report things as they are, the world which each man is thus forced to create for himself through his own activity is a partial, even a false world, in which the true relation of things is never perceived, and knowledge - the perception of relations is rendered impossible. So when a man neglects the health and training of his faculties, for business, for more immediate pleasure, or for whatsoever end, he deliberately makes this larger world and larger knowledge impossible, and condemns himself to something distinctly less than the best, to a more limited experience. How truly tragic this curtailment is can be seen only too vividly when such a partialist is called upon to meet either leisure or old age. The petty business to which he gave his manhood is gone, and there remains only the unfurnished house. One meets the tragedy in every village which boasts its retired men of business, in every corner of Europe where the unenlightened seek to enjoy what they call success. The failure to become accomplished means a failure to come into the largest fulfillment of the self, the greatest happiness, and must be accounted an essential immorality. It was Socrates who said:

'The best man is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself.'

And Arnold may be further quoted when he

writes, 'Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the most beautiful souls that have ever existed, used to say that one's business in life was, first, to perfect one's self by all the means in one's power, and secondly, to try and create in the world around one an aristocracy, the most numerous that one possibly could, of talents and character.'

To be strong and beautiful and accomplished and good seems to me the full formula of individual morality, a formula which has in it the vitality of infinite promise; for strength and beauty and accomplishment and goodness are not shallow springs to be drunk dry in the hot summer of a single lifetime, but rather unfailing wells of ceaseless effort and attainment. Nor is the order accidental. In one sense, to be beautiful includes everything, the idealization of one's relations to one's self, to the neighbor, and to God. But it gains in impressiveness to have on the one side strength and on the other accomplishment. When one is all this, one is in the truest sense good, for one has satisfied the moral law, has manifested efficiency and the worth which means individual good fortune and social welfare. To be good is the general aim, of which strength and beauty and accomplishment are the special terms. It is properly mentioned last both because it deserves the emphasis of such position, and because it is the result, the summing up, of all those efforts

after perfection which constitute culture, the affirmation of the larger self.

But we must pass now to the more special aspects of the quest, and to the psychological method by which morality is attained.

THE

IX

THE CARDINAL VIRTUES

HE Cardinal Virtues of the ancient world, at least as far back as Aristotle, were Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Fortitude. Human virtue turned upon these as upon a pivot. The Roman church retains these virtues unaltered, though it changes the order, making the sequence run Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance, and Justice, a change significant of the different outlook between the ancient and the modern world, the change of emphasis from state duty to individual duty. To antiquity, individual virtues like prudence, temperance, and fortitude apparently flowed out of the civic virtue of justice. To a later world, cause and effect are reversed, and social righteousness comes as the flower of personal virtue. The minor morals are supposed to flow out of the cardinal virtues, and to be distinct from the three great theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity, the greatest of which we are all supposed to know, whether or not we practice it.

These seven most august of virtues make an impressive series. The life which could exemplify

them all would indeed reach a high order of excellence. Our modern man, seeking good fortune, would not wish to neglect one of them. But as a matter of daily method he shows a diminishing esteem for all these hard-and-fast distinctions. In attempting to make conduct square with these seven virtues, and do full justice to all of them, it soon becomes evident, not that they are in any way antagonistic, but rather that in many cases they so far overlap as to become distinctions without a difference, and that in all cases they are such vague terms, and open to such varying interpretation, that one can read into them either a narrow duty or a whole system of morals. This is especially true of the first and last of the virtues, Justice and Charity. Justice, in this latitudinarian sense, means everything, not only strict obedience to the clear letter of the law, which it is commonly limited to mean, but also an equally punctilious regard for all the requirements imposed by the larger self, for all sides of the developed human nature, generosity, consideration, and mercy, as well as the harsher virtues. To say of any one,' He was a just man,' is to accord the highest praise, if by this one means that he satisfied all the demands of his own rich nature, for the larger content of justice is personal and subjective. So inclusive is the term that it might properly be used as synonymous with good