fellow-man to be loyal. Now, as we also set forth at the last lecture, one of the most effective of these ways lies in being loyal your self to some personally chosen and determi nate social cause which constitutes your busi ness. This special cause need not be one in which the particular fellow-man whom you are just now to help is, at the moment, directly interested. Your very loyalty to your own cause will tend to prove infectious. Who ever is loyal to his own therefore helps on the cause of universal loyalty by his every act of devotion, precisely in so far as he refrains from any hostile attack upon the loyalty of other people, and simply lets his example of loyalty work. Whoever makes the further ance of universal loyalty his cause, lacks, therefore, neither practical means nor pres ent opportunity for serving his cause.
To each man our principle therefore says: Live in your own way a loyal life and one subject to the general principle of loyalty to loyalty. Serve your own cause, but so choose it and so serve it that in consequence of your life loyalty amongst men shall prosper. For tune may indeed make the range of your choice of your calling very narrow. Neces sity may bind you to an irksome round of tasks. But sweeten these with whatever loy alty you can consistently get into your life. Let loyalty be your pearl of great price. Sell all the happiness that you possess or can get in disloyal or in non-loyal activities, and buy that pearl. When you once have found, or begun to find, your personal cause, be as stead ily faithful to it as loyalty to loyalty henceforth permits. That is, if you find that a cause once chosen does indeed involve disloyalty to loyalty, as one might find who, having sworn fidelity to a leader, afterwards discov ered his leader to be a traitor to the cause of mankind, you may have altogether to abandon the cause first chosen. But never abandon a cause except for the sake of some higher or deeper loyalty such as actually requires the change.
Meanwhile, the principle of loyalty to loyalty obviously requires you to respect loyalty in all men, wherever you find it. If your fellow's cause has, in a given case, assailed your own, and if, in the world as it is, conflict is inevitable, you may then have to war with your fellow's cause, in order to be loyal to your own. But even then, you may never assail whatever is sincere and genuine about his spirit of loyalty. Even if your fellow's cause involves disloyalty to mankind at large, you may not condemn the loyalty of your fellow in so far as it is loyalty. You may condemn only his blindly chosen cause. All the loyal are brethren. They are children of one spirit. Loyalty to loyalty involves the active furtherance of this spirit wherever it appears. Fair play in sport, chivalrous respect for the adversary in war, tolerance of the sincere beliefs of other men, — all these virtues are thus to be viewed as mere variations of loy alty to loyalty. Prevent the conflict of loyal ties when you can, minimize such conflict where it exists, and, by means of fair play and of the chivalrous attitude towards the opponent, utilize even conflict, where it is inevitable, so as to further the cause of loyalty to loyalty. Such maxims are obvious conse quences of our principle. Do we not gain, then, a great deal from our principle in the way of unifying our moral code?
II But next, as to those just-mentioned para doxes of popular morality, do we not gain from our principle a guide to help us through the maze? "Be just; but also be kind." These two precepts, so far as they are sound, merely emphasize, as we pointed out at the close of our last lecture, two distinct but inseparable aspects of loyalty. My cause links my fellow and myself by social ties which, in the light of our usual human inter pretation of life, appear to stand for superpersonal interests, — for interests in property rights, in formal obligations, in promises, in various abstractly definable relations. If I am loyal, I respect these relations. And I do so since, from the very definition of a cause to which one can be loyal, this cause will become nothing unless these ties are preserved intact. But to respect relations as such is to be what men call just. Meanwhile, our common cause also personally interests both my fellow and myself. So far as we both know the cause, we love it, and delight in it. Hence in being loyal to our cause, I am also being kind to my fellow. For hereby I further his delight in just so far as I help him to insight. But kindness which is not bound up with loyalty is as a sounding brass and as a tinkling cymbal, a mere sentimentalism. And abstract justice, apart from loyalty, is a cruel formalism. My fellow wants to be loyal. This is his deepest need. If I am loyal to that need, I therefore truly delight him. But kindness that is not bound up with loyalty may indeed amuse my fellow for a moment. Yet like "fancy," such kindness "dies in the cradle where it lies." Even so, if I am loyal, I am also just. But justice that is no aspect of loyalty has no reason for existence. The true relations of benevolence and justice can therefore be best defined in terms of our conception of loyalty.
If any one says, "I will show thee my justice or my kindness without my loyalty," the loyal man may rightly respond, " I will show thee my kindness and my justice by my loyalty."
