Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/280

 H. STEINTHAL, ALLGEUEINE ETHIK. 279 Now the Moral Ideas are not psychological ; they do not enter into the chain of cause and effect. Yet they have power (Macht); and because they are presented as ideas ( Vorstellungen) they also become psychological forces. In this way there grows up a group of ethical ideas ( Vorstellungen) ; and consequently while Freedom still remains an ideal fact, not psychological, it may yet be measured by the degree to which the other groups of ideas are determined by the ethical group. This supremacy of the ethical group it is duty to develop, and it is the object of education. Freedom is thus Autonomy, the determination of the will by a self-imposed Law. In the Fourth Part Prof. Steinthal goes on to complete his ethical theory by a moral Weltanschauung. It is for the most part a development of the notion of an objective spirit (which contains the truth of knowledge, the beautiful and the good), but he repudiates the help of the metaphysical conception of an absolute spirit as much as that of religion. There is, he holds, no antagonism between ethics and religion, but moral institutions like marriage stand in their own rights : marriage is a disposition of two persons, religion only stamps their entry into religious society as the state stamps their entry into civil society. The moral spirit it is which gives value to Nature, which in itself is wholly the play of accident without an end of its own. It creates out of Nature a Cosmos, a world of humanity. This intelligible world contains not only the good will but Truth and Beauty as well, which the Good draws up to its own height. For Science and Art alike are the creation of the Eeason, but they are still separated from their creator ; whereas a man is his will, and in virtue of this identity he gives his knowledge the mark of Truth, and that which pleases him the qualifica- tion of Beauty. The truth then of Science, Art, and Action, is given in the human spirit, which itself without time or space posits its sensation in definite time and space. This objective spirit is the medium of the individual subjects, in which they communicate as by speech. It is the sum and system of subjec- tive minds, at once their creation and superior to them. So far as I understand Prof. Steinthal, he seems in his distinction of subjective and objective not to mark clearly two different meanings of objective, (1) that which is outside a subject, for example a word uttered, which Prof. Steinthal does not con- sider objective (p. 421), and (2) that which is communicable from one mind to another like a language, or a true thought. The latter is, I suppose, the sense he intends. He shows further the historical character of this objective spirit, and how in individual nations it gathers into separate Ideas or ideals, ways of thinking or dispositions of character. It lifts the individual who breathes in it out of a purely natural state into an ideal character (ideell). This spirit exists only in and through the individuals, on whom is therefore imposed the duty of assimilation to the total order.