Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/333

319 in the Marxian doctrine of surplus value. According to this doctrine, the surplus value of the laborer's industry over the 'subsistence minimum,' is wrongfully appropriated by the capitalist and the landlord. While it is easy to criticise this theory, yet Marx here lays down a certain ideal of abstract justice which contains elements essential to a true and complete doctrine. Equality is not the sole aim of society. The true end of Socialism is ethical, the use of the state for ethical or human ends. In the struggle for existence our fellow-men are at once our most formidable enemies and most potent allies. But, as in the animal world, so in the social, the higher the organism the greater the interdependence of its parts. Competition is the law of the unorganized, coöperation of organized life. Progress in evolution, the evolution of higher types, is identical with the advance of organization. The natural organ of such organization is the moral intelligence, by virtue of which the individual makes the good of the species the object of supreme interest. This conception of life is as old as the ethical consciousness of man. In primitive society, however, coöperation is limited to the family, tribe, city, or nation. Moral progress has consisted primarily in what Green calls "the extension of the area of the common good." The goal will have been reached when all the world becomes as one family. To sum up: the tendency of modern collectivism is to absorb the abstract ideals of earlier political systems into a comprehensive and distinctly ethical system, based on the substitution of peace and good-will for the principle of rivalry and war. It aims to qualify the methods of competition by the social spirit realized in the more intimate personal relations. In so doing it reveals itself as a phase of a wider evolutionary process, whereby in the higher races a purposive and intelligent organization of life, inclusive of the whole species, is gradually substituted for the war of all against all by which the survival of types is determined at a lower stage.

Melanchthon's text-books cover the whole field of philosophy: dialectic, physics and astronomy, metaphysics and natural theology, anthropology, ethics. He is an Eclectic, and he culls what he conceives to be the truth out of all the systems of the ancients as well as the scholastics. Sometimes the influence of Aristotle and the ancients predominates; at other times, the influence of scholasticism; and, again, the new Humanistic movement sways his thought. In these two articles, which conclude the series, the writer makes a minute investigation of the sources, the different tendencies, and the various elements of Melanchthon's philosophy.