And it is not only the claim of the specialist that I would repudiate.
People are too apt to suppose that in order to discuss morals a man must
have exceptional moral gifts. I would dispute that naive supposition. I
am an ingenuous enquirer with, I think, some capacity for religious
feeling, but neither a prophet nor a saint. On the whole I should be
inclined to classify myself as a bad man rather than a good; not indeed
as any sort of picturesque scoundrel or non-moral expert, but as a
person frequently irritable, ungenerous and forgetful, and
intermittently and in small but definite ways bad. One thing I claim, I
have got my beliefs and theories out of my life and not fitted them to
its circumstances. As often as not I have learnt good by the method of
difference; by the taste of the alternative. I tell this faith I hold as
I hold it and I sketch out the principles by which I am generally trying
to direct my life at the present time, because it interests me to do so
and I think it may interest a certain number of similarly constituted
people. I am not teaching.
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