44 DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS: 



would ask the reader to dwell for a few minutes longer on the consider- 

 ations which show that it is really as impossible to draw a fixed line be- 

 tween moral and immoral passions as it is between moral and immoral 

 actions, and which therefore force us, if we are to find any ground of 

 morality at all, to look for it in some further region of our nature. 



Plato in his allegory of the soul in the Phaedrus though he appar- 

 ently divides the passions which draw the human chariot into two classes, 

 the heavenward and the earthward figured by the white horse and the 

 black horse respectively does not recommend that the black horse should 

 be destroyed or dismissed, but only that he (as well as the white horse) 

 should be kept under due control by the charioteer. By which he seems 

 to intend that there is a power in man which stands above and behind 

 the passions, and under whose control alone the human being can safely 

 move. In fact if the fiercer and so-called more earthly passions were re- 

 moved, half the driving force would be gone from the chariot of the hu- - 

 man soul. Hatred may be devilish at times but after all the true value 

 of it depends on what you hate, on the use to which the passion is put. 

 Anger though inhuman at one time is magnificent at another. Obstinacy 

 may be out of place in a drawing-room, but it is the latest virtue on a 

 battle-field when an important position has to be held against the full 

 brunt of the enemy. And Lust, though maniacal and monstrous in its 

 aberrations, cannot in the last resort be separated from its divine com- 

 panion, Love. To let the more amiable passions have entire sway no- 

 toriously does not do : to turn your cheek, too literally, to the smiter, is 

 (pace Tolstoi) only to encourage smiting ; and when society .becomes so 

 altruistic that everybody runs to fetch the coal-scuttle we feel sure that 

 something has gone wrong. The white-washed heroes of our biographies 

 with their many virtues and no faults do not please us. We have an 

 impression that the man without faults is, to say the least, a vague, unin- 

 teresting being a picture without light and shade and the conventional 

 semi-pious classification of character into good and bad qualities (as if 

 the good might be kept and the bad thrown away) seems both inadequate 

 and false. 



What the student of human nature rather has to do is not to divide the 

 virtues (so-called) from the vices (so-called), not to separate the black 

 horse and the white horse, but to find out what is the relation of the one 

 to the other to see the character as a whole, and the mutual interdepend- 

 ence of its different parts to find out what that power is which constitutes 

 it a unity, whose presence and control makes the man and all his actions 

 " right," and in whose absence (if it is really possible for it to be entirely 

 absent) the man and his actions must be " wrong." 



What we call vices, faults, defects, appear often as a kind of limitation : 

 cruelty, for instance, as a limitation of human sympathy, prejudice as a 

 blindness, a want of discernment ; but it is just these limitations in one 

 form or another which are the necessary conditions of the appearance 



