Read Ebook: The Moral Economy by Perry Ralph Barton

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 374 lines and 69897 words, and 8 pages

It is worth while to remark and proclaim such a conviction as this only because mankind has so treacherous a memory, and so fatuous a habit of disowning its most precious and dearly won possessions. Cardinal truths are periodically overlaid with sophistication, blended with tentative opinion, and identified with the instruments of the day. There results a confusion of mind that fails to distinguish the essence from the accident, and aims to destroy where there is need to rectify. Because government is clumsy and costly, it is proposed to abolish government; because education is artificial and constraining, society is exhorted to return to the easy course of nature; metaphysics must be swept away, because the metaphysics of some time or school has outlived its usefulness; and morality, because it is hard or tiresome, must give way to the freedom and romance of no morality. Such blind and irresponsible agitation is a perpetual menace to the balance of impressionable and unsteady minds, if not indeed to the work of civilization.

Now it is safe to say that these venerable institutions have arisen in answer to fixed needs; needs implied in life as a general and constant situation. There is no other way of accounting for them. They have been tolerated only because they yield a steady return. Their loss would be a catastrophe which mankind, obedient to the necessities of life, would fall at once to repairing. Institutions are the very body of civilization; and while they may grow and change without limit, if they be abruptly destroyed civilization must suffer paralysis in some vital part. At once the most direct and striking proof of this lies in the fact that the revolutionist, whether he be propagandist or man of action, invariably commits himself, and ends by executing the very function he denied. At the moment when he comes to close quarters, and actually engages the object of his attack, he is swept into some current of endeavor that has from the most ancient times been pressing steadily toward the solution of a problem that lies in the centre of the path of life. He straightway commences himself to govern, educate, speculate, or moralize. And the more patiently he labors, the greater his respect for the vested wisdom of his time. Whereas he first sought utterly to demolish, he is now content to make his little difference and hand on the work. In the end every purely destructive programme is inevitably futile, because it goes against the grain. For all conduct is constructive in motive, and forward in direction. But how wasteful is the momentary fury--wasteful of high passion and distinguished capacity, and how mystifying to the lay intelligence!

It may, of course, be said that there is method in this madness; since man's twofold blindness, his dogmatism and his scepticism, his immobility and his wantonness, tend in the long run to neutralize one another. But with the perspective required for such consolation, neither the agencies of destruction nor those of obstruction preserve the same heroic proportions which they are wont to assume in their day. They seem to be engaged in a sort of by-play, and wear an unmistakable aspect of childishness. Lo! Mankind has been a long time on his way, and endures hardily the prospect of endless leagues to go. He is the Patient Plodder, symbol of mature intelligence. And he has in his company two small boys who exhibit an incorrigible naughtiness. The one of these is called Destruction; his other names being Cynic, Sceptic, and Nihilist. He it is that mocks and cries, "Go up, thou bald head! go up, thou bald head!" Mankind does not curse him in the name of the Lord, but invites him to play with another small boy, named Obstruction, and whose other names are Vested Interest, Reactionary, and Pedant. This one, whenever Mankind will lead him, digs in his heels or lies down in his tracks; until, pricked and goaded by his playfellow, he at length gets up and scrambles after. And so these two keep ever by the side or at the heels of Mankind, whom they neither lead nor deflect from his course.

Paradox serves to dislodge prejudice; and blasphemy may rudely but effectually bring to their senses those who have mistaken the hardness of their hearts for loyalty, and their easy default for success. But practical wisdom belongs only to those who proceed unwaveringly out of the past and into the future, correcting mistakes when they may, conserving the good already won, and making new conquests.

When men find that something can be said in favor of what, on the very proposal, they have thought utterly indefensible, they grow doubtful of their own reason; they are thrown into a sort of pleasing surprise; they run along with the speaker, charmed and captivated to find such a plentiful harvest of reasoning, where all seemed barren and unpromising. . . . There is a sort of gloss upon ingenious falsehoods that dazzles the imagination, but which neither belongs to, nor becomes the sober aspect of truth. . . . In such cases, the writer has a certain fire and alacrity inspired into him by a consciousness, that let it fare how it will with the subject, his ingenuity will be sure of applause.

