Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/191

Rh upon physiological conditions, feel at once the great gulf that divides Fichte’s ethical idealism from the world of the natural order. We honor the stern enthusiasm of this idealist, but we find in his system the record of a distinctly individual experience. That he has a hold upon a very genuine truth we ought to recognize; but we cannot read his fearless and often intolerant essays without becoming aware that it has not pleased God to create any perfectly orthodox Fichtean, save Fichte himself. Many of us will no doubt call ourselves, with Fichte, ethical idealists, since we indeed hold that the world is through and through a moral order; but his way of showing how it is a moral order will not content us. I, the active being, shall create this sense-world of mine unconsciously, for the sake of having my task, the material of my duty, made manifest to my senses. Very good, but why, then, do I create a world that has a belt of asteroids in it between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter? What portion of my personal and private duty do the comets, or the jellyfishes, or the volcanoes, or the mosquitoes, make manifest to my senses? What part has the Silurian period in the scheme of my moral order? And of what ethical value to me are the properties of the roots of algebraic equations, or the asymptotes of an hyperbola? In the world of this moral order, you see, there is a great deal that will not easily submit to my ethical interpretation. But if we say, with Fichte, that the real world is after all not the world of just my private and individual moral order, but the world of God’s infinite ethical activity, so much the more is it incumbent upon us to be industrious in our efforts to comprehend the spirituality of the truths of nature by means of formula that are more submissive to facts, more widely sensitive to the varied aspects of reality, less impatient of mystery, than were Fichte’s impetuous undertakings. If God’s world is through and through, moral, it is also through and through complicated, profound and physical.