much practically until experience and reflection have given one an interest in the deepest problems of life. It belongs to a period when the commonplaces are fraught with meaning, when a rational conviction has the force which Socrates gave to insight into wisdom—when to understand virtue is to conform the life to it. But, nevertheless, the whole period of high-school work should be a contribution to the end of moral character. Let us get rid, at the outset, of the idea that a moral life is a mechanical obedience to rules and conventionalities, a cut-and-dried affair, a matter that lies in but one province of our nature, a formalism, and learn that the whole being, its purposes and activities, the heroic impulses and the commonplace duties lie within its circle. Everything a man is and does, learns and becomes, constitutes his moral character.
Ethics is the science of conduct—conduct on both its subjective and its objective side. It considers the relation of the self to all consequences of an act as foreseen and chosen by the self, and to the same consequences as outwardly expressed. Practically it teaches control of impulse with reference to results as expressing and revealing the character—results both immediate and remote. Some acts show a one-sided inclination, uncontrolled by regard for the claims of other and better impulses; only a part of the individual is asserted, not the whole self in perfect balance. For example, the pupil plays truant, acting with sole regard for the impulse to seek ease and sensuous pleasure. He neglects other more important impulses, all of which might have been satisfied by attending faithfully to his school duties: the impulse of ambition, to gain power and
