Perfect behaviour may be as unattainable as perfect gear-changing when we drive but it is a necessary ideal prescribed for all men by the very nature of the human machine just as perfect gear-changing is an ideal prescribed for all drivers by the very nature of cars. But it is dangerous to describe a man who tries very hard to keep the moral law as a "man of high ideals," because this might lead you to think that moral perfection was a private taste of his own and that the rest of us were not called on to share it. In such matters we are entitled to have different tastes and, therefore, different ideals. When a man says that a certain woman, or house, or ship, or garden is "his ideal" he does not mean (unless he is rather a fool) that everyone else ought to have the same ideal. But there is another sense in which it is very misleading to call moral perfection an ideal. In that sense every kind of perfection is, for us humans, an ideal we cannot succeed in being perfect car drivers or perfect tennis players or in drawing perfectly straight lines. Now it is, of course, quite true that moral perfection is an "ideal" in the sense that we cannot achieve it. Some people prefer to talk about moral "ideals" rather than moral rules and about moral "idealism" rather than moral obedience. When you are being taught how to use any machine, the instructor keeps on saying, "No, don't do it like that," because, of course, there are all sorts of things that look all right and seem to you the natural way of treating the machine, but do not really work. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was "The sort of person who is always snooping round to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it." And I am afraid that is the sort of idea that the word Morality raises in a good many people's minds: something that interferes, something that stops you having a good time. There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like.
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