to permit anyone who wishes to light fire from fire; to give faithful
advice to one who is in doubt; which things, as he naively remarks, "are
useful to the receiver and do no harm to the giver." [Footnote: De
Officiis, Book I, chapter xvi.]

Compare with this the admonition to love one's neighbor as oneself;
Sidgwick's "self-evident" proposition that "I ought not to prefer my own
lesser good to the greater good of another;" [Footnote: The Methods of
Ethics, Book III, chapter xiii, Sec 3.] Bentham's utilitarian formula,
"everybody to count for one, and nobody for more than one." The
admonition, "be benevolent," may mean many things.

12. THE REFLECTIVE MIND AND THE MORAL CODES.--Even the cursory glance we
have given above to the moral codes of different communities and those
proposed by individual moralists must suffice to bring any thoughtful man
to the consciousness that they differ widely among themselves, and that
the differences can scarcely be dismissed as insignificant. A little
reflection will suffice to convince him, furthermore, that to treat all
other codes as if they were mere pathological variations from his own is
indefensibly dogmatic.

On the other hand, the differences between codes should not be unduly
emphasized. The core of identity is there, and, although in its bald
abstractness it is not enough to live by, it is vastly significant,
nevertheless. If there were not some congruity in the materials, they
would never be brought together as the subject of one science. Unless
"good," "right," "obligation," "approval," etc., or the rudimentary
conceptions which foreshadow them in the mind of the most primitive human
beings, had a core of identity which could be traced in societies the
most diverse, there would be no significance in speaking of the