Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/524

 510 R. R. MARETT : kind of pity may be lavished. The other case is very differ- ent. It is the case of the martyr, of the warrior stricken down in his prime, of the intellectual giant cut off ere he could benefit the world. Have these two, then, no Normal Self (for to say that they realise this self in one supreme moment ere death comes is surely a paradox, seeing that we know not any such concrete self that is not considerably extended in time, and seeing, further, that it is well-nigh impossible to conceive of such supreme moments as happen- ing for many who might deserve them), and in this way do they resemble the incurable criminal or fool ? Philosophy can but answer ' Yes ' and ' No '. Yes, since they too are the sports of sheer inexplicable Accident. Whether it be mad- ness or death that robs a man of his natural destiny, and whether the evil fate interpose at the very start or at the turn of the race, in any case it is the fault of vrj. No, because inward flaw and outer accident seem at any rate different modes of the same unaccountable Necessity. If we could feel pity of a kind towards the moral idiot because our own Abnormal Self taught us in part how he was made, it is at least on a very different scale that we can feel sympathy and admiration for the noble life of unfulfilled promise, since our Normal Self whereon and wherein alone we are able to dwell with permanent satisfaction constitutes a bond of union between such lives and ours which we do not willingly let slip whether untimely, or indeed even timely, death has ravished them to that unknown whence itself it came. Meanwhile Ethical Science establishing its Normal by the roughest method of averaging is constrained to persist in adding ev fiiy reeiro to its definition of the Moral End as it is for us. ' So careless of the single life ' may well be the cry of the poet out of patience with Nature. But Science must stick to Nature with its mingled goodness and badness, and must exercise its patience to the full in striving to define the Good Nature as it is and may be in us ; so that the actual may, at any rate so far as within us lies, coincide with the actually possible Best, whatever part in the final ordering be played by incalculable chance. To sum up, then, it is the function and privilege of Science in its Formal or Definitory aspect to deal in highly abstract formulae. Such abstractions cannot, however, in the case of an evolutionary or concrete science be ' blank,' that is, unpervaded by conditional truth. The Normal Self is such a formula, abstract, that is, general, yet not ' blank,' that is, abstractly self-consistent, like the truths of Formal logic ; for it refers to a group of psychic activities that in part