Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/520

 506 B. E. MABETT : however, must remain between you and him that you cannot on the strength of this identification argue, as he does, that therefore there cannot be any self-regarding virtues. If the virtues be conceived, as they naturally must, as so many parts or aspects of the content of the moral ideal that actually governs man at any given time, then there undoubtedly do exist virtues that alike on the ground of their origin and on that of the characteristic fashion in which they make them- selves felt in the moral consciousness must be pronounced to be primarily self-regarding. Or if on the other hand we consider rather the ulterior goal and destination of the virtues, then none of them can be said to be exclusively and merely other-regarding. It is indeed often the source of great confusion to the well-meaning person whose morality is largely unreflective, or what is almost as bad tinged with a reflexion borrowed from a school of philosophy that is out of date and false, that he cannot bring his perfectly fair and honest acts of competition, directed towards the attainment of what must normally prove ' a wider sphere of usefulness,' into comfortable harmony with the dictates of what he mistakes for his Sense of Duty 7rA.ok. Now to constitute such a harmony, that is, to overcome the sense of contrast and actual opposition between the trend or ' pull ' of the two sets of normal impulses that are severally indivi- dualistic and altruistic in ' bias,' lies of course entirely beyond the power of mere Feeling, however moral, and in so far as it is possible at all must be accomplished by the aid and under the direction of Eeflexion, that is to say, of Eeason no mere instigator and supporter of anti-social selfishness, as Mr. Benjamin Kidd, and I am afraid Mr. Marshall also, would have us believe, but a sterling ' all-round faculty ' with a scope and use as wide as the ideal purpose of human life as a whole. Thus it is Eeason that alone is competent to provide us with the abstract conception of a life of Ego- altruism, as it may be called, wherein the claims of self are immediately and wholly satisfied by doing and suffering whatsoever the general good is held to demand. But such a ' philosophic life ' considered as an actual possibility for man cannot be thought out ; much less can it be lived out. Thought can reduce Individualism and Socialism to their greatest common measure, but it cannot entirely annul the disparity between these contrary ' points of view ' ; and so there are correspondingly rival ' pivots of motive ' in the moral life that must always entail an even greater degree of internal discrepancy, inasmuch as motives owing to the element of ' slow ' feeling that enters into them are in-