The effort to make a distinction between acting for self and acting for one's neighbor is the basis of "morals." As long as a man feels an ultimate antagonism between himself and society, as long as he tries to hold his own life as a thing apart from that of others, so long must the question arise whether he will act for self _or_ for those others. Hence flow a long array of terms--distinctions of right and wrong, duty, selfishness, self-renunciation, altruism, etc. But when he discovers that there is no ultimate antagonism between himself and society; when he finds that the gratification of every desire which he has or can have may be rendered social, or beneficial to his fellows, by being used at the right time and place, and on the other hand that every demand made upon him by society will and must gratify some portion of his nature, some desire of his heart--why, all the distinctions collapse again; they do not hold water any more. A larger life descends upon him, which includes both sides, and prompts actions in accordance with an unwritten and unimagined law. Such actions will sometimes be accounted "selfish" by the world; sometimes they will be accounted "unselfish"; but they are neither, or--if you like--both; and he who does them concerns himself not with the names that may be given to them. The law of Equality includes all the moral codes, and is the standpoint which they cannot reach, but which they all aim at. Judged by this final standard then, it may doubtless fairly be said--since we all fall short of it--that we are all criminals, and deserve a good hiding; and even that some of us are greater criminals than others. Only of this real criminality the actual moral and legal codes afford but ineffectual tests. I may be a far worse or more self-included ("idiotic" or brutal) man than you, but the mere fact that I have violated the laws and been clapped into prison does not prove it. There may be, probably is, a real and eternal difference represented by the words Right and Wrong, but no statement that we can make will ever quite avail to define it. One use, however, of all these laws and codes in the past, imperfect though they were, may have been to gradually excite the consciousness in the individual of his opposition to society, and so prepare the way for a true reconcilement. As Paul says, "I had not known sin, but by the law," and, if we had not been cudgeled and bruised for centuries by this rough bludgeon of social convention, we should not now be so sensitive as we are to the effect of our actions upon our neighbours, nor so ready for a social life in the future which shall be superior to law.