Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/107

91 of a mind in God like ours. The terms 'knowing' and 'willing' are not to be indiscriminately applied to God, as if we could understand them as they are in him. We cannot think the universe except as a unity. In its effects we cannot directly grasp this unity, but as cause of all activity it is conceivable and clear to us, for we feel such a unity in our own conduct. We feel our ego not as a mere cause from which an effect follows, but as setting its effect before itself as an end, which it knows and wills. We cannot think the universal life otherwise, though we have no idea of its knowledge or will. Indeed, our own ego we feel; when we try to conceive it, it is not less a puzzle than divinity itself. But the fact that we cannot, through forms of knowledge which we ourselves produce, express the nature of God, does not mean that a consciousness given us by the very constitution of our nature, a feeling, cannot reveal the divine essence to our minds. The religious feeling is given with the feeling of our ego and develops with it. Religious forms are attempts of our imagination to give expression to the originally formless feeling. Our ego is itself only an effect of the divine ego, and yet is felt as being the cause of its own activity; this can only be because the ego itself belongs to the divine cause and works in its service. Our religious feeling is fundamentally nothing else than the feeling of the cause working in us. The feeling of self never comprehends the religious feeling, because in this life the full unity of the ego-form never is, but only becomes. Of a great part of our experience we are manifestly not the cause; hence arises the feeling of dependence upon a complete ego, which is the cause of all things good and evil.

As ordinarily interpreted, Aristotle's ethical system as we have it is dispersive and incomplete, or even a tissue of confusions. The author of this article offers an alternative interpretation, which, without straining the Greek, presents the system as a coherent whole. Aristotle objects to the abstract nature of Plato's Absolute Good; but it is clear that Aristotle himself sought an ultimate principle. His denial of precision in ethical matters is simply a recognition of the familiar fact that all moral rules have their exceptions. In describing the sphere of ethics as 'things which can be different,' he refers, not to a contingent irrational element, but to action from choice; and while he does not solve the riddle of 'free will,' he does not confuse choice with chance. We are told that we must choose the 'right plan' or 'mean' for its own sake; but this is further defined in a later book. The theoretical and the practical reason are distinguished, but are conceived as subtly and vitally interrelated. Moral virtue implies knowledge of the right 'plan' (the 'mean') and desire for it. Just as scientific knowledge is a lower form of theoretical reason, prudence is practical intelligence on a low level; it deals with the good for man, not