In a similar fashion, the moral problems regarding the right relations of strictness to generosity, of prudent foresight to present confidence, of self-surrender to self-assertion, of love to the righteous resistance of enemies, - all these moral problems, I say, are best to be solved in terms of the principle of loyalty to loyalty. As to the problem of the true concern and regard for the self, the loyal man culti vates himself, and is careful of his property rights, just in order to furnish to his cause an effective instrument; but he aims to forget precisely so much of himself as is, at any time, an obstruction to his loyalty; and he also aims to be careless of whatever about his private fortunes may be of no importance to his ser vice of the cause. When he asserts himself, he does so because he has neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak save as his cause commands; and it is of precisely such self-sacrificing selfassertion that the foes of his cause would do well to beware. All the paradoxes about the care of self and the abandonment of self are thus soluble in terms of loyalty. Whoever knows and possesses the loyal attitude, ipso facto solves these paradoxes in each special case as it arises. And whoever comprehends the nature of loyalty to loyalty, as it is ex pressed in the form of fair play in sport, of chivalry in war, of tolerance in belief, and of the spirit that seeks to prevent the conflict of loyalties where such prevention is possible, — whoever, I say, thus comprehends what loyalty to loyalty means, holds the key to all the familiar mysteries about the right relation of the love of man to the strenuous virtues, and to the ethics of conflict.
Ill As you see, it is my deliberate intention to maintain that the principle of loyalty to loyalty is a sufficient expression of what common sense calls "the dictates of conscience." When I state this thesis, it leads me, however, to a somewhat new question, which the title of this lecture is intended to emphasize.
Stated practically, this our next question takes the form of asking: Is the principle of loyalty to loyalty not only a means of solving certain perplexities, but an actually general, safe, and sufficient test of what is right and wrong in the doubtful moral situations which may arise in daily life? We have shown that the well-recognized duties and virtues, such as those which have to do with truth-speak ing, with courtesy, with fair play in sport, and with chivalrous regard for enemies, can indeed be regarded, if we choose, as special forms of loyalty to loyalty. But it is indeed one thing (as you may now interpose) to interpret in terms of our principle certain virtues or duties that we already recognize. It is another thing to use the concept of loyalty to loyalty as an universal means of finding out what it is right to do when one is otherwise in doubt. Is our principle always a serviceable prac tical guide? Or, to use the well-known term, does our principle adequately express what people usually mean by the "dictates of con science"?
The word "conscience," which here becomes important for our philosophy of loyalty, is a term of many uses. The problem as to the true nature of the human conscience is a com plicated and difficult one. I shall here deal with the matter only in so far as is necessary for our own distinctly practical purpose. In expounding my precept, Be loyal to loyalty, I have set forth what does indeed pretend to be a general guiding maxim for conduct. But most of us, when we say, " My conscience dic tates this or this sort of conduct," are not disposed to think of conscience as definable in terms of any one maxim. Our conscience seems to us to represent, in our ordinary lives, a good many related but nevertheless dis tinct motives, such as prudence, charity, reasonableness, piety, and so on. Conscience also seems to us somewhat mysterious in many of its demands, so that we often say, "I do not precisely know why this or this is right; but I feel sure that it is right, for my conscience tells me so." Since, then, con science seems so complex and sometimes so mysterious a power, you may naturally hesi tate to accept the views of a moralist who attempts, as you may think, to simplify too much the requirements of conscience. You may still insist that the moral doctrine which I have so far set forth is in one respect like all other philosophies of conduct that fill the history of ethical thought; because, as you may insist, this theory is powerless to tell any one what to do when a really perplexing case of conscience arises.
The reproach that moral philosophers have fine-sounding principles to report, but can never tell us how these principles practically apply, except when the cases are such as common sense has already decided, --this is an old objection to philosophical ethics. I want to show you how I myself meet that objection, and in what way, and to what extent, as I think, the principle of loyalty to loyalty does express the true dictates of conscience, and does tell us what to do in doubtful cases.
