Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/79

63 The conclusion to which Idealism points is in brief this: Time or Change is neither an absolute reality nor an absolute unreality; notwithstanding that each of these views has been maintained in an extreme form by thinkers in ancient and modern times, and in the Eastern and Western worlds. They are not mutually exclusive alternatives, one or the other of which must be true nor can we form an absolute antithesis between temporal and super-temporal existence. There must be some via media between them, which makes it possible to conceive of Reality as a multiplicity of individual, finite, growing lives, immanent in a universal and eternally complete Life.

To resume: Ethics, in the proper sense, as dealing with the ultimate Ideal of human life, is a part of Ontology. It has a twofold problem, corresponding to the two meanings of the ambiguous assertion that it 'has to show what the supreme End of human existence is' When we ask, What is the End? we may be asking either: (1) How are we to define the End? or (2) What do we mean by saying that this is the End? And in a penetrating analysis of the sense in which we can say there is an End,—i.e., of the sense in which reality can be predicated of it,—we are compelled to raise the deepest problems of Ontology. It is not enough for Ethics to try to define the End, without showing us the exact sense in which we can affirm its reality. The Ethics of Conduct, on the other hand, is not a coherent science, but a body of doctrines bearing on practice; it assumes the End, and looks to Sociology and Psychology,—i.e., to the facts of social morality (actual and historical) and the facts of the individual life,—for guidance in realizing the End.

Note.—It is idle to maintain that in the present state of our knowledge we have anything more than dark hints towards a solution of the problem referred to above,—the reality of Time. Evidently it is only another form of the question, How is it that an individual can be immanent in, and share in, a Universal Life, and yet have a distinct Selfhood of his own? If we could explain this, we should be explaining 'the relation