BOOK I. § 73. religious types. religion founded on the moral law, of liberty which is the source of law; 2nd, the idea of imaginative The poetic and pleasure unfettered by any law; 3rd, the idea of positive law, custom, and authority, as the source of morality. The two first are ideas of liberty, and alike opposed to the third; standing alike on the same ground; the conception of moral liberty being supreme. But upon this ground, and within these limits, they are opposed to each other, as tending the one to substitute licence for liberty, the other to maintain self-control against licence. This is the logic to which the analysis of feelings here given leads us, the mode in which it arranges for examination the phenomena of the conflict and evolution of characters in modern society. The position of civilisation at the present day is analogous to its position in Europe at the period of the Renaissance. A Reformation saved the church system not only in the north but also in the south of Europe from decay, in presence of the growing Humanism, as it has been called, of the time. The struggle between Humanism and Authority was prolonged by its decision being delayed. We are now living at a later stage of the same struggle, but with this difference from the Renaissance period, namely, with the conception, gradually acquired in the meantime, of fixed and universal laws of nature, to which all phenomena are subject, not only in the physical but also in the moral world. 25. These new forces are however, it must still be held, not such as to change the general direction, but only partially to modify the course, of the normal development of character, and consequently of society. The same causes, which assure the ulti Book I. § 73. religious types. mate supremacy of the moral law over other emotions, will probably assure it also over those imaginative ones which do not spring from the same source. The poetic and The justice of poetry is simply consistency; the emotion adopted by imagination is the standard and limit of the justice; the enquiry whether this emotion is itself just towards other emotions, or towards other men, and the consequent testing of justice and arriving at truth in it, has no place in this mode of mental activity. If it had, this mode of mental activity would itself be or contain the moral law, would no longer be distinguished from that to which it is now opposed. The moral law, therefore, and the religion founded on it, while recognising the claims of the emotions which are bound up with poetic imagination to exert themselves, and the independence of poetic imagination itself, its autotely or right to have its End imposed solely by itself, yet imposes limits upon that exertion in two directions, and on two grounds, first, in its relations to other persons besides the person of the Subject imagining, second, in its relations to the moral law itself, which it is bound to preserve from the danger of being de facto weakened or stifled. 26. If the supremacy of the moral law could not maintain itself in the individual character, it certainly could not maintain itself in society; nor yet could it do so, were it only an exceptional case here and there, and not the great mass of mankind, in whose character the moral law were supreme. What then is meant by saying that the moral law is and ought to be supreme, in the individual character, over the tendencies which flow from poetic imagination? Let us suppose that eros is the passion which is allied BOOK I. with poetry. Now supremacy means not destruction or forbidding, but simply subordination, limitation, The poetic and supplying a negative condition. It is not required religious types. that the two passions, eros and religion, shall be § 73. capable of existing in great strength, at the same moment, in the same mind, in order to prove that they are capable of combination, that religion does not refuse to combine with eros, but can subordinate without destroying it. If it were necessary to combine the two passions, while each was in full vigour, into a single complex state of consciousness in order to make them out compatible, they must be regarded as irreconcilable. But it is not the particular nature of the passions in question, it is the general incapacity of the mind, or of its nervous organism, to feel any two different passions strongly at the same time, which is the cause of this kind of incompatibility. This, therefore, is not the decisive circumstance; but on the contrary the decisive trial is when the passion of eros is remembered in moments of feeling the moral sense, or in moments of religion. The passion of eros thus remembered must be capable of approval by the moral sense, that is, must be capable of subsisting in consciousness without the emotion of remorse, or with that of good conscience; and so much of its accompaniments must be abandoned as cannot consist with this reflection. 27. The laws regulating external action and conduct, whether imposed by the individual upon himself, or by the concurrence of individuals upon society, must be the expression of the moral sense of the individual, or of the individuals in common, so acting as above described, and taking all circumstances, all impulses, and all tendencies, into account. Book I. § 73. religious types. But since the mass of individuals never stand upon the same moral level as the greatest and best among them, the laws imposed by society never can be The poetic and such as the best and greatest individual would impose upon himself, or upon society were it composed of his equals in moral matters. For them some greater legal restraint is needed, and they usually impose it more perseveringly than the moral reformer does, than those moral reformers at least who do not represent the principle of authority and custom. Their tendency is to allow insufficient liberty of action to those who draw their principles more directly from an inward source, whether it be from poetically or from religiously imaginative emotion. Here opens a field into which it is beyond the scope of the present work to enter. One thing only must be laid down as the result of the analysis hitherto conducted, namely, that only those restraints of law are morally justified which are recognised, dimly perhaps but yet undoubtingly, as good and right by the conscience of him on whom they are imposed; which are restraints therefore which he will make effort from within to obey and impose on his own will, and which are therefore regarded by him as aids to his own truer life. The law must be such that the persons on whom it is imposed shall never be able, in foro conscientiæ, to lay the blame of suffering its penalties on the injustice of the law, but must lay it on their own weakness and self-indulgence. § 74. 1. Difference of sex has been named in § 60 among the influences external to character; but this relates only to the actions, circumstances, and feelings, determined by the rest of the bodily organism, not by the organisation of the cerebral hemispheres. $74. Difference in character of the two sexes. It accords with analogy to suppose that the difference of sex does not stop short here, but extends to the cerebral organisation and functions; in which case there will be differences of character natural and ori ginal to the two sexes. The foregoing analysis gives some additional support to this view, by means of the different tendencies it points out in character, to which the differences commonly observed in life between the modes of thought and feeling of men and of women may be referred. The phenomena, as commonly observed, would be explained if we suppose that in man the formal, in woman the material, element is most prominent; in man the representative framework, in woman the pervading emotion; this would be the general law or general fact, of which the remainder would be cases. The first minor fact depending upon this law is not less general in its range; it is that men are most ready at perceptions of justice, as compared to the other emotions with which justice or injustice is combined, while women are most readily struck with those other emotions in preference to justice. The charm of justice as such, or in the abstract, is rarely perceived by women. The same holds with respect to another contrast between the emotional and the intellectual, in the case of truth. Coleridge says (Table-Talk, Aug. 6, 1831) that he had known many women love the good for the good's sake, but rarely or never the true for the truth's sake, meaning thereby not veracity but truth in the strict sense of the term. The good is a general term for all ultimately pleasureable emotion. 2. We may trace the same fundamental difference in other groups of emotion. In love and eros women are both more affective and less regardful of |