It is safe to accept morality as one accepts agriculture, navigation, constitutional government, or any other tried solution of an unavoidable problem. There is false opinion here as elsewhere, and hollow convention is not infrequently paraded as duty and wisdom; but the nucleus of morality is verified truth, the precipitate of mankind's prolonged experiment in living.

I do not propose, however, to be satisfied with so modest a claim. It might still be contended that morality is doubtless true so far as it goes, or well enough for those who care for it; but that it will scarcely concern other than the more coarse-grained and less adventurous minds. It is customary to associate high wisdom with the pursuit of some special interest, for its own sake, and under no wider law than a sort of professional etiquette or code of honor. Business is business, art is art, truth is truth, and for one who cares to "go in for it," virtue is for virtue's sake. Those who ride hobbies do not object to the moralist, provided he does not intrude. But if he applies his rules to other than his own personal or domestic affairs, he is berated as an impertinent busybody who is talking of things he does not understand. Now I venture to assert that the moralist in the nature of the case can never be impertinent, though he may be impolite or even insulting. He can never be impertinent because, contrary to the formula of the day, there is no such thing as virtue for virtue's sake. Morality is the one interest that virtually represents all interests. It is the interest of every man in the general tests of success and failure, and in the maintenance of the field or medium of all interests. There is no enterprise which, if conducted efficiently, is not a verification of moral rules; there is no enterprise which does not receive and transmit the now of life that circulates through the moral system at large. To be righteously indignant is to protest passionately in behalf of the whole good, and against the clumsy and inadvertent evil. To this morality owes its universal support, its invincible finality. It need never be apologetic, because it holds no brief; it advocates no measure except the carrying through to the end of what is virtually undertaken by all parties to the adventure of life.

It follows that no man can exempt himself from moral liability. He is irrevocably committed to life, and can neglect the laws of life only at his absolute or ultimate peril. What does it profit a man to gain a bit here and a bit there, if he is foreordained to loss on the whole? If he squanders his moral patrimony he has no means of recouping his fortunes; he has wasted his supporting vitality and forfeited his general livelihood.

And now if this be true it is of more than passing or sentimental importance. It needs to be vividly realized if morality is to make its saving appeal. Morality is only discredited through being sanctioned; its proper merits are more eloquent than its friends and borrowed auspices. If it can be simply proclaimed as it is, it cannot be denied. This is one of the things which I undertake to do. But to understand what morality really is, to recognize its claims, is to understand also its application, its critical pertinence to art and religion, to all the great and permanent undertakings of men. Such application I shall in the later chapters undertake to suggest, partly as an amplification of the meaning of morality, and partly as a programme of further reflection looking toward a moral philosophy of history. I can do no more in the present chapter than broadly present the structure of morality, leaving the logic of its appeal and its more important applications for the chapters which follow.

The moral affair of men, a prolonged and complicated historical enterprise, is thrown into historical relief upon the background of a mechanical cosmos. Nature, as interpreted by the inorganic sciences, presents a spectacle of impassivity. It moves, transforms, and radiates, on every scale and in all its gigantic range of temporal and spatial distance, utterly without loss or gain of value. One cannot rightly attribute to such a world even the property of neglect or brutality. Its indifference is absolute.

Such a world is devoid of value because of the elimination of the bias of life. Where no interest is at stake, changes can make no practical difference; where no claims are made, there can be neither fortune nor calamity, neither comedy nor tragedy. There is no object of applause or resentment, if there be nothing in whose behalf such judgments may be urged.

But with the introduction of life, even the least particle of it, the rudest bit of protoplasm that ever made the venture, nature becomes a new system with a new centre. The organism inherits the earth; the mechanisms of nature become its environment, its resources in the struggle to keep for a time body and soul together. The mark of life is partiality for itself. If anything is to become an object of solicitude, it must first announce itself through acting in its own behalf. With life thus instituted there begins the long struggle of interest against inertia and indifference, that war of which civilization itself is only the latest and most triumphant phase.

Through their organization into life, the mechanisms of nature thus take on the generic quality of good and evil. They either serve interests or oppose them; and must be employed and assimilated, or avoided and rejected accordingly. Events which once indifferently happened are now objects of hope and fear, or integral parts of success and failure.

