Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/664

652 which he had dallied for a while in his youth: "if there be no such thing as morality, or if morality be but an epiphenomenon of economic conditions, what warrant have the hungry or the disadvantaged for complaining?" (p. 46.) "I became convinced that the ethical principle must run like a golden thread through the whole of a man's life, in a word, that social reform unless inspired by the spiritual view of it, that is, unless it is made tributary to the spiritual, the total end of life, is not social reform in any true sense at all" (p. 56). It is due to the stern regard of their leader for reason and right, to his down-right sanity, that the ethical societies which Professor Adler founded avoided the pitfalls into which they might easily have disappeared; that they never took the shadow for the substance is in large measure owing to his wise guidance, as is also the fact that the social movements which have quietly grown up in these societies have become established institutions throughout the land.

The fundamental fact in ethics for Professor Adler is the notion of worth. The quality of worth belongs to a particular kind of energy. "It is unlike the physical forces; it is not a transformed mode of mechanical energy. It is sui generis, underivative, unique; it is synonymous with the highest freedom; it is power raised to the N'th degree. It is ethical energy. To release it in oneself is to achieve unbounded expansion. Morality, as commonly understood, is a system of rules, chiefly repressive. Ethical energy, on the contrary, is determined by the very opposite tendency; a tendency, it is true, never more than tentatively effectuated under finite conditions. And because the energy is unique, it points toward a unique, irreducible, hence substantive entity in man, from which it springs. This entity is itself incognizable, yet the effect it produces requires that it be postulated. The category of substance, which is almost disappearing from science, is to be reinstalled in ethics. Ethics cannot dispense with it" (pp. 92f.). But ethics cannot take a step without an ideal of the whole. "No detached thing has worth. No part of an incomplete system has worth." "We must possess an ideal plan of the whole if we are to be certain of our Tightness in any particular part of conduct." "There is not a single partial rule of conduct, neither 'Thou shalt not kill' nor 'Thou shalt not lie,' nor any other that, taken by itself, is of itself ethically right. It may be right, it may be wrong. It takes its ethical quality from the plan of conduct as a whole, and without reference to the whole it is devoid of Tightness. " (See pages 98 and 99.) "Hence the conclusion that there is no possibility of establishing