A CRITICISM OF MORALITY. 51 



we are ever to be " right " at all, it must be at some moment when we 

 fail to notice it when we have forgotten our apartness from others and 

 have entered into the great region of human equality. Equality in that 

 region all human defects are redeemed ; they all find their place. To 

 love your neighbor as yourself is the whole law and the prophets ; to feel 

 that you are "equal" with others, that their lives are as your life, that 

 your life is as theirs even in what trifling degree we may experience such 

 things is to enter into another life which includes both sides ; it is to 

 pass beyond the sphere of moral distinctions, and to trouble oneself no 

 more with them. Between lovers there are no duties and no rights ; and 

 in the life of humanity, there is only an instinctive mutual service express- 

 ing itself in whatever way may be best at the time. Nothing is forbidden, 

 there is nothing which may not serve. The law of Equality is perfectly 

 flexible, is adaptable to all times and places, finds a place for all the ele- 

 ments of character, justifies and redeems them all without exception ; and 

 to live by it is perfect freedom. Yet not a law; but rather as said, a new 

 life, transcending the individual life, working through it from within, lift- 

 ing the self into another sphere, beyond corruption, far over the world of 

 Sorrow. 



The effort to make a distinction between acting for self and acting for 

 one's neighbor is the basis of " morals." As long as a man feels an ulti- 

 mate antagonism between himself and Society, as long as he tries to hold 

 his own life as a thing apart from that of others, so long must the ques- 

 tion arise whether he will act for self or for those others. Hence flow a 

 long array of terms distinctions of right and wrong, duty, selfishness, 

 self-renunciation, altruism, etc. But when he discovers that there is no 

 ultimate antagonism between himself and Society ; when he finds that the 

 gratification of every desire which he has or can have may be rendered 

 social, or beneficial to his fellows, by being used at the right time and 

 place, and on the other hand that every demand made upon him by So- 

 ciety will and must gratify some portion of his nature, some desire of his 

 heart why, all the distinctions collapse again ; they do not hold water 

 any more. A larger life descends upon him which includes both sides, 

 and prompts actions in accordance with an unwritten and unimagined 

 law. Such actions will sometimes be accounted ' ' selfish " by the world ; 

 sometimes they will be accounted "unselfish; " but they are neither, 

 or if you like both ; and he who does them concerns himself not 

 with the names that may be given to them. The law of Equality in- 

 cludes all the moral codes, and is the stand-point which they cannot reach, 

 but which they all aim at. 



Judged by this final standard then, it may doubtless fairly be said since 

 we all fall short of it that we are all criminals, and deserve a good hid- 

 ing; and even that some of us are greater criminals than others. Only of 

 this real criminality the actual moral and legal codes afford but ineffect- 

 ual tests. I may be a far worse or more self-included (" idiotic " or bru- 



