Page:Ethical Studies (reprint 1911).djvu/142

 act embodies a self-contradiction is immoral. Whatever act is self-consistent is legal. Whatever act is self-consistent, and is done for the sake of realizing self-consistency, and for the sake of nothing else, is moral. This is simple, this is practical; and there surely is cause for thankfulness in the arrangement of things which has placed the standard and test of all that is most important, of everything which really is important, in a form which even the unlettered can understand, and a child can apply.

Stated as we have stated it above, the theory of duty for duty’s sake carries with it little or no plausibility. Criticism of it may appear to the reader to be superfluous, but nevertheless it will repay us to see briefly set forth the inner contradictions in which it loses itself, and which destroy its claim to practical value.

The theory contradicts itself; and, reduced to a simple form, the contradiction is as follows:—Self-realization is the end, and the self to be realized is the negative of reality; we are to realize, and must produce nothing real. Let us explain. The good is the will. The will is the carrying of the inner mind out into the world of fact; it is the identity of thought and existence, the process in which the ideal passes over into reality, and where the content on both sides is the same, subject always to the diversity of the two different elements. Mere thought is not will—that is the inner side only. Mere existence in time and space, or time, is not will—that is the outside only. For will we want both sides, and both sides in one. And from the above we see at once that, if the two sides are to correspond, there must be some correspondence in the nature of what they contain; and, starting here from the side of existence, we may say, you can realize nothing, unless that which you are to realize have in it already the character which distinguishes reality.

To realize means to translate an ideal content into existence,