Moral responsibility, then,--whatever social responsibility may be,--is the responsibility of the individual to himself. The social is not necessarily the moral--let the sociological fact be what it will. The unthinking conformity of the “normal social life” is, just because it is unthinking, below the level of morality: let us call it sociality, and make morality the prerogative of the really thinking animal. In any society so constituted as to give to the individual an increase in powers as recompense for the pruning of his liberties, the unsocial will be immoral,--that is, self-destructively unreasonable and unintelligent; but even in such a society the moral would overflow the margins of the social, and would take definition ultimately from the congruity of the action with the criticised purposes of the individual self. This does not mean that all ethics lies compact in the shibboleth, “Be yourself.” Those who make the least sparing use of this phrase are too apt to consider it an excuse for lives that reek with the heat of passion and smack of insufficient evolution. These people need to be reminded--all the more forcibly since the most palatable and up-to-date philosophies exalt instinct and deride thought--that one cannot be thoroughly one’s self except by deliberation and intelligence. To act indeliberately is not to be, but in great part to cancel, one’s self. For example, the vast play of direct emotional expression is almost entirely indeliberate: if you are greatly surprised, your lips part, your eyes open a trifle wider, your pulse quickens, your respiration is affected; and if I am surprised, though you be as different from me as Hyperion from a satyr, my respiration will be affected, my pulse will quicken, my eyes will open a trifle wider, and my lips will part;--my direct reaction will be essentially the same as yours. The direct expression of surprise is practically the same in all the higher animals. Darwin’s classical description of the expression of fear is another example; it holds for every normal human being; not to speak of lower species. So with egotism, jealousy, anger, and a thousand other instinctive reaction-complexes; they are common to the species, and when we so react, we are expressing not our individual selves so much as the species to which we happen to belong. When you hit a man because he has “insulted” you, when you swagger a little after delivering a successful speech, when you push aside women and children in order to take their place in the rescue boat, when you do any one of a million indeliberate things like these, it is not you that act, it is your species, it is your ancestors, acting through you; your acquired individual difference is lost in the whirlwind of inherited impulse. Your act, as the Scholastics phrased it, is not a “human” act; you yourself are not really acting in any full measure of yourself, you are but playing slave and mouth-piece to the dead. But subject the inherited tendencies