Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/539

525. But God, Freedom, and Immortality, thus banished from the phenomenal order, did not lose their meaning for Kant. Rather did they suggest and indicate the way for an attempt to restate the problem of ethics from a non-empirical point of view,—to seek the realm of morality in some ideal kingdom of ends, in the noumenal nature of rational beings. And, in this abstract sphere of ethical discussion, Kant found the concepts of 'rationality,' 'lawfulness,' 'duty,' and the practical postulates, God, Freedom, and Immortality, to involve each other necessarily. On the basis of this mutual implication of abstract concepts, Kant constructed his entire system of rational obligation of autonomous wills.

To a man so human and so much alive to the frailties of man as Schopenhauer, Kant's theory of morals seemed to have cut loose from reality altogether. "The structure floats in the air," he says, "like a web of the subtlest conceptions devoid of all contents; it is based on nothing, and can therefore support nothing and move nothing." In his plea for an attempt at an empirical investigation of actual human nature as a propædeutic to the solution of the problem of human conduct and the statement of ethics in terms of direct experience, Schopenhauer stands for what is more and more becoming the method of recent significant ethical investigation. Ethics may not end with man, but it must start with a study of conduct from a human point of view, and not from the heights of any imagined or abstractly reasoned-out Deity. Morality can never be consistently based upon any theology or any supernatural religion. Rather do these latter find their origin and whatever real significance they may have in terms of the moral development and the social experience of their advocates and adherents. The moral theorist must first become intimate with what man is, before presuming to intimate what man ought to be. The hierarchy of ethical values can rise above the brute in man and reach the plane of the divine only by resting upon the solid rock of actual human nature.

But what manner of experience is that upon which Schopenhauer prides himself to have based his theory of morals? In his