But it seemed to Kant, as I suppose it would to anyone, that we do not restrict ourselves to this hypothetical use of the term good. There seems to us to be a distinction between a good way of thieving and a way of being good. If so, must there not be a good that is sought for its own sake and not merely for the sake of what it may lead to? Is there not a _categorical_, an _absolute_ good? And surely Kant was not very far from the thought of all of us when he sought to identify this absolute good with the moral good and with the object of virtue. Plainly we see that however good a thief a man may become, he does not increase in virtue as he advances in science. And have we not here come upon the ultimate meaning of those who contend that, let the world advance never so in its science, it grows no whit better? Its increase is altogether measured in those hypothetical goods thanks to which the thieves of today are indeed better thieves than the crude ones that used to be; but as little as ever do they know, and still less do they care, for that absolute good, that moral world, to have progressed away from which is to have gone backward indeed. What, we asked of the critics of civilization, do you take to be good? And setting aside those who have idly answered, It was good when the world was young, before Onor “bound in nets the tresses Zephyr used to scatter,”--setting aside “licentious poesy” we have found the answer of serious men to be, The world will only be good when it has become moral. Not the growth of science, but the increase in morality is real progress, progress toward the absolute good. We have then only to make plain morality’s meaning to have found what progress is. Morality no doubt first presents itself to most of us as a set of laws or maxims of conduct to follow which is virtue. These laws we may think of as delivered unto man in God’s own voice, and carved upon tables of stone. Or, if our image of their origin and authority be not so definite, we may still find moral peace in the thought that what words the still small voice of conscience whispers to us are no less God’s words. They are what Antigone took them to be-- The immutable unwritten law of Heaven. They were not born today or yesterday; They die not, and none knoweth whence they sprang.