dreadful to a man imbued with
liberal interests. But the degree to which moral science, or the
dialectic of will, can condemn any type of life depends on the amount of
disruptive contradiction which, at any reflective moment, that life
brings under the unity of apperception. The discordant impulses therein
confronted will challenge and condemn one another; and the court of
reason in which their quarrel is ventilated will have authority to
pronounce between them.

The physical repulsion, however, which everybody feels to habits and
interests which he is incapable of sharing is no part of rational
estimation, large as its share may be in the fierce prejudices and
superstitions which prerational morality abounds in. The strongest
feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they
express merely physical antipathies.

Toward alien powers a man's true weapon is not invective, but skill and
strength. An obstacle is an obstacle, not a devil; and even a moral
life, when it actually exists in a being with hostile activities, is
merely a hostile power. It is not hostile, however, in so far as it is
moral, but only in so far as its morality represents a material
organism, physically incompatible with what the thinker has at heart.

[Sidenote: Common ideal interests may supervene.]

Material conflicts cannot be abolished by reason, because reason is
powerful only where they have been removed. Yet where opposing forces
are able mutually to comprehend and respect one another, common ideal
interests at once supervene, and though the material conflict may remain
irrepressible, it will be overlaid by an intellectual life, partly
common and unanimous. In this lies the chivalry of war, that we
acknowledge the right of others to pursue ends contrary to our own.
Competitors who are able to feel this ideal comity, and who leading
different lives in the flesh lead the same life in imagination, are
incited by their mutual understanding to rise above that material
ambition, perhaps gratuitous, that has made them enemies. They may
ultimately wish to renounce that temporal good which deprives them of
spiritual goods in truth infinitely greater and more appealing to the
soul--innocence, justice, and intelligence. They may prefer an enlarged
mind to enlarged frontiers, and the comprehension of things foreign to
the destruction of them. They may even aspire to detachment from those
private interests which, as Plato said,[H]