I have thus far described the situation as though it were essentially a social one. But while, historically speaking, it is doubtless always social in one of its aspects, the essence of the matter is as truly represented within the group of interests sustained by a single organism, when these, for example, are united in an individual life-purpose. Morality is that procedure in which several interests, whether they involve one or more physical organisms, are so adjusted as to function as one interest, more massive in its support, and more coherent and united in the common task of fulfilment. Interests morally combined are not destroyed or superseded, as are mechanical forces, by their resultant. The power of the higher interest is due to a summing of incentives emanating from the contributing interests; it can perpetuate itself only through keeping these interests alive. The most spectacular instance of this is government, which functions as one, and yet derives its power from an enormous variety of different interests, which it must foster and conserve as the sources of its own life. In all cases the strength of morality must lie in its liberality and breadth.

The quality of moral goodness, like the quality of goodness in the fundamental sense, lies not in the nature of any class of objects, but in any object or activity whatsoever, in so far as this provides a fulfilment of interest or desire. In the case of moral goodness this fulfilment must embrace a group of interests in which each is limited by the others. Its value lies not only in fulfilment, but also in adjustment and harmony. And this value is independent of the special subject-matter of the interests. Moralists have generally agreed that it is impossible to conceive moral goodness exclusively in terms of any special interest, even such as honor, power, or wealth. There is no interest so rare or so humble that its fulfilment is not morally good, provided that fulfilment forms part of the systematic fulfilment of a group of interests.

Moral procedure, then, differs from life in its more elementary form, through the fact that interests are organized. Morality is only life where this has assumed the form of the forward movement of character, nationality, and humanity. Moral principles define the adjustment of interest to interest, for the saving of each and the strengthening of both against failure and death. Morality is only the method of carrying on the affair of life beyond a certain point of complexity. It is the method of concerted, cumulative living, through which interests are brought from a doubtful condition of being tolerated by the cosmos, to a condition of security and confidence. The spring and motive of morality are therefore absolutely one with those of life. The self-preservative impulse of the simplest organism is the initial bias from which, by a continuous progression in the direction of first intent, have sprung the service of mankind and the love of God.

Thus there is an ancient belief that it is natural to be licentious; that man is at heart unruly and wilful, wearing the artificial good behavior of civilization as he wears his clothes. Nietsche has contributed not a little to the glorification of this pro-natural and anti-moral monster. And yet no one has recognized more clearly than he, that restraint and law are not only in life from the beginning, but that they are themselves the very sources of its power.

It only remains to drop the terms "arbitrary" and "tyranny"; since the principle of development in life can scarcely be regarded as arbitrary, or its effectual working as tyranny.

Huxley chose to draw a line between nature and morality, at the point where a limit is set to the isolated organism's struggle against all comers.

The practice of that which is ethically best--what we call goodness or virtue--involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint.

But Huxley appears momentarily to have overlooked the fact that the struggle for existence itself puts a premium on self-restraint. For there is no stage of evolution in which the adjustment and co-operation of interests is not an aid to survival. One does not have to rise higher in the scale of life than the plants fertilized by insects, to observe the working of this principle. It is only the crudest and most impotent self-assertion that is "ruthless." The reason for this is simply that the real enemy of every vital process is not another kindred process, but the mechanical environment. Life is essentially an assertion, not against life, but against death. Interests that expend their energies in destroying or crippling one another, slip back toward that primeval lifelessness from which they emerged. Restraint for the sake of organization is therefore only a developed and intelligent self-assertion.

If one insists still upon drawing a line between cosmical and moral forces, let it be drawn at the point where there first arises that unstable complex called life. Life does in a sense oppose itself to the balance of nature. To hold itself together, it must play at parry and thrust with the very forces which gave it birth. Once having happened, it so acts as to persist. But it should be remarked that this opposition between the careless and rough course of the cosmos, the insidious forces of dissolution, on the one hand, and the self-preserving care of the organism on the other, is present absolutely from the outset of life.

Vegetable and animal organisms do, it is true, adapt themselves to the environment; but their adaptation is essentially a method of using and modifying the environment in their own favor, precisely as is the case with human action. Therefore Huxley's sharp distinction between natural plant life and man's artificial garden is misleading.

'The tendency of the cosmic process,' he says, 'is to bring about the adjustment of the forms of plant life to the current conditions; the tendency of the horticultural process is the adjustment of the conditions to the needs of the forms of plant life which the gardener desires to raise.'

