The new Protestantism from Hume and Kant placed at last faith in the room and stead of authority, and thus came back again to the divine ethical autonomy of Jesus, who promised a Holy Spirit guiding men step by step into all truth, but who himself felt that the only real basis was the experience of the loving individual heart working on and with the experience of all the ages. All authoritative absolutism, whether ecclesiastical or Scriptural or rationalist, has gone. Even those who think they still maintain it flee daily to the modern workshop and use the tools furnished by the modern study. In law and ethics, in theology and philosophy, the ghosts of the absolute still haunt us, but they are shadowy with the twilight of a rising day. And as that day breaks we enter with joy upon the study of the past. It is, indeed, no longer a storehouse of infallible revelations, but it is a history of a steadily unfolding revelation, of God to man, and of man to humanity. Augustine, Bernhard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, Luther, Calvin, and Tyndal become voices of God to us speaking, not indeed in infallible tones as Paul and Aristotle were thought by the schoolmen to speak, but all the more clearly and wonderfully because they speak as divinely illumined men to men seeking divine guidance.

The history of ethics is not more and not less a weary struggle with human limitations than are the histories of astronomy and chemistry. They, too, had to shake off the chilling hands of an authoritative past, that in the very sense of their helplessness they might gain strength.

On no field of human activity is the realization of the limited and relative character of all our knowledge at first more painful and more depressing than upon the field of ethics. And yet a moment's thought should show us human life struggling at every moment with just that half-darkness. No matter how absolute and final the commandment, Thou shalt do no murder! may at first appear, the moment we ask, what is murder? all the doubt and uncertainty of a thousand differing voices besets us. Is capital punishment "murder"? Was Servetus "murdered"? Was the beheading of King Charles "murder"? Was Hamilton

"murdered" by Burr? Is modern warfare wholesale "murder"? What is the good of an "absolute" authority that cannot answer these most pressing questions? No two churches, no two councils, no two ecclesiastical courts, no two popes would probably answer all these questions alike. What, then, is the good of an "absolute" authority that leaves a poor erring soul to take his choice between answers, one of which must be wrong, and with only the individual experience to guide him?

Christian faith replies that the process is more than the immediate product. Our mistakes and wanderings are our training for communion and fellowship with a Father of free as well as loving children. Only the truth can make us free, and that truth, in ethics as in all other sciences, can only be won by hard work on the materials of human experience. In that struggle for truth Christian faith gives us assurance that in spite of all mistakes, nay, because of them and through them we may yet enter the kingdom of God's loving fulfilled purpose. In this spirit we have tried to faithfully and as objectively as possible follow the struggles and splendid victories of God's army of chosen spiritual and ethical leaders. If our judgments have often been one-sided and wrong, as they like enough have been, it has been through no lack of respect for those who have done such yeoman's service in the discovery of truth. And even when the emphasis has often been, perhaps, rather on the failings than the successes, it has only been so because it is so largely from the failures of great men that we lesser ones learn to steer our smaller way aright.

CHAPTER IX

THE MERGING OF CHURCHLY WITH PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS-A SUMMARY

Note of Introduction.-I. Kant and Post-Kantian Thought; Fichte; Schelling; Hegel; Schleiermacher-II. Kant and Empiricism; Fechner; Lotze; Wundt-III. Rationalism in France; Voltaire Rousseau; The Encyclopædists; Cousin; Comte-IV. The English Reaction upon Hume; Price; Reid and Uncritical Intuitionalism; Coleridge; Green-V. English Utilitarianism; Bentham; Mills; Darwin; Spencer.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

This chapter can only be a hasty summary of the history of ethics from Hume and Kant to the present time, for the history of ethics within Protestant organized Christianity so merges with philosophic ethics that there is no distinguishing line. It is impossible to write a history of Protestant ethics and omit Bentham and Herbert Spencer, but it is equally impossible to regard them as constituent elements of organized Christianity. Protestantism, in its denial of the ever-present authority of an ecclesiasticism to determine thought and conduct, failed happily to really establish any past authority as final in ethics. It would have been fatal to moral progress if it had succeeded in doing so. The faith of Christianity in all ages has been that a Holy Spirit is guiding us into all truth. Moreover, in Protestantism the distinction between the religious and the secular has broken down. It is a false antithesis. Ethical advance is always religious in the highest sense, and it is not in ecclesiastical Christianity alone that ethical advance has had its rise. In a really Protestant ethics dogmatism has no proper place. The science of Christian ethics is, like all other sciences, a science of experience with its advancing organization of thought. The

destruction of dogmatic ethics on the basis of authority was complete with the work of Immanuel Kant,' whose services on the ethical field are largely the examination and rejection of the last traces of dogmatic rationalism. The critical rationalism which he sought to substitute in ethics must, however, be seriously challenged. The weakest point of Kant's philosophy is his formal attempt at ethical reconstruction.

