respects:
first, in respect of its immediate return of fulfilment; second, in
respect of its bearing on all residual interests. Every good action
will be both profitable and safe; both self-sustaining and also
serviceable to the whole.

The necessity of determining the relative weight which is to be given
to these two considerations accounts for the peculiar delicacy of the
art of life, since it makes almost inevitable either the one or the
other of two opposite errors of exaggeration. The _undue assertion of
the present-interest_ constitutes materialism, in the moral sense.
Materialism is a forfeiture of greater good through preoccupation with
nearer good. It appears in an individual's neglect of his fellow's
interest, in his too easy satisfaction with good already attained, in
short-sighted policy on any scale. Formalism, on the other hand,
signifies the _improvident exaggeration of ulterior motives_. It is
due to a misapprehension concerning the relation between higher and
lower interests. I have sought to make it clear that higher interests
owe their eminence, not to any intrinsic quality of their own, but to
the fact that they save and promote lower interests. Formalism is the
{76} rejection of lower interests in the name of some good that without
these interests is nothing.

The conflict between the material and formal motives in life is present
in every moral crisis, and qualifies the meaning of every moral idea.
It may even provoke a social revolution, as in the case of the Puritan
revolution in England. The Puritan is still the symbol of moral rigor
and sobriety, as the Cavalier is the symbol of the love of life. The
full meaning of morality tends constantly to be confused through
identifying it exclusively with the one or the other of these motives.
Thus morality has come, on the whole, to be associated with constraint
and discipline, in both a favorable and a disparaging sense. This has
led to its being rejected as a falsification of life by those who
insist that every good thing is free and fair and pleasant. And, even
among those who recognize the vital necessity of discipline, morality
is so narrowed to that component, that it commonly suggests only those
scruples and inhibitions which destroy the spontaneity and
whole-heartedness of every activity.

That morality should tend to be identified with its formal rather than
its material aspect is not strange; for it is the formal motive which
i