Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/660

640 people, speak of horses as "fromm," pious, not in the religious, but in the primary and proper sense of the word, meaning thereby kind and docile. The English "gentle" and the French "gentil" which are used in the same connection, refer to good conduct as the result of fine breeding.

Archdeacon Paley's definition of virtue, to which Dr. Arnold adverts, is essentially anthropocentric and intensely egoistic. "Virtue," he says, "is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God, for the sake of everlasting happiness." In order to be virtuous, according to this extremely narrow and wholly inadequate conception of virtue, we must, in the first place, do good to mankind, our conduct toward the brute creation not being taken into the account; secondly, our action must be in obedience to the will of God, thus ruling out all generous impulses originating in the spontaneous desire to do good; thirdly, we must have an eye single to our own supreme personal advantage—in other words, our conduct must be utterly selfish, spring not merely from momentary pleasure or temporary profit, but from far-seeing calculations of the effect it may have in securing our eternal happiness. Thus the virtuous man becomes the incarnation of the intensest self-love and self-seeking, and virtue the synonym of excessive venality. From a moral point of view, there is no greater merit in "otherworldliness" than in worldliness, and no reason why the endeavor to attain personal happiness in a future life should differ in quality from the effort to make everything minister to our personal happiness in the present life.

"The whole subject of the brute creation," says Dr. Arnold, "is to me one of such painful mystery that I dare not approach it," The mental distress experienced in such cases arises from the fact that the subject is approached from the wrong side and surveyed from a false point of view. Traditional theology and anthropocentric ethics are brought into conflict with the better impulses of a broad and generous nature and the sharp antagonism could hardly fail to be a source of perplexity and pain. "Charity," says Lord Bacon, "will hardly water the ground, where it must first fill a pool"; and of all pools the hardest to fill is that which is dug in the dry, gravelly soil of human egotism.

Theocritus, the father of Greek idyllic poetry, represents Hercules as exclaiming, after he had slain the Nemean lion, "Hades received a monster soul"; and he saw nothing incongruous in the spirit of the dead beast joining the company of the departed spirits of men in the lower world. Sydney Smith says, in speaking of the soul of the brute, "To this soul some have impiously allowed immortality." Why such a belief should be deemed impious it is difficult to discover. The question which the