What is conscience? You will all agree that the word names a mental possession of ours which enables us to pass some sort of judgment, correct or mistaken, upon moral questions as they arise. My conscience, then, belongs to my mental equipment, and tells me about right and wrong conduct. More over, my conscience approves or disapproves my conduct, excuses me or accuses me. About the general nature and office of the conscience we all of us, as I suppose, so far agree. Our differences regarding our con science begin when questions arise of the following sort: Is our conscience inborn? Is it acquired by training? Are its dictates the same in all men? Is it God-given? Is it infallible? Is it a separate power of the mind? Or is it simply a name for a collection of habits of moral judgment which we have acquired through social training, through reasoning, and through personal experience of the con sequences of conduct?
IV IV In trying to meet these questions so far as they here concern us, it is important next to note a few fundamental features which char acterize the personal life of all of us. The first of these features appears if one, instead of stopping with the question, "What is my conscience?" goes deeper still and asks the question, "Who and what am I?" This latter question also has indeed countless as pects, and a complete answer to it would con stitute an entire system of metaphysics. But for our present purpose it is enough to note that I cannot answer the question, "Who am I?" except in terms of some sort of statement of the plans and purposes of my life. In re sponding to the question, "Who are you?" a man may first mention his name. But his name is a mere tag. He then often goes on to tell where he lives, and where he comes from. His home and his birthplace, however, are already what one may call purposeful aspects of his personality. For dwelling-place, country, birthplace, and similar incidental facts about a man tend to throw light upon his per sonality mainly because they are of importance for a further knowledge of his social relations, and so of his social uses and activities.
But the answer to the question, "Who are you?" really begins in earnest when a man mentions his calling, and so actually sets out upon the definition of his purposes and of the way in which these purposes get expressed in his life. And when a man goes on to say, "I am the doer of these and these deeds, the friend of these friends, the enemy of these opposing purposes, the member of this family, the one whose ideals are such and such, and are so and so expressed in my life," the man expresses to you at length whatever is most ex pressible and worth knowing in answer to the question, "Who are you?"
To sum up, then, I should say that a person, an individual self, may be defined as a human life lived according to a plan. If a man could live with no plan at all, purposelessly and quite passively, he would in so far be an organism, and also, if you choose, he would be a psycho logical specimen, but he would be no per sonality. Wherever there is personality, there are purposes worked out in life. If, as often happens, there are many purposes connected with the life of this human creature, many plans in this life, but no discoverable unity and coherence of these plans, then in so far there are many glimpses of selfhood, many fragmen tary selves present in connection with the life of some human organism. But there is so far no one self, no one person discoverable. You are one self just in so far as the life that goes on in connection with your organism has some one purpose running through it. By the terms " this person " and " this self," then, we mean this human life in so far as it expresses some one purpose. Yet, of course, this one purpose which is expressed in the life of a single self need not be one which is defined by this self in abstract terms. On the contrary, most of us are aware that our lives are unified, after a fashion, by the very effort that we more or less vaguely make to assert ourselves somehow as individuals in our world. Many of us have not yet found out how it would be best to assert our selves. But we are trying to find out. This very effort to find out gives already a certain unity of purpose to our lives.
But in so far as we have indeed found out some cause, far larger than our individual selves, to which we are fully ready to be loyal, this very cause serves to give the required unity to our lives, and so to determine what manner of self each of us is, even though we chance to be unable to define in abstract terms what is the precise nature of this very cause. Loyalty may be sometimes almost dumb; it is so in many of those obscure and humble models of loyalty of whom I have already spoken. They express their loyalty clearly enough in deeds. They often could not very well formulate it in words. They could not give an abstract account of their business. Yet their loyalty gives them a business. It unifies their activities. It makes of each of these loyal beings an individual self, — a life unified by a purpose. This purpose may in such cases come to consciousness merely as a willing hunger to serve the cause, a proud obedience to the ideal call. But in any case, wherever loyalty is, there is selfhood, personality, indi vidual purpose embodied in a life.
And now, further, if the argument of our first and second lectures is right, wherever a human selfhood gets practically and consciously unified, there is some form of loyalty. For, except in terms of some sort of loyal purpose, as we saw, this mass of instincts, of passions, of social interests, and of private rebellious ness, whereof the nature of any one of us is originally compounded, can never get any effective unity whatever.
To sum up so far, — a self is a life in so far as it is unified by a single purpose. Our loyalties furnish such purposes, and hence make of us conscious and unified moral per sons. Where loyalty has not yet come to any sort of definiteness, there is so far present only a kind of inarticulate striving to be an indi vidual self. This very search for one's true self is already a sort of life-purpose, which, as far as it goes, individuates the life of the person in question, and gives him a task. But loyalty brings the individual to full moral self-con sciousness. It is devoting the self to a cause that, after all, first makes it a rational and uni fied self, instead of what the life of too many a man remains, — namely, a cauldron of seeth ing and bubbling efforts to be somebody, a cauldron which boils dry when life ends.
