view, where it exists merely as easy-going conformity to an unprogressive moral average. Even some singularity of zeal is better than an æsthetic sloth. Epicureanism lacks the principle of progress. But a strict code of morality is perfectly compatible with companionability, while want of self-control (in sexual matters) certainly involves selfishness and cruelty. In the order of evolution, the man who fails to control his passions is a grade nearer the savage than the representative of self-control.
All organic processes involve the combination in harmony of opposing tendencies. In both the intellectual and the moral life, functions depend upon corresponding deficiencies. The wrong-doer has no intellectual advantage over the good, since goodness implies a knowledge of temptation. As between two beings on different levels in the scale of life, each must be ignorant of the temptations of the other. This deficiency does not determine any moral excellence, since each is doing moral work in so far as he rightly deals with his own temptations. Intellectual functions involve moral deficiencies in the same sense as moral functions themselves, but it does not follow that a function can be produced by simply introducing the corresponding deficiency. Moral deficiencies are essentially involved in intellectual functions whenever the comprehension of certain forms of evil involves such a participation in the evil as amounts to sin. Elementary passions are not in themselves sinful, and the good man may experience them as truly as the wrong-doer. Sin itself, however, with all its consequences, is an experience in which he has no part. It is not dwelling in sin that determines insight into life so much as it is outgrowing and condemning it. One has not the true intellectual function until one has begun to transcend the moral deficiency. Knowledge as such is always an innocent possession. Its moral limitations belong to it per accidens, and it is never my business as a moral being to shun it.
This article is an address delivered as President of the London Ethical Society. It is chiefly practical, dealing as it does with the
