and must be taught each to
know its order and its sphere. He therefore continually holds in mind
the principles by which their boundaries are fixed."

What Godwin means is something elementary, and for that reason of the
first importance. Let a man love his wife above other women, but
"universal benevolence" will forbid him to exploit other women in order
to surround her with luxury. Let him love his sons, but virtue will
forbid him to accumulate a fortune for them by the sweated labour of
poor men's children. Let him love his fellow-countrymen, but reason
forbids him to seek their good by enslaving other races and waging
aggressive wars. Godwin, in short, no longer denies the beauty and duty
(to use Burke's phrase) of loving "the little platoon to which I
belong," but he urges that these domestic affections are in little
danger of neglect. Men learned to love kith and kin, neighbours and
comrades, while still in the savage state. The characteristic of a
civilised morality, the necessary accompaniment of all the varied and
extended relationships which modern existence has brought with it, must
be a new and emphatic stress on my duty to the stranger, to the unknown
producer with whom I stand in an economic relationship, and to the
foreigner beyond my shores. "Let us endeavour to elevate philanthropy
into a passion, secure that occasions enough will arise to drag us down
from an enthusiastic eminence. A virtuous man will teach himself to
recollect the principle of universal benevolence as often as pious men
repeat their prayers."

If the central tendencies of Godwin's teaching survive these later
modifications, it is none the less true that some of his theoretic
foundations have been shaken in the work of reconstruction. The isolated
individual shut up in his own animal skin and communicating with his
fellows through the antennae of his logical processes, has vanished away.
Allow him to extend his personality through the private affections, and
he has ceased to be the abstract unit of individualism. Godwin should
have revised not only his doctrine of the family, but his hatred of
co-operation. There is still something to be learned from the view of
his school that the human mind, as it begins to absorb the collective
experience of the race, is an infinitely variable spiritual stuff, an
intellectual protoplasm. They stated the view with a rash emphasis,
until one is forced to ask whether a mind which is originally nothin