Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/125

 112 CRITICAL NOTICES : The process that has just been described is aided by a certain incompatibility, not intellectual but emotional, of the theoretical and the ethical view of things. The ethical view of external nature must always be somewhat Manichaean. M. Eenouvier has illustrated this by quotation of the celebrated passages from Mill's Essay on Nature. Those, on the other hand, who take by preference the pantheistic or intellectualist view, tend to pass from admiring contemplation of the order of the universe to assertion of its ethical perfection. This tendency is found, often unaccompanied by pantheism, in men of science. M. Eenouvier contrasts, for example, Darwin's admiration of the law of survival of the fittest, regarded hypothe- cally as imposed by a creator, with Mill's reprobation of laws of conflict and mutual destruction among living beings. And more than once he shows the ethical superiority of Spinoza's system attained, as he thinks, by the inconsequence of practically de- taching ethics from metaphysics, when, according to Spinoza's principles, ethics should be subordinate over the optimistic doc- trines of Leibniz and Hegel. This last comparison may furnish a suggestion for solving the difficulty. Is not the remedy to dis- tinguish clearly the ethical from the theoretical point of view, neither subordinating nor suppressing either ; to avoid, on the one hand, affirming an ethical end of the universe, and on the other hand to refrain from all attempts to find a moral justification of anything in the mere fact of its necessary determination according to universal laws ? The refusal to compromise between points of view, each maintained as separately valid, is not really an incon- sequence. A distinction of points of view may help to clear up the anti- nomy of happiness and duty. We may admit that the conceptions of obligation, of duty and of right are not ultimate in ethics, with- out denying them all relative validity ; without declaring them to be mere illusions, and proposing to substitute direct seeking of the good of others under the impulse of sympathy or pity for the idea of justice as the foundation of the social order. There is no doubt that the systematic working out of some doctrines of "happiness," or of a "good" as the ethical end, has led to the theoretical suppression of personal freedom. This, however, is due to the special character of the good that is aimed at ; in these cases some social good is regarded as superior to the good of all individuals. Those who recognise, with M. Eenouvier, that the highest good, while attained socially, must be a good for the indi- vidual, and that personal freedom is a condition of its attainment, are entirely at one with him practically, although they may make rights and duties deductions from the conception of good, not ultimate conceptions. To the making of obligation ultimate it may be objected that the word " obligation " implies command from some source ; and that a command, as M. Eenouvier fully recognises, cannot be the ultimate reason in ethics. The empiri-