Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/106

90 problem even for biology. And even if man's life were prolonged a few years, would death be more natural, and would the will to die ever eclipse the will to live? Further, intelligence, though aiding us in science, ever creates new ills. It is the source of our fear of death, which is not merely instinctive as in animals. Now the logical ideal of this biological ethics would be a life of pure instinct, of definite and passive equilibrium between the individual and his environment. When man through his intelligence has become an animal perfectly adapted to his conditions, an organism completely harmonious, he will be happy, and may dispense with intelligence. But there is no optimism here. Further, if ever such an ideal could be realized, the happiness of man as a thinking being would not ensue. This theory looks only at man as a bodily organism, whereas the conditions of human happiness and man's interests are more diverse and obscure. Less pain and consciousness do not bring more happiness. So biology alone is unable to decide between these diverse moral tendencies and ends which are presented to man as a thinking being. It fails to reconcile the end of the individual with that of his species. Its struggle with disease is of infinite value, but it can never solve the moral problem.

Our life is bound up in the life of the universe. Our sensations come to us, and their feeling-tone is determined by our nature, not our will. We know the world only in fragments, which we strive to unify because of a unity which we find in our own soul-life. We feel natural forces active in us; but also a self-knowing, self-determined activity proceeding from the ego, such as we find nowhere else in the world. Since we do not create our own egos, but these are ever newly begotten from the universal life, we suppose that there is such a unity in nature also. We think the world-unity as the activity of a force, which in producing unity asserts itself as a personal life, the divine ego of the world. The fragments of the activity of the universal life point to a connection of the phenomena, but neither agree with our ethical requirements nor ever disclose a world-end. If, nevertheless, we are convinced of the personal life of a divine ego in the universal life of the world, this has its ground in the fact that universal life and personal life interpenetrate each other in our own souls, and we are aware how they necessitate each other. To the universal life we owe sensations and feelings. The multiplicity and variety of these impressions meet in us an ego which transforms them in becoming conscious of them, and in giving them a representation in speech conformable to the constitution of the human mind. Through the transformation the ego comes to feel itself as active, to distinguish the activity of the universal life from its own life. We call the personal life of the world God; but we know