Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/234

 226 INTRODUCTION

which is by open confession without a reason? Hitherto men's reverence and obedience to that law have rested on tradition, authority, convention, self-interest, unquestioning habit, as its sufficient reason ; but, these reasons once invalidated, how will it be with no reason at all ?

What in this case will, nay, must happen appears to be not in the least doubtful. An example will show. There is in this country a so-called " ethical culture movement " which, repudiating all claims of tradition and authority and curiously supposing itself to be leader of the world's highest advance, aims to create a religion out of ethics pure and simple on the general foundation of the Kantian agnosticism, — that is, the assumed impossibility of assign- ing an intellectual or conceptual reason, an intelligible and valid ground in human knowledge as such, for the Moral Law. It thus gives us an ethics founded on irrationalism. To the founder and leader of this movement, an able, eloquent, and generally high-minded man, an appeal for "justice" was made in a case in which he was personally interested, and in which he had some power of decision. The appeal was refused, and the appellant was dismissed on the ground that he was "a fanatic for justice " ! Such a decision in practice, made on such a ground in theory, would seem to be the reductio ad absurdiint of the attempt to create a religion out of agnostic or irrational ethics ; for the very conception of "a fanatic for justice" shows that, in the mind of the founder himself, there is something more important than justice, something more valuable than ethics, some concept or notion of a utility higher than Right, out of which, and not out of ethics, it would seem that his new religion should be created.

Now, if the very highest that can be said of the " Law of the Whole" is that it is a "Just Law," — if justice

�� �