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 THE NORMAL SKI.K, KTC. including various sorts of crazy and dangerous aberration on the part of Reason itself. Thus a man may be al> mally self-sacrificing in deference to a misleading philosophy no less than he may trom one cause or another be abnormally selfish ; and the relative danger of a given person or IK. persons succumbing to the one temptation or the other will depend on circumstances and conditions which it is the business of Ethical Science to characterise, and of the Ethical Art to guard against, with equal care. To discriminate right from wrong to the last detail must of course prove impossible for human thinking to the end. Meanwhile, to obtain a general insight into the essential nature of the good character regarded as a ' real kind ' an ewov etgos must at any rate constitute the all-important ' first step ' towards such success as may be practicable. Now the good character viewed in this light is always an actual possibility for man ; but is it necessarily so likewise for any and every man? This problem, I believe, in one form or another constitutes the crux of moral philosophy for the vast majority of its votaries. The reason of this, how- ever, would seem merely to be that their interest in logic and metaphysics lags behind their devotion to the subject of con- duct. They have not sufficiently reflected on the inevitable limitations of Theory, of our attempt to understand the nature of things, whether it take the shape of science or of Art and express its conclusions as indicatives or as impera- tives. They ignore the fact that Theory in focussing its attention on this or that aspect of concrete reality is bound in every case to leave a great deal altogether out of account. But for the existence of this irrelevant residuum it is clearly Theory itself, and not the nature of things, that is to blame. At least we dare not suppose otherwise, since Contingent Matter spells Misology and Pessimism. Let us be fully prepared, then, to find that 'the circuit of our musings ' is in Ethics as in all other science most inadequately narrow. Thus there immediately suggest themselves two classes of men that appear to lack a Normal Self. Under the first category comes the moral idiot 6 Tre7rr)p<afj,evo<f 71730? aperijv whose impulses are permanently warped or whose intellect is hopelessly perverse. Such beings, or rather such nega- tions of true human being, would certainly seem to exist ; and Ethical Theory confronted with the fact of their exist- ence is fain on the whole to ascribe it to vr), that is, to refer it to the Inexplicable, since it cannot show how any good can accrue to the species from the occurrence of such ' sports,' save perhaps in so far as they provide objects whereon a