Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/351

350 s. COIT : religion, " the joy of the Lord," the blessing of the Holy Ghost, the love of Christ. The Christian consciousness knows nothing of doing deeds " for their own sake ". What- ever asceticism Christianity may contain, it has never de- manded the renunciation of the peace and joy of self-denial. Bather has it made the inner moral sanction not only the controlling but the exclusive aim. And doubtless this ex- aggeration of zeal, together with the mystical interpretations given to the spiritual emotions, has cast discredit upon the pursuit of a subjective moral aim. But at least it must be admitted that the Christian consciousness affirms the pur- suit of the peace that comes of devotion to right to be in the highest sense virtuous. And as to the common moral judgment of the Greeks on this subject, if we regard Aristotle's judgment as a fair expression of it, it is at least not adverse to making the pleasure attending right activity "the highest good". For Aristotle refuses to distinguish between the right activity and the accompanying pleasure. He says that the pleasure belonging to the activity is more nearly related to the activity than is the desire for the activity, as this is separated from the activity both in time and by nature, but the pleasure stands very near ; and it is so hard to separate the activity from the pleasure that one may doubt whether the former is not one and the same with the latter. Aristotle seems to approach Spinoza's thought, that the delight in right activity is virtue. At least, since he seems to oppose a separation of the two and to admit that doing a deed for its own sake may be one and the same with doing it for the attendant pleasure, his testimony may also be counted on the side of the inner moral sanction as the highest good. And in the post-Aristotelian development of ethical thought, however divergent the abstract theories may have become, in their practical outcome they seem all to have agreed that the highest good was the conscious satis- faction of virtue itself. Of the many effects of adopting this aim none is more prominent and characteristic than the supreme worth with which it invests each passing moment of life. With this aim a man can no longer look upon his life as a process of gradual development toward perfection, in which each moment and day gets its meaning from its relation to the future. It is as if he were taken out of time. " To be eternal in every moment," says Schleiermacher, " that is the immortality of religion." A man's life will then appear to him like a process of crystallisation. The process may have only begun, but the crystal is already there. From the