immoralities._'

Now, in the above passage we have at least one thing. We have a short
epitome of one of those classes of answers that our positive moralists
are offering us. It is with this class that I shall deal in the
following chapter; and point out as briefly as may be its complete
irrelevance. After that, I shall go on to the other.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Vide _Nineteenth Century_, No. 3, pp. 536, 537.




CHAPTER III.

SOCIOLOGY AS THE FOUNDATION OF MORALITY.


Society, says Professor Clifford, is the highest of all organisms;[9]
and its organic nature, he tells us, is one of those great facts which
our own generation has been the first to state rationally. It is our
understanding of this that enables us to supply morals with a positive
basis. It is, he proceeds, because society is organic, '_that actions
which, as individual, are insignificant, are massed together into ...
important movements. Co-operation or_ band-work _is the life of it_.'
And '_it is the practice of band-work_,' he adds, that, unknown till
lately though its nature was to us, has so moulded man as '_to create in
him two specially human faculties, the conscience and the intellect_;'