Equally striking is the example of the idea that dominated the succeeding decade-the idea of a French Empire founded on the ruins of national liberty in Europe. Every circumstance seemed to combine to favour its realisation. Yet the whole power of the greatest military genius the world has ever seen was insufficient to establish the Napoleonic abstraction in the face of the forces that concrete reality had at its disposal to oppose it.

These ideas failed because they did not correspond to the actual wants of the time. They were not in the line of actual progress. There was no place for them in the moral order that was then on the point of establishing itself among the nations of Europe.

If, on the other hand, you desire an example of the power of a concrete idea, you may go to Professor Seeley's life of Stein, who was Napoleon's contemporary. From the very first the great Prussian minister was in contact with reality. He had conceived the idea of Nationality in all its depth and complexity as the living moral force of the time. He was almost alone among the leading men in Europe in his belief in it. Even to Goethe, with his magnificent humanitarianism, it seemed but a thin abstraction. Everything was against it. The national rising in Spain was a miserable failure. Austria showed no response to it. Russia was cold. Yet Stein stuck doggedly to it, and in the long run, in spite of incredible discouragement and opposition, so far succeeded in organising the national feeling in Prussia as to prepare the way for the fall of Napoleon and lay the foundation of the modern German Empire and modern German civilisation.

Whether the evil influence of abstract ideas may not be overruled and in the long run turned to good,

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as it has been asserted that the despotism of Napoleon was turned to good in that it roused the spirit of freedom in the nations of Europe, is another question. To the individual, at any rate, and especially to the individual who thirsts to be practical, it is a poor consolation to recognise that the good has triumphed and the concrete world has got its way in spite of, or even because of, his efforts to oppose it.

These illustrations are from politics. In ethics and philosophy the autobiography of John Stuart Mill offers an historical illustration. Mill, it will be remembered, was brought up by his father in the straitest sect of the Pleasure Philosophy. He was trained from his youth up to look for all the law and the prophets to the Utilitarian school, especially to its great founder, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham's contribution to ethics (as is well known) was not his theory that happiness is the end, but that the happinessgiving properties of objects and actions may be reduced to scientific measurement and that the art of life consists in the just appreciation of the pleasure value of objects of desire. As a devout Benthamite, Mill sought to perfect himself in this art and to become a kind of professor of it. But the more of an adept he became in this moral arithmetic, the further he seemed to be from the promised happiness. Measuring all objects of pursuit by their capacity to give positive \ pleasure, the interest in the objects themselves seemed to evaporate and life to become sordid and empty. In one of the most interesting passages in philosophical biography he has described the period of moral depression which supervened upon this discovery, and from which he only finally succeeded in escaping by casting aside the pleasure-calculus as a guide to happiness, and

throwing himself into the concrete interests of life. He explained his experience as an instance of what he called the paradox of Hedonism; the paradox, namely, that to obtain happiness you must cease to aim at it as an end, "to get it you must forget it." The explanation sufficed to save the credit of the school among the followers of Mill, but it could not be expected that it would satisfy anyone else. The true explanation, of course, is that pleasure is only one element in well-being, and only by a confusion could be mistaken for the whole of it. The idea that it was the whole was an abstract idea in the sense for which I have contended, and it revealed its abstractness the moment that a consistent attempt was made to apply it to practice, by refusing to work at all.

The bearing of these examples on the present argument is plain. If in order to be practical in the best sense, ideas must be concrete, and if concrete ideas cannot, as a rule, be had without serious intellectual effort, there is at least a presumption in favour of an institution one of whose professed objects is to offer a hand to anyone who is willing to make the effort required.

I have tried to establish a general presumption in favour of the "abstract" study of ethics. But this is not all that may be said: it may be pleaded also that rising out of the special character of the time in which we live there is at present a special need for such a study.

Our age, we are often told, is an age of transition. This means among other things that on many subjects that concern the life and destiny of human beings we no longer stand where we used to. The old maxims and the old authorities that existed to enforce them no

longer suffice us.

New ideas of individual life are

opening up to us, new types of character appeal to us. The centre of authority has shifted from the pulpit and confessional to the press.

And what is true of individual is still more obviously true of social life. For a century or more we have ceased to see any special sacredness in established forms of government, or indeed in any of the fixed forms of social or industrial life. Prescription is no defence. Every one of them is called upon to submit itself to the test of reason and experience. By its utility it must stand or fall.

The consequence of all this is that people who are in earnest about individual or public duty are beset by perplexities that did not trouble an earlier generation. They have lost faith in the precedents and authorities to which it would have appealed, with the result that they are thrown upon their own private judgment in many matters that would have been settled for them' in another age. Under these circumstances it need hardly be said that there is danger of mistake where formerly there was none. What precisely the danger is and whence it arises is a more difficult question. The answer will bring us to our point. We shall prepare the way for it if we consider for a moment the nature and origin of the forms we are leaving behind us, and the kind of service they performed for our ancestors.

Take first the religious formulæ of the ages of faith. With all their crudity these continue to impress us with the richness and many-sidedness of their contents. And this becomes comprehensible when we remember that these forms obtained their hold upon mankind because they represented many streams of thought

and aspiration. The theological doctrines we find epitomised in our articles of religion and confessions of faith were the issue of an earnest attempt on the part of their framers to grasp the meaning of life in all its manifold relations. It was only natural, accordingly, that so long as they were acquiesced in in their entirety they should exercise a double influence over human thought. In some respects undoubtedly they were repressive. This is the side of them that is now commonly emphasised. But in another respect they were expansive and in the strictest sense educative. To understand them called for an effort in the believer -too great an effort as we now think, considering the amount of truth that they contained, yet an effort which had its reward in a dignified and comprehensive view of human nature.1 Similarly the catechisms professed to expound the whole duty of man and present us with an ideal of character which we must admit was conceived with extraordinary breadth and insight.

What is true of moral and religious formulæ is true also of the older forms of social, industrial, and political organisation. They did not, of course, leave room for wants that are of recent development, but so far as they went they represented in broad outline the organic requirements of human life. In the times when they were generally accepted there was not much danger that essential elements in human nature should fail to have justice done them.

But they are no longer entirely accepted. We have outgrown the forms that have hitherto served us. New

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1 This was what led F. D. Maurice into his paradoxical defence of the Thirty-nine Articles as guiding the student of humanity and divinity into a pathway of truth, and pointing out to him the different forms of truth.”—Life, vol. i. p. 524.