Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/384

370 in the guise of religious belief or of transcendental metaphysics continues. Wherever the latter is employed for the explanation of morality, the ascetic conception of the moral process always creeps in. Bacon, standing as he does, half way between scholasticism and modern science, distinguishes between the 'natural' and ascetic forms of morality. But he believes 'natural' morality to be incapable of a satisfactory explanation on the ground of inborn social impulse and desire. The lex naturalis, which, as the active will of the deity, is immanent in the created nature of man, furnishes the basis of the entire moral process. Way for the anthropological explanation of morality was made by the English empiricists, while in opposition to them Cudworth and Clarke sought for a metaphysical explanation. With the Platonist Cudworth the moral an sich exists before, and independently of, all actual morality. It belongs to the eternal truths which exist in the mind of God as creative realities. It is neither produced nor destroyed. Eternal moral truth is innate in man as an a priori function, independent of all sense-experience. The moral process, which could take place on this basis, would only be the process of personal contact with the absolute good, i.e., the process would be asceticism. It is, however, on the Continent that the metaphysical direction in ethics has maintained itself longest and most energetically. The inheritance from scholasticism of the idea that universal moral law is the expression of the will of God, falls to both Descartes and Bayle. Even Voltaire and Rousseau acknowledge a morality, original and inborn, given with the nature of man, and object to the idea that morality is a product of the reciprocal relations of the human reason and the outer world. The ascetic consequences of this isolation of absolute morality from the actual is, however, drawn only by those who, like Geulincx and Malebranche, were religious mystics. Of Spinoza it is boasted that he emancipated ethics from theology. With Spinoza, however, morality has no direct or necessary relation to society. His ethics is summed up in the doctrine of the emotions and the supremacy of the intellectual emotion of divine love over the emotions of sense. Preservation of self is conceivable only in the form of the surrender of self to the All, i.e., to God. This intellectual emotion of divine love, or love of the absolute, which looks away from the world, is not distinguishable from the knowledge of the world sub specie aeternitatis. One finds in Spinoza no real contribution to the explanation of morality, when one regards his conception of the subject as a whole. The derivation of the moral process from the impulse to self-preservation