But this is to ignore the basal fact, which is that plant life in any form is a defiance of current conditions. Art has already begun when natural processes assume a form that feeds itself, reproduces itself, and grows. The first organisms have only a local footing; they are rooted in the soil, and can turn to their advantage only the conditions characteristic of a time and place. Eventually there evolves a more resourceful unit of life, like the gardener with his cultivated plants, who is capable of inhabiting nature at large. But the method is still the same, that of playing off nature against nature; only it is now done on a larger scale, and in a more aggressive and confident spirit. The need of concession to the demands of locality is reduced, through a concession once and for all to the wider processes of nature. But in relation to its environment, life is never wholly constructive, as it is never wholly passive. Whether it appears in the form of vegetation or civilization, it always involves both an adaptation of nature to itself and of itself to nature.

Morality, then, is natural if life is natural; for it is defined by the same essential principles. It is related to life as a later to an earlier phase of one development. The organization of life answers the self-preservative impulse with which life begins; the deliberate fulfilment of a human purpose is only life grown strong enough through organization to conduct a larger and more adventurous enterprise.

In the light of this conception let us examine more fully the relation of morality to the competitive struggle between individuals and communities. There can, of course, be no doubt that competition forces life up in the scale. But it is equally true, and more significant, that in the course of that progress competition itself is steadily eliminated. The stronger units of life prevail against the weaker. But the stronger units of life are the more inclusive and harmonious complexes of interest. They are constituted by adjusting interests; allowing each a modicum of free play, or crushing those that will not submit to organization. Within such units the principle of mechanical survival gives way to the principle of moral survival. I mean by this that the selection, rejection, and gradation of interests is made not on the basis of the uncompromising self-assertion of each and the survival of the hardy remnant; but on the basis of the contribution made by each to the life of the collective body. The test of survival is obedience to a law defined in the joint interest of all, and control is vested in the rational capacity to represent this interest and conduct it to a safe and profitable issue. The strength of life thus organized lies in its massiveness, in its effective plenitude. When such units wage war on one another, this strength is wasted; and the very same principle that strength shall prevail, tends to the extension of the organization until it shall embrace contentious factions.

Even where the principle of survival does not operate, conflict has been, and yet remains, a factor in moral progress of enormous and far-reaching importance. The more keen and unrelenting it is, the more effectually does it expose the weakness of the competing units, the more urgently does it require a better concentration and economy of effort. In order to fight a rival, it is necessary to leave off fighting one's self, and be healthy and single-minded. An industrial corporation, in order to overreach its competitors, is compelled to adjust its intricate functions with incredible nicety, to utilize by-products, and even to introduce old-age pensions for the promotion of morale among its employees. And so a nation, to be strong in war, must enjoy peace and justice at home. War has served society by welding great aggregates of interest into compact and effective wholes, the enemy providing an object upon which collective endeavor can unite.

The loss when contending currents are redirected and flow together is not a loss of power, but only of neutralizing resistance. It is true that the lesson of harmony is learned through discord; but harmony is none the less in the end exclusive of discord. The principle of peace, learned at home through the hard necessity of war abroad, finds only a more complete justification and beneficent application in peace abroad. It is love and not hate that is the moving spring of life. It is love which is constructive; hate destroys even the very object that evokes and sustains it. It is essential, then, to life, not only to assert and reproduce itself, but to increase itself through allying itself with life. Where the motive of life thus freely expresses itself, there are no natural enemies.

I count it to be important thus to trace morality back to the original love of life, since only so is it possible to understand its urgency, and its continuity with every organic impulse. It is because morality is without warrant dislocated from the natural life, that it is accused of being barren and formal. To many minds it is best symbolized by the kindly lady who gives the small boy a penny, and admonishes him not to spend it. But there could be no more outrageous travesty. Morality in its springs is absolutely one with that clinging to life which is the most deep-lying of all interests, and with that relish for life in which its goodness needs no philosopher's approval. The primal determination to be and to sell one's self dearly, is not different, except in its limits, from the moral determination to be and to attain to the uttermost. The whole force of life is behind every moral scruple, and guarantees the sanity even of a universal good-will.

