As a matter of fact everything which in the ordinary ethical valuation of the relations of men to each other ranks as good, can be brought under the description of material and spiritual maintenance or promotion of human life, and of effort to bring it to its highest value. Conversely, everything which ranks as bad in human relations is in the last analysis material or spiritual destruction or obstruction of human life, and negligence in the effort to bring it to its highest value. Separate individual categories of good and evil which lie far apart and have apparently no connexion at all with one another fit together like things which belong to each other, as soon as they are comprehended and deepened in this the most universal definition of good and evil. The basic principle of the moral means, however, not only an ordering and deepening of the current views of good and evil, but also a widening of them. A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves one’s interest as being valuable, nor, beyond that, whether and how far it can appreciate such interest. Life as such is sacred to him. He tears no leaf from a tree, plucks no flower, and takes care to crush no insect. If in summer he is working by lamplight, he prefers to keep the window shut and breathe a stuffy atmosphere rather than see one insect after another fall with singed wings upon his table. If he goes into the street after a shower and sees an earthworm which has strayed on to it, he bethinks himself that it must get dried up in the sun, if it does not get back soon enough to ground into which it can burrow, and so he lifts it from the deadly stone surface, and puts it on the grass. If he comes across an insect which has fallen into a puddle, he stops a moment in order to hold out a leaf or a stalk on which it can save itself. He is not afraid of being laughed at as sentimental. It is the fate of every truth to be a subject for laughter until [pg 248] it is generally recognized. Once it was considered folly to assume that men of colour were really men and ought to be treated as such, but the folly has become an accepted truth. To-day it is thought to be going too far to declare that constant regard for everything that lives, down to the lowest manifestations of life, is a demand made by rational ethics. The time is coming, however, when people will be astonished that mankind needed so long a time to learn to regard thoughtless injury to life as incompatible with ethics. Ethics are responsibility without limit towards all that lives.