V V But what, you may now ask, has all this view of the self to do with conscience? I answer that the nature of conscience can be under stood solely in terms of such a theory of the self as the one just sketched.
Suppose that I am, in the foregoing sense, a more or less completely unified and loyal self. Then there are two aspects of this selfhood which is mine. I live a life; and I have, as a loyal being, an ideal. The life itself is not the ideal. They are and always remain in some sense distinct. For no one act of my life, and no limited set of acts of mine, can ever completely embody my ideal. My ideal comes to me from my cause, as the ideal of the Speaker of the House of Commons, in the story that we have already used to illustrate loyalty, came to him from the House. My cause, how ever, is greater than my individual life. Hence it always sets before me an ideal which de mands more of me than I have yet done, — more, too, than I can ever at any one instant accomplish. Even because of this vastness of my ideal, even because that to which I am loyal is so much greater than I ever become, even because of all this can my ideal unify my life, and make a rational self of me.
Hence, if I am indeed one self, my one ideal is always something that stands over against my actual life; and each act of this life has to be judged, estimated, determined, as to its moral value, in terms of the ideal. My cause, therefore, as it expresses itself to my own con sciousness through my personal ideal, — my cause and my ideal taken together, and viewed as one, perform the precise function which tra dition has attributed to conscience. My cause, then, for our philosophy of loyalty, is my con science, — my cause as interpreted through my ideal of my personal life. When I look to my cause, it furnishes me with a conscience; for it sets before me a plan or ideal of life, and then constantly bids me contrast this plan, this ideal, with my transient and momentary impulses.
To illustrate: Were I a loyal judge on the bench, whose cause was my official function, then my judicial conscience would be simply my whole ideal as a judge, when this ideal was contrasted with any of my present and nar rower views of the situation directly before me. If, at a given moment, I tended to lay unfair stress upon one side of a controversy that had been brought into my court, my ideal would say: But a judge is impartial. If I were dis posed to decide with inadvised haste, the ideal would say: But a judge takes account of the whole law bearing on the case. If I were offered bribes, my judicial conscience would reject them as being once for all ideally intol erable. In order to have such a judicial conscience, I should, of course, have to be able to view my profession as the carrying out of some one purpose, and so as one cause. This pur pose I should have learned, of course, from the traditions of the office. But I should have had willingly to adopt these traditions as my own, and to conceive my own life in terms of them, in order to have a judicial conscience of my own. Analogous comments could be made upon the conscience of an artist, of a states man, of a friend, or of a devoted member of a family, of any one who has a conscience. To have a conscience, then, is to have a cause, to unify your life by means of an ideal determined by this cause, and to compare the ideal and the life.
If this analysis is right, your conscience is simply that ideal of life which constitutes your moral personality. In having your conscience you become aware of your plan of being your self and nobody else. Your conscience pre sents to you this plan, however, in so far as the plan or ideal in question is distinct from the life in which you are trying to embody your plan. Your life as it is lived, your experi ences, feelings, deeds, — these are the embodi ment of your ideal plan, in so far as your ideal plan for your own individual life as this self, gets embodied at all.
But no one act of yours ever expresses your plan of life perfectly. Since you thus always have your cause beyond you, there is always more to do. So the plan or ideal of life comes to stand over against your actual life as a gen eral authority by which each deed is to be tested, just as the judicial conscience of the judge on the bench tests each of his official acts by comparing it with his personal ideal of what a judge should be. My conscience, therefore, is the very ideal that makes me this rational self, the very cause that inspires and that unifies me. Viewed as something within myself, my conscience is the spirit of the self, first moving on the face of the waters of natural desire, and then gradually creating the heav ens and the earth of this life of the individual man. This spirit informs all of my true self, yet is nowhere fully expressed in any deed.
So that, in so far as we contrast the ideal with the single deed, we judge ourselves, condemn ourselves, or approve ourselves.
