Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/40

Rh not therefore sufficient, — is seen to involve, as the complemental condition making tip sufficiency, its awareness of a whole society of minds, the genus against which it spontaneously defines itself, per differentiam, as individual. Thus the world of minds, as the sole world of Ends presupposed in all moral responsibility, the world of ultimate and standard Objects, becomes at one and the same stroke the warranting foundation of knowledge and of good-will alike: to refuse good-will is to violate the primary principle of each mind's own existence, and is therefore to convict oneself, in one and the same act, of irrationality and folly as well as of indifference or of ill-will. In this light, duty is seen to be the freedom of autonomy, instead of simply the freedom of sharing in a good lot, — freedom in a world of utter reality, where nothing is predestined otherwise than by the self's own thinking, so that each self thinks every other as an essential complement of himself, and sees that he cannot realise himself except as he realises all the others. In fine, the principle of self-recognition, as a condition of any and all knowledge, not only turns out to be the first principle of morality, but the first principle of morality becomes at once the first principle of knowledge and itself an act of knowledge, not simply a sentiment of obligation. Objective knowledge and the intelligibly objective certainty of the moral judg-