the
advantage offered or avoid the pain which may befall him here and now,
or some time subsequently to his contemplated action. Hence there is
no obligatory force in this ethic. Prudential motives, suggestions of
expediency, abundance of counsel, if you will; but we miss the note of
authority, the commanding voice, the categorical imperative, the solemn
injunction, "Thou canst, therefore thou must". Indeed, it seems
difficult to see how one could convince a man on hedonistic or
utilitarian grounds that a course of conduct on which he was bent, and
to which he was allured by the overmastering impulse of a vehement
nature, and which promised him sensible gratification, possibly even
material advancement, was not legitimate. I do not press this, nor do
I suggest that moral elevation of life is not discernible amongst
professors of this interpretation of ethics equally with those who take
an idealist view. All I say is, that the recognised terminology of the
ethical life, the "ought," the "must," receive an ampler recognition, a
fuller interpretation, in the rational schools than in those of Bentham
and Spencer.

And, finally, we may approach the question from the point of view of
evolution. Everybody knows the pitiless manner in which the late
Professor Huxley contrasted the ethical man with the cosmical process,
how he pointed out that the one hope of progress lay in man's ability
to successfully combat by ethical idealism the rude realism of the
material order of which he is a part. The facts need no exposition.
Every man has the evidence of it in himself, in the periodical
insurrection of the ape and tiger element in him against the authority
of some mysterious power which in the course of his long sojourn here
has been acquired, and to which he recognises that the allegiance of
his life is due. That tearful, regretful expression of the _Grand
Monarque_, after one of Massillon's searching, scathing sermons on the
sensual and spiritual in every man, "_Ah, voila deux hommes que je
connais tres bien!_" may be repeated with even greater truthfulness by
every one of us, now that Darwin has superseded St. Paul in the
explanation of the phenomenon.

Now, here we have a surprising contradiction in Nature, the startling
apparition of an element in man so utterly opposed to all that is
beneath him, that a scientific chieftain tells us that his only hope is
to kill out that ape and tiger, or at any rate keep it under u