But, it is urged, there is no such thing as intelligence in the sense of a control of passion by reason, desire by thought. Granted; it is so much easier to admit objections than to refute them! Let intelligence be interpreted as you will, so be it you recognize in it a delayed response, a moment of reprieve before execution, giving time for the appearance of new impulses, motives, tendencies, and allowing each element in the situation to fall into its place in a coördinated whole. Let intelligence be a struggle of impulses, a survival of the fittest desire; let us contrast not reason with passion, but response delayed by the rich interplay of motive forces, with response immediately following upon the first-appearing impulse. Let impulse mean for us fruit that falls unripe from the tree, because too weak to hang till it is mature. Let us understand intelligence as not a faculty superadded to impulse, but rather that coördination of impulses which is wrought out by the blows of hard experience. The Socratic ethic fits quite comfortably into this scheme; intelligence is delayed response and morality means, Take your time. It is charged that the Socratic view involves determinism; and this charge, too, is best met with open-armed admission. We need not raise the question of the pragmatic value of the problem. But to suppose that determinism destroys moral responsibility is to betray the mid-Victorian origin of one’s philosophy. Men of insight like Socrates, Plato, and Spinoza, saw without the necessity of argument that moral responsibility is not a matter of freedom of will, but a relation of means to ends, a responsibility of the agent to himself, an intelligent coördination of impulses by one’s ultimate purposes. Any other morality, whatever pretty name it may display, is the emasculated morality of slaves. VIII The Secularization of Morals The great problem involved in the Socratic ethic lies, apparently, in the bearings of the doctrine on social unity and stability. Apparently; for it is wholesome to remember that social organization, like the Sabbath, was made for man, and not the other way about. If social organization demands of the individual more sacrifices than its advantages are worth to him, then the stability of that organization is not a problem, it is a misfortune. But if the state does not demand such sacrifices, the advantage of the individual will be in social behavior; and the question whether he will behave socially becomes a question of how much intelligence he has, how clear-eyed he is in ferreting out his own advantage. In a state that does not ask more from its members than it gives, morality and intelligence and social behavior will not quarrel. The social problem appears here as the twofold problem of, first, making men intelligent, and, second, making social organization so great an advantage to the individual as to insure social behavior in all intelligent men.