though the good will can legitimately be considered from one point of view as a number of units of a certain sort of energy, yet mere size is not the essence of the matter, and to say that moral perfection must rise and fall with the addition or subtraction of such units would be absolutely false.
These questions at every point have done their best to draw us beyond our depth into the abstract metaphysic which in the end they turn upon. And now we come to one which threatens to involve us more deeply, and our answer to which must remain superficial. What sense have the words ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ when applied to morality?
(1) In the strict meaning of ‘moral’ we have discussed this above (p. 214). Strictly speaking, a higher stage in historical progress is not more moral than a lower stage. For in personal morality we consider not the relative completeness of the ideal aimed at, but the more or less identification of a given sum of energy with the particular ideal. And on this head we have dwelt as long as seemed necessary.
(2) But in the wider sense of ‘moral’ there is a question which we have not properly discussed. If human history is an evolution (p. 171 foll.), how is one stage of it morally higher than another? For in one sense the European certainly is morally a higher being than the savage. He is higher, because the life he has inherited and more or less realized is nearer the truth of human nature. It combines greater specification with more complete homogeneity. And he is higher morally, not only because the good will is better according as the type it aims at is truer, but also because that stage of the progressive realization of human nature from which the European gets his being is the historical product of a will which in the main was for good, and now at any rate is the present living embodiment of the good will. Thus if we hold that in evolution one stage is higher than another, we can say also that one stage is more moral than another. But (as before) in the strict sense general human progress is not moral, because it abstracts from the collision of good and bad in the personal self.
And here we might perhaps stop, did not a fresh question irresistibly intrude. Is there such a thing as progress? Does not progress mean the perpetual ‘more,’ the would-be approxima-
