of interests. The great increments to ethical thought have always come as a result of reflection and analysis made necessary through social changes and the discrediting of traditions, a typical illustration of which was the Athens of Socrates.

A vigorous social conscience obviously makes great demand upon the moral imagination. It only exists, therefore, where there is an advanced stage of enlightenment. The best ethical ideas of an age are never the possession of the average man. They are living realities only in the refined and highly organized sentiments of moral leaders. The average man, especially in a dynamic society, shares in this higher realm of ethical insight but only because he takes the great moral leader as his guide. For these subtler values are objectified in the personality of the leader and thus find their way through suggestion and imitation and the countless avenues of social contact into the moral life of the community. Lincoln has furnished moral "social copy" to Americans for over half a century. The demands upon the moral imagination of the average man are increasing constantly. The abstract idea is becoming more and more the basis of social relations. We are living in the organic phase and the sins and social injustices of which we complain can be seen only with the mind's eye.

§ 4. THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE AND THE VIRTUES

It should be obvious from the foregoing analysis that the social conscience is closely connected with the idea of virtue. Broadly speaking, virtue is the term we apply to some phase of character or habit of will that is recognized as having social merit. According to Aristotle, moral virtue is not something implanted in us by nature but is the outcome of habit or, in modern parlance, of the organizations of the sentiments. Men gain this habit by acting in certain ways in society. "The virtues we acquire by first exercising them, as is the case with all the arts, for it is by doing what we ought to do when we have gained the arts that we learn the arts themselves; we become, for example, builders by building and harpists by playing the harp. Similarly it is by doing just acts that we become just,

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by doing temperate acts that we become temperate, by doing courageous acts that we become courageous. The experience of states is a witness to this truth, for it is by training the habits that legislators make good citizens." The virtues, then, sum up those phases of character that are recognized by all members of the community as of special importance for the maintenance of a healthful social life.

As it was in democratic Athens that social self-consciousness first reached an advanced stage of development, so it was there that thinkers first tried to classify the virtues or socially valuable phases of character. Aristotle's catalogue includes such qualities as liberality, high-mindedness, magnificence, wittiness, and friendship, all held in high esteem in ancient Athens. But the outstanding virtues are courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. Both Aristotle and Plato conceived of these phases of character in a highly rationalistic fashion. Courage, for Aristotle, is the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice, temperance the mean between licentiousness and insensibility. Reason or insight, therefore, is the determining factor in the shaping of a virtue. And yet even for Aristotle "the good of man is an activity of soul in accordance with virtue or, if there are more virtues than one, in accordance with the best and most complete virtue. But it is necessary to add the words,' in a complete life"." Evidently there was back of this phrase "in a complete life" the image of the Athenian city-state as the setting that determined these virtues. Hence Plato in his Republic, a sketch of the ideal state that is to make possible the comprehensive virtue of justice, really gives us an idealization of existing Athenian society.

Much of the formalism and lack of human interest that has characterized the traditional treatment of the virtues is due to the failure to recognize that virtues are really types or phases of the organization of the sentiments of the average man brought about by the stresses and strains of the social order in which he lives. It is true that more than any people of history the Greeks struck the universal human note in the arts and 1 Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Ch. 1.

formulated the enduring problems of philosophy. Hence it is possible to find points of similarity between the Aristotelian definitions of courage, temperance, wisdom or justice, and the prevailing ethical ideals of subsequent civilization. But it should not be forgotten that Athenian society has never been duplicated. The peculiar structure of the groups and communities that have lived since the fourth century B.C. have varied infinitely. Hence the structure of the social conscience of every age and more or less of every nation must necessarily be different. Variations of political, religious, economic, or social emphasis will tend to bring those virtues or organizations of the moral sentiments into prominence that harmonize with the demands of the social structure while discrediting other virtues that do not harmonize.

It is most instructive to contrast the structure of the social conscience of Athenian society reflected in Aristotle's classification of the virtues in the second book of his Nicomachean Ethics with the structure of the social conscience of the early Christians as reflected in their writings. It will be found that in the latter the virtue of high-mindedness is subordinated to that of humility; magnificence and liberality, which presuppose an ethical evaluation of great wealth, disappear while poverty is stressed; the civic virtues of courage and justice make way for passive attitudes of meekness, forbearance, gentleness, charity; the intellectual virtues of wisdom, sagacity, and the like are discounted entirely. It is impossible to understand this almost complete transvaluation of values without keeping in mind the totally different setting, social, political, and economic that effected such a striking difference in the organization of the social conscience of the early Christians.

After the rise of institutional Christianity that brought the priest and the sacrament into the center of the stage and made them the dispensers of spiritual truth and power, and after the formulation of the great creeds such as that of Nicea in 325, it is possible to detect another shifting of ethical values in the social conscience. We now find that the so-called Christian

virtues of faith and love are made fundamental in character. It is only after regenerating faith has touched the springs of moral power and made possible the life of love that the individual is able to cultivate effectively the virtues of temperance, wisdom, courage, and justice. In the mind of as great a thinker as Augustine the virtues of Aristotle were all but discounted; they had no merit in and of themselves. For him the virtues of the pagan, that is of the unregenerate soul, were gilded vices". Later in the famous regula of St. Benedict of Nursia (circa 530 A.D.) we have an outline of a most elaborate group life designed to surround the monk with a social discipline that would give to his moral sentiments a form of organization in which humility holds the highest place among the virtues. With the advent of Protestantism a social discipline arose, the tendency of which was to create another type of social conscience and another scale of moral values. Lecky has shown how the rise of an industrial society has tended to emphasize the virtues of veracity, order, sobriety, thrift, while diminishing the virtues so prized in the middle ages, namely, reverence and humility.

It should be plain from this brief sketch that there are no fixed norms of the social conscience that persist the same from age to age. The so-called virtues of the moral theorist are in reality variable terms, purely formal concepts. They give in broad schematic form the outstanding characteristics of the organized moral sentiments of every age. There is no classification of the virtues that is final. What we have is an everchanging mass of moral sentiment that is being molded to fit the needs of a social order that is never static. With the shifts of emphasis, the redistribution of the stresses and strains, comes a change in the moral emphasis. The virtues are after all comprehensive norms that men find indispensable for the solution of the eternal social problem. These norms cannot possibly be any more permanent than the human order that gave them birth.

This does not mean that the moral life is essentially relativistic. The social conscience presupposes continuity of social

traditions. The ethical generalizations of the social conscience cannot be viewed as merely the results of the needs of one given stage isolated from the past. Ethical norms arise as part of the social process and are related both to the future and to the past. They are organically connected with the past and yet they do not grow out of it by strict logical sequence. They look to the future and yet they do not anticipate in its entirety the nature of the ethical ideal as it will take shape a decade or a generation hence. Our present formulation of the ethical ideal derives its concrete content from the conflicting interests concerned in the immediate social order. We depend upon the past for perspective and the critical estimate of the values concerned. The particular application we are to make of the formal ethical norms to modern conditions and the content of the norms concerned are problems our age together with every other age must solve for itself.

The ideal toward which society moves with blundering steps is one in which all the members of a given stage of the social process shall set themselves the common task of adjusting intelligently their differences in terms of clearly defined authoritative ethical norms. It is hardly conceivable that the social conscience should ever be brought under rational control and direction to the same extent that this is possible in the case of the individual conscience. But we may hope for a far closer approximation to the purposefulness and continuity of the individual conscience than now exists. And of this we may be sure, in that direction alone lies society's hope for social peace, the elimination of friction and the stoppage of the incontinent waste of human values.