the exercise of virtue and benevolence." "A deep and intelligent sympathy with the race" is to supply the place of the old sanctions. I pity the race. There is no conceivable motive why we should trouble ourselves about the welfare of others if they are mere automatic organisms. The "agreeable consciousness that results from the healthy exercise of the energies of our nature" is grotesquely inadequate to support the old rule of right action, "Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra." Physical science is utterly unable to supply any reason why we should "prefer a noble life before a long." If ever M.Renan, who is of the house and lineage of Balaam, the son of Beor, said a true word, it is this, "L'intérêt personnel n'inspire que la lâchetė." It is an insult to my understanding to tell me that selfishness, however sublimated, will yield the same fruits as self-sacrifice; that from natural history, from physiology, from chemistry, you can derive the elements of moral force. Justice, duty, love, are the idlest of words, if no echo come back to them from beyond the grave." Virtue will never cease to be admirable so long as man is man," a Teutonic materialist urges. I entirely agree. But if you empty the human mammal of the ideas of God, right, responsibility, immortality, he ceases to be man. "'A had him from me Christian, and, look, if the fat villain have not transformed him ape! "And then assuredly virtue will cease to be admirable to him. Not indeed that I am now pleading for Christianity. Still less am I pleading for any special form of it. There is little in Christian morality that is exclusively Christian; and I am not prepared to assert that many of the most precious of the ethical elements of our civilization might not survive a general decay of specifically Christian dogmas. My present contention is more general. It is this: that morality can have root only in the spiritual nature of man. If from that happy soil, watered by the river of life and refreshed by the dews of heaven, you transplant it to the rocks and sands of materialism, wither and die it must. "Independent morality." Yes. I quite allow that, in a sense, morality is independent. It is independent of all systems, religious and metaphysical; of all facts, psychological or historical. It is, as Kant has so well shown—that is to me the great achievement of his philosophy—it is a formal law, transcending all persons and all conditions, and sovereign over all: a law of ideal relation, universally obligatory upon all wills. It is as absolute as are the laws of mathematics, and concerning it even God is not free; for it has its source in his nature, and "he can not deny himself." In this sense it is independent; but it is not independent of personality. How can we predicate ethicalness or unethicalness of a thing? I maintain, then, that whether morality be regarded subjectively or objectively, materialism is fatal to it. Only a person is capable of a moral act; and materialism destroys personality. No action can be I obligatory, in the strict sense, unless it is binding upon us without regard to its consequences and without reference to any personal end.
