1. In a hilly country, two or three steps sometimes measure all the interval between the basins of two rivers, whose mouths are miles apart. In the crisis of an illness the merest trifle will turn the scale between death and recovery. In a nice point of law and intricate procedure, the lawyer is aware that scarcely more than the thickness of the paper on which he writes lies between the case going for his client or for the opposite party. To rail at these fine technicalities argues a lay mind, unprofessional and undiscerning. _Hair-splitting_, so far as it is a term of real reproach, means splitting the wrong hairs. The expert in any profession knows what things to divide and distinguish finely, and what things to take in the gross. Moral Science in many respects gives its demonstrations, and can give them, only "in the way of rough drawing," as Aristotle says. ([Greek: pachulos kai tupo], _Ethics_, I., iii., 4.) But there are lines of division exceeding fine and nice in natural morality no less than in positive law. The student must not take scandal at the fine lines and subtle distinctions that we shall be obliged to draw in marking off lawful from unlawful action touching human life. 2. _It is never lawful directly to kill an innocent man_. Understand _innocent_ in the social and political sense, of a man who has not, by any _human act_ (_Ethics_, c. i., n. 2, p. 1) of his own, done any harm to society so grievous as to compare with loss of life. To kill, or work any other effect, _directly_, is to bring about that death, or other effect, willing the same, _either as an end desirable in itself_, as when a man slays his enemy, whose death of its own sheer sake is to him a satisfaction and a joy, or _as a means to an end_, as Richard III. murdered his nephews to open his own way to the throne. We must then in no case compass the death of the innocent, either _intending_ it as an _end_, or _choosing_ it as a _means_. The assertion is proved by these considerations. To kill a man is to destroy the human nature within him: for, though the soul survives, he is man no more when he is dead. Now to destroy a thing is to subordinate that thing entirely to your self and your own purposes: for that individual thing can never serve any other purpose, once it is destroyed. The man that is killed is then subordinated to the slayer, wholly given up, and as we say, _sacrificed_, to the aims and purposes of him who slays him. But that ought not to be, for man is a _person_. Body and soul in him make one person, one personal nature, which _human personality_ is destroyed in death. Now it is the property of a person to be what we may call _autocentric_, referring its own operations to itself as to a centre. Every _person_--and every intelligent nature is a person [Footnote 17]--exists and acts primarily for himself. A _thing_ is marked off from a _person_ by the aptitude of being another's and for another. We may venture to