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In most of the great philosophies reality has been conceived as a function of moral theory. This is to conceive the whole as a function of the part or that which ought to be in relation to that which is. "That which ought to be will be." Romanticism fixes its attention upon ends that are impossible to attain while philosophy's true sphere is to understand rather than to remodel, and thus some moralists have adopted the more modest program of "That which ought to be is that which is." If the ideal of morality is no more than the end toward which reality directs itself in order to attain perfection, then this ideal together with the movement which it determines, is one of the most interesting aspects of reality. The moral impulse is intimately related to religion, as a means of expression. All religions are enriched by hypothetical explanations of the world and in their many forms are the inspiration for human activity. The moral impulse, divorced from religious sentiment, can find no more universal scheme of harmony than can theology. Yet these many ethical systems, in their strife with one another, help us to conceive the reality behind experiential illusion and to realize life in its fullness. Different ethical theories are considered and their incompleteness proven. Thus, in the hedonistic school, the universal presence of the idea of good and evil is but a witness of the sensation of pleasure and pain in another form. Applying a Kantian method of reasoning, we may say that pleasure and pain are the forms of moral phenomena just as time and space are the forms of all phenomena. Thus by analogy, to totally suppress pain in an effort to increase pleasure would be to destroy all moral conduct, just as to remove time or space in the hope of finding a pure form of the other would be to destroy both. Again, of religion and ethics it is shown that the illusion of a metaphysical finality is not necessary to the founding of morality. This illusion removed, it still remains an irrational element in the world as the creative understanding which formulates value judgments of good and evil. But this irrational principle issues imperative commands and is an agent of realization. As this fact of realization is engendered by the moral happenings and explains its rise by the fiction of a universal and transcendent purpose, it matters little from what point of view we consider moral phenomena. In the body of philosophical speculation it occupies the position that it should occupy: it objectifies reality.

Following Spencer's "vicious social organism theory" we take it for granted that nations, like organisms, are born, grow, and die. Reflection, however, will show that such a view is false and superficial. Institutions or associations are to be distinguished from the "community as a real focus of social life." In the latter sense, "society is a spiritual thing to which there belongs no natural destiny of decay and death." It expresses itself in institutions and in forms of state but it outlives them all. The Greek life, for instance, is