taken up into ourselves, and becomes part and parcel of our own personal
morality. But it then becomes quite a different matter, as we shall see
very shortly; and even then it supplies us with but a very small part of
the answer.

Thus far what has been made plain is this. General, or social happiness,
unless explained farther, is simply for moral purposes an unmeaning
phrase. It evades the whole question we are asking; for happiness is no
more differentiated by saying that it is general, than food is by saying
that everyone at a table is eating it; or than a language is by saying
that every one in a room is talking it. The social happiness of all of
us means nothing but the personal happiness of each of us; and if social
happiness have any single meaning--in other words, if it be a test of
morals--it must postulate a personal happiness of some hitherto
unexplained kind. Else sociology will be subsidiary to nothing but
individual license; general law will be but the protection of individual
lawlessness; and the completest social morality but the condition of
the completest personal un-morality. The social organism we may compare
to a yew-tree. Science will explain to us how it has grown up from the
ground, and how all its twigs must have fitting room to expand in. It
will not show us how to clip the yew-tree into a peacock. Morality, it
is true, must rest ultimately on the proved facts of sociology; and this
is not only true but evident. But it rests upon them as a statue rests
upon its pedestal, and the same pedestal will support an Athenè or a
Priapus.

The matter, however, is not yet altogether disposed of. The type of
personal happiness that social morality postulates, as a whole, we have
still to seek for. But a part of it, as I just pointed out, will, beyond
doubt, be a _willing_ obedience by each to the rules that make it in its