not so much in discovering that cruelty is wrong, but in realizing that it is still wrong though your victim does not happen to belong to your own class or family.

The usual advance of humanity has thus run on two lines, separating men more thoroughly only to unite them more closely narrowing down responsibility while it has extended obligation. It has thus become at once more legal and less legal in its outlook. More legal in its conception of responsibility: for it is the lawyer who has the most interest in holding the isolated individual to be the cause of his own actions, however doubtful the doctrine. Less legal on the other hand in the range of duties recognized for the rights of humanity repose on no authority but that of the moral consciousness itself, and are therefore at once less and more substantial than the legal codes to which under the name of the jus gentium they were once assimilated, as though the ideal archetype could exist in the same sense as the imperfect copies.1

Personality is the term that can naturally be applied to a being thus at once the subject of duties and the possessor of rights. And it is needless to insist how clearly it suggests at once the ultimate value of the individual and the necessary relation of the individual to society. But the closer interpretation of these ideas is not so easy that discussion is needless. On the one side the absolute responsibility of the individual seems little better than a legal fiction. On the other it is not

1 For the weight attached by mediaeval theory to Natural Law against the 'positive' law of particular countries see Giercke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, p. 85. It is interesting to compare with this old doctrine the tendency of the international socialist movement to assert a body of rights for Labour, valid against all particular codes which indeed are 'so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just so many bourgeois interests' (Communist manifesto, p. 15).

clear whether it would be right to consider the individual person as the unit, so to speak, of moral value nor in what way his perfection is related to society and social duty.

The very term 'personality' in fact makes a double suggestion. It sums up in the first place a doctrine. of what man is as a moral agent: in the second place it indicates an ideal that man ought to set before himself. We cannot help being persons, it might be said, but we are persons in order that we may become personalities.

Now a philosophic treatment of the subject must do its best to elucidate both aspects of the term. It clearly cannot show whether personality is the condition of goodness without a clear view of the general nature of goodness. Nor can it settle how far personality may be regarded as an ideal without a close examination of the central issues of politics. Throughout the history of reflection on these questions a division can be traced between two groups of thinkers. To the one, man's highest personal life implies and is exhausted in social relationships: the good man is in the last resort the good citizen. To the other morality seems to begin where politics end. No doubt the difference between these two schools has often turned on misunderstanding. The one side has been tempted to include all forms of human association under the name of the State. The other side has inclined to miss the social element in all activities that are not directly political. It will be necessary later to make a closer examination of the subject from this point of view and to decide in what precise sense man really is a political animal. But apart from these confusions of the issue there is a real conflict often present between the ideals of personal development and of social service.

This is not the same as a conflict between personal and public interest. In one sense such a conflict does exist. Duty towards a man's fellows may involve a sacrifice of certain personal pleasures which is none the less a sacrifice, if the 'true interest' of a man is to do his duty and the attempt of Plato to show that goodness and happiness are identical only succeeds by defining happiness as goodness from the beginning. But such divergences between the promptings of personal inclination and the command of the moral law are not what I have in mind. The question is rather about the content of the moral law: can it attach moral value to things like disinterested knowledge or artistic enjoyment? That a man ought to prefer his country's welfare to a good dinner no one need dispute. But does the proper study of the political questions on which his vote is solicited come before the enjoyment of Bach or Velasquez? And can such cultivation of artistic faculty be reckoned among his duties as citizen? On such questions as these authority is divided. Some writers endeavour to include the full development of such personal capacities as these in the end to be set before the State: some confine the life of a citizen to simpler, less exalted matters. Some would have us believe that every duty is also a social duty: others protest against the continual reference to society in general, and find the really valuable part of a man's life to begin when he is alone, or at least alone with his friends. The fluctuating views of politics that result were never more apparent than to-day. For years the range of the State's authority has been extended. It has gone beyond the narrow task of safeguarding life and property: it has come to educate and control its citizens from their cradle to their grave. For thirty years we have lived in

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an era of collectivist legislation,1 and our statesmen vary their denunciations of socialism as robbery with the perhaps more scathing condemnation of it that they have been socialists themselves all the time. And yet of all the popular moral teachers of the time none has been more popular than one who despised politics, scorned the weakness of ordinary altruism, and preached an ideal of strenuous and noble egoism. In literature of a less definitely didactic kind, we discover on all hands an assertion of individual rights to which the happiness of society generally appears to be a matter of the smallest moment. A French novelist 2 invites our sympathy for the speculative genius which is extinguished by a father's affection. An English novelist describes a new league which is to regenerate the world; and the pledge taken by its members is to discover their tastes and gratify them, always excepting a taste for any form of political activity. It would not be mere cynicism to assert that in proportion as the State becomes a moral agency its members grow weary with politics. This is not necessarily a proof of degeneracy. The tide of public service, of devotion to the State, has ebbed and flowed all through history: and it would be difficult to establish that those ages have been most moral which have most clearly identified morals and politics. Amid the decline of the City State and the overshadowing of civic duties there grew up universal religions and universal philosophies. But in any case no historical investigation could show us how far, or in what way the

1 A description of the passage from laisser faire to collectivist ideas not written from the avowed Socialist standpoint can be found in Professor Dicey's Law and Opinion in England.

2 M. Benda's L'Ordination.

3 Mr. Charles Marriott's Now!

personal development of the individual may coincide with his faithful payment of a debt owed to the community. We must be more certain first of what in any case we mean by personal development, self-realization, and all such phrases. Thus a study of personality in its relation to ethics and politics will obviously lead to a discussion of the whole vast question of the true relation between society and individual: and in so far as it must also examine the ultimate responsibility and ultimate value of personal life, it opens up the still profounder questions of the relation between individual and universe. A complete theory of conduct and of reality would therefore sooner or later issue from it. The following treatment pretends in no way to be exhaustive and must at many times indicate further problems that it does not attempt to solve. But where so vast a range of topics could be discussed it seems better to deal with a few questions in some detail, even though their complete treatment would necessitate further inquiries that cannot here be undertaken. The attempt shall be made then to discuss those aspects of personality which have most direct bearing on the theory of conduct, with reference to metaphysics only so far as ethical or political problems turn out to demand it. In the main there are two questions, as we have already seen, to be considered: how far is personality the necessary basis of morals, and in what sense is it the summary expression of a moral ideal? I wish to establish first that though some moral goodness may be found elsewhere than in persons, its most characteristic forms demand personality: that equally the highest goodness of which we can conceive would be personal goodness: that it would further be the goodness of finite personalities who could in no way be absorbed into one another