threads might be
woven into it, would not have a texture fundamentally different.

The radical impulses at work in any animal must continue to speak while
he lives, for they are his essence. A true morality does not have to be
adopted; the parts of it best practised are those which are never
preached. To be "converted" would be to pass from one self-betrayal to
another. It would be to found a new morality on a new artifice. The
morality which has genuine authority exists inevitably and speaks
autonomously in every common judgment, self-congratulation, ambition, or
passion that fills the vulgar day. The pursuit of those goods which are
the only possible or fitting crown of a man's life is predetermined by
his nature; he cannot choose a law-giver, nor accept one, for none who
spoke to the purpose could teach him anything but to know himself.
Rational life is an art, not a slavery; and terrible as may be the
errors and the apathy that impede its successful exercise, the standard
and goal of it are given intrinsically. Any task imposed externally on a
man is imposed by force only, a force he has the right to defy so soon
as he can do so without creating some greater impediment to his natural
vocation.

[Sidenote: Reason expresses impulses.]

Rational ethics, then, resembles prerational precepts and half-systems
in being founded on impulse. It formulates a natural morality. It is a
settled method of achieving ends to which man is drawn by virtue of his
physical and rational constitution. By this circumstance rational ethics
is removed from the bad company of all artificial, verbal, and unjust
systems of morality, which in absolving themselves from relevance to
man's endowment and experience merely show how completely irrelevant
they are to life. Once, no doubt, each of these arbitrary systems
expressed (like the observance of the Sabbath) some practical interest
or some not unnatural rite; but so narrow a basis of course has to be
disowned when the precepts so originating have been swollen into
universal tyrannical laws. A rational ethics reduces them at once to
their slender representative role; and it surrounds and buttresses them
on every side with all other natural ideals.

[Sidenote: but impulses reduced to harmony.]

Rational ethics thus differs from the prerational in being complete.
There is one impulse which intuitive moralists ignore: the impulse to
reflect. Human instincts are ignorant, multitudinous, and con