Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/515

 TIIK NOKM.U. SKI.K, KM .-,|)| sil.lc attainment. Of course this is not the only shupr in winch the Ethical Norm may be presented. Thus the indi- vidual concerned with his own self-moralisation will tcn.l t,, conceive it exclusively under the form of a new and higher Self ; the ' moral legislator ' under that of a scheme of out- ward acts ; and the votary of ethical science, together with the practical moralist intent on a theory of moral education in the widest sense, under both the one and the other. Meanwhile of the two forms in question the one that repre- sents morality as more intimately and as it were spiritually the concern of the personal consciousness is decidedly the more comprehensive, because it is the introspective evidence, though only when combined with the historical, that yields us the deeper insight into its peculiar ' thinghood '. Indeed it is truly a sign of grace in a writer of so pronounced a positivistic tendency as Clifford that he should thus make the idea of ' self-realisation ' the rallying-point of his ethical system. It is, I repeat, a great merit and the mark of a sounder philosophy than many will be prepared to expect from him thus to strike the note of ' inwardness ' at the commencement of an inquiry that professes to apply to morality precisely the same methods and canons of research as to any other subject of ' natural ' science. By all means then let us follow him in thinking of our Best as a Self a ' new man ' to be put on in place of the ' old Adam '. It is therefore only the specific constitution of this Self that is in question now ; in short, the adequacy of its alleged ' tribal ' character as a general explanation of its ' normality,' of its ability and right to serve as the type of the most perfect moral manhood within our reach. It may indeed be urged that it is no fair exchange to remove ' tribal ' in order to substitute a comparatively colourless expression like ' normal '. ' Tribal," it will be said, may imply a one-sided and unhistorical point of view or it may not, but at any rate it embodies an attempt to describe the phenomenal content of the Self; whilst 'normal' fails to invest the bare form of the Good with any specific char- acter whatever, since the Norm is just the form in its regu- lative aspect. To this I would reply firstly, that, suppose it to turn out later that the content of the Good Self always presents for us a mixture of characters, the term used to describe this content must at any rate be so colourless as not to connote one character rather than another ; secondly, that the associations of the word ' normal ' by no means restrict it to a transcendental context. Let me illustrate this latter point from the history of the kindred expression