The life in which there is most of life! By holding fast to this clue we shall, I think, see our way through many of the obscurities in which, partly by the search for an extra-natural basis of morality, partly by the reactionary attempt to base morality simply on the striking of a balance between pleasures and pains, the philosophy of right and wrong has been involved. We get a natural basis for establishing a scale in human action, a distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower,’ without which a philosophic ethics is clearly impossible. I do not, of course, mean to say that it is possible to apply a mechanical rule and measure to moral action in the manner of Catholic casuistry, according to which it is a venial sin to steal 19s. 6d. but a mortal sin to steal £1.[148] Still, the existence of a natural scale is evident at once when we consider the fact that man is constantly being placed in positions in which his action may either thwart and depress life, or simply maintain it, or markedly enrich and extend it. The ethical quality of his action appears to arise from the fact that it is possible for him, under the impulse of immediate personal gratification, to do things which if commonly done by men would destroy the beauty and order of human life. The interests of the whole and of the individual may be identical, as we have said, in the long run, but at the moment they are often in violent conflict. Allowing for the fact that it is never possible in nature to draw a sharp dividing line between different classes of being, and to say absolutely that things are _thus_ on one side of it and _thus_ on the other, we may repeat that this opposition between the long-run or universal and the momentary or personal interest is a characteristic of human life as opposed to that of the lower animals. It arises from the strong sense of individuality, of selfhood, which emerges in man and of which the animals know little or nothing. In itself it is a new and noble power of life, but it has its fatal and mischievous aspect. Without it we should know neither good nor evil. Personality is at once man’s pride and his fall.