Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/609

591 basis," for the morality of a mere theism that viewed all duties and commands as directly those of a personal God. If this means that the world has progressed from the notion of an external to that of an immanent deity, we may again allow this assertion about the actual and inevitable tendencies of theism to pass unchallenged. But he goes even further, and claims that the true union of theism (with its three ideas of God, freedom, and immortality) and abstract monism, with a true cosmic philosophy, is to be found in Schopenhauer's metaphysical principle that personality and consciousness belong only to the sphere of appearance, while true existence and true reality can be predicated only of the Absolute. Now, while Schopenhauer's doctrine of the identity of the wills of different individuals with the one will in nature is no doubt a powerful corrective to egoism and the tendency to think of man's development as separate from that of the universe in general, I do not think that it is of so much service to ethical thought as his other doctrine of the affirmation and negation of the individual or selfish will. I am perfectly aware that the two doctrines are intimately connected in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and that he regards the fact of my identity with another man and with God as the all-convincing motive to altruism and true benevolence, but I do not, for many reasons, regard this philosophy of monism as the one and only support of disinterested and perfect conduct. In particular, I do not think that the mere formal proclamation of my identity with all other men and with the rest of the world completely gives that background to the conception of the development of human life of which we are still in search. It merely says that the end of human development is also the end of the Absolute, because man and the cosmos are identical in substance. And Hartmann, himself, after having contended that Schopenhauer's monism of the will is superior to ordinary theism and abstract monism, proclaims that all mere monism and 'identity philosophy' is inadequate to the demands of ethics, for the simple reason that it does not tell us what is the meaning, or content, or purpose, of the one will that is said to constitute the identity and reality of all things.