Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/682

666 best accessible knowledge upon a given subject, and to draw from it such conclusions as it fairly warrants.

Had this dissertation come to me without the appended Vita, I should unhesitatingly have attributed it to a German having a very imperfect knowledge of English. Its style is distinctly un-English, inelegant, and not seldom ungrammatical. Its method is German, painstaking, exhaustive, but not lucid or incisive. It does not hold the attention of the reader, or lead him naturally up to a bird's-eye view of the subject.

Apart from these defects of style and method, the dissertation deserves the no small praise of having achieved its purpose. It brings out clearly Plato's notion of ethics, showing that they are naturalistic and eudæmonistic, conceding the form of the virtuous life to be harmony, inner and outer, and its aim to be happiness, individual and social. Rosmini expressed this by saying that Plato's ethical ideal was the "unity of human perfection." In such a system, the "will of God" and its correlates, "righteousness" and "sin," have no place; the "categorical imperative" is unknown.

From an historical point of view, the most interesting point in Plato's ethical system is one of which Dr. Hammond has taken no notice, and which, indeed, did not lie within the scope of his undertaking. By showing that his institutional ethics, embodied in the state, is correlated with "idiopsychological ethics" manifested in the individual, Plato took the first step towards shifting the ethical centre of gravity from the outward social order to the inner individual conscience, and thus started a movement which broke up ancient institutions and transformed human life. This movement was continued by Aristotle, greatly accelerated by the Stoics and Epicureans, and consummated in Christianity, which completely detaches the individual, as far as his moral relations are concerned, from the State, and places him, solum coram Solo, face to face with the source of the moral law. It is in contrast with Christian ethics that the system of Plato exhibits its character most clearly. The Platonic ethics aim at a harmony, the conditions of which can be learnt only through knowledge and insight, hence the fundamental virtue is Wisdom ; Christian ethics aim at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; hence the fundamental Christian virtue is faith ripening, through hope, into love. It is needless to say that one of the chief efforts of modern ethical thinking, as well as of modern civilization, has been to reconcile these two points of view.

To refer to one or two minor details: When Dr. Hammond (p. 132) says: "Philosophical ethics is possible only when investigated [sic] in perfect freedom, uninfluenced by tradition, religion, or other like causes," he asserts something that is by no means obvious, and the contrary might equally well be asserted. All depends upon what use is made