CHAPTER VI

THE IDEAL OF THE SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE AND THE GOD-IDEAL

We have seen whence the ideal of a spiritual universe arises. It is unnecessary to prove that the universe is moral. What it is necessary to verify is that a universe exists; for “universe” is an ethical ideal, it is the ethical manifold, or, if we distinguish ethical as concerning relations between man and man, then we may use the term “spiritual” to designate that infinite system of interdependence in which men as ethical units have their place. We begin with the affirmation—Man is an end _per se_. This wonderful affirmation, which the democracies are darkly and confusedly trying to express in political and social arrangements, constitutes the problem of all problems. It is the great datum of ethics, of which ethical theory must give an account. All other data or problems that have been thrust into the foreground—freedom of the will, responsibility, altruistic self-sacrifice—are secondary, in the sense that they depend for their solution on a right conception of man as end _per se_. As possessing worth on his own account he is an ethical unit. Only as a member of the infinite spiritual universe does he possess the two-fold attributes implied in worth—inviolability with respect to outsiders and indefeasible, intrinsic preciousness. Therefore I say that around the individual, the ethical unit, we build up as a necessary postulate the spiritual universe. Man ethically considered carries with him this infinite environment.

Does this universe exist or is it a mere figment? It is the product of the reality-producing functions in their ideal completion. It is the necessary postulate required if the idea of right is to have validity, and the idea of right is required by man in so far as he is an agent and not merely a spectator of life. The ethical manifold, the spiritual universe, exists in so far as there is a right.

Have we then reinstated the idea of God as existent? Not the idea of God as an individual. We have on the contrary set aside that idea by affirming that manifoldness cannot be derived from unity, that the positing of plurality is just as much a primary function of the mind as the positing of unity. We have discarded the God-idea as the _locus_ of unity, since the unity subsists in the relation of the units. Strictly speaking, we have replaced the God-idea by that of a universe of spiritual beings interacting in infinite harmony.

But at this point I must go back for a moment to Kant, using his ideas once more as a foil to make my own more explicit. Wilhelm von Humboldt said of Kant that some of the things he had destroyed would never be rebuilt, and that some of the things he had built would never be destroyed.

For more than a hundred years the impression has prevailed that among the things forever destroyed by Kant are the proofs of the existence of God. He is represented as an intellectual giant whose blows have forever shattered the proofs on which the existence of a supersensible reality rested. Kant’s mind was preëminently scientific. He was the philosopher who made explicit the principles underlying Newtonian science as Aristotle had made explicit the logic underlying the Greek science. His philosophy is essentially agnostic. The use that he continues to make of the God-idea can be dissociated from his system with advantage to the latter.[34]

But did Kant indeed destroy the idea of a supersensible reality as existent, or are we warranted in undertaking to build anew the supersensible world.[35] “_Du hast sie zerstörrt, die schöne Welt, In deinem Busen baue sie wieder_”—not indeed in the realm of mere feelings, but in the sphere of will. The spell of Kant’s shattering attack still rests upon the intellectual world today. The notion of a supersensible reality, if held at all, is held timidly, apologetically and is apt to be based on subjective emotional need. The wish is more or less admitted to be father to the faith—the will to believe is defiantly asserted in despair of sound foundations. A scientist like Dubois-Reymond enumerates seven world riddles, or mysteries that cannot be explained, and after saying that they cannot be explained, he seems to see that no alternative remains but to take refuge in resignation: “Ignoramus, ignorabimus!”

That “explanation” is not the only avenue to truth, that the referring of effects to their causes is not the highest operation of the reality-producing functions, I have pointed out in a previous chapter. But Kant, as has been said, is supposed to have utterly annihilated the arguments intended to demonstrate the existence of God, and it will clear up the matter at issue if we consider wherein he actually succeeded and wherein he quite failed. As he himself declares, his method is regressive; he does not attempt the progressive method path. He seeks to ascertain whether by going backward along the chain of effects and causes, or of conditions, he can somewhere find God as first cause or as unconditioned. He does not look forward looking to the ideals of the will. He does not enter into the realm of ends, where the necessity of determining action in obedience to some universal plan or scheme of relations might have forced itself on his attention. His approach, like his habit of mind, is scientific. He is not primarily an ethicist. Proceeding in this manner he shows that the notion of a first cause is untenable, and he attacks in particular the ontological argument by which every other argument supplements itself at the point where it breaks down.

