Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/522

504 and feeling. Not until the decay of civic life began in the Greek city-states did the antithesis between rationalism and hedonism appear in marked form. Primitive Christianity sharpened this antithesis. The sense-life was despised and regarded as altogether inimical to the realization of the highest good. The latter was conceived in supernatural, otherworldly terms, and in time, with the admission of the growing tide of pessimistic revolt against nature and of a Manichæan dualism into Christianity, the antithesis became complete. Here we have, then, a well-nigh complete trans-valuation of values in contrast with those of classic Greek life, although not without an infusion of Greek elements, especially in Augustine's notion of the 'Highest Good,' the cardinal virtues, and the general mediæval notion of the hierarchy of virtues and duties. Since the Renaissance the tide has been setting in the reverse direction towards a definition of ethical goods in terms of immanent and purely human ends, but with a stronger emphasis on the worth of the individual than one finds in classical Greek ethics. To-day ethical valuations are a more or less confused blending of Christian super-naturalistic or transcendent ideals with naturalistic and immanent conceptions of individual and society, strongly colored by the modern democratic movement.

In some directions there undoubtedly has been reached, since the time of Aristotle, a clarification and deepening of ethical-values. Justice perhaps affords the best illustration of the universalization of an ethical value. Our idea of justice not only has a vastly wider application, but it also has a deeper and richer content, than that of the Greek. And the Greek ideal of friendship has been deepened and widened by the Christian notion of love into the ideal of a fuller social sympathy and beneficence. But in other respects ethical value-judgments are confused and narrow. Notwithstanding much fuss and talk about art, one does not find any widespread appreciation of the personal worth of beauty in nature, poetry, and the fine arts. The utility of science is generally recognized, but hardly the ethical quality of