1. Kantianism is the reaction upon the dogmatism of such as Wolff and an attempt to again assert faith in its proper sphere. Kant himself was roused, as he explains, by the necessity laid upon him of meeting the doubts and the negations of Hume; he entered upon his critique of pure reason in order to get a basis for faith. His style is overladen by the terminology of dogmatic rationalism; his schemes of classification are artificial and by their elaboration defeat his own end. He never frees himself completely from the superstition that mathematical conceptualism has something superhuman in it and can be divorced from sense-perception. The influence at this point of Descartes, Leibnitz, and Spinoza, not to speak of Plato, is apparent. Moreover, some of his most fruitful conceptions are either not worked out at all, or they are implicitly contradicted by the formal outcome. At the same time he is the founder of the new Protestantism which looks out upon a world of science with a faith large enough to trust scientific analysis as by divine

'Immanuel Kant, born April 22, 1724, died February 12, 1804. His whole life was spent in Königsberg. The best life is still that by Schubert, F. W., in Schubert and Rosenkranz's edition of his works, although corrections in details are being constantly made, as in Arnoldt's (E.) "Excursen zur Kantforschung," 1894. The completest English life is that of Stuckenberg, J. H. W.: "The Life of Immanuel Kant," London, 1882. The edition of his works undertaken by the Berlin Academy of Science is not yet finished. The ethical works are translated (unequally) by Abbott, Thomas Kingsmill, the 5th ed. in 1898. Max Müller has translated the "Critique of Pure Reason." An excellent popular introduction to Kant is Paulsen, Friederich: "Immanuel Kant, His Life and Doctrine," admirably translated by Creighton and Lefevre (1902), who have added the English works of chief importance to the bibliography. Schopenhauer's criticisms upon Kant are among the best in the literature, but the system of Schopenhauer forbids any serious development of his own ethical thought as a proper substitute.

right in its own sphere, and at the same time to demand the recognition of a world of supersensuous values which scientific analysis can neither give nor take away.

The main interest for the student of ethics in the "Critique of Pure Reason" is its demonstration of the possibility of a concept of freedom not found in the phenomenal world. This freedom is the moral spontaneity needed for the world of moral activity. This freedom which analysis of our world of knowledge shows is possible, the ethical man asserts as a first necessity of his rationality. The moral man asserts as a postulate of his moral will, God, freedom, and immortality. He lives in a world that belongs essentially to supersensuous reality, as well as in a world of phenomenal appearances held together in the category of causality. The basis, therefore, of his moral world is intuition, but it is a critical intuitionalism made necessary by a metaphysical examination of the world of experience. Only that conduct is really moral which is dictated by respect for the categorical imperative of the law within each rational creature. All conduct that has pleasure or happiness as its motive may be legal and appropriate, but it is not moral. The end of moral conduct is perfection, and faith in its attainment makes the postulate of immortality a necessity. God is needed to unite worthiness and happiness, which cannot be identified in the world of our experience as the Epicureans and Stoics would from different stand-points do.' The characteristic of this moral law must be its universality. Hence Kant gives as a rule for conduct the possibility of willing that that conduct should be a universal law. It is at this point that Kant's greatest service to ethics 1 "Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (v. Kirchmann's edition, vol. II, pp. 38 ff. and 146–158), II : 2; V, I, § 8; IV and II : 2; III.

2 Carried on in "Kritik der reinen Vernunft," and in "Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten," v. Kirchmann's edition, vols. I and III.

"Kritik der reinen praktischen Vernunft," I: 3, v. Kirchmann's edition, vol. II, pp. 86-107.

4.66 "Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten," v. Kirchmann's edition, vol. III, pp. 67-73.

"Der Analytik der praktischen Vernunft II," v. Kirchmann's edition, vol. II, pp. 83-84.