Did Kant, however, annihilate the Ontological Argument? Yes, in the scholastic form in which it was held. No, in a form, based on the idea of the ethical manifold, in which it can be restated. In the scholastic form it runs: “There is such a thing as the idea of a perfect being. Existence is an element of perfection. If the perfect being did not exist it would be less than perfect. But the _ens realissimum_, the perfect being, is present as an idea in the mind. Therefore it exists.” The disproof of this amounts to the curt statement that what exists in the mind does not necessarily exist outside of it, or, as Kant put it: “The idea of 100 thalers in the head of a man is one thing, lacking no element of conceptual integrity; while the existence of the 100 thalers in the man’s purse is an entirely different matter.” The evidence of existence, in other words, depends on the synthesis of the data of sense as arranged in the space and time manifold in accordance with the categories of the understanding. Existence is temporal and spatial. To prove that God exists we should have to prove that he exists in the world of the senses. Of any other kind of existence we are agnostic. Kant’s disproof of the Ontological Argument thus depends on his agnosticism.

But suppose that on ethical grounds we find ourselves compelled to affirm that there is an object which has worth, and that to account for the inviolableness, indispensableness and preciousness of this object we are compelled to give free rein to the reality-producing functions, and to place this object having worth as a member in a manifold not spatial and temporal but infinite: and suppose we say that the existence of this worth-endowed object, of this ethical unit with its compeers, is as certain as the notion of rightness is certain, have we not then without blame widened the conception of existence, and placed the Ontological Argument where Kant’s disproof does not even touch it?[36]

One more important remark is here in place, suggested by Kant’s designation of God as the ideal of reason, and by his designation of our highest nature as the rational nature.

Is “rational” equivalent to intellectual? If it be so, then feeling must be classed as irrational, and impulse likewise, since neither feeling nor impulse is subject to logical rules. And then the war will be on between the intellectualists or rationalists and the champions of irrational conceptions of life, since feeling and impulse actually make up the major part of life, and can neither be left out of account nor compressed into intellectualist formulas.[37]

Plainly, there is a deep misunderstanding between the two parties. An error is involved somewhere. It appears to consist in assuming that objectivity can be supplied only by the intellect, in overlooking the fact that the feelings and still more the volition possess intrinsic controls and norms of their own, that Science, the work of the intellect, and art and ethics, spring from a common root, namely, the reality-producing functions. The manifolds with which each of the three respectively deals are different, the methods of synthesis are different, but the root principle, synthesis of the manifold, is identical in all.

To describe our highest nature, therefore, as the rational nature is perilous, since the word rational suggests intellectual. Either we must strain the signification of reason to include feeling and will, which is contrary to common usage, or we should select some other term, such as _spiritual_, to designate that nature within us which operates in science and art and achieves its highest manifestation in producing the ethical ideal.

Finally, if what has been said regarding the ethical manifold holds good, then a genuine philosophy of life can only be reached by the ethical approach to the problems of life. This has never yet been consistently attempted. The approach has been made from the scientific or the logical side, or as in the case of Plato from the æsthetic, or as in modern times from the biological. Yet the ethical approach is full of promise. A philosophy of physical nature may be feasible without it, a philosophy of art may be possible without it, but not so a philosophy of life. It has not been tried because ethics has lain in the lap of theology, which was itself corrupted by the attempt to apply to ethical problems the inadequate principle of causality in the form of creation theories, while again in recent times, by way of reaction against theology, the solution of ethical questions is sought for in the empirical disciplines where a measure at least of objective certainty has rewarded the investigators. Even Kant, who asserted the independence of ethics, actually made it dependent on Newtonian science. The great task now is, strictly to carry out the idea of the independence of ethics, not indeed as if its principles were unrelated to those of science and art, but in the sense of independently investigating the problems _peculiar_ to ethical consciousness. I am well aware that the attempt made in this volume to take the ethical line of approach to a general philosophy of life, is tentative and defective in a hundred ways, nevertheless it is an attempt in a new direction.

