Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/84

68 the contrast between the ideal and actual cannot be overcome, and a reconciliation can be merely approximate. The treatment of this problem carries with it interesting discussions of the relation between the two requisites, 'harmoniousness' and 'comprehensiveness,' of the antinomy of the attainability and unattainability of the ethical end, of the antithesis between the 'form' and 'content' of ethics, of various views of 'immortality,' and of the ideal of a perfect human society regarded as an incentive, and the actual existence of the realized ideal regarded as a full and complete satisfaction of its constituent members. The source of the antithesis and contradictions is found in "the temporal character of the moral experience, in virtue of which ideal and achievement inevitably fall apart" (p. 423). The only complete satisfaction must be one "arising from the conviction that our lives, ... are 'as functions of the perfect universe.'" But even this leads us to a consciousness "of our own fundamental identity with an order which fulfils itself no less in blunders, mistakes, sins, and ultimately perhaps in our extinction as finite individuals, than in our highest successes. As functions of that universe we are already perfect, and know ourselves to be so." This naturally leads to the closing chapter, which has the significant title, "Beyond Good and Bad." Since the religious experience is the final form in which our practical aspirations express themselves, it must be examined to ascertain whether we may at last discover those characteristics which are essential to a 'pure' experience. If we fail in this search, it follows that "ethics, as the science which describes the practical side of our experience as human beings, cannot be in any case based upon preconceived metaphysical certainties." The main purpose, then, of this concluding discussion leads to the establishment, in accordance with the same method hitherto employed, of two leading results, which can be most briefly stated in the author's own words: "(a) That the religious experience itself, when tested at the bar of metaphysics, is found to be full of unresolved and unresolvable contradictions and inconsistencies, and therefore to require modification to an unknown extent and in unknown directions before it could be accepted as a finally satisfactory account of the world of experienced reality ; and (b) that in the religious experience ... the narrowly and purely ethical or moral concepts with which we have hitherto been working ... are already so transformed as to be emptied of all significance; in a word, that you cannot become truly 'religious' without at the same time becoming something more—or less—than moral" (p. 427).