Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/384

 of a dogmatic moral code by small infractions to secure obviously kindly ends, but it was, I am told, the Jesuits who first deliberately sought to qualify the moral interpretation of acts by a consideration of their results. To-day there are few people who have not more or less clearly discovered the future as a more or less important factor in moral considerations. To-day there is a certain small proportion of people who frankly regard morality as a means to an end, as an overriding of immediate and personal considerations out of regard to something to be attained in the future, and who break away altogether from the idea of a code dogmatically established for ever.

Most of us are not so definite as that, but most of us are deeply tinged with the spirit of compromise between the past and the future; we profess an unbounded allegiance to the prescriptions of the past, and we practise a general observance of its injunctions, but we qualify to a vague, variable extent with considerations of expediency. We hold, for example, that we must respect our promises. But suppose we find unexpectedly that for one of us to keep a promise, which has been sealed and sworn in the most sacred fashion, must lead to the great suffering of some other human being, must lead, in fact, to practical evil? Would a man do right or wrong if he broke such a promise? The practical decision most modern people would make would be to break the promise. Most would say that they did evil to avoid a greater evil. But suppose it was not such very great suffering we were going to inflict, but only