ad weight and number.

A moralist is called upon, first of all, to decide in what things
pleasure ought to be found. Of course his decision, if he is rational,
will not be arbitrary; it will conscientiously express his own
nature--on which alone honest ideals can rest--without attempting to
speak for the deafening and inconstant convocation of the whole sentient
universe. Duty is a matter of self-knowledge, not of statistics. A
living and particular will therein discovers its affinities, broadens
its basis, acknowledges its obligations, and co-operates with everything
that will co-operate with it; but it continues throughout to unfold a
particular life, finding its supports and extensions in the state, the
arts, and the universe. It cannot for a moment renounce its autonomy
without renouncing reason and perhaps decreeing the extinction both of
its own bodily basis and of its ideal method and policy.

[Sidenote: Sympathy a conditional duty.]

Utilitarianism needs to be transferred to Socratic and dialectical
ground, so that interest in absent interests may take its place in a
concrete ideal. It is a noble thing to be sensitive to others'
hardships, and happy in their happiness; but it is noble because it
refines the natural will without enfeebling it, offering it rather a new
and congenial development, one entirely predetermined by the fundamental
structure of human nature. Were man not gregarious, were he not made to
be child, friend, husband, and father by turns, his morality would not
be social, but, like that of some silk-worm or some seraph, wholly
industrious or wholly contemplative. Parental and sexual instincts,
social life and the gift of co-operation carry sympathy implicitly with
them, as they carry the very faculty to recognise a fellow-being. To
make this sympathy explicit and to find one's happiness in exercising it
is to lay one's foundations deeper in nature and to expand the range of
one's being. Its limits, however, would be broken down and moral
dissolution would set in if, forgetting his humanity, a man should bid
all living creatures lapse with him into a delicious torpor, or run into
a cycle of pleasant dreams, so intense that death would be sure to
precede any awakening out of them. Great as may be the advance in
charity since the days of Socrates, therefore, the advance is within the
lines of his method; to trespass beyond them would be to recede.

This situation is repeated on a broader stage.