In the next book I shall take up the practical consequences that follow from the theory here advanced. Having delineated the ethical ideal, and discovered the invaluable fact that there is a structural plan contained in it, we shall see that our actual human duties may be derived by applying this ideal scheme to the quasi-organic groups already existing in human society. There are provocative correspondences to the ethical ideal in the social life of men; otherwise it would be impossible to apply it. There are human groups in which a quasi-correlative membership in a common life already exists. In the case of each of these groups we find some sort of empirical multiplicity which must be studied scientifically, and also an empirical motive which may be utilized in the interest of developing the ethical relation. The family is the first of these groups which offers a footing in the world of experience for the ideal. In the family natural affection is the motive; in the vocational group, the desire to express a talent or special gift; in the state, patriotism; in the church, the need felt to integrate all human ideals.

Thus the things of earth are to be used as instrumentalities by which we are to become aware of the spiritual reality. Only that the disparateness of the physical world and the ethical universe should ever be kept in the foreground. Every effort to solve the riddle by somehow identifying the two has failed. To account for the existence of a finite world of indefinite extensibility side by side with a universe _ex hypothesi_ infinite is impossible. Instead of seeking to explain let effort go toward utilizing. Let the _world_ be used instrumentally for the purpose of verifying the existence of _universe_.

For the average man, and indeed for all men, the test of the truth of a theory is in the practice to which it leads. Abstract metaphysical arguments appeal only to a few, and even for them the formula in its abstract guise is unconvincing. Look at the mathematical figure, and see whether the axioms hold good. Look at the sequent phenomena and see whether the so-called law of nature is exemplified. And so with respect to conduct: look at the ways of human behavior traced out in accordance with the plan of the ethical manifold, and see whether such behavior wins the approval of the spiritual nature implicit within you.[38]

NOTE I

There are various points at which the system sketched in the text deviates from current opinion, but in regard to the underlying proposition the reader’s particular attention is called to the remarks on the “prejudice of causality” and to the statement that verification is exemplification.

How can ethical truth be verified? How can we be sure that ethical ideals are more than fine wishes, expressing subjective aspiration, but having no counterpart in the ultimate constitution of things? This is the dark doubt that haunts the minds of ethical writers, as well as of the average man. We ask to have the things we believe in, the objects of our supreme aspiration, verified. How can they be verified?

I think that we shall see light in this matter once we have grasped the thought that verification, both in science and in ethics, is nothing more than exemplification. In the case of causality, in science, verification does not consist in mere recurrence. For if we find, even by a single carefully guarded experiment, that a given phenomenon A is the true antecedent of B, then we take leave to predict that B will always follow A, without regard to the repetition of the sequence in our experience.[39] Indeed, no amount of repetition would justify prediction. The problem in the case of causality is to determine the true antecedent and the true consequent. For at any moment there are innumerable phenomena that might possibly be antecedents of B. How obtain certainty that A is the causal antecedent? By the synthetic process. We assume a unity, say energy. We assume that there are differentiæ, say a certain mathematically determined quantum of mechanical energy in A, and a determined quantum of thermal energy in B. No sooner have these differentiæ been mathematically determined, than in virtue of the assumed unity of energy underlying the differences, we pronounce the nexus to be necessary. We predict that B will always follow A.

