through no adventitious allurements of the teaching, or personal authority or charm of the teacher, or other accident or circumstance. It is the sheer compelling or awakening power of the teaching that has won the victory. In the nature of the case, assent procured in any other way would be only partial and precarious. Thus it is that the haltings and gropings of the neophyte are apt, at best, to be viewed with a certain impatient commiseration. To admit that his private likes and dislikes, his uniquely intimate devotions to other persons, his fear to do violence to himself, his desire to deserve his own private self-respect, can have done more in the whole transaction than show a praiseworthy compliance with what considerations of a higher order dictated, would disparage the perfections of the system. Even the convert is prone in retrospect to think of his transformation as a surrender or a return to his congenital sanity or an attainment to his generic and ideal type.
In all this, ethical theory shows a significant contrast with the institutional forms of guidance and control that men obey. Religion, government, the family and friendship, all by their very nature call upon the individual in particular junctures to hold his own beliefs and volitions in subordination to those of certain other persons or powers in whom inheres a rightful jurisdiction over him. But ethical theory, just because it is a theory and not an institution or communion, makes no such demand. From its point of view, no such demand is either necessary to procure assent or befitting its own high character. Supremely persuaded of its own conclusiveness, it deems belief, acceptance, conformity, the resolves of particular persons at particular times to 'live by' the new teaching, as matters of historical accident and circumstance. They are not acts to be required of the individual, whose readiness to perform them may prove his imagination and initiative and earn merit, but signs of a deliverance that has come to him.[1] If only a man will listen, not to the moral philosopher but to the philosophy, if he will think for himself, he will have no need to seek or tolerate guidance from without or give himself to any end that is not his end already. He need accept no rule of
- ↑ Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, § 326.
