The ethical imperative we therefore find to possess a two-fold origin. It has external authority in the imposition of coercive rules of conduct, carrying with them social penalties or rewards, varying in degree according to the essential or trivial manner in which actions affect the lives of other individuals, and again an external one in the sympathetic action of surrounding subjective organisms upon subjective organisms in eliciting and enkindling sympathetic response. It has also an internal authority in the sympathies which, by a law of nature, grow up in the ego towards surrounding egos in the manifestation of its several subjective characteristics. Thus the ethical imperative is a growth within a man. It is also an education imposed upon him, and it is again an external social pressure accompanied by rewards and punishments. The internal ethical imperative does not exist to all men, and to them must be applied the social pressure in more or less manifest forms of scorn, denunciation, and even scant diet, and the cold frowning walls of jails, and unrewarding labour. Towards this end the legislator works, also in the removal of hindrances to life, and the promotion of education. The philanthropist gently encourages the feeble efflorescences of humanitarian sympathies. Sunday schools and pulpits more or less earnestly impress the moral obligations. Parents call forth the love and sympathy of children, and amongst brothers and sisters and companions the child first learns the lesson of mutual duty and mutual help. Occasionally in the world's history arises a prophet in whom has become concentrated in a ten-fold degree the humanitarian sentiment, and he speaks in a voice which reverberates down the outspreading avenues of time, calling forth an answering note from the attuned heart chords of the nations. CHAPTER VI. SYSTEMS OF ETHICS. Mr. Spencer very justly claims for his system that it gives a new meaning and authority to all previous systems of Ethics and theories of human action. In his system they all harmonise. Their contradictions disappear on the discovery that they are all parts of one consensus of truth. We will proceed to examine in order some of these earlier theories in their relation to the one now propounded. The idea that society is a pact or contract, though essentially untrue, since society has been a growth and not a partnership resulting from negociations, is nevertheless true in the sense that men have had to give up individual biological liberties or egoisms in entering upon the social stage. There never was any conscious bargaining, but there have been an infinite number of tacit understandings of societarian and individual adjustments which eventually brought about the well-ordered societies of modern times.