The tendency to make of society the universal scapegoat is not, one
scarcely needs add, to be ascribed entirely to the romantic moralist.
It is only one aspect of the denial of the human law, of the assumption
that because man is partly subject to the natural law he is entirely
subject to it; and in this dehumanizing of man the rationalist has
been at least as guilty as the emotionalist. If the Rousseauist hopes
to find a substitute for all the restraining virtues in sympathy, the
rationalistic naturalist, who is as a rule utilitarian with a greater
or smaller dash of pseudo-science, hopes to find a substitute for these
same virtues in some form of machinery. The legislative mill to which
our “uplifters” are so ready to resort, is a familiar example. If our
modern society continues to listen to those who are seeking to persuade
it that it is possible to find mechanical or emotional equivalents for
self-control, it is likely, as Rousseau said of himself, to show a
“great tendency to degenerate.”
The fact on which the moral positivist would rest his effort to
rehabilitate self-control is, as I have said, the presence in man of
a restraining, informing and centralizing power that is anterior to
both intellect and emotion. Such a power, it must be freely granted, is
not present equally in all persons; in some it seems scarcely to exist
at all. When released from outer control, they are simply unchained
temperaments; whereas in others this superrational perception seems to
be singularly vivid and distinct. This is the psychological fact that
underlies what the theologian would term the mystery of grace.