SOMETIMES when our lives seem to be running smoothly along the guidelines of virtue and we feel that we are doing everything that duty and conscience require, a great doubt assails us. Are we really good? May it not be that our seeming integrity is just mere conformity, external and accidental, with the Law—product, or part product, of fortunate circumstance, without any trustworthy guarantee of our real strength of character?

At such times we find a very ominous resonance in the imprecations of the poet on the “race of Abel,” or in the sarcastic references of the novelist to the “rascality of honest men”; and anxiously we ask ourselves whether we, too, placed in other environments, exposed to other dangers, would succeed in maintaining our present high estate and avoid becoming, to our shame, like men from whom we now withdraw in anger and in horror. In this torturing perplexity we are seized with a feverish craving to put ourselves to the test by provoking some extraordinary trial. Fortunately, the occasion is rarely offered us by the placid march of events which does not stop to reassure us in the hoped-for enjoyment of our own self-conceit and self-esteem.

The poet Alfieri suffered a great deal from just such misgivings. “No matter how hard I tried to believe and to make others believe that I was different from the generality of men, I feared” (he says in his Diaries) “that I was very like them.” And in his celebrated sonnet of auto-portraiture he confesses that he thought himself “now Achilles and now Thersites,” and for real moral values he could discover no trustworthy measure other than Death: O son of Adam, art thou gold or clay?

Die, and the knowledge cometh!

But not even death is unfailing proof. Cowards and sinners have been known to die with courage; just as good men have faced their passing with fear and dread. Death at the most bears witness to the spiritual vitality present in a man at the moment of agony: it says nothing about the quality of a character.

This eagerness to assay our true moral worth, to have a definite gauge of the strength of our moral fibre, inspires some of the ideals and practices of asceticism. People withdraw from the world and its pleasures, seek deliverance from the bonds of the flesh, detach themselves from family and friends, allotting to each, of course, the dues prescribed by the commandments, but careful always not to let the emotions become involved, lest things be done out of affection or pleasure which should be done wholly from a sense of duty. This particular quirk of asceticism reappears, as has been noted, in the ethics of Kant.

In reply to Kant and to ascetics in general it has been pointed out that the scruple in which they are here entangled is a more or less specious one. It is sheer absurdity to think of morality as an endless struggle against our passions, which, after all, make up the substance of life and may properly be repressed only as they assert themselves by and for themselves, apart from the moral outlook which reduces them to unity and harmony.

And passing to the attack from this defensive position, it has been observed that the desire for gratuitous heroism, the self-conscious aim of living in meticulous acquittal of duty—all the major concerns of the ascetic, in short—are themselves sins of refined selfishness, since they tend to regard the world as an arena for celebrating the triumph of our individuality, as a stage for the vainglorious display of our virtues. Meanwhile the world stands in need not of perfect characters to be admired in various poses, but of useful, efficient work, even though the doing of that work “leave Honesty appalled” and be attended with many shocks of error and blemishes of weakness.

The truth is that this solicitude for perfection is connected with a well-known concept of the old metaphysics which bears its proper fruit in a perversion of ethics. It is the so-called monadistic notion of individuality which in ethics takes the form of egoism. Our own “inner selves,” our own “real selves,” our own “substantial egos”—those hard, however radiant, jewels which we are said to possess within us, which distinguish us from all or many or common mortals, and which we must not keep under bushels if we would preserve their splendour undimmed—exist only in false theories of metaphysics or amid the intoxicating fumes of self-adoration. Our characters are not altogether ours, and the characters of others are ours also: it is the universal always that is truly real.

If we denote the sin of ethical monadism with the name that really describes it—if we call it “pride”—the virtue that corresponds to it. the virtue that springs from the very essence of anti-monadistic and idealistic philosophy, must be called “humility.” This humility is nothing but a realisation on our part that our actions belong not to an entity or substance that is individual, but to all reality which is forever varying the conditions that determine them. No one therefore can feel secure as in a citadel of virtue and look down upon others as beings of different or inferior nature. From any one of those beings an act or a word may some day come that will make us blush for shame as we compare it with words and deeds of ours. At any time each of us may find himself in crying need of indulgence. And humility transforms proud nicety of scruple into watchful conscientiousness which devotes itself to its work in life, with full appreciation of the dangers and difficulties that confront it; and humbling itself in this work, finds therein its only grandeur.