Causality, therefore, is an example of a synthesis which over-arches sequences. The fact that the phenomena are sequent does not affect the principle involved. Whenever we contemplate an example of synthesis, that is, defined differentiæ of some sort, and a defined underlying unity of some sort, the mind affirms that reality exists. There are degrees of reality. The degree of completeness with which the synthetic function is carried out in any instance determines the degree.

Ethical verification is likewise exemplification, though in another sense. When the ideal plan of ethical relations is presented, the ideal plan being a synthesis not of sequences but of all co-existent entities whatsoever, the mind assents to this ideal plan as representing the complete synthesis or the complete reality. The more explicitly and definitely the relation between the ethical units is conceived, the greater the conviction of reality resulting. Now frustration after partial achievement has the effect of making more explicit the idea of the plan of relations as it ought to be carried out in human life. And in this sense I would have the reader understand the main practical argument of the book—that frustration is the condition of our intensified conviction as to the reality of the supersensible universe.

In virtue of the constitution of our minds we cannot help acknowledging as real that which is synthesized. Synthesized and real are synonymous terms. Hence the idea of the completed synthesis necessarily is the idea of the ultimate reality.

NOTE II

The three principal respects wherein Kant has failed to justify his affirmation that every human being is to be regarded as an end _per se_, and not to be used as a tool, are:

1. Out of the bare experience of oughtness, absolute constraint, he seeks to derive personality. Out of the empty categorical imperative he seeks to draw a substantive entity—a being possessed of worth.

2. The society of ends _per se_ described by him is not a true society, but a collection of atomic individuals juxtaposed. The capital flaw in his ethics is here. He begins by detaching the individual. He studies the individual, and discovers, or believes himself to have discovered, that something happens in him (the consciousness of absolute constraint) which entitles him to be considered worth while on his own account.

Next, since the formula of university proposes imitability by others as the test of a moral act, all others are called in as concomitants of the detached atom first considered. Each of the concomitants in turn is an atomic entity. It is in this mechanical way that the conception of a kingdom of ends, or a holy community, is supposed to be validated. Kant’s mistake is to assume that an individual regarded as an isolated being can be worth while, can be an end _per se_. The notion of end involves relation to others, not mechanical juxtaposition, but intrinsic connection. No one is worth while by himself. He has worth only as an organic member of a spiritual whole. The unique quality which lends him incomparable distinction is the creative life which emanates from him and quickens cognate but diversely modified life in his associates.

3. Kant’s version of the ethical rule is strong on the side of interdiction, but quite inadequate on the positive side. He tells us that we are to look on others not merely as means to our own ends, but also ends _per se_. The vagueness is in the formula “not merely ... but also.” Where the dividing line is to be drawn he does not tell. I am at liberty to use the services of others in the prosecution of my own interests, as they may use mine, since we are social beings and dependent on one another. But how far may I go in this direction? On this point we are left wholly in the dark. Kant admits into his system the so-called natural ends,[40] such as wealth, culture and the like, gives them leave to abound, only with the proviso that they may not overpass a certain limit,—the limit beyond which they would interfere with the rights of fellowmen. An instrumental view of wealth, science, culture, as positively promoting the ethical end of man, he does not and cannot establish.[41] But the instrumental view is precisely that in which modern society has most at stake, on the working out of which the solution of our most pressing problems,—such as the labor problem, the problem of the family, the problem of patriotism and international relations—is entirely dependent. If Kant has failed at this point, as I believe he has, his usefulness as a guide in the reconstruction of modern life is seriously diminished. What he had set out to demonstrate, the inalienable worth of man, remains; but foundations other than his must be found. For the formula “not merely as a means but also as an end” I would substitute: Treat every man as a spiritual means to thine own spiritual end and conversely ... treat the extent and the manner in which we are to use one another as means being determined by the criterion that our exchange of services shall conduce to the attainment of each other’s ends as ethical beings conjointly.

