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But the cynic may maintain with some plausibility that the moralist's chapter on International Ethics must be as void of content as the traditional chapter on "Snakes in Ireland." In this the cynic is wrong, as usual; but it is instructive to listen to him, if only that we may intelligently refute him.
I remarked that our Lord here seemed to give an injunction which the facts of life would prevent our obeying, and so it would be, had He not pointed us to that firm truth, which, if we believe it, will keep us unmoved. There is no more profitless expenditure of breath than the ordinary moralist's exhortations to, or warnings against, states of feeling and modes of mind.
THE MORALIST'S INTEREST IN EGOISM It has been worth while to treat at length of egoism because the doctrine takes on more or less subtle forms, and its fundamental principle, self-interest, has a significance for various ethical schools which are not, or are not considered, egoistic.
If men are to work together for their common welfare they must be truly in touch with one another; otherwise there is a spy at their councils, an incalculable force that may counterwork their plans. Achievement, the value which the virtue of purpose conditions, needs no moralist's justification. The world never tires of praising it, for it is the world's business.
She reveals to us not with the moralist's arbitrary formula, but as men and years reveal the truths we have wit to grasp the final helplessness of evil, brought face to face with life; the final appeasement of all things in nature as well as in death, "which is only the triumph of life over one of its specialised forms."
For you know love is not a very reasonable thing, and perversity and self-will are commoner than some of our moralist's think." He added, in a still more sombre tone: "Yes, only a month ago there was a mishap down by us, that in the end cost the lives of two men and a woman, and, as it were, put out the sunlight for us for a while. Don't ask me about it just now; I may tell you about it later on."
It will, for instance, enable a man to lead the life he needs in order to preserve his physical and mental vigour at its highest. Even from the moralist's point of view it is all round desirable, for nothing is so morally deteriorating as a life of narrow and cramped pinching, when all one's best years are spent in hungering and longing for what one will never again attain."
But it was not until, through that moralist's guidance, they climbed a steep acclivity to a second ridge, and were comparatively safe, that he began to feel ashamed of his surly silence or surlier interruptions. And Collinson, either through his unconquerable patience, or possibly in a fit of his usual uxorious abstraction, appeared to take no notice of it.
There are some of the great moralist's papers which I cannot peruse without thinking on a second-rate masquerade, where the best-known and least-esteemed characters in town march in as heroes, and sultans, and so forth, and, by dint of tawdry dresses, get some consideration until they are found out.
He rarely sought pleasure in those of her haunts for which the Queen of the Adriatic had a guilty renown, but he has left one singular anecdote, showing the degree to which profound sensibility is capable of doing the moralist's work in a man, and how a stroke of sympathetic imagination may keep one from sin more effectually than an ethical precept.
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