Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/545

531 stratum of evolution and reach the plane of the Uebermensch. Thus we see how, upon the basis of Schopenhauer's inadequate epistemology and psychology, a narrowly pessimistic, and a narrowly optimistic view of the development of experience have found expression, respectively, in an ethics of racial self-annihilation and an ethics of blatant assertion of the 'blond beast’ in man.

Schopenhauer is right in pleading for an appeal to human experience, and, as was indicated above, his criticism of Kant in this respect is, so far as it goes, quite justified. For no theory of morals can have any real significance if its basis is alien to concrete experience. A morality for which the joys and sorrows of mortal men and women have no real, essential meaning, is itself barren of any meaning for mortal men and women. Morality is no abstractly rational concern of phantom citizens in some noumenal Kingdom of Ends; it cannot borrow its sanction of authority from any transcendent Deity or any divinely inscribed Decalogue. An ethics of abstract sorites may do for a universe of bloodless artifacts; but an ethics which would show living man the springs of his own conduct, and set before him the concrete vision of his own dimly felt ideals,—such an ethics must necessarily find both its problem and its method in human experience. This is the proper sphere of the moral philosopher; here and here alone is the real basis of morality to be sought. Heic Rhodus, heic salta! But Nietzsche's attack upon Schopenhauer's morality of self-effacement is also perfectly well justified. A morality whose logical result involves the self-annihilation of the human species can have as little meaning for living men and women as the morality which treats them as bloodless rational beings. In his ethics Kant errs in apparently refusing to read the open book of human experience; Schopenhauer, however, would fain close it and cast it aside in disgust. The moral