Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/199

181 offers as the differentiæ of moral experience, not the psychological ones of assertiveness, intentness, singlemindedness, incisiveness, but the logical ones of unconditionalness, universality, necessity. Analyzing practical experience from the point of view of import, he defines it in terms of end-setting, i.e., a purposive process aiming at a good. Pure practical experience, or moral experience in its true sense, aims unconditionally at the only end of which universality and necessity can be predicated, i.e., reason as revealed in the recognition of, and obedience to the moral law. Here then is the answer to the question: ''As what does moral experience give itself? What point of view does it logically imply? Moral experience is teleological in so far as it partakes of the purposive character of all practical experience; it is "auto-teleological" in as much as its only end is complete self-expression of its own meaning, the complete unfolding of its own rationality''. That such expression of practical reason as self-end is the burden, or meaning of moral experience, Kant persistently maintains. No doubt what Kant gives is the logical equivalent of the sense of duty; but is it that of the moral consciousness as well? And can the whole structure of moral experience be balanced on this point? With characteristic distrust of the empirical Kant has cast aside all empirical purposes and concrete will-affirmations and thus achieved a teleology whose object is none other than its own purposiveness. The result is a theory exhilarating because of the force and earnestness back of it, affecting in its simplicity, but often distressing in its naiveté. Whenever Kant is a rationalist his theories of a kingdom of ends and of personality as self-end give more than a hint of another, the idealistic, point of view—he slips into that circular and barren reasoning so prevalent in ethics and so destructive of a really fruitful discussion of moral problems. Stoicism with its emphasis on the reasonableness of living according to nature and its definition of nature as a system of reason is the classic example. How many points of contact there are between Stoic and Kantian ethics has perhaps never been fully realized.

Another serious objection to the Kantian interpretation of moral experience remains. It has not done full justice to the