Even here we are not at the end: but this is enough to show that for us to make an accurate comparison is scarcely possible, and fully to justify the saying that ‘only God sees the heart,’ if we mean by that not that morality is a matter of the heart in the sense of staying there, but that the data for solving the psychological problem are not accessible to us. This is not to be regretted: in morality we have nothing to do with others and what they do or neglect; we have nothing to do with what we ourselves may in past time have succeeded with or failed in, except so far as it is present in our will; what is before us is the relation of our private will to the good will, what we are and do and have still to do.
To resume, after making these four qualifications we may say men are equal morally, whose good and bad selves are equal in extent and intent; but here we have two sides to consider and not one, and it does not appear how these stand to one another, and how the problem is to be worked.
You can not measure by comparative lessness of bad self, because morality is not merely negative; nor again by moreness of good self, because it is not merely affirmative. You can not go by severity of struggle between bad and good, because, other things being equal, the more of good against less of bad, and hence lessness of struggle, is the better. Greater or less struggle is a test only when it points to greater or less affirmation, when, being a negative condition,[1] the moreness of it points to the moreness of the positive, the condition of which it is. It is a serious mistake to argue, ‘because more sine qua non, therefore more.’ Nor again can you go by relative absence of struggle, because that may mean relative absence of the good will, and moral deadness.
To measure morality you must take the two sides, good and bad together, and then comes up the question of their relation. May we (1) say the bad self is in itself indifferent, and so measure simply by the good; or must we (2) treat it as a minus quantity and subtract it from the good?
- ↑ A condition is negative when, not its existence as such, but the negation of its existence is necessary to that of which it is the condition.
