perfection be reached. This calm, pitiless, penetrating scrutiny of human conduct has about it the immense strength of the things that are absolutely honest. This fearless way of regarding conduct, one's own as well as another's, precludes all attitudinizing, whether the less-than-the-truth of humility, or the more of pretension. The student and practitioner of morals must have a passion for things as they are. And if this flawless honesty be needed in estimating that simpler half of morality which we have called efficiency, still more is it needed in considering the vastly more complicated questions concerning the ends of conduct, that other half of morality which we have called worth. VI WORTH T seems that all inquiries, and particularly all IT moral inquiries, have a tendency to branch out in many directions. Morality, as we have just seen, divides at once into efficiency and worth. It is possible to keep efficiency pretty much of a unit, though hardly possible to treat it adequately with any degree of brevity. Efficiency presents many aspects worthy of the most careful attention, aspects barely touched upon in the preceding chapter, and not easily exhausted. When one writes about morality, one writes about life, and by that very fact is doomed to be fragmentary and inadequate. But the handling of efficiency is mere preliminary skirmishing compared to the almost interminable vistas which present themselves at the bare mention of worth. We have at the outset another of those bisections of which we have just spoken. Life's purpose, in order to be carried out at all, must appeal to the individual as a goal worth striving for, as the good fortune which his heart desires. But life's purpose, in order to be moral, must also satisfy those objective standards of conduct which emerge from the broader experience of the race. In calling the subjective ends of conduct good fortune, the goal which stirs the individual deeply enough to keep him, day after day, in vigorous action, and in calling the objective ends of conduct social welfare, the more abstract standard of morality which corrects and chastens the limited experience of the individual, we have not only a division which is convenient for the purposes of formal exposition, but more significant far, a division which supplies. the one possible key to the solution of this problem of worth. The final and overpowering interest in morality depends, as I have tried to show in my very title, upon the subjective side of morals, upon individual good fortune. What healthy-minded men and women care about is immediate and personal salvation, the art of right conduct, the art of successful daily living. They are interested, not so much to set up some abstract standard of morals, which by its ingenuity shall please themselves, if no one else, but rather to help on the cause of concrete morality, the practical quest of good fortune. And yet, as soon as one comes to deal with the problem in any serious way, one sees that this abstract side of morals conditions the practical quest and must needs have adequate study. Reflection, and especially reflection upon the cause of human failure, soon suggests that while individual good fortune is the supreme end of conduct, it is an end too frequently missed. The conviction deepens that individual good fortune is the result of very definite forces, and that the quest, in order to be intelligent and successful, must recognize these forces and must act in harmony with their requirements. To want good fortune is one thing; to get it is another. To seek good fortune momentarily and on impulse might be said to be the method of the majority. But the method commonly fails. It fails because it lacks persistence, that is, efficiency, and because it is founded upon the very limited experience of a single life. The individual who omits to chasten his personal desires by reference to that larger experience gained by the race, in reality omits to measure his idea of good fortune by those valid objective standards which establish the worth of the idea. This less personal side of morality, this wholly impersonal side, by which human conduct is objectively and unemotionally measured, is the necessary corrective of individual ignorance and eccentricity. In saying, then, that that conduct is right or good which promotes human welfare, we have in mind two realities, personal welfare and social welfare. To know good fortune, and in what it gen uinely consists, one must know what welfare in this larger sense means, and must be able and willing to measure one's desires objectively as well as subjectively. But it is every whit as essential that this outer show of welfare shall honestly mean the inner good fortune. When morality becomes so abstract and formal that it leaves out the human heart and its needs and desires, it passes into an arid desert where there is no longer any motive power to set in motion the machinery of conduct. If morality part company with experience, it grows speculative and theoretical, and finally comes to propose ends for conduct not only without worth, but even harmful. Good fortune and social welfare are both of them matters of experience, and the successful student of morals, let us repeat, must needs be at the same time a practitioner. It is grotesque that a closet philosopher should ever attempt to tell the world in what the worth of conduct consists. We all gladly admit the intellectual supremacy of the Greeks. Yet even in the days of their prime, one is struck by the curious feebleness in their handling of natural events. They preferred to speculate about Nature, to think out what she might be, or could be, instead of finding out experimentally what she is. As a result, we have a series of poetic but eminently |