NOTE III

I would also ask the reader to consider well the effect upon the philosophy of life of the position taken throughout this volume that there is no intellectual bridge between the finite order and the infinite order. This involves dropping creation at the beginning and immortality in its usual sense at the end. Creation is an attempt to show how the world, including man, proceeded out of the infinite. Immortality is an attempt to express how man returns to the infinite. In this volume man’s dealings with the finite order are represented as having for their purpose the achievement of the conviction that there verily is an infinite life, a supersensible universe. Creation systems, pantheistic systems, certain evolutionary systems, also the Hegelian system, are futile attempts to explain the How. But explanation is impossible; for to explain means to understand, and to understand means to trace an effect to its cause. And causality is not the kind of synthesis applicable to a co-existent totality.

Among practical consequences note the difference between the theistic attitude in fatal sickness and the spiritual attitude.[42] The theist presupposes that there is a God to whose will he must patiently submit. But theism is a principle of explanation, the God-idea being employed to account for the finite order. God is thus made responsible for the suffering of the sick as well as for all other evils in the world. Hence the very idea which is presupposed in order to produce patience raises up doubts and perplexities, which imperil patience. If God made the world why does he permit pain and evil? The spiritual attitude, on the contrary, ethically interpreted, does not presuppose the idea of a divine order as a dogma, but offers it as the product of the experience of suffering itself. The conviction that there is in man an essential spiritual self, a holy thing, and a spiritual universe, a holy community, are not gifts to which we fall heir at birth, or by some sort of revelation borrow from the experience of ancient teachers; they are a supreme good to be arduously worked out by ourselves. And the interpretation given to the facts of suffering and frustration is that they can be used as the means of bringing to birth in us that supreme conviction.

In general it may be said that the purpose of existence, both of the individual and of the race, is so to work in the finite world as to become possessed with ever greater distinctness of the conviction of the reality of the wholly real world, the infinite supersensible universe.

The attitude of the Christian is other-worldly. He shuns intimacy with the finite world and turns his face toward his “true home.” The attitude herein described is that of hearty attack upon the business of life, and close embrace of all the partial reality which finite experience contains, with a view of thus acquiring in some measure an appreciation of the utter reality of which these partial realities are hints and glimmerings.

NOTE IV

In the case of any new theory, it is true that one must live with it for a considerable time before acquiring the habit of thinking in accordance with it. The older habits constantly crop up and interfere with the correct understanding of any new point of view. This is especially so of a new attitude towards reality. The world seems topsy-turvy to one who learns for the first time that grass and the leaves of trees are not really green apart from the eye that sees them, that beings with different organs might interpret differently that which stimulates the human eye to its specific color reactions. The heliocentric theory, when first announced by Copernicus, outraged naïve commonsense. It exacted a new habit of thinking in regard to the relation of the sun to the earth,—the real relation, apprehended by intercalated mental processes being the direct opposite of the apparent relation. The sun evidently revolves around the earth, nevertheless the truth is that the earth revolves around the sun.

Modern science reveals behind the palpable world around us unimaginable fluids, speeds, and physical units which are so sublimated in thought as to be barely distinguishable from metaphysical entities. The habit of penetrating with radium-like glance the concrete screen of things, and of seeing behind the screen the company of atoms, ions, etc., may be gradually acquired; but the older habit of regarding the palpable and visible as the truly real continues to assert itself in conflict with the new habit.

The ethical unit in an ethical manifold postulated in the text as the closest, though still symbolic, reading of the ultimate reality, makes a similar demand upon the reader, and requires of him in like manner the formation of a new habit of thinking, against which the older habits will doubtless continue to protest.

The most obstinate of the older habits that stand in the way has been dealt with in the note on causality, namely,—the unscientific habit of ignoring the boundaries of science, and of taking the method employed in the physical sciences as the sole method that leads to certainty. The prejudice of causality is probably ineradicable, just as the illusion that the sun revolves about the earth persists. But we can at least reach the point of realizing that it is a prejudice, and to this extent overcome it. If it be synthesis, or the employment in inseparable conjunction of the two functions mentioned, that for the human mind spells reality, then one kind of synthesis called causality, that of sequent phenomena, does not exclude the ampler, though ideal synthesis, which is carried out in the mental production of the ethical manifold. So much I wish to add to the statements contained in the text in regard to the theory.

