Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/433

415 book has a distinct and permanent pedagogical value. But it is more than this: it is the first serious attempt to present together, with any approximation to completeness, the ethical writings of a man from whom we have still much to learn, and this not merely from the matter of his writings, but from the spirit with which they are pervaded throughout.

In accordance with the plan proposed by the Academy, the author of this treatise first presents the essential features of the ethical theory of Kant, which he then subjects to a critical examination in respect to its fundamental principles and their logical development. The work concludes with an attempt to assign to Kant as an ethical writer his proper place in the development of moral theory, and in particular to show wherein his doctrine resembles the Stoic and the Christian ethics and wherein it differs from both.

In his exposition of the Kantian theory, the author, instead of making use of copious extracts, selects a single proposition, which, as a guiding thread, shall at once facilitate the reader's passage through difficulties in Kant's ethical treatises, and afford a clue to subsequent criticism. The clue is put into the reader's hand by the opening sentence of the treatise. It is Kant's celebrated formula: "Act so that the maxim of thy will shall be valid at the same time as a principle of universal legislation." Concerning this formula, the author remarks that, taken by itself, no moralist would refuse to accept it; it is peculiar to Kant only in form, and in the very special meaning which he puts into it. Prior to Kant, philosophers had sought in two ways to solve the problems of ethics, viz.: by rational theology, assigning to the law of duty a transcendent origin in the will of God, whose existence is proved by reason; or by psychology, finding the source of morality in the original tendencies of human nature. From the first solution, that of transcendent origin, Kant had cut himself off in the "Critique of Pure Reason." Those who teach an immanent ethics, deriving the moral law from the nature of man, fall into two classes, according as they make happiness, or perfection, the end of action. The former, the Eudæmonists, fail because sensibility, whence pleasures and pains