1: Santayana: _Reason in Common Sense_, p. 6.]

Nor does the leading of a moral life, as Kant and other
moralists said or implied, demand a stern and lugubrious
countenance and a sad, resigned determination to be good.
A moral system should promote rather a hallelujah than a
halo. One may suspect the adequacy to human happiness of
those moral systems which promote in their holders or
practitioners a virtuous somberness and a moral melancholy. A
morality that demands such unwholesome outward evidences
is inwardly not beautiful. As art is an attempt to give perfection
and fulfillment to matter, so is morals an attempt to
give perfect and complete fulfillment to human possibility.
A genuine morality will, in consequence, be spontaneous and
free. In Matthew Arnold's well-known lines:

"Then, when the clouds are off the soul,
When thou dost bask in Nature's eye,
Ask, how _she_ view'd thy self-control,
Thy struggling task'd morality.
Nature, whose free, light, cheerful air
Oft made thee, in thy gloom, despair.
* * * * *
"There is no effort on _my_ brow--
I do not strive, I do not weep.
I rush with the swift spheres, and glow
In joy, and when I will, I sleep."[1]

[Footnote 1: From _Morality_.]

MORALS, LAW, AND EDUCATION. No moral code, however
adequate in its theoretical formulation or the means of its
attainment, is socially effective merely as theory. No matter
how completely it takes into account all the natural desires
and possibilities which demand fulfillment, it remains merely
an academic yearning. It becomes an instrument of happiness
only when it has been made the habitual mode of life of
the individual and the group, through the long continuous
processes of education and law. There is a familiar discrepancy
between theory and practice, even when the discrepancy
is not due to insincerity. Philosophy cannot make a man
virtuous, however much it may convince him of the path to
virtue. Socrates thought that if men only knew the good
they would follow it. But modern psychologists and ordinary
laymen know better. The good must become a habitual
practice if men are to follow it, and it can only become a
habitual practice if education and social conditions in general
provide for the early habituation of the individual to conduct
that is socially useful. Aristotle, who himself framed a
theory of morals that was built on the firm foundation of
human possi