Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/155

130 not only moral, but also non-moral and immoral systems, the distinctions regarded from the outside between these subdivisions are not essential, and have no philosophic import.” Such then is the skeptical outcome of this very idealistic position from which we ourselves started. Thus viewed, the moral world seems essentially chaotic. Each end, if chosen, has its own way of marshaling acts as good and bad. But one end cannot establish itself theoretically over against another. The warfare among them is practical, but is not rationally to be judged or ended. Each says, “In me is the truth about right and wrong. I am the Way.” But for one another they have, not arguments, but anathemas. They give no proof, only assertion and condemnation. It is the contemplation of this chaos that has suggested to us that plausible and yet dreadful pessimism of which modern thought has had so much to say, and of which this chapter has tried to give some notion.