But the identification of morality with the organization of life, serves also to demonstrate life in its unity and larger auspices. Morality harmonizes life and eliminates its wanton self-destruction; but life is not therefore left without an object of conquest. For there is one campaign in which all interests are engaged, and which requires their undivided and aggressive effort. This is the first and last campaign, the war of life upon the routine of the mechanical cosmos and its forces of dissolution. To live, to let live, and to grow in life, constitute an absorbing and passionate task, in which every human heroism may find a proper object.

It must be admitted that the imagination has not yet sufficiently glorified this enterprise of civilization. It is hard to forget old shibboleths and loyalties. And yet precisely that must be done with every advance in liberality. Admiration and passion lag behind reason; are forever backsliding and debauching themselves among the companions of their youth. But man's salvation lies not in degrading his reason to the level of his loyalties, nor in allowing the two to drift apart, but in acquiring a finer loyalty. And while one cannot extemporize the symbols and imagery of devotion, these will surely grow about any sustained purpose.

Now there is a paradox that does not seem to have occurred to Nietsche, in the slave insurrection by which he accounts for this dreary spectacle. It can scarcely be a code of slavishness that has enabled slaves to overthrow their masters. The morality of the modern European democracy is the morality of the strong; of the many, it is true, but of the many united and impassioned, moving toward the general end with good heart. And it is this which gave mastery to the once ruling class. Mastery appears wherever action is bold, united, and with the pressure of interest behind it; mastery has nothing to do with the airs of mastery, with Nietsche's "pathos of distance," separating class from class. The "instinct for rank," and "delight in the nuances of reverence," are not signs of nobility, as Nietsche would have it. There is no nose for them so sensitive and discriminating as that of the chambermaid or butler. The mere pride of an easy mastery over slaves is the taint of every society in which class differences are recognized as fixed. It attaches to all classes; whether it be called snobbery or obsequiousness, it is all one. The virtue of mastery, on the other hand, lies in the power and in the attainment which it represents.

Now it seems that if man is not to become spiritually bankrupt, he must be confronted with unfavorable conditions that keep him vigilant and alert. Nietsche has no imagination for resistance, struggle, and victory, except as these arise in the war of man against man. His heroes are Alcibiades, Caesar, and Frederick II, "men predestined for conquering and circumventing others." But it is not easy for us of this day to forget the others; it is the cost to them that galls our conscience. We cannot sincerely applaud a heroism in which life is condemned to feed on itself. Shall the only enemy that never fails, the condition that is always indifferent if not unfavorable, namely, the perpetual wear and drag of nature, be forgotten in order that men may fall on one another? Has man no more lordly task than that of destroying what he holds to be good? Is there no more of "creative plenipotence" in man than killing and robbing?

I am convinced that it needs only enlightenment to reduce Nietsche's circumventer of others to the proportions of a burglar; and to enlarge to truly heroic proportions him who circumvents the blindness of nature, brings up the weak or faint-hearted who lag behind, and throws himself bravely into the enterprise of steady constructive civilization. Nietsche is beguiled by a love of melodrama. He forgets the real war for the pageantry of an era that will pass. As a misleader of youth he conspires with the writers of dime-novels to fix the imagination on false symbols. The small boy who would run away from home for the glory of fighting Indians is deceived; both because there are no longer any Indians to fight, and because there are more glorious battles to be fought at home. War between man and man is an obsolescent form of heroism. There is every reason, therefore, why it should not be glorified as the only occasion capable of evoking the great emotions. The general battle of life, the first and last battle, is still on; and it has that in it of danger and resistance, of comradeship and of triumph, that can stir the blood.

But I have not undertaken to make morality picturesque. I shall leave that to other hands. In an age when it has been somewhat out of literary fashion, Chesterton has found it possible even to proclaim morality as the latest and most enlivening paradox. But I propose to leave it clad in its own sobriety. Its appeal in the last analysis must be to a sense for reality, and to an enlightened practical wisdom. Morality is that which makes man, "naked, shoeless, and defenceless" in body, the master of the kingdom of nature. Morality in this sense has never been more simply and eloquently justified than in the words which Plato puts into the mouth of Protagoras. He first describes the arts with which men contrived barely to sustain themselves, in a condition no better than the beasts which preyed on them in their helplessness. It is then that through the gift of Zeus they are rescued from their degradation and invested with the forms of civilization.

