GIOVANNI BALDELLI the social body (which is but a metaphor) but protect each of its individual members from ma.ny a grievous harm. The beneflts of social living, from anything so basic as language to something so sophistlcated as modern hospital care, need no remlnding. Without ethics none of them would last. Only -when abstracted from these benefits, which it is its funct1on to ensure, may ethics appear dull and uninteresting, irreleva.nt and negative. What is more negative than birth-control? But in certain conditions, wlth which we are growing only too . famUiar, it is the only means of safeguarding whatever specific human meaning birth ls supposed to have. «A stationary condition of capital and population,> wrote John Stuart Mill as far back as 1857, «implies no stationary state of huma.n lm- . provement. There would be as much scope as ever for all klnds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much . room for improving the Art of Living and much more likelihood of 1ts being improved when minds cease to be engrossed by·the art Qf getting on>. This applies as much to ethics as to btith- . contr.ol, which 1s only part of an equilibrium which a fully grown society, and even a growing one, must seek to maintain as a necessary condition to its health and preservatlon. Ethics is raised as a barrter to the impa.lring of lite and waste of energy ar1s1ng from some members of a society being 1n1mica.l to or dominant over others, and it ls thus that it is the regulator of a society's health. I N ONE respect ethics is a rational construction, a. set of prtnciples a.nd rules, the same as mathematics. Llke mathe- .maties, it is not a matter of opinion as moral philosophies may be argued to be. Its pronouncements are not so universally · and uncontroversially accepted as those of mathematics. because there is nothlng by the side of mathematics to stand to it as vartous codes of morality stand to ethics. The language of mathematics is ma.lnly based on numbers, whlle that of ethics is based exclusively upon words, whlch are alwa.ys more ·or less emotionally connotated. Mathematlcs, too, however, can be juggled with, and its objectlvity can be used to serve partisan purposes. Mathematlcs reflects an order ln the world of tfüngs far more stable a.nd rea.lized than that order of human relationships which ethics postulates more than it reflects. Ethics is not less useful than mathematlcs, but the Intuitions of mathematlcs ca.n be more readily. disengaged from
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