Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/44

Rh to find, if at all, the completion of his religious philosophy. When he comes to this second stage, which our second book is to treat, he may find himself obliged to analyze afresh and skeptically the naïve theoretic notions that he has possessed concerning nature, and so even concerning his own fellow-men. But for his analysis itself he will have a fresher courage, because he will have filled himself with the love of an ideal, whose realization he will be hoping somehow to find all through all the tedious wanderings of his theoretic study. If the order of his whole thought is thus not the order of the truth itself, still his little inconsequence in beginning his religious philosophy with assumptions that he proves only after he has gone some distance in his investigation, may be a useful concession both to his own human weakness and to the needs of his practical nature.

With the search for the ideal, then, we begin, expressly assuming, in this part of the first book, without proof, as much of the world of daily life as may be necessary to a study of the moral law in its application to this daily life. Yet, with this explanation, we are only at the beginning of the troubles that arise in examining the relation between the basis of ethics and the real world. These troubles form a great part of the obscurity of moral doctrine.

In treating of ethical doctrine, it is common to avoid by all sorts of devices the main and most difficult problem of all. Men like to fill half a volume