ied through many a storm, abused AEEneas's mind in order to nerve him
to his real duty. Yet his illusion was merely intellectual. The mission
undertaken was truly worth carrying out. Piety thus came to bear the
fruits of philanthropy in an age when the love of man was inconceivable.
A dull and visionary intellect could hit on no other way of justifying a
good instinct.

[Sidenote: Piety accepts natural conditions and present tasks.]

[Sidenote: The leadership of instinct is normal.]

Philosophers who harbour illusions about the status of intellect in
nature may feel that this leadership of instinct in moral life is a sort
of indignity, and that to dwell on it so insistently is to prolong
satire without wit. But the leadership of instinct, the conscious
expression of mechanism, is not merely a necessity in the Life of
Reason, it is a safeguard. Piety, in spite of its allegories, contains a
much greater wisdom than a half-enlightened and pert intellect can
attain. Natural beings have natural obligations, and the value of things
for them is qualified by distance and by accidental material
connections. Intellect would tend to gauge things impersonally by their
intrinsic values, since intellect is itself a sort of disembodied and
universal function; it would tend to disregard material conditions and
that irrational substratum of reason without which reason would have no
organs and no points of application. Piety, on the contrary, esteems
things apart from their intrinsic worth, on account of their relation to
the agent's person and fortune. Yet such esteem is perfectly rational,
partiality in man's affections and allegiance being justified by the
partial nature and local status of his life. Piety is the spirit's
acknowledgment of its incarnation. So, in filial and parental affection,
which is piety in an elementary form, there is a moulding of will and
emotion, a check to irresponsible initiative, in obedience to the facts
of animal reproduction. Every living creature has an intrinsic and ideal
worth; he is the centre of actual and yet more of potential interests.
But this moral value, which even the remotest observer must recognise in
both parent and child, is not the ground of their specific affection for
each other, which no other mortal is called to feel their regard. This
affection is based on the incidental and irrational fact that the one
has this particular man for a father, and the other that particular man
for a