Our philosophy of loyalty thus furnishes us with a theory of a certain kind of conscious ness which, in any case, precisely fulfils the functions of the traditional conscience. I need hardly say that the conscience which I have now described is not in its entirety at all innate. On the contrary, it is the flower rather than the root of the moral life. But unquestionably we should never get it unless we possessed an innate power to become reasonable, unless we were socially disposed beings, unless we were able so to develop our reason and our social powers as to see that the good of mankind is indeed also our own good, and, in brief, unless we inherited a genuine moral nature.
With this view of the nature of conscience, what can we say as to the infallibility of such a conscience? I answer: My conscience is pre cisely as fallible or as infallible as my choice of a cause is subject to error, or is of such nature as to lead me aright. Since loyalty, in so far as it is loyalty, is always a good, the conscience of any loyal self is never wholly a false guide. Since loyalty may be in many respects blind, one's conscience also may be in many respects misleading. On the other hand, your con science, at any stage of its development, is unquestionably the best moral guide that you then have, simply because, so far as it is viewed as an authority outside of you, it is your ideal, your cause, set before you; while, in so far as it is within you, it is the spirit of your own self, the very ideal that makes you any rational moral person whatever. Apart from it you are a mere pretence of moral personality, a manifold fermentation of desires. And as you have only your own life to live, your con science alone can teach you how to live that life. But your conscience will doubtless grow with you, just as your loyalty and your cause will grow. The best way to make both of them grow is to render up your life to their service and to their expression.
Conscience, as thus defined, is for each of us a personal affair. In so far as many of us are fellow-servants of the same cause, and, above all, in so far as all of us, if we are en lightened, are fellow-servants of the one cause of universal loyalty, we do indeed share in the same conscience. But in so far as no two of us can live the same life, or be the same indi vidual human self, it follows that no two of us can possess identical consciences, and that no two of us should wish to do so. Your con science is not mine; yet I share with you the same infinite realm of moral truth, and we are subject to the same requirement of loyalty to loyalty. This requirement must interpret itself to us all in endlessly varied ways. The loyal are not all monotonously doing the same thing. Yet they individually partake of the one endlessly varied and manifold spirit of loyalty. As to whether conscience is in any sense divine, we shall learn something in our closing lecture upon the relations of Loyalty and Religion.
VI So far as is needful for our present practical purpose, the theory of the conscience which our philosophy of loyalty requires is now before you. We needed this theory in order to pre pare the way for answering the question: In how far does the law, Be loyal to loyalty, enable us to decide cases of moral doubt? In how far does this principle furnish a means of discovering these special precepts about single cases which common sense calls the "dictates of conscience"?
How do moral doubts arise in the mind of a loyal person? I answer: Moral doubts arise in the loyal mind when there is an apparent conflict between loyalties. As a fact, that cause, which in any sense unifies a life as com plex as my human life is, must of course be no perfectly simple cause. By virtue of my nature and of my social training, I belong to a family, to a community, to a calling, to a state, to humanity. In order to be loyal to loyalty, and in order to be a person at all, I must indeed unify my loyalty. In the meantime, however, I must also choose special causes to serve; and if these causes are to interest me, if they are to engross and to possess me, they must be such as together appeal to many diverse sides of my nature; they must involve me in nu merous and often conflicting social tasks; they can form one cause only in so far as they con stitute an entire system of causes. My loyalty will be subject, therefore, to the ancient diffi culty regarding the one and the many. Unless it is one in its ultimate aim, it will be no loyalty to universal loyalty; unless it is just to the va ried instincts and to the manifold social interests of a being such as I am, it cannot engross me. Despite this great difficulty, however, the loyal all about us show us that this union of one and many in life is, at least in great por tions of long human careers, a possible thing. We never completely win the union; we never realize to the full the one loyal life; but in so far as:ve are loyal, we win enough of this unity of life to be able to understand the ideal, and to make it our own guide. Our question still remains, however, this: Since the only loyal life that we can undertake to live is so complex, since the one cause of universal loyalty can only be served, by each of us, in a personal life wherein we have to try to unify various spe cial loyalties, and since, in many cases, these special loyalties seem to us to conflict with one another, — how shall we decide, as between two apparently conflicting loyalties, which one to follow? Does our principle tell us what to do when loyalties thus seem to us to be in con flict with one another?
