not called religion, but
philosophy. It is true, in a sense, that philosophy is the purest
religion and reason the ultimate conscience; but so to name them would
be misleading. The things commonly called by those names have seldom
consented to live at peace with sincere reflection. It has been felt
vaguely that reason could not have produced them, and that they might
suffer sad changes by submitting to it; as if reason could be the
_ground_ of anything, or as if everything might not find its
consummation in becoming rational.

CHAPTER IX

RATIONAL ETHICS

[Sidenote: Moral passions represent private interests.]

In moral reprobation there is often a fanatical element, I mean that
hatred which an animal may sometimes feel for other animals on account
of their strange aspect, or because their habits put him to serious
inconvenience, or because these habits, if he himself adopted them,
might be vicious in him. Such aversion, however, is not a rational
sentiment. No fault can be justly found with a creature merely for not
resembling another, or for nourishing in a different physical or moral
environment. It has been an unfortunate consequence of mythical
philosophies that moral emotions have been stretched to objects with
which a man has only physical relations, so that the universe has been
filled with monsters more or less horrible, according as the forces they
represented were more or less formidable to human life. In the same
spirit, every experiment in civilisation has passed for a crime among
those engaged in some other experiment. The foreigner has seemed an
insidious rascal, the heretic a pestilent sinner, and any material
obstacle a literal devil; while to possess some unusual passion,
however innocent, has brought obloquy on every one unfortunate enough
not to be constituted like the average of his neighbours.

Ethics, if it is to be a science and not a piece of arbitrary
legislation, cannot pronounce it sinful in a serpent to be a serpent; it
cannot even accuse a barbarian of loving a wrong life, except in so far
as the barbarian is supposed capable of accusing himself of barbarism.
If he is a perfect barbarian he will be inwardly, and therefore morally,
justified. The notion of a barbarian will then be accepted by him as
that of a true man, and will form the basis of whatever rational
judgments or policy he attains. It may still seem dreadful to him to be
a serpent, as to be a barbarian might seem