Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/621

603 fabric of things. And there is a sense in which Hartmann's phenomenological study of ethics is a complete success, a true introduction, as he would have it to be, to all future ethical philosophy—Prolegomena zu jeder künftigen Ethik. It is an elaborate and exhaustive study of the various points of view that the educated man of to-day inevitably tends to take about the subject-matter of his conduct, about the directions in which he thinks he may realize that imperative duty which no philosophy can completely explain, but which all philosophy must assume as implied in man's consciousness of himself as man. It is a valuable study of the 'dialectic,' of the moral consciousness of the natural man, showing how we naturally tend to take first of all a selfish view of the ethical end, then a rationalistic view, then a view of the end as outside ourselves—in society, then a religious and then a metaphysical, and then an evolutionary view, until we finally come back to the idea that the supreme moral principle is in ourselves, in the struggle we are conscious of between the regressive and the progressive tendencies of our nature. It shows us how morality, after all, enjoins nothing so much as its own perfection or realization, through the removal of our imperfection. This is in a sense a return to dualism in ethics, a return from all evolutionary or naturalistic or metaphysical monism, but neverthe- less a dualism that reposes on a monism—on the idea of an identity in essence of man's will with the positive will that is at work in nature and in history.