The modern man is unable any longer to think of himself as a single personality approaching an everlasting judgment. He is one man to-day and another to-morrow, one person here and another there. He does not feel he knows himself. He is sure that no one else knows him at all. His motives are intricate, and not wholly what they seem. He is moved by impulses which he feels but cannot describe. There are dark depths in his nature which no one has ever explored. There are splendors which are unreleased. He has become greatly interested in his moods. The precise nuances of his likes and dislikes have become very important. There is no telling just what he is or what he may become, but there is a certain breathless interest in having one of his selves watch and comment upon the mischief and the frustrations of his other selves. The problems of his character have become dissociated from any feeling that they involve his immortal destiny. They have become dissociated from the feeling that they deeply matter. From the feeling that [p114] they are deeply his own. From the feeling that there is any personality to own them. There they are: his inferiority complex and mine, your sadistic impulse and Tom Jones’s, Anna’s father fixation, and little Willie’s pyromania. The thoroughly modern man has really ceased to believe that there is an immortal essence presiding like a king over his appetites. The word ‘soul’ has become a figure of speech, which he uses loosely, sometimes to mean his tenderer aspirations, sometimes to mean the whole collection of his impulses, sometimes, when he is in a hurry, to mean nothing at all. It is certainly not the fashion any longer to think of the soul as a little lord ruling the turbulent rabble of his carnal passions; the constitutional form in popular psychology to-day is republican. Each impulse may invoke the Bill of Rights, and have its way if the others will let it. As Bertrand Russell has put it: “A single desire is no better and no worse, considered in isolation, than any other; but a group of desires is better than another group if all of the first group can be satisfied, while in the second group some are inconsistent with others,” but since, unhappily as is usually the case, desires are extremely inconsistent, the uttermost that the modern man can say is that the victory must go to the strongest desires. Morality thus becomes a traffic code designed to keep as many desires as possible moving together without too many violent collisions. When men insist that morality is more than that, they are quickly denounced, in general correctly, as Meddlesome Matties, as enemies of human liberty, or as schemers trying to get the better of their fellow men. Morality, conceived as a discipline [p115] to fit men for heaven, is resented; morality, conceived as a discipline for happiness, is understood by very few. The objective moral certitudes have dissolved, and in the liberal philosophy there is nothing to take their place.