y definite, in
each generation, to act as a guide and incentive to conduct. It is the
star, gradually growing brighter and brighter, which lights our path,
and, any way, we know that, if it were not above us in the heavens, we
should be walking in the darkness.

It must be confessed that the test of social well-being is not always
easy of application. Even, when we know what the good of the community
consists in, it is not always easy to say what course of action will
promote it, or what course of action is likely to retard it. Society
arrives, in a comparatively early period of its development, at certain
broad rules of conduct, such as those which condemn murder, theft,
ingratitude to friends, disobedience to parents. But the more remote
applications of these rules, the nicer shades of conduct, such as those
relating to social intercourse, the choice between clashing duties, the
realisation of our obligations to the community at large, require for
their appreciation a large amount of intelligence and an accumulated
stock of experience which are not to be found in primitive societies.
Hence, the rules of conduct, which at first are few and simple,
gradually become more numerous and complex. Nor have we yet arrived at
the time, nor do we seem to be within any appreciable distance of it,
when the code is complete, or even the parts of it which already exist
are altogether free from doubt and discussion. In the simpler relations
of life, he that runs may read, but with increasing complications comes
increasing uncertainty. To remove, as far as may be, this uncertainty
from the domain of conduct is the task of advancing civilisation, and
specially of those members of a community who have sufficient leisure,
education, and intelligence to review the motives and compare the
results of actions. The task has doubtless its special difficulties, and
the conclusions of the moralist will by no means always command assent,
but that the art of life is an easy one, who is there, at all
experienced in affairs or accustomed to reflexion, that will contend?

I may here pause for a moment, in order to emphasise the fact, which is
already abundantly apparent from what has preceded, that, with ever
widening and deepening conceptions of well-being, man is constantly
learning to subordinate his individual interests to those of society at
large, or rather to identify his interests with those of the larger
organism of which he is a part. It i