inion of the majority
for the benefit of the totality.

The moral sphere then is a contractual unit of two or more persons who
agree to moderate their individual conduct for their common good: and
the State itself is only a stage in the growth of this moral unit from
its emergence out of primitive savagery to its superannuation in
ultimate anarchy, commonly called the Millennium. The State indeed is a
moral sphere, a moral unit, which has long been outgrown by enlightened
opinion; and the trouble is that we are now in a transition stage in
which the boundaries of the State survive as a limitation instead of
setting an ideal of moral conduct.[1]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This conception of the gradually extending and still to be
extended sphere of morality, or from another aspect of law, was implied,
I think, by Lord Haldane in his Address on Higher Nationality. (_The
Conduct of Life, and Other Addresses_, p. 99.)

In this address Lord Haldane distinguished in the State three sanctions
of conduct.

1. Law.

2. The Moral Sanction, Kant's Categorical Imperative "that rules
the private and individual conscience, but that alone."

3. The force of social habit or _sittlichkeit_, "less than legal
and more than merely moral, and sufficient in the vast majority of
the events of daily life, to secure observance of general standards
of conduct without any question of resort to force." The Lord
Chancellor adds, "If this is so within a nation, can it be so as
between nations?"

But although Lord Haldane distinguishes three sanctions of conduct, the
resultant line of conduct is one. And it seems to me unimportant to
analyse the sanctions if we can only estimate the sum of their
obligations. It is this totality of obligations, the whole
systematisation of conduct in human life, that in my adumbrated analysis
I call the moral sphere.

Curiously enough Lord Haldane was hounded from the Government on the
paradoxical ground that he knew too much about the enemy against whom we
are fighting. It is certainly true that he has a better understanding
than any other statesman of the Prussian perversion of aristocracy and
of the true function of science in the State. But it is too much to hope
that philosophers should remain Ministers of a State in which
journalists are become dictators.]

Sec.3

The Receding God

I don't know that it is necessary to drag God into the argument. But