To attempt the training of human character by means of ethical philosophy or moral science—­as it used to be called—­appears to be somewhat of a theological “survival.”  When the sanctions of authority were removed from the pagan deities they were found to have been long reduced in the nursery to the dimensions of fairies.  The tremendous conceptions of Christian theology may some day be revealed as similarly diminished in the catechised mind of childhood.  And the abstract principles of ethical philosophy cannot hope for any better fate.  The child’s mind cannot receive the metaphysics of virtue.  It is impossible to explain to a child, for instance, the reasons for truthfulness, which, indeed, have grown out of the experience of the human race as matured by many ages.  And so of humanity to animals, which is mainly a Darwinian revival of Buddhist sentiment based on a doctrine of transmigration.  And the same may be said of other virtues.  We must not suppose that a child has no scepticism because he cannot express or explain it in words; it will appear in the sweetness to him of stolen apples, in the fact that to label a thing “naughty” may only render it more tempting to a healthy boy.  A philosopher said, “A fence is the temptation to a jump.”

Our ethical teaching is vitiated by, an inheritance from theology of a superstition which subordinates conduct to its motives.  Really, if conduct be good, the motive (generally too complex for even consciousness to analyse) is of least importance.  Motives are important as causing conduct, but the Law is just in assuming good or bad motives for the corresponding actions.  The world does not depend on a man’s inner but on his outer life.  Emerson once scandalised some of his admirers by saying that he preferred a person who did not respect the truth to an unpresentable person.  But, no doubt, he would regard the presentable person as possessing virtues of equal importance.  The nurture of “civility and decent behaviour in company and conversation,” is not of secondary, but primary, importance.

For what does it imply?  If the Rules about to be submitted are examined, it will be found that their practice draws on the whole moral world, as in walking every step draws on the universal gravitation.  Scarcely one Rule is there that does not involve self-restraint, modesty, habitual consideration of others, and, to a large extent, living for others.  Yet other Rules draw on the profounder deeps of wisdom and virtue, under a subtle guise of handsome behaviour.  If youth can be won to excellence by love of beauty, who shall gainsay?