It is, of course, not sufficient to answer here that loyalty to loyalty requires us to do whatever can be done to harmonize apparently conflicting loyalties, and to remove the con flict of loyalties from the world, and to utilize even conflict, where it is inevitable, so as to further general loyalty. That answer we have already considered in an earlier passage of this discussion. It is a sound answer; but it does not meet those cases where conflict is forced upon us, and where we ourselves must take sides, and must annul or destroy one or two conflicting loyalties. One or two illustrations of such a type will serve to show what sorts of moral doubts our own philosophy of loyalty has especially to consider.
At the outset of our Civil War, many men of the border states, and many who had already been in the service of the Union, but who were conscious of special personal duties to single states of the Union, found themselves in presence of a well-known conflict of loyalties. Consider the personal problem that the future General Lee had to solve. Could the precept,. Be loyal to loyalty, and to that end, choose your own personal cause and be loyal thereto, — could this principle, you may say, have been of any service in deciding for Lee his personal problem at the critical moment?
Or again, to take a problem such as some of my own students have more than once urged, in various instances, as a test case for my theory of loyalty to decide: A young woman, after a thorough modern professional training, begins a career which promises not only worldly success, but general good to the community in which she works. She is heartily loyal to her profession. It is a beneficent profession. She will probably make her mark in that field if she chooses to go on. Meanwhile she is loyal to her own family. And into the home, which she has left for her work, disease, perhaps death, enters. Her younger brothers and sis ters are now unexpectedly in need of such care as hers; or the young family of her elder brother or sister, through the death of their father or mother, has come to be without due parental care. As elder sister or as maiden aunt this young woman could henceforth devote herself to family tasks that would mean very much for the little ones in question. But this devo tion would also mean years of complete absorp tion in these family tasks, and would also mean an entire abandonment of the profession so hopefully begun, and of all the good that she can now be fairly sure of doing if she continues in that field.
What are the dictates of conscience? How shall this young woman solve her problem? How shall she decide between these conflicting loyalties? To be loyal to the family, to the needs of brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, - surely this is indeed devotion of a self to a cause. But to be loyal to her chosen profession, which, in this case, is no mere hope, but which is already an actual and successful task, -is not that also loyalty to a cause? And does the principle, Be loyal to loyalty, decide which of these two causes is the one for this young woman to serve?
These two cases of conscience may serve as examples of the vast range of instances of a conflict of loyalties. And now you may ask: What will our principle do to decide such cases?
VII I reply at once by emphasizing the fact that the precept, Be loyal to loyalty, implies two char acteristics of loyal conduct which are, to my mind, inseparable. The first characteristic is Decisiveness on the part of the loyal moral agent. The second characteristic is Fidelity to loyal decisions once made, in so far as later insight does not clearly forbid the continuance of such fidelity. Let me indicate what I mean by these two characteristics.
Loyalty to loyalty is never a merely pious wish. It is personal devotion. This devotion shows itself by action, not by mere sentiments. Loyalty to loyalty hence requires the choice of some definite mode of action. And this mode of action involves, in critical cases, some new choice of a personal cause, through which the loyal agent undertakes to serve henceforth, as best he can, the general cause of the loyalty of mankind. Now, my special choice of my personal cause is always fallible. For I can never know with certainty but that, if I were wiser, I should better see my way to serving universal loyalty than I now see it. Thus, if I choose to be loyal to loyalty by becoming a loyal clerk or a watchman or a lighthouse keeper, I can never know but that, in some other calling, I might have done better. Now, it is no part of the precept, Be loyal to loyalty, to tell me, or to pretend to tell me, what my most effective vocation is. Doubts about that topic are in so far not moral doubts. They are mere expressions of my general ignorance of the world and of my own powers. If I indeed hap pen to know that I have no power to make a good clerk or a good watchman, the precept about loyalty then tells me that it would be dis loyal to waste my powers in an undertaking for which I am so unfit. If, of various possible ways of undertaking to be loyal to loyalty, my present insight already tells me that one will, in my case, certainly succeed best of all, then, indeed, the general principle of loyalty requires me to have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak save as this best mode of ser vice commands. But if, at the critical mo ment, I cannot predict which of two modes of serving the cause of loyalty to loyalty will lead to the more complete success in such service, the general principle certainly cannot tell me which of these two modes of service to choose. And, nevertheless, the principle does not desert me, even at the moment of my great est ignorance. It is still my guide. For it now becomes the principle, Have a cause; choose your cause; be decisive. In this form the principle is just as practical as it would be if my knowledge of the world and of my own powers were infallible. For it forbids coward ice; it forbids hesitancy beyond the point