recognize the truth of the doctrine, we shut our eyes to its accompanying falsity.
And, finding in neither the expression of our moral consciousness, we thankfully accept the correction which sees in ‘conduct’ nine tenths of life, though we can not expect the main question to be answered by a coarse and popular method, which divides into parts instead of distinguishing aspects; and though, in the saving one tenth and the sweeping nine tenths alike, we can see little more than the faltering assertion of one mistake, or the confident aggravation of another.
A man’s life, we take it, can not thus be cut in pieces. You can not say, ‘In this part the man is a moral being, and in that part he is not.’ We have not yet found that fraction of his existence in which the moral goodness of the good man is no more realized, and where ‘the lusts of the flesh’ cease to wage their warfare. We have heard in the sphere of religion, ‘Do all to the glory of God,’ and here too we recognize no smaller claim. To be a good man in all things and everywhere, to try to do always the best, and to do one’s best in it, whether in lonely work or in social relaxation to suppress the worse self and realize the good self, this and nothing short of this is the dictate of morality. This, it seems to us, is a deliverance of the moral consciousness too clear for misunderstanding, were it not for two fixed habits of thought. One of these lies in the confining of a man’s morality to the sphere of his social relations; the other is the notion that morality is a life harassed and persecuted everywhere by ‘imperatives’ and disagreeable duties, and that without these you have not got morality. We have seen, and have yet to see, that the first has grasped only part of the truth; and on the second it is sufficient to remark that it stands and falls with the identification of morality with unwilling obedience to law, and that, according to the common view, a man does not cease to be good so far as goodness becomes natural and pleasant to him.
But we shall be met at this point with an absurdity supposed to follow. Work of any sort, it will be said, is, we grant you, a field for morality, and so is most of life in relation to others; but there must be a sphere where morality ceases, or else it will follow that a man is moral in all the trifling details of his own life which
