Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/410

392 morality, like other systems, has been determined by the collective thought of twenty centuries. The new morality will be similarly affected by the progress of the sciences. The particular science affecting it is sociology, which shows how morality depends on a people's conception of the universe, of life, and of man's destiny, and how morality varies with the progress of knowledge. Formerly the notion of God furnished a model to follow and forced believers to rise above their personal desires toward the attainment of harmony between them and their social group. Science offers the same stimulus and more certitude. Religious rites and scientific technique were closely associated in primitive times, but have diverged so widely in their evolution, that no trace of their common past remains. Nothing in the methods of research in religion is akin to those of science. In religion, intuition, uncriticized sensations, internal persuasion, are alone considered. The degree of certitude in science and religion is best found by an analytic study of the methods of science. There are four moments in the method of science: observation, experimentation, criticism, and hypothesis. In religion the starting point is certitude; in science certitude is the goal. Religion defines and limits the means to be used; science leaves the judgment free and keeps curiosity on the alert for the unknown. Religion limits man to God and forbids him to conceive anything outside of God. Science opens the way to every aspiration. In offering the spirit a method, it systematizes and harmonizes the mind and thus acts upon the moral life. The intuitive formulæ of the past were not wholly empty, for they tended to establish rules of conduct capable of disciplining men; but rules based upon ideas poorly supported by experience and not demanding any critical effort from the individual, remain only partly efficacious. The apostolic precepts have done nothing to suppress violence in the individual, because they never explained its physiological causes. Science does explain them and enables man to control them. Religions, with their fixity of ideals, have lost the power to organize an ideal in harmony with positive knowledge. Science in morality means an ideal indefinitely perfectible, supported by stable principles. Those who are alarmed by the disappearance of religions have not reflected sufficiently on the grandeur of the new ideal. Every man who possesses the maximum of exact knowledge acquired in his epoch, though not acquired by his own efforts, can control his actions, because science gives precise, even if relative answers to the questions he puts, and they suffice for the limits of his existence.

Mediæval German Mysticism was a revival of Neoplatonism. One thought prevails throughout. The essential goal of human life is a return from the many into the one. For Master Eckhart, the whole universe, from the highest state of pure spirituality to the lowest worm in the dust emanates from one eternal will. The trinity is its highest expression. A mythical birth