Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/547

533 or fear of damnation. In the clash of conflicting motives the consciousness of moral obligation is the voice of man's rational nature, demanding the recognition of its intrinsic superiority over the petty caprices of transitory impulses. The imperative rationality of our highest ideals: this is what Kant's ethics points to, even though it does not present it with any adequacy. And, if the validity of this truth is recognized, Schopenhauer's contention that Kant's morality is a morality of masked egoism appears in a new light. Kant's 'categorical imperative' is egoistic, if one fails to appreciate the real significance of what Kant calls its 'autonomous' character. If one conceives it to be the command of a transcendent God, then obedience to it is nothing but a 'wise bargain,' and Schopenhauer's satire of such a 'du sollt' morality is well merited. But a realization of one's essential kinship with all reality must necessarily show that the true 'ought' is the expression of man's own truest self, in which he shares in the organic character of all experience. And, on that plane, which is the ideal plane of all ethical evaluation, narrow egoism and narrow altruism both lose their significance; for they both rest on a radically false dualism, to transcend which is the prime object of ethics as well as of all philosophy.

Ethics must study man, but it must recognize man for what he ideally is in his concrete totality, and not try to reduce the organic complexity of his nature to some one favorite formula. 1 Man is rational, and his consciousness of duty and universal law is essential to his moral life; but the consciousness of duty is not all. Sympathy is a prime factor in the evolution of man's social consciousness, and indispensable to any truly ethical development; but sympathy cannot exhaust the moral life. Egoism, the pursuit of one's own ends in the struggle for life, is also a normal tendency, but healthy man is no Juggernaut crushing everything and everybody in his path. Taken in isolation, out of their immanent relation within the organic unity of human nature, the stern sense of duty and the austere pursuit of virtue turn into the spiritless operation of an a priori rational machine; the glow of compassionate love, into the diseased fever of