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183 of the auto-teleological method, but inasmuch as it hits the other varieties as well I shall postpone urging it, and merely state that it concerns difficulties connected with the concept 'meaning.' (2) Personal idealism and pragmatism are the other varieties. As ethical theories they mark a reaction from the formalistic and ultra-simple interpretation of moral experience. Beyond that they need have little in common, but they often do—in Dewey, for instance, and Schiller.

There is, perhaps no more instructive problem in the history of ethical thought than the tracing of the relations of Kantian rationalism, Hegelian idealism, and personal idealism. Critics of Kant's ethics generally overlook his second formula of the categorical imperative. We are to respect humanity in ourselves and in others. Personality is self-end; it ought never to be exploited like a thing. Here Kant seems to be within promise of idealism, but when it comes to defining personality he lapses to rationalism, for he defines personality in terms of self and self in terms of the abstract quality of rationality. Hegelian idealism with its method of an interpretative analysis of self-consciousness on its dynamic side and of rejecting the Kantian thing-in-itself sought and found a more satisfactory theory of self. Rationality is still the central conception, but by it is meant, not something abstract, but a system of concrete meanings, self-developing and self-articulated by means of an immanent dialectic. In such a system the teleological interpretation of moral experience has substantial, and not merely nominal, rights. That it has yielded much of value to ethics, Hegel, Bradley, and Green have shown. But what seemed to be the strength of Hegelianism—its unity and economy— made for its ultimate downfall as a system. To decide the question of the meaning of a single class of experiences by its place in a complex system, and to apply to every fact a rather cumbrous and often distorting dialectic of relations seemed to some critics a decided slurring of the unique and the individual. Ethics was interpreted rightly as a theory of self and of self-realization; the method was rightly auto-teleological; but something seemed wrong: Geist, mind,