THAT politics have a law of their own which is not the moral law is a truth often reluctantly and grudgingly conceded; though people are quite ready to admit that morality makes use of political compromise to attain the particular ends it holds in view. Even in this latter case, however, there is some unwillingness to reflect, and much more unwillingness openly to recognise, that among the ends toward which morality may proceed by a politic or a political method is the purpose of establishing and maintaining moral virtue itself (or virtue, merely, if you prefer the shorter term).

And yet, if it were not for such compromises, if it were not for politics, personal politics, so to speak, a “technique of virtue”—we should be put to it to discover a means for vindicating—in the midst of all our passions, with all our passions, against all our passions—the claims of morality.

Shall we, for example, suppress our passions and replace them with “apathy” (which, etymologically, means absence of passions)? But the Stoics tried that method, and their effort is proverbially repudiated, one might say, by the connotation that “apathy” has acquired in the end: depression, reduced or lost vitality. We had better keep our passions then (since we have to anyway).

And keeping them, accepting them, shall we give them a free rein to trot and run and gallop as they please? This, too, has been tried in certain schemes of life put forward by the Romanticists of a century ago; and the criticism of it is offered by the scattering of forces, the ruin, the nausea, the opposite but more or less equivalent apathy that are reached in the mad stampede of unbridled passions.

But, still accepting them, shall we accept them in such a way that a pure and virtuous volition will face and master them, careful to avoid too close association, keeping her hands clean, lifting her spotless skirts clear of their mud, elbowing her way through the throng of such unwelcome companions, and using a whip on them as occasion requires? But this scheme, too, is not a new one. It is the moral “rigorism” of Emmanuel Kant, a theory of uncompromising virtue which ends, as everybody knows, in lip-service and hypocrisy. The proud (but futile) self-assertion of Pure Will against the passions may be a useful and convenient symbol of the ethical will and its autonomy; but translated into reality it either belies its words in its deeds, or wears itself out in vain struggling, to return in the end to a kind of Stoicism, which may contribute to a dignified death but not to an efficient living.

The only alternative left then is for Morality to get down from her high horse, mingle on even terms with the passions, become a passion among them, treating them civilly meanwhile, without trying either to destroy them or to do violence to their nature, fighting now one, now another, playing one against another, in alliance now with these and now with those. True ethical volition, the really moral will, is a creator and promoter of life. It need therefore have no fear of contamination in using life to obtain greater and fuller life.

This is what we actually do; and any one of us can observe in himself all the little tricks, all the little twists and turns, which he brings into play to create and maintain and augment that habit of well-doing which we call virtue. We often seem to feel the presence of an impassable abyss between our moral intentions and our powers of executing them. We are pulled this way and that by forces beyond our control. We know that the right thing should be done for its own sake, and yet we are discouraged and depressed by lack of justice and co-operation from others. The task ahead is clear enough, but it arouses in us none of that glowing enthusiasm, none of that sparkle of personal interest, without which we can never work to good purpose. It is our duty to rouse ourselves and begin to do something; but our heads droop in torpor and despondency. We know that we have life before us, and here we are despairing and thinking of suicide. It is the familiar rift between the spirit that is willing (or would be willing) and the flesh that is weak.

So what do we do? Do we rise in Kantian style and give orders to ourselves in a thunderous tone of military command? No, for we should be wasting our breath! Do we grit our teeth, clench our fasts, and rush forward to execute the resplendent design that is in our minds? The trouble is that the strength for just these noble resolves is lacking. The trouble is that we are weak and languid. Any such impulsive thrust, any such heroic gesture, would fall back upon itself as a futile spasm—mock-heroic if anything.

As a matter of fact, our good sense, born of experience, tells us what to do. We choose less dramatic remedies, milder instruments more certain of their aim. We treat ourselves as children, or as invalids, now coaxing and cajoling our listless imaginations till disturbing or depressing thoughts have been wheedled away; or to the rescue of our faltering sense of duty we send some re-enforcement from our personal likes or dislikes, now appealing to our pride, now clinging to fond hopes or to illusions which we know to be illusions, but which we keep alive by artificial means; now looking forward to future joys which we think of as rewards and compensations for the trials and worries we must confront at the present time. “Vanity,” says a German apothegm attributed by some to Schiller and by others to Goethe, “Vanity is the cement that Nature uses to unite the high and the low in man.” How monstrous this would seem to the ethics of Kant! And how human it seems to the ethics of human beings!

For in very truth, in all these tricks and twists and turns there is not a trace of impurity, not a trace of means which the good end would justify but cannot. If there were, our alliance with wrong passions would not be an alliance with mere passions (which, as such, are neither good nor bad), but with definite and concrete wrongdoing, and the contradiction would spring to light; for good actions comport with bad ones as doves comport with serpents.

The passions, big or little, which we use in the process here considered, may have been wrongful at one time in the past, and they may be wrongful again at some other time, or under some other conditions, in the future. But in the case before us, either they have ceased to be such, or they have not yet become such. They appear simply as “forces of nature,” to use a current phrase; that is to say, as resources available in one way or another for our individual purposes. The vanity referred to above, for example, is not a caprice which transgresses moral propriety for the sake of self-satisfaction. It is simply a foretaste of the praise or triumph we shall win, and lends itself as a docile servant to the virtue that is struggling with distracting thoughts. When Virtue has won her victory, and established herself firmly on solid ground, she will dismiss the handmaiden who came running to help her; for now the minx is no longer needed, and her chatter, were she to stay on, might disturb a work already on its way again and now proceeding in the full flush of its own inner conviction and enthusiasm.