enthusiasm, that ideal vision might become efficacious and be largely
realised in practice. The abstract power of self-direction, if
enlightened by a larger experience and a more fertile genius, might give
the Life of Reason a public embodiment such as it has not had since the
best days of classic antiquity. Thus the two prerational moralities out
of which European civilisation has grown, could they be happily
superposed, would make a rational polity.

[Sidenote: Prerational morality marks an acquisition but offers no
programme.]

The objects of human desire, then, until reason has compared and
experience has tested them, are a miscellaneous assortment of goods,
unstable in themselves and incompatible with one another. It is a happy
chance if a tolerable mixture of them recommends itself to a prophet or
finds an adventitous acceptance among a group of men. Intuitive morality
is adequate while it simply enforces those obvious and universal laws
which are indispensable to any society, and which impose themselves
everywhere on men under pain of quick extinction--a penalty which many
an individual and many a nation continually prefers to pay. But when
intuitive morality ventures upon speculative ground and tries to guide
progress, its magic fails. Ideals are tentative and have to be
critically viewed. A moralist who rests in his intuitions may be a good
preacher, but hardly deserves the name of philosopher. He cannot find
any authority for his maxims which opposite maxims may not equally
invoke. To settle the relative merits of rival authorities and of
hostile consciences it is necessary to appeal to the only real
authority, to experience, reason, and human nature in the living man. No
other test is conceivable and no other would be valid; for no good man
would ever consent to regard an authority as divine or binding which
essentially contradicted his own conscience. Yet a conscience which is
irreflective and incorrigible is too hastily satisfied with itself, and
not conscientious enough: it needs cultivation by dialectic. It neglects
to extend to all human interests that principle of synthesis and justice
by which conscience itself has arisen. And so soon as the conscience
summons its own dicta for revision in the light of experience and of
universal sympathy, it is no longer called conscience, but reason. So,
too, when the spirit summons its traditional faiths, to subject them to
a similar examination, that exercise is