others. Their theory was that each man having a right to pursue his own
aims, skilful thinkers might, for money, furnish any fellow-mortal with
instruments fitted to his purpose. Socrates, on the contrary, conceived
that each man, to achieve his aims must first learn to distinguish them
clearly; he demanded that rationality, in the form of an examination and
clarification of purposes, should precede any selection of external
instruments. For how should a man recognise anything useful unless he
first had established the end to be subserved and thereby recognised the
good? True science, then, was that which enabled a man to disentangle
and attain his natural good; and such a science is also the art of life
and the whole of virtue.

The autonomous moralist differs from the sophist or ethical sceptic in
this: that he retains his integrity. In vindicating his ideal he does
not recant his human nature. In asserting the initial right of every
impulse in others, he remains the spokesman of his own. Knowledge of the
world, courtesy, and fairness do not neutralise his positive life. He is
thoroughly sincere, as the sophist is not; for every man, while he
lives, embodies and enacts some special interest; and this truth, which
those who confound psychology with ethics may think destructive of all
authority in morals, is in fact what alone renders moral judgment
possible and respectable. If the sophist declares that what his nature
attaches him to is not "really" a good, because it would not be a good,
perhaps, for a different creature, he is a false interpreter of his own
heart, and rather discreditably stultifies his honest feelings and
actions by those theoretical valuations which, in guise of a mystical
ethics, he gives out to the world. Socratic liberality, on the contrary,
is consistent with itself, as Spinozistic naturalism is also; for it
exercises that right of private judgment which it concedes to others,
and avowedly builds up the idea of the good on that natural inner
foundation on which everybody who has it at all must inevitably build
it. This functional good is accordingly always relative and good for
something; it is the ideal which a vital and energising soul carries
with it as it moves. It is identical, as Socrates constantly taught,
with the useful, the helpful, the beneficent. It is the complement
needed to perfect every art and every activity after its own kind.

[Sidenote: Its vitality]

Rational ethics is