Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/588

572 follow the power impelling it onward and to fulfil its historical vocation. "The type inherent in the ego as germ must be developed even at the expense of life." "The choice of moral ends is determined for the personality by the inexorable law of its individuality." Personality, then, is the ideal. Since, however, it cannot be developed in isolation, there arises the duty to participate in social life. But, "in situations where the assertion of individual life of personality conflicts with the maintenance of civilization, i. e. social ends, the regard for the latter must unconditionally vanish, in order that the ego may preserve its freedom and individual peculiarity." Only that power which has made for the subject its individuality can reveal to it the law of its own being. No fixed formula or principle can be discovered that shall be binding for all personalities. Habits and customs as expressed in conscience generally guide us. In exceptional cases acts are due to the pressure of a given situation, some slumbering predisposition is aroused by some external object or other in which the deity reveals itself.

There can be no perfect morality without religion. It requires a life in God, an understanding of his thought moving the universe. We must believe in the moral order of the world. No scientific contemplation of nature or of history alone could inspire such a faith. The highest good can be given only in a unique moral personality, in which the essence of God and morality reveals itself. Such a personality is Jesus Christ, whose conception of the universe reveals all the dark, mysterious features of natural and historical occurrence. Christ teaches a teleological system of ethics, whose laws serve self-interest. "The highest and ultimate good is an individual, egoistical one: the perfection of one's own moral personality, the happiness of the soul." The Christian God is a personal God, creator of heaven and earth, the life-giving spirit underlying all natural occurrence, whose existence inspires us with the hope that our moral life may reach completion. "If there were no God, we should have to invent one in the interest of ethical science."

Gallwitz falsely accuses utilitarianism of not taking account of the subjective factor of morality on which he himself lays such stress. Yet Paulsen, whom he takes as the representative of this school, bases morality on sympathetic impulses which grow with human reason and thus insure ethical progress. Besides, I fail to see what can be the significance of a personality that is determined in critical periods by the deity working upon it through external circumstances. Paulsen would also agree with the author that there are individual diversities; indeed, he insists on them quite as strongly as Gallwitz does. Evolutionary ethics, too, grants that the same impressions affect different individuals differently, and bases on this fact the elimination of some and the preservation of others. In spite of these differences, however, we discover