It must be confessed that the test of social well-being is not always easy of application.  Even, when we know what the good of the community consists in, it is not always easy to say what course of action will promote it, or what course of action is likely to retard it.  Society arrives, in a comparatively early period of its development, at certain broad rules of conduct, such as those which condemn murder, theft, ingratitude to friends, disobedience to parents.  But the more remote applications of these rules, the nicer shades of conduct, such as those relating to social intercourse, the choice between clashing duties, the realisation of our obligations to the community at large, require for their appreciation a large amount of intelligence and an accumulated stock of experience which are not to be found in primitive societies.  Hence, the rules of conduct, which at first are few and simple, gradually become more numerous and complex.  Nor have we yet arrived at the time, nor do we seem to be within any appreciable distance of it, when the code is complete, or even the parts of it which already exist are altogether free from doubt and discussion.  In the simpler relations of life, he that runs may read, but with increasing complications comes increasing uncertainty.  To remove, as far as may be, this uncertainty from the domain of conduct is the task of advancing civilisation, and specially of those members of a community who have sufficient leisure, education, and intelligence to review the motives and compare the results of actions.  The task has doubtless its special difficulties, and the conclusions of the moralist will by no means always command assent, but that the art of life is an easy one, who is there, at all experienced in affairs or accustomed to reflexion, that will contend?

I may here pause for a moment, in order to emphasise the fact, which is already abundantly apparent from what has preceded, that, with ever widening and deepening conceptions of well-being, man is constantly learning to subordinate his individual interests to those of society at large, or rather to identify his interests with those of the larger organism of which he is a part.  It is thus that we may justify the peculiar characteristic of the moral sentiment, indicated in the last chapter, which seems, in all acts of which it approves, to demand an element of sacrifice, whether of the lower to the higher self, or of the individual to his fellows.  In order thoroughly to realise ourselves, we must be conscious of our absorption, or at least of our inclusion, in a greater and grander system than that of our individual surroundings; in order to find our lives, we must first discover the art of losing them.

CHAPTER V.

Practical applications of the moral test.