its virtues, and aspired after are its ideals, when it commands their pursuit become its duties. Thus in sexual love and friendship there are the duties of constancy, faithfulness, and truth; in parental love the duties of patience, self-control, and wisdom; in the sentiment for knowledge, the duties of perseverance, truthfulness, and impartiality, and of attaching to our opinions no greater degree of assurance than that which the evidence warrants.

And these duties are familiarly recognised. But have they not been imposed upon us by the authority of parents and teachers, by the influence of books, and by our social environment generally? In great part they have; but have they not another source in ourselves, on account of which we are more ready to accept them from outside? Our heart' tells us they are right. For since each sentiment tends to develop certain qualities and not others, and to possess certain virtues and not others, and with this end to acquire special emotions whose function it is to maintain these qualities and virtues, or to pursue them as ideals, so also, as a different and additional stimulus to their attainment, will it tend to acquire the consciousness of duties.

It is because love develops its own duties, ideals, and virtues that we find them in the social atmosphere around us, whence they come back to us with a still stronger voice. If often they are first made known to us through our social environment, and being suggested to us on all sides, are naturally accepted, yet it is only when we have developed the sentiments to which they belong, that we feel and adequately realise their obligations. How often is it said that a man must have a family himself to realise fully the duties of the family-life. But he will not realise them any the more if he does not acquire the sentiment of the family. The man who loves his wife will feel more strongly the duties of being constant and faithful to her than will he who marries without love. If unfaithful, how much keener will be the remorse and sense of wrong-doing of the former than that of the latter. For the mother who loves her child to neglect it and to injure its health and welfare for the sake of her own enjoyment would be a crime, for which she could not forgive herself;

but to neglect another child of her own whom she does not love, or a step-child, would be natural, and carry fainter reproaches. The man who loves his country will be jealous of its interests and prepared to die in its defence; but where humanitarianism has displaced, and not been added to patriotism, the sense of these duties perishes.

If some duties are indeed impressed upon us by our social environment there are others which are not. That man only who loves knowledge or truth will feel the wrong of exaggeration, of loose thinking, of careless work, as well as the duty of precision of thought, of weighing evidence, of proportioning belief to it; and all these duties are summed up in that intellectual conscientiousness which the true thinker alone recognises. These duties are not generally found in our social environment, are seldom impressed upon us from outside; but our own sentiments create them for us. Each one of us, when he is tempted to do careless work, when indolence, or the desire of gain, or of popularity, restrains him from that unremitting perseverance and those pains and the ideal of perfect work, feels dissatisfied with himself and remorseful. But he will hardly be punished by the world for his neglect of such duties; because there are so few who love truth for itself, or the perfection of art, and so many who are indifferent or contemptuous toward both. But men in general love their families, and the duties of the family life are impressed on our social surroundings, and survive from age to age with those sentiments and that common human nature from which they spring.

As the sentiments create their own duties and punish us with self-reproach for neglect of them, so anyone who has fulfilled their duties under difficulties which have strained his endurance feels within himself, though all the world be ignorant of the fact, that secret and humble self-approval that is their reward of faithful service.

This self-approval and its complementary self-reproach belong to that same higher part of the sentiment which is connected with the pursuit and maintenance of its great qualities, its virtues, ideals, and duties. This inner system we shall call the Relative Ethics of the Sentiment. For it possesses an

ethical character throughout in respect of its special emotions, its virtues, ideals and duties, relative to the sentiment of which it is a part, and working at first exclusively on behalf of its object and ends.

So far we have referred to the great qualities necessary to a sentiment, its ideals and natural virtues, as constituting the object with which this relative ethics is concerned ; and these become a very important proximate end of the sentiment, because its efficiency so largely depends upon them. And we may call this the end of its organisation as such, to distinguish it from its more familiar and final ends, as the welfare and happiness of the person we love, the discovery and accumulation of knowledge in the intellectual sentiment, the possession and accumulation of wealth in avarice. Of the prominence of this subjective end of organisation we find evidence in many strong sentiments. Under its influence a man will often say, that he must make himself worthy of the person he loves, and if the object is impersonal, as truth, or art, or religion, that he must make himself worthy of his great vocation, so that his love may become stronger and better.

