book nor the other can have more than the faintest effect on the march of the great compact majority of the social army. Yet, while all this is so, there is still some interest in the question of morals. For, after all, there is the small body of individuals ahead, alertly eager to find the road, with a sensitive flair for all the possibilities the future may hold. When the compact majority, blind and automatic and unconscious, follows after, to tramp along the road these pioneers have discovered, it may seem but a dull road. But before they reached it that road was interesting, even passionately interesting. The reason is that, for those who, in any age, are thus situated, life is not merely a discipline. It is, or it may become, really an art. II THAT living is or may be an art, and the moralist the critic of that art, is a very ancient belief. It was especially widespread among the Greeks. To the Greeks, indeed, this belief was so ingrained and instinctive that it became an implicitly assumed attitude rather than a definitely expressed faith. It was natural to them to speak of a virtuous person as we should speak of a beautiful person. The “good” was the “beautiful”; the sphere of ethics for the Greeks was not distinguished from the sphere of æsthetics. In Sophocles, above all poets, we gather the idea of a natural agreement between duty and inclination which is at once both beauty and moral order. But it is the beautiful that seems to be most fundamental in τὸ καλὸν, which was the noble, the honourable, but fundamentally the beautiful. “Beauty is the first of all things,” said Isocrates, the famous orator; “nothing that is devoid of beauty is prized.... The admiration for virtue comes to this, that of all manifestation of life, virtue is the most beautiful.” The supremely beautiful was, for the finer sort of Greeks, instinctively if not always consciously, the supremely divine, and the Argive Hera, it has been said, “has more divinity in her countenance than any Madonna of them all.” That is how it came to pass that we have no word in our speech to apply to the Greek conception; æsthetics for us is apart from all the serious business of life, and the attempt to introduce it there seems merely comic. But the Greeks spoke of life itself as a craft or a fine art. Protagoras, who appears to-day as a pioneer of modern science, was yet mainly concerned to regard living as an art, or as the sum of many crafts, and the Platonic Socrates, his opponent, still always assumed that the moralist’s position is that of a critic of a craft. So influential a moralist as Aristotle remarks in a matter-of-fact way, in his “Poetics,” that if we wish to ascertain whether an act is, or is not, morally right we must consider not merely the intrinsic quality of the act, but the person who does it, the person to whom it is done, the time, the means, the motive. Such an attitude towards life puts out of