The ethic of Jesus and of the religious thinkers of India withdraws itself completely from social to individual ethics. The utilitarianism which has become scientific ethics gives up individual ethics in order that social ethics may alone have currency. In the first case ethics can survive because it keeps possession of the mother-country, and has sacrificed only its foreign possessions. In the [pg 159] other it wishes to exert its authority in the foreign possessions while the mother-country belongs to it no more. Individual ethics without social ethics are imperfect, but they can be very deep and living. Social ethics without individual ethics are like a limb with a tourniquet round it, into which life no longer flows from the body. They become so impoverished that they really cease to be ethics any longer. The reduction to impotence of scientific, biological ethics shows itself not only in the fact that it finally makes all ethical standards merely relative. Such ethics can no longer uphold the duty of humanity as they ought to. A sinister uniformity prevails in the evolution of ethics. The ethics of antiquity began to teach humanity after they had lost in the Later Stoicism their interest in organized society as they found it existing in the ancient state. Modern utilitarianism, conversely, loses its sensitiveness to the duty of humanity in proportion to the consistency with which it develops into an ethic of organized society. It cannot be otherwise. The essence of humanity consists in this: that individuals never allow themselves to think impersonally in terms of expediency as society does, or to sacrifice individual existences in order to attain their object. The outlook which seeks the welfare of organized society cannot do anything but compromise with the sacrifice of individuals or groups of individuals. In Bentham, with whom utilitarianism is still simple and concerns itself with the conduct of individuals to the multitude of other individuals, the idea of humanity has not been tampered with. Biological, sociological utilitarianism is obliged to give it up as being sentimentality which cannot maintain itself in the face of matter-of-fact ethical reflexion. Thus sociological ethics contribute not a little to the disappearance from the modern mind of any shrinking from inhumanity. It allows individuals to adopt the mentality of society instead of keeping them in a state of tension with regard to it. [pg 160]