Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/231

Rh follows the Metaphysica into a second edition, and advantage has been taken of the opportunity thus afforded to "elaborate the argument more fully, and correlate it more frequently" with the earlier work. The book, as now reissued, contains several new chapters, dealing especially with the altruistic virtues and with the idea and functions of the State. The general argument has gained perceptibly in value and impressiveness through the present revision; and while the book has been enlarged, the statement is even more succinct than in the original edition. So condensed is the argument, and so severely scientific is the entire treatment, that the work is, now as formerly, suited rather to the capacity of experts than of the "general reader," or even of the college student. Yet the style is, for the purpose, often strikingly effective; one feels that such earnest and rigorous thinking is appropriately clothed in such language. And to those who can read between the lines of the scientific exposition, the work breathes an ethical fervor which is none the less impressive because it is carefully restrained. The practical interest which, according to Aristotle, an ethical treatise ought to possess, is not absent; the book abounds in acute moral judgments, and gives evidence of an ethical temper which is at once genial and severe.

The author's main thesis is the parallelism of knowledge and morality. He finds "will-reason" at the heart of both. "The end of man, as of every other organism, is self-realization " (p. 37). This is possible only through the fulfilment of the idea or law of man's nature. The peculiarity, in man's case, is that we have "realization of self by self"; man has to "organize himself," or reduce himself to law. For in man there is a dual nature — the "attuent" and the "rational," — the man of feeling or impulse, and the man of reason or will. The former is the "real" or "nature," the "subject" or "individual"; the latter is the "formal," the "personality," or "ego," constituted by the subsuming of the attuent subject or individual. The function of the rational ego, in relation to "sensibility," is essentially the same as its function in relation to "sense"; in both cases the "attuent" has to be "intuited." "All incitements of feeling are arrested just as, in the cognition of the external, the presentations of sense are arrested; and they are co-ordinated towards ends" (p. 51). "Self-realization, then, is possible only through the constant presence of the formal (the idea) in the real, of will in feeling, and its perpetual supremacy in that domain" (p. 37). Accordingly, "perhaps the best expression for the chief good ... is Fulness of Life achieved through Law by the Action of Will as Reason on Sensibility" (p. 287). On the other hand, "immorality is the letting loose of feeling in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it is individuality in opposition to personality" (p. 244). In immorality, "will is defeated, the personality overcome, and the attuent subject it is which volitionizes,