But in two directions this conception of morality needs to be supplementing. There is, on one hand, what is called duty to God. The phrase is not altogether appropriate: for it follows too closely the analogy of social requirement, and treats Deity as an additional and social authority,--a lord paramount over merely human sovereigns. But though there may be some use in the analogy, to press the conception is seriously to narrow the divine character and the scope of religion. As in similar cases, we cannot change one term without altering its correlative. And therefore to describe our relation to God under the name of duty is to narrow and falsify that relation. The word is no longer applicable in this connexion without a strain, and where it exists it indicates the survival of a conception of theocracy: of God regarded as a glorification of the magistrate, as king of kings and lord of lords. It is the social world--and indeed we may say the outside of the social world--that is the sphere of duties. Duty is still with these reductions a great august name: but in literal strictness it only rules over the medial sphere of life, the sphere which lies between the individual as such and his universal humanity(63). Beyond duty, lies the sphere of conscience and of religion. And that is not the mere insistence by the individual to have a voice and a vote in determining the social order. It is the sense that the social order, however omnipotent it may seem, is limited and finite, and that man has in him a kindred with the Eternal.
It is not very satisfactory, either, as Aristotle and others have pointed out, to speak of man's duties to himself. The phrase is analogical, like the other. But it has the merit, like that of duty to God, of reminding us that the ordinary latitude occupied by morality is not all that comes under the larger scope of ethics. The "ethics of individual life" is a subject which Mr. Spencer has touched upon: and by this title, he means that, besides his general relationship to others, a human being has to mind his own health, food, and amusement, and has duties as husband and parent. But, after all, these are not matters of peculiarly individual interest. They rather refer to points which society at certain epochs leaves to the common sense of the agent,--apparently on an assumption that he is the person chiefly interested. And these points--as the Greeks taught long ago--are of fundamental importance: they are the very bases of life. Yet the comparative neglect in which so-called civilised societies(64) hold the precepts of wisdom in relation to bodily health and vigour, in regard to marriage and progeny, serve to illustrate the doctrine of the ancient Stoics that { ~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~} { ~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH DASIA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER PSI~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}, or the modern idealist utterance that the World is my idea. More and more as civilisation succeeds in its disruption of man from nature, it shows him governed not by bare facts and isolated experiences, but by the systematic idea under which all things are subsumed. He loses the naïveté of the natural man, which takes each fact as it came, all alike good: he becomes sentimental, and artificial, sees things under a conventional point of view, and would rather die than not be in the fashion. And this tendency is apparently irresistible. Yet the mistake lies in the one-sidedness of sentiment and convention. Not the domination of the idea is evil; but the domination of a partial and fragmentary idea: and this is what constitutes the evil of artificiality. And the correction must lie not in a return to nature, but in the reconstruction of a wider and more comprehensive idea: an idea which shall be the unity and system of all nature; not a fantastic idealism, but an attempt to do justice to the more realist as well as the idealist sides of life.