“The mistake,” I said to him, “of human moralists seems to me to be, that they treat all men as more or less equal in the matter of moral responsibility.  How often,” I added, “have I heard a school preacher tell boys that they could not all be athletic or clever or popular, but that high principle and moral courage were things within the reach of all.  Whereas the more that I studied human nature, the more did the power of surveying and judging one’s own moral progress, and the power of enforcing and executing the dictates of the conscience, seem to me faculties, like other faculties.  Indeed, it appears to me,” I said, “that on the one hand there are people who have a power of moral discrimination, when dealing with the retrospect of their actions, but no power of obeying the claims of principle, when confronted with a situation involving moral strain; while on the other hand there seem to me to be some few men with a great and resolute power of will, capable of swift decision and firm action, but without any instinct for morality at all.”

“Yes,” he said, “you are quite right.  The moral sense is in reality a high artistic sense.  It is a power of discerning and being attracted by the beauty of moral action, just as the artist is attracted by form and colour, and the musician by delicate combinations of harmonies and the exquisite balance of sound.  You know,” he said, “what a suspension is in music—­it is a chord which in itself is a discord, but which depends for its beauty on some impending resolution.  It is just so with moral choice.  The imagination plays a great part in it.  The man whose morality is high and profound sees instinctively the approaching contingency, and his act of self-denial or self-forgetfulness depends for its force upon the way in which it will ultimately combine with other issues involved, even though at the moment that act may seem to be unnecessary and even perverse.”

“But,” I said, “there are a good many people who attain to a sensible, well-balanced kind of temperance, after perhaps a few failures, from a purely prudential motive.  What is the worth of that?”

“Very small indeed,” said my teacher.  “In fact, the prudential morality, based on motives of health and reputation and success, is a thing that has often to be deliberately unlearnt at a later stage.  The strange catastrophes which one sees so often in human life, where a man by one act of rashness, or moral folly, upsets the tranquil tenor of his life—­a desperate love-affair, a passion of unreasonable anger, a piece of quixotic generosity—­are often a symptom of a great effort of the soul to free itself from prudential considerations.  A good thing done for a low motive has often a singularly degrading and deforming influence on the soul.  One has to remember how terribly the heavenly values are obscured upon earth by the body, its needs and its desires; and current morality of a cautious and sensible kind is often worse than worthless, because it produces a kind of self-satisfaction, which is the hardest thing to overcome.”