wledge and
virtue, would appear to think so; the church has gone a long way,
under humanistic pressure, in tacit acquiescence with their doctrine.
Yet most of us, judging alike from internal and personal evidence
and from external and social observation, would say that there was no
sadder or more universal experience than that of the failure of right
knowledge to secure right performance. Right knowledge is not in
itself right living. We have striking testimony on that point from one
of the greatest of all humanists, no less a person than Confucius.
"At seventy," he says, "I could follow what my heart desired without
transgressing the law of measure."[33] The implication of such
testimony makes no very good humanistic apologetic! Most of us, when
desire has failed, can manage to attain, unaided, the identification
of understanding and conduct, can climb to the poor heights of a
worn-out and withered continence. But one wonders a little whether,
then, the climbing seems to be worth while.

[Footnote 33: _Analects_, II, civ.]

But the doctrine usually begins by minimizing the free agency of
the individual, playing up the factors of compulsion, either of
circumstance or inheritance or of ignorance, as being in themselves
chiefly responsible for blameful acts. These are therefore considered
involuntary and certain to be reformed when man knows better and has
the corresponding strength of his knowledge. But Aristotle, who deals
with this Socratic doctrine in the third book of the _Ethics_, very
sensibly remarks, "It is ridiculous to lay the blame of our wrong
actions upon external causes rather than upon the facility with which
we ourselves are caught by such causes, and, while we take credit for
our noble actions to ourselves, lay the blame of our shameful actions
upon pleasure."[34] "The facility with which we are caught"--there
is the religious understanding there is that perversion of will which
conspires with the perils and chances of the world so that together
they may undo the soul.

[Footnote 34: _Ethics_, Book III, ch. ii, p. 61.]

Of course, as Aristotle admits, there is this half truth lying at the
root of the Socratic identification of virtue and knowledge that every
vicious person is ignorant of what he ought to do and what he ought to
abstain from doing in the sense that what he is about to do could
not be defended upon any ground of enlightened self-interest. And
so, while he finds sin sweet and evil plea