Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/120

 C. BENOUVIER, DES DOCTRINES PHILOSOPHIQUES. 107 consequence of this he was able to found his metaphysical doc- trine on his ethics, substituting practical " postulates " for theo- retical " dogmas ". The relative positions of practice and specu- lation are thus reversed. There is no longer any apparent dependence of morality on cosmical physics and the law of evolu- tion of the world ; " conformity to nature " has become explicitly what it always really meant, conformity to the nature of reason. Duty has been rigorously denned, and the doctrine of happiness placed in its true dependence on the morality of duty. For a doctrine of happiness is after all necessary. The ques- tion of optimism and pessimism is not indifferent to philosophy, but is a question which, once it has been raised, requires a deci- sive answer. Now the Kantian doctrine enables us to view hap- piness as dependent on our own attitude towards the world, not on a previous determination of the nature of the world. There are two beliefs that it is theoretically possible to hold : the belief that duty and happiness are in the end brought into harmony ; and the belief that the idea of justice has no application in the universe as a whole. We are under the moral obligation to choose that belief which will enable us to act best. This position is fundamentally that of Pascal's " argument of the wager". The necessity of acting renders it impossible to refrain from choosing ; and we must choose the alternative on the side of which our highest interests are placed. There is this defect in Pascal's argu- ment that one particular doctrine, the doctrine of the Catholic Church, is arbitrarily taken as the subject of the wager. An opponent can object against Pascal the merely local and tempo- rary character of this doctrine ; and then there is the scientific test of historical evidence. The argument of Pascal, however, can be thrown into a universally valid form. It has been " re- duced to good sense " by Locke, and cleared of even the appear- ance of making an appeal to " the lower interests " by Eousseau. The principle of its reduction to a valid form is that we must seek " the maximum of security in the minimum of determination of doctrine " (ii. 334). Kant's postulates of the practical reason God, Freedom and Immortality are found to be at once neces- sary and sufficient. Freedom is required in order to make moral obligation possible ; immortality or at least continuation of life after death to make possible the realisation of the ideal of jus- tice in the universe ; theism, inferred, as we have already seen, from the necessity of a creative act and the universality of law, is required as a security for the final ordering of the universe in accordance with the principle of justice. A necessary part of the system of the postulates is that physical evil should be traced to moral evil. This is made conceivable by the doctrine of free-will as " a gift " which could not be conferred without the power being left to the creature to choose wrong as well as right. By the existence of a real free-will the sense of sin and its reality are also explained.