1. Law.
2. The Moral Sanction, Kant's Categorical Imperative "that rules the private and individual conscience, but that alone."
3. The force of social habit or sittlichkeit, "less than legal and more than merely moral, and sufficient in the vast majority of the events of daily life, to secure observance of general standards of conduct without any question of resort to force." The Lord Chancellor adds, "If this is so within a nation, can it be so as between nations?"
But although Lord Haldane distinguishes three sanctions of conduct, the resultant line of conduct is one. And it seems to me unimportant to analyse the sanctions if we can only estimate the sum of their obligations. It is this totality of obligations, the whole systematisation of conduct in human life, that in my adumbrated analysis I call the moral sphere.
Curiously enough Lord Haldane was hounded from the Government on the paradoxical ground that he knew too much about the enemy against whom we are fighting. It is certainly true that he has a better understanding than any other statesman of the Prussian perversion of aristocracy and of the true function of science in the State. But it is too much to hope that philosophers should remain Ministers of a State in which journalists are become dictators.
[2] Cf. Plato's myth of Protagoras (Prot. 322 B ff.).
[3] Even Aristotle probably had some suspicion of it; so in his anxiety to justify the institution of slavery he had to make out that slaves were not men at all but only machines.
[4] Duelling might be classified theoretically as a survival of the wolfish condition sketched in § 5. But the persistent institution of single combat should not be regarded as in itself a survival, but rather as an outlet for the surviving instinct, a concession justified by political or social considerations that vary from age to age. Even Plato in his Republic (465 A) agreed that the citizen might in certain circumstances take the law into his own hands, probably regarding such action as a sort of equity, what Aristotle calls επανὁρθωμα νὁμου ἡ ελλεἱπει δια τοὑ καθὁλου, a rectification of certain special cases not covered by law.
In modern states again, e.g. in Austria and Germany, duelling is not so much a survival as a corollary of militarism, which involves a fetichistic veneration of the military uniform or of military "honour."
[5] See below, Chapter IV, § 4. Nationalism True and False.