g and free. This end can never be attained while the
scope of moral fellowship is narrower than that of physical interplay.
Ancient civilisation, brilliant in proportion to its inner integration,
was brief in proportion to its outer injustice. By defying the external
forces on which also a commonwealth depends, those commonwealths came to
premature extinction.

[Sidenote: Rational charity.]

There is accordingly a justice deeper and milder than that of pagan
states, a universal justice called charity, a kind of all-penetrating
courtesy, by which the limits of personal or corporate interests are
transgressed in imagination. Value is attributed to rival forms of life;
something of the intensity and narrowness inherent in the private will
is surrendered to admiration and solicitude for what is most alien and
hostile to one's self. When this imaginative expansion ends in
neutralising the will altogether, we have mysticism; but when it serves
merely to co-ordinate felt interests with other actual interests
conceived sympathetically, and to make them converge, we have justice
and charity. Charity is nothing but a radical and imaginative justice.
So the Buddhist stretches his sympathy to all real beings and to many
imaginary monsters; so the Christian chooses for his love the diseased,
the sinful, the unlovely. His own salvation does not seem to either
complete unless every other creature also is redeemed and forgiven.

[Sidenote: Its limits.]

Such universal solicitude is rational, however, only when the beings to
which it extends are in practical efficient relations with the life that
would co-operate with theirs. In other words, charity extends only to
physical and discoverable creatures, whose destiny is interwoven
dynamically with our own. Absolute and irresponsible fancy can be the
basis of no duty. If not to take other real forces and interests into
account made classic states unstable and unjust, to take into
consideration purely imaginary forces yields a polity founded on
superstition, one unjust to those who live under it. A compromise made
with non-existent or irrelevant interests is a wrong to the real
interests on which that sacrifice is imposed gratuitously. All
sacrifices exacted by mere religion have accordingly been inhuman; at
best they have unintentionally made some amends by affording abstract
discipline or artistic forms of expression. The sacrifice must be
fruitful in the end and bring happiness to so