Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner

Philip Carey’s provisional rule, “Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner,” is his first practical guide after he decides to think out morality for himself. It joins personal desire to the recognition of external limits: Philip will not simply obey inherited moral conventions, but neither does he treat freedom as exemption from consequences. The rule’s later appearance beside his deliberate choice to face the humiliation of an examination failure reveals its limits, exposing the pull of motives that resist his own formula.

Origins in Philip’s Moral Search

After losing his Christian faith, Philip recognizes that the morality he has retained was bound up with the religion he rejected. He resolves to examine his conduct without prejudice and asks whether any rules are necessary at all. Because he must continue living before reaching an answer, he adopts this provisional rule rather than waiting for a finished ethical system. Its temporary status matters: it is a working principle for uncertainty, not a doctrine he has proved.

Philip’s dissatisfaction is directed at moral systems that, in his view, reproduce familiar Christian expectations under another name. He wants to discover how he ought to behave, rather than accept rules merely because he was taught them. The rule therefore gives immediate practical form to a larger independence of mind: inclination supplies a starting point, while the policeman stands for the boundary imposed by the law and its consequences.

Desire and the External Limit

The rule does not make Philip’s conduct a matter of unrestrained impulse. Its second clause qualifies the first. The image of the policeman places a concrete check beside private desire, suggesting that Philip’s provisional ethic recognizes an outside authority even while refusing to take inherited ideas of virtue and vice as unquestionable guides. It is an expedient for conduct, not a claim that every desire is wise or harmless.

That distinction is important in the context of Philip’s religious change. When belief falls away, he initially experiences freedom from the spiritual responsibility that had made every action seem consequential for his immortal soul. His later ethical search is more deliberate: rather than simply preserving his old morality or replacing it with another ready-made code, he tries to identify principles for himself. The rule marks the interim between repudiating an inherited system and discovering whether he can construct a durable one.

The Rule Tested by Self-Punishment

Philip’s failure in a medical examination brings the rule into sharp relief. Ashamed and lonely, he goes to the hospital even though he expects the successful students’ celebration, the satisfaction of those who dislike him, and the sympathy of other unsuccessful students to make the visit painful. He recognizes that his instinct had been to stay away for a week, until the failure was no longer a fresh subject of attention. Instead, he makes himself face the ordeal because he wants to inflict suffering on himself.

The episode does not simply show Philip following an inclination. It shows competing impulses: self-protection urges him to avoid the hospital, while a grim appetite for self-punishment draws him toward it. The narration connects this choice explicitly to his maxim, while allowing for the possibility that some obscure morbidity, rather than ordinary preference, governs him. The rule can name a principle but cannot resolve the conflict within the person applying it.

After enduring the visit, Philip leaves the smoking-room feeling utterly alone and futile. His need for consolation makes him want to see Mildred, although he expects little comfort from her and knows that returning to the shop will be humiliating. The sequence shows that emotional need can overtake considered judgment: the rule does not protect him from dependence, disappointment, or choices he understands as painful.

Significance and Limits

As an ethical formula, the rule condenses Philip’s attempt to live without either religious command or an established replacement. Its two parts remain in tension: inclination asserts individual freedom, while the policeman acknowledges a social and legal boundary. That tension makes the saying more practical than a declaration of absolute liberty, but also deliberately provisional. It supplies no account of how to judge conflicting inclinations or how to distinguish an ordinary desire from a destructive compulsion.

The examination episode supplies the clearest test of that incompleteness. Philip can remember the rule and still act against the inclination he had identified as his own, because self-torment has become a motive in its own right. The maxim thus functions both as a statement of his intellectual independence and as a measure of what that independence cannot master: Philip wants to make his conduct answer to himself, but his actions continue to disclose motives that escape his proposed code.