of what was called
Religion to promote moral culture is now explicable: its scheme of
terror and hope appealed to and powerfully stimulated selfishness, and
was also fundamentally anti-social, cultivating alienation of all who
did not hold certain dogmas. The terrors and hopes having faded away,
the selfishness they developed remains, and is only unchained by the
decay of superstition. On the other hand, the social sentiment has
thrown off sectarian restrictions, and an enthusiasm of humanity has
succeeded. It is now certain that the social instinct is the only one
which can be depended on to influence conduct to an extent comparable
with the sway once exercised by superstitious terrors and expectations
of celestial reward. The child is spiritually a creation of the commune;
there can be no other motive so early responsive as that which desires
the approval and admiration of those by whom it is surrounded.

To attempt the training of human character by means of ethical
philosophy or moral science--as it used to be called--appears to be
somewhat of a theological "survival." When the sanctions of authority
were removed from the pagan deities they were found to have been long
reduced in the nursery to the dimensions of fairies. The tremendous
conceptions of Christian theology may some day be revealed as similarly
diminished in the catechised mind of childhood. And the abstract
principles of ethical philosophy cannot hope for any better fate. The
child's mind cannot receive the metaphysics of virtue. It is impossible
to explain to a child, for instance, the reasons for truthfulness,
which, indeed, have grown out of the experience of the human race as
matured by many ages. And so of humanity to animals, which is mainly a
Darwinian revival of Buddhist sentiment based on a doctrine of
transmigration. And the same may be said of other virtues. We must not
suppose that a child has no scepticism because he cannot express or
explain it in words; it will appear in the sweetness to him of stolen
apples, in the fact that to label a thing "naughty" may only render it
more tempting to a healthy boy. A philosopher said, "A fence is the
temptation to a jump."

Our ethical teaching is vitiated by, an inheritance from theology of a
superstition which subordinates conduct to its motives. Really, if
conduct be good, the motive (generally too complex for even
consciousness to analyse) is of least importance. Motives are important
as causing