Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/524

506 ethics seems to be that in the inner nature of self-conscious personalities, and here alone, can be found the unfailing spring of ethical insight. Personality is an ultimate and irreducible principle for ethics. The latter discipline forgets the conditions of its birth and the specific character of its problems when it becomes merely a department of sociology. There exists outside the rational individual no institution of society or demonstrable principle of abstract reason that can be regarded as an ultimate and universal source of ethical judgments or final standard of authority.

The rational self, then, is a limiting concept for ethical investigation. All psychological and historical analyses of goods, values, or ideals, must have reference to selves from which they derive and in which they are realized. Hence the objectivity of ethical values or ideals cannot be grounded in the existing social order. A ground for ethical objectivity can only be found in a universal spiritual essence or principle manifested in and sustaining the multiplicity of individuals. And here metaphysics takes up the tale. The more radical ethical tendencies of contemporary literature, for example, the 'over-man' of Nietzsche, the poetry of Browning and Whitman, Ibsen's dramas, etc., and many minor currents that might be named, are vaguely indicative of the search for a fuller and more consistent recognition of the scope of personality. Whatever be the further value of these recent movements in literature, one principle they enforce and illustrate, viz.: That a primary condition for the fuller development of a spiritual individuality is, on the one hand, the systematization and simplification of social morality as embodied in law, custom, and sentiment, and, on the other hand, the clear distinction between this field and the undefined and indefinable field of action for the development of personality. Historically speaking, the greatest step in the spiritual evolution of man was the discovery and affirmation of inherent individual or personal values by Socrates, Jesus, and others.

Progress in ethical knowledge and practice depends on the recognition that that judgment or attitude alone has intrinsic worth which flows from the inner personality. The outcome of