After a while the desire of self-preservation gathered them into cities; but when they were gathered together, having no art of government, they evil-intreated one another, and were again in process of dispersion and destruction. Zeus feared that the entire race would be exterminated, and so he sent Hermes to them, bearing reverence and justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship and conciliation.

But reverence and justice are more even than the ordering principles of cities. They are the conditions of the maximum of attainment, whether this be conceived as that supreme excellence which Plato divined, or as that all-saving good which is the object of a Christian devotion to humanity. Morality is the law of life, from its bare preservation to its supreme fruition. There is a high pretension in morality which is the necessary consequence of its motive. But man is not, on that account, in need of those reminders of failure which are so easy to offer, and which are so impotently true; he needs rather new symbols of faith, through which his heart may be renewed, and his courage fortified to proceed with an undertaking of which he cannot see the end. Faith and courage have brought him thus far:

"Till he well-nigh can tame Brute mischiefs and control Invisible things and turn All warring ills to purposes of good."

THE LOGIC OF THE MORAL APPEAL

There is a phrase, "liberty of conscience," which well expresses the modern conception of moral obligation. It recognizes that duty in the last analysis is imposed upon the individual neither by society nor even by God, but by himself; that there is no authority in moral matters more ultimate than a man's own rational conviction of what is best.

We meet here with the application to morality of the motive which underlies the whole modern reaction against medievalism, the motive which John Locke so aptly summarized when he said, "We should not judge of things by men's opinions, but of opinions by things." This is individualism of the positive temper, the protest against convention and authority; in behalf, not of license, but of knowledge. Mediaevalism is condemned, not for its universalism, but for its arbitrariness and untruth; for its mistaking of the weight of collective opinion, or of institutional prestige, for the weight of evidence.

This is the characteristic temper of the modern individualism, whether it be dominated by a bias for sense or a bias for reason. Locke, like his forerunner, Bacon, is an individualist because it is the individual in his detachment from society that alone can be open-eyed and open-minded; who is qualified to carry on that "proper business of the understanding," "to think of everything just as it is in itself." Descartes, although in habit of mind and speculative instinct he has so little in common with the Englishman, nevertheless finds in the individual's self-discipline and concentration the only hope of preserving the savor of the salt of knowledge. Thus he says:

I thought that the sciences contained in books, , composed as they are of the opinions of many different individuals massed together, are farther removed from truth than the simple inferences which a man of good sense using his natural and unprejudiced judgment draws respecting the matters of his experience.

Spinoza, who both abandoned the world and was abandoned by it, sought an individual philosophy of life that should be more universal than the opinion of the world on account of its greater truth. "Further reflection convinced me, that if I could really get to the root of the matter I should be leaving certain evils for a certain good."

This was the impulse in which modern tolerance of individual opinion and appeal to individual conscience originated. It was a protest not against order, but against the disheartening drag, the heavy and dull constraint, of an order externally imposed. Freedom was valued not for the sake of lawlessness, but for the sake of a clearer recognition of the proper laws of things, of the principles that lie in nature and civilization and control them inherently.

The individualist virtually claims that an individual's belief, if it be critical, is entitled to precedence over public belief, simply because the individual mind is a better instrument of knowledge than the public mind. It is the individual mind that is more directly confronted with the evidence, more single and responsive. Individualism is not, then, an appeal to private opinion in any disparaging sense. For, in so far as private opinion is independent and truthful in motive, concerning itself with its objects rather than with the social model of the day, it is self-corrective and tends inevitably toward the common truth. It is the opinion that is not really individual, but imitative, respectful of persons, generally submissive to ulterior motives of a social kind, that is private in the bad sense. Its privacy lies in its artificiality, in its partisanship, and in its remove from the open daylight of experience.

In view of these considerations, then, we may pronounce legitimate and hopeful the moral individualism of the time. It implies the recognition that there is a genuine ground for moral action, which may be brought home to any individual mind that will deal honestly and directly with the facts of life. Morality is not a useful fiction which must be protected against inquisitiveness and cherished in ignorance and servility; it is a body of compelling truth that will convince wherever there is a capacity to observe and reason. It requires no higher sanction than the individual, because the individual is society's organ of truth; because only in the individual mind is society open to rational conviction.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet