morality but the condition of the completest personal un-morality.  The social organism we may compare to a yew-tree.  Science will explain to us how it has grown up from the ground, and how all its twigs must have fitting room to expand in.  It will not show us how to clip the yew-tree into a peacock.  Morality, it is true, must rest ultimately on the proved facts of sociology; and this is not only true but evident.  But it rests upon them as a statue rests upon its pedestal, and the same pedestal will support an Athene or a Priapus.

The matter, however, is not yet altogether disposed of.  The type of personal happiness that social morality postulates, as a whole, we have still to seek for.  But a part of it, as I just pointed out, will, beyond doubt, be a willing obedience by each to the rules that make it in its entirety within the reach of all.  About this obedience, however, there is a certain thing to remember:  it must be willing, not enforced.  The laws will of course do all they can to enforce it; but not only can they never do this completely, but even if they could, they would not produce morality.  Conduct which, if willing, we should call highly moral, we shall, if enforced only, call nothing more than legal.  We do not call a wild bear tame because it is so well caged that there is no fear of its attacking us; nor do we call a man good because, though his desires are evil, we have made him afraid to gratify them.  Further, it is not enough that the obedience in question be willing in the sense that it does not give us pain.  If it is to be a moral quality, it must also give us positive pleasure.  Indeed, it must not so much be obedience to the law as an impassioned co-operation with it.

Now this, if producible, even though no further moral aim was connected with it, would undoubtedly be of itself a moral element.  Suppose two pigs, for instance, had only a single wallowing-place, and each would like naturally to wallow in it for ever.  If each pig in turn were to rejoice to make room for his brother, and were consciously to regulate his delight in becoming filthy himself by an equal delight in seeing his brother becoming filthy also, we should doubtless here be in the presence of a certain moral element.  And though this, in a human society, might not carry us so far as we require to be carried, it would, without doubt, if producible, carry us a certain way.  The question is, Is this moral element, this impassioned and unselfish co-operation with the social law, producible, in the absence of any farther end to which the social law is to be subordinate?  The positive school apparently think it is; and this opinion has a seeming foundation in fact.  We will therefore carefully examine what this foundation is, and see how far it is really able to support the weight that is laid upon it.