ; and in our own defective knowledge of these tracts. 



For these reasons, and as the subject is a complex and difficult one, I 