But there is also a new habit to be acquired in regard to the practical ethical consequences of the theory. The chief of these is the prizing of distinctive difference above uniformity or sameness. The ethical quality is that quality in which a man is intrinsically unique. The ethical act is the most completely individualized act (I ought perhaps to say personalized, but the completely individualized act _is_ that of a unique personality). In brief, the emphasis is here put on that in which a man differs from all others, and not on the common nature which he shares with the rest; or rather, since the common nature is not denied, the stress is put on the intrinsically different mode in which the common nature is expressed in him.[43]

The accentuation in current ethical discussion of the common nature of man, and the fallacious assumption that the common interests are the pre-eminently moral interests, that uniformity is the test of ethical quality, is easy to understand. It is the reaction of the modern world against feudalism, a social system not yet entirely outgrown, in which the empirical differences of rank and birth were made the basis of intolerably oppressive discriminations, and in which it was an accepted axiom that some men are baked of better clay than others. It is also a reaction against the capitalistic system that has taken the place of the feudal, in which wealth is to a considerable extent made the standard of social appraisement.

It is against these false discriminations that the voice of humanity is now indignantly raised, affirming the moral equality of all men. But equality is mistakenly taken to mean likeness in the sense of sameness, not in the sense of that fundamental likeness on the background of which the desirable unlikenesses stand forth. And this notion of equality as identical with sameness leads to great practical aberrations. Thus, for instance, women are not only to be recognized as the equals of men, but are to be the same as men,—their education patterned on that of men, their specific functions, as far as possible, ignored. For unlikeness is supposed to connote inferiority, and inferiority is justly repelled as morally intolerable. But aside from this one example, the stressing of the common nature, or of the basis of likeness at the expense of the outstanding unlikenesses, leads to other leveling tendencies of which modern democracies furnish many unpleasing illustrations. Thus uniform popular opinion, encompassing the individual on every side, penetrates into his inmost thinking, so that he hardly ventures to hold to his own judgment against the judgments of the majority. And the impulses of the mass tend also to threaten his independence in action. There is indeed a certain intoxication in the very sense of being submerged in a large whole, a certain glad loss of self in great impersonal movements, a certain strain of democratic pantheism, as it were, that takes the place with some of mystic absorption in Deity. But whatever the value that may attach to these upswellings of feeling, it is counterbalanced by the circumstance that in proportion as indiscriminate devotion to society as a whole becomes the paramount motive, the sub-organisms of society, the family, the vocation and the state, in which the ethical personality is ripened, are threatened with effacement. Instead of moral equality it were better to use the term “moral equivalence.” The differences are to be stressed; they are the coruscating points in the spiritual life of mankind. That every man is the equal of his fellows means that he has the same right as each of the others to become unlike the others, to acquire a distinct personality, to contribute his one peculiar ray to the white light of the spiritual life.

FOOTNOTES:

[34] I do not however agree with those who regard the shreds of theology remaining in his system as a concession, not wholly ingenuous, to orthodoxy. He was brought up in the pietistic faith, and had probably not entirely outgrown the emotional impressions of those early teachings. The noumena, however, play a part in the system itself distinct from the theology, and are not to be taken as supersensible realities. They are limiting concepts intended to serve as incentives or lures, winning the mind to continue without cessation its advance along certain paths within the field of experience; but they are not supposed to give any clue as to what is beyond experience. That which is beyond the field of experience is simply unknowable. Thus the noumenon called “thing _per se_” is notice given to the mind not to be deterred in its proper business of unifying the space and time manifold by the difficulties which arise when the time and space manifold is taken as an ultimate account of reality. The thing _per se_ is a welcome to science and not a bar set up in its path.

