of
sceptical analysis with credulous assertion' (Rev. Dr. Mackintosh,
_Hegel and Hegelianism_, p. 219).

[15] Rev. Dr. R. Mackintosh, _Hegel and Hegelianism_, 1903, p. 216.

Sec. 9. IDEALS

Ideals, obviously, are part--the best part--of our bias: to that
admission we may unhesitatingly revert. By his bias the rationalist can
afford to be tried. Intellectually he makes truth his paramount
consideration, and morally he insists upon the same sincerity in things
intellectual as men profess to practise in honourable intercourse. I
have heard a distinguished Christian scholar denounce these canons as
commanding such an outrage as telling a child of its mother's shame. The
charge is an illustration of the strange malice of which piety is
capable. No human being ever proposed to communicate all truth of any
kind to children; and the limit to the gratuitous telling of wounding
truth is fixed by normal courtesy and sympathy as regards the sufferings
even of adults. The charge is in fact one more illustration of the
anti-veridical bias of pietism--the need to distort and pervert the case
against the rationalist.

And if pietism can thus distort the bearing of the intellectual canons
of rationalism, much more habitually does it distort the specific
purport of rationalist morals. The fact that naturalism implies
utilitarianism is transformed into the proposition that utilitarianism
means the subordination of all play of sympathy to an incessant calculus
of profit. As we have seen, theism and Christianity alike do chronically
subordinate the veridical instinct--a moral instinct like another--to
lower considerations of utility; and only too often in history do we see
them annulling the instincts of mercy and reciprocity by the law of
dogma. Not by propounders of that test is the rationalist to be put to
shame. The very basis of Christianity, in fine, is an other-world
utilitarianism. 'What _profits_ it a man----?'

Utilitarianism means for him, in brief, what it meant when it first took
shape as a moral plea--the testing of traditional moral canons, and
their annulment when they are seen to be mere survivals of barbarism,
sanctioned only by custom and religion; never the substitution of a
calculus of utility for an accepted moral canon in every act of life.
Any general moral rule rationally seen to be broadly utilitarian is
thereby vindicated _qua_ rule; and to put its practice at the hazard of
every trying emergency wou