As this end of organisation is subordinate to the final ends of the sentiment, its relative ethics must indirectly or directly concern itself also with these ends; hence we reproach ourselves from time to time with the little we have done for those we love in comparison with what we might have done. The ethics of a sentiment has then two sets of duties, (1) those which concern the strength and organisation of its system, and (2) those which concern its final ends.

If a sentiment, over and above the ethics which are common to it and other sentiments, tends, as we have seen, to develop certain special virtues and ideals and to exclude others, so the ethics and conscience of its love will tend to have a certain originality and be more or less different from that of other sentiments. And thus the lives of men are apt to impress them more with the importance of some duties than others. Each sentiment has a type of virtue and perfection more or less its own which enriches the common conscience. And when any man develops its relative ethics in a higher degree,

and in a clearer form than that to which other men attain, because his love has reached a higher perfection, he becomes an ideal and a law to them so far as they possess the same sentiment. And thus the exalted love of truth and wisdom of a Plato or a Spinoza becomes the conscience of lesser men and teaches them the intellectual virtues; and the pure and constant love which women so often give to men, admonishes them of what is lower in their love, and evokes in it the ideal and the duty of purity.

We have now further to consider the function which these ideas of duty are fitted to perform in the sentiment. We are familiar with the conditions under which, with reference to our ordinary conduct, ideas of duty arise. As long as our actions do not conflict with them, and are such as they prescribe, because the right emotions, or established habits restrain us, ideas of duty do not usually arise, because they are not needed. When, on the other hand, the system does not elicit the requisite emotion, or at least not in sufficient strength, so that we come to doubt whether in our actual situation we shall remain true and constant, or loyal, or patient, or brave, then the consciousness of duty tends to arise because it is needed, sometimes taking the commanding form "I must do this," sometimes the weaker and more persuasive form "I ought to do it." And whichever form the ideas of duty assume they have not fulfilled their function unless they arouse the will to action. It is the same with the relative duties of sentiments. long, for instance, as the first freshness of sexual love lasts, its emotions naturally lead us to be constant, faithful, and pure. It is to this stage of love that the maxim of St. Paul applies: "He that hath love needs not the law." But if, when this stage is past, love grows weak through the loss of novelty of its object, or the competition of some other system, and its emotions no longer have sufficient strength to maintain its virtues, and the issue is in doubt, then under these conditions the sentiment tends to elicit its ideas of duty. And the function of these ideas is not so much to awaken its languishing emotions as to arouse its will.

As

We have formerly noticed that there are two broadly

distinguishable kinds of will which are found in a sentiment ; the impulsive will of its emotions, the reflective, deliberate will of the sentiment acting as a whole. Now the ideas of duty do not appeal to its impulsive will, shown by their presence to be inadequate to its task, but to this reflecting, deliberate will. It is this kind of will which we have spoken of as the self-control of the sentiment: a will which only ceases to be reflective and deliberate when it acts from a fixed habit of obedience to its special duties.

This then is the function of the relative ethics of the sentiment, first to awaken the ideals of its virtues, secondly to provide and elicit the special emotions required by these ideals,-aspiration, admiration or enthusiasm, self-reproach and self-approval,-thirdly in situations of doubt and conflict, to evoke the ideas of its duties, and through them to arouse the highest will of its system, that which acting after reflection and deliberation, has to guide it to its destined end.

We have found that certain characteristic types of love, both personal and impersonal, frequently develop a relative ethics characteristic of them. We must assume, as we have already done with regard to their emotions and qualities, that there is a general tendency of these sentiments to develop such a relative ethics, on account of its approved value for their systems. We have now to attempt to formulate this law: (10) All varieties of love for an object other than oneself tend to develop a relative ethics, comprising the common emotions of selfapproval and self-reproach, more or less special virtues and ideals with emotions of admiration and aspiration, and particular convictions of duty evoked in situations of doubt and conflict when the ends of the sentiment are in danger.

As Love is the original source of a certain relative ethics,— and even builds up its own conscience in those who seem to be bereft of any other, -so Hate tends to destroy all restraints and duties that we have formerly acknowledged on behalf of its object, and any others which stand in the way of its ends. As soon as we begin to hate anyone the sense of these duties begins to decline, until one after another such protections against our enmity are abolished, and the man has no longer a right to his own life. And even in the restrained hatred of