The noumenon of freedom is an incentive to man urging him to act as if he were capable of practicing the law of universality and necessity. In fact the phrase “as if” plays a leading rôle in the Kantian philosophy. The noumenon of God, as will presently be shown, is afflicted with this conditional “as if” character to even a higher degree. We are to assume God in order to look upon the vast field of possible experience as if it were unified, as if a being who himself stands for unity had been its creator. This assumption is supposed to be necessary in order to encourage the scientist in his search for the thread of unity, lest he flag by the way. As a matter of fact scientists have contented themselves with the simple assumption of the uniformity of nature as necessary to the prosecution of their investigations, and have as a rule troubled themselves little to hypostasize the notion of unity. Nor has recent progress in science been associated with and influenced by the belief in an individual Deity. The noumenon of God is unnecessary for science while in Kant’s ethical application of it it is positively harmful. He introduces the God notion as an artificial device for linking together happiness and virtue, a device quite inconsistent with the noble austerity of his ethical system, whatever its other defects may be.

The noumena, then, are apparitions that appear at the end of certain paths in the field of experience, far off where the sky and the ground seem to meet. These paths run off in different directions. At the end of each is one of these limiting apparitions, and the society of noumena is disconnected internally: there is no relation of unity between the unifiers.

[35] The difference between “supersensible” and “supernatural” is capital. I do not encourage relapse into supernaturalism. The supernatural is the opposite of the supersensible. It is an attempt to represent in natural or _sensible_ guise what is supposed to be beyond the senses; and the naturalistic representation of the supersensible is then taken not metaphorically but literally.

[36] He allows indeed the _Ens Realissimum_ to remain, and calls it the ideal of the reason, the ideal of unity hypostasized, centralized in an individual, and somehow harboring within itself all real properties whatsoever. But it is quite impossible to conceive how all real properties can belong to a single individual. For the properties as we know them are incompatible with each other. Surely an individual cannot be both great and small, beautiful and ugly, of all colors and sounds, etc., etc. Or again if all properties were somehow assembled in one individual, since that individual is conceived of as an hypostasized unity, it would be impossible to speak of a relation between them, and yet upon the relation of the differentiæ depends the ethical utility of the idea of a supreme reality.

[37] Compare, for instance, the anti-intellectualistic philosophy of Bergson, with its emphasis on planless spurts of energy, the irrationalist philosophy of Schopenhauer, etc.

[38] The above exposition is not a transcendental derivation of ethics. The ideal of the infinite society is a fulguration _out of_ ethical experience, to be ever renewed _in it_. We build not only our world, but our universe. The ethical principle is not a working hypothesis, like those provisionally used in science. It is the outgrowth of the functional finalities. It is a postulate. The specific moral laws, or expressions of the ethical principle indeed, are changeable, being the product of the principle with the varying empirical conditions of human society. The fundamental principle is unchangeable.

The consciousness of universal interrelation is not to be described as mystical consciousness. The identity of the self remains intact; it is never lost in the One or the All. The ethical consciousness includes indeed the consciousness of other selves related to our own, in a kind of superindividual consciousness. But this is reached along the sunlit path of action (So _act_, etc.), and not along the dreamy flux of emotionalism or in the silent depths of quietism.

[39] The frequent recurrence gives us a sense of safety in expecting the consequent on the appearance of the antecedent. But the sense of safety should not be confounded with the sense of the certainty. We expect that day will follow night, because it has followed innumerable times. But no amount of repetition can warrant the assertion that it will and must do so. The Pragmatist view explains the sense of safety in expectation, but does not appear to account for the certainty in prediction, as for instance in the astronomer’s prediction of an eclipse.

[40] A hybrid conception, since in nature there are only happenings, but no ends.

[41] His efforts in some measure to remedy this defect in the Doctrine of Virtue are artificial and unconvincing.

[42] See Book III for a fuller development of this point.

[43] Difference in the ethical meaning is not to be confounded with mere idiosyncrasy, or originality, not to say eccentricity. It is the kind of difference which elicits correlated difference in all spiritual associates.