Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/573

 572 CRITICAL NOTICES : clew to the labyrinth of ethics, and probe more deeply the causes of the decay or efflorescence of ethical speculation. What Mr. Sidgwick has put most prominently forward in his account is the contrast between the chief aim in Greek and in modern ethics. In Greek times ethics, free from any idea of an already accomplished salvation only needing to be received, and an already promulgated law only needing to be apprehended and obeyed, launched boldly forth on the quest for the Chief Good the voyage to discover the means whereby human life may be lived to the best effect. Gradually it forced itself upon the notice of thinkers that, in order to distinguish the good from the apparent good (the merely useful and pleasant), a criterion must be taken in what was at first known as reason and right reason, but was afterwards more objectively entitled nature and the law of nature, and even the moral law and duty. Yet the Greek, though he owned that the Good must be determined by law and reason, was reluctant to adopt an ethical formalism, and even in affirming knowledge to be the chief good explained that it was the knowledge of the good. The soul according to the Platonic description rises by the fresh direction of its intellectual eye to an apprehension of ever higher and higher forms of good : and it is always good towards which that eye is inherently turned. The advance in the development of this doctrine was seriously harassed by the prevalence of a common antithesis between law and nature. To the citizens of a country broken up into petty communities the side of law which most impressed itself upon reflection was its arbitrary and parti- cularist character, as of something running counter to that free, original and spontaneous bent of things called nature. Yet along- side of this emphasis on the features of authoritative and external dictation, philosophers of more than local patriotism set forth the ideal of a law which is passionless and self-regulating mind, the voice of right reason, and which to those later Stoics who saw the great vision of the Roman Empire became the code of organi- sation for the universal city of God. In the hands of the Christian scholars of the early centuries this ideal became the law of God. Yet one of the most interesting passages in Mr. Sidg- wick's book is where he shows the new virtues and the new forms of old virtues that Christianity made influential in the world. And the sum of his pages on this point is to the effect that not in the idea of morality as divinely ordered, but in the freshening of those impulses which gave birth to faith, hope and love, and in the vivifying by a personal example of the sense of divine ownership of man, lay the specially progressive influences ethics owed to Christianity. In the brotherhood of love, in the fact-transcending power of faith, and in the hope of endless improvement, lay the new dynamic, which supplied what had been lacking in the old conception of reason and knowledge : reason and knowledge which had never been what they claimed