120 The Morality of Nature 



out the true Tightness of beneficial effect, soon become obso- 

 lete, as witness the dictatorial laws of the reign of terror 

 in France, and conversely any laws or rules of conduct 

 which have been accepted and respected by many genera- 

 tions of mankind must surely have behind them the forces 

 of nature with her rewards and penalties. To deny these 

 established rules is to refuse to heed warnings of danger. 



It is evident that the rightness of conduct depends upon 

 time and place, as well as upon any intrinsic value and per- 

 sonal circumstances; so that even when certain action has 

 been found and declared to be right, a change in any of the 

 factors, time, place or circumstance, may disturb its right- 

 ness; and this fact operates to lessen the value of any so 

 called absolute standards of good and bad conduct, and to 

 reduce the status of any such fixed standard, to that of an 

 approved convention or code. And just as the value of an 

 individual conduct varies in accord with environment, so 

 the value of aspiring motive varies, and the moral ideas 

 change in rightness or wrongness. Conscience and practice 

 therefore demand that justice shall be qualified by mercy, 

 which is humanity's concession of the variable righteous- 

 ness of absolute truth. Truth is the vehicle of knowledge, 

 but when knowledge is responsibility and suffering, there 

 may be as much injury done by truth as by the imposition 

 of physical pain; and on the other hand a suspension of 

 this severity may be as righteous and altruistic a deed as the 

 assumption of a material burden. These are self-evident 

 facts by which action may be tested, for a realization of 

 its need of timeliness. 



Time thus appears, not only as a factor for producing 



