Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/413

the product of a Cloud-cuckoo-town in which historical science and morality would be equally out of place. But, it may be said, your science cuts at the roots of moral conduct by treating the individual as made by conditions over which he has no control. Far from it. Our science traces a growth of social and individual freedom so far as the conditions of human life have hitherto allowed them to grow together. Nothing is really gained for morality or religion by assuming that the life with which they deal is unlimited, unconditioned; nay, such limitless pretensions have hitherto proved very fatal to morality by fostering suicidal extremes of social and individual thinking. How are these suicidal extremes to be best kept in check? By insisting on the individual and social, physical, and the physiological limits within which man moves and has moved; by answering the admirers of universal shadows, in which morality itself becomes shadowy, in the words of the Hebrew prophet: "Who hath heard such a thing? What hath seen such things? Shall a land bring forth in a day? or a people be born in a moment?"