[#] This is why no great work of art over becomes out of date, whereas the work of a great scientist is always liable to do so, because his successors revise it in the light of ever widening knowledge.
Moreover, these activities of the mind or spirit fail to govern our lives as a whole precisely because they are contemplative and not active. We stand before the world gazing at it, setting our minds indeed to work upon it in certain ways, yet not fundamentally changing it. But we are active beings, with wills as well as contemplative minds, and our volitional action lies very largely outside the range which these activities and interests can control. And therefore it is that so little real unity is reached by means of them.
In Morality the practical instincts and impulses are for the first time included. Morality is the science or the art, or both, of living in society; of living, that is to say, as fellow members with other beings, who also have aspirations and ideals as legitimate as our own, so that our own claim to pursue our own ideals must be won by recognition of their equal claim to pursue theirs. And the man who, with full mastery of himself, if such a man exists, is following out a great purpose that is adequate to satisfy his whole nature, is a man who has achieved the conquest of Time in the completest way. It is essential to the pursuit of a purpose that we move from stage to stage, as we adapt means to our end, and yet all of it is one thing, thought and experienced as one. Indeed a test that we always instinctively apply to a biography is whether it enables us to see the different stages of a man’s life as constituting one spiritual whole. That is just what we desire the biographer to set forth before us.
At the same time Morality conquers antagonism because it is the life of fellowship. It begins with the recognition that other men have as much right to live as we have, and we buy our rights precisely by conceding theirs. Its root principle is the recognition of this brotherhood or fellow-membership. And yet it, too, never reaches its goal; it fails in two ways; every man in this world, however perfectly he may achieve mastery of his own nature—and it may be doubted if any man has ever done even that by his own strength—is so conditioned by circumstances that he is never able to make his life a perfect masterpiece of art; and as regards the whole fellowship of which he is a member, and his own relation to it, he can find no absolute rules except the command to reach a state of mind which he cannot reach by his own will. There are no moral laws that are absolute except the law to love one’s neighbour as oneself. All the rest have exceptions somewhere. "Thou shall not kill," was the formula of the old law. But we have altered it into, "Thou shalt do no murder." It is always wrong to murder, because murder is such killing as is wrong. But it is not always wrong to kill. And so we find no principle that can be made entirely binding and universal, except the law to love our neighbour as ourselves. But how are we to do it? Is there any man who seriously thinks that by taking thought he can make himself love somebody else?