great unknown something. It will never show itself complete in the course of development to any generation.

Development pushes on, irrestrainable, infinite. This 'infinite" has double meaning. It blinds us so long as we regard it as synonymous with 'absolute.' But it cannot help becoming clearer to us that it means without end, and the absolute without goal. At this point the great question is suggested whether the moral end ought to be limited to this world, whether the final word of wisdom is the ethics of the present life, the ethics which makes this 'Immanence' its base. Here we may just call to mind two sayings of Goethe, the great originator and, so to speak, saint of this moral philosophy. The first stands in the suppressed epilogue to the second part of Faust: "Man's life is like a poem; it has certainly its commencement and its end, but yet it is not a whole." The second runs: "How stale and flat is such a life if all its activity, all its driving leads continually to fresh activity, and at the end no desirable end accomplished rewards you!" It would indeed be insipid to call the great, glorious ends, Country, Knowledge, Art, flat'; but is it not necessitated that there must be a 'final desirable end' when work for them with continually fresh courage and ever like faithfulness is possible?

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It is not all the representatives of the evolutionary ethics who are to be so named to-day who have conceived and elaborated their principles like the above-named philosopher. Some have no more than an inclination for this essentially eudæmonistic ethics to lean on the evolutionary theory. Others follow openly and with pride the flag of evolution, and do in fact give to their principles a special turn or colour according to the special department of life in which their activity lies. For one the principle of evolution receives an æsthetic stamp; for another the love of country fills the soul as the highest end of life. At the present time two particular types of the evolutionary ethics are widely spread and popular. One of these is determined by natural science, the other by political economy. Marx and Engel saw in the evolution of economic conditions, in the production and the use of economic products, the core of all evolution. The evolution of all other

forms of activity is only an associated phenomenon of the former. Even art and religion are therefore only reflex phenomena of the battle for bread, the means of living. This is the science of brotherhood, the single infallible panacea in the circles of social democracy-or, to speak more accurately, that so called by their leaders, for the masses favour utilitarian hedonism. But these ideas of Marx excited them to the conflict. Everything is to be made to turn on the alteration of present industrial conditions.

Monism.

Often the industrial is associated with the natural science basis, and this latter is on its own account a great power, especially in the upper ten thousand. Not infrequently the system of ethics influenced by science and erected on this foundation is called Monism, a term emphasising the unity of the spiritual and the natural in the cosmic process, in which unity the former is subsumed under the latter. Thus all is natural in agreement with the tendency of the day, proud of its great scientific achievements in the mastery of nature. In this direction goes, e.g., the influential work of Spencer, whom Darwin called our great philosopher.' To others the term Monism is merely a grand name for the materialism which is no longer attractive, or a veil for general obscurity in final questions (cf. Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe). A difference which grows more marked has here arisen. The evolutionary ethics associated with scientific concepts had at first an intelligible leaning to recognise unregarding brute force in the battle of existence, even in the sphere of human life, therefore inclined to favour egoism and to derive from that the ever-weak impulse to benevolence. Others in an increasing number consider benevolence a product of the battle of selfish interests which has thus grown into a law of human life. You cannot go back to a stage that is passed and won,' it is proclaimed to those who draw such a conclusion from the evolutionary theory the sympathetic-altruistic social sense, once created, is eternal and rises to ever-fresh developments.' 'I am not justified in doing just as I like because I can.' 'The personal

ego has become wide as the world; the love of our neighbour stands high over all.' Occasionally in this circle the voices are heard of those who seek to bind the idea of development with that of real freedom; or anyhow sing psalms over its development in individuals which, if taken seriously, must lead to the recognition of a degraded idea of responsibility in any adequate sense. Strong words may be heard about that misconceived determinism which leads to a fatalistic disregard of personal veracity, and results in the unfruitful worship of the idols of evolution.

From this it is intelligible that there are not wanting those who attempt to reconcile monistic and Christian ethics, who with more cleverness than clearness explain the idea of evolution as essentially similar to the following of Christ, the core of all religion. That is useful, say they, which helps the individual; good, that which is for the common welfare. And it is by evolution that this 'good' is victorious; this morality is the development of our nature. Drunkenness will cease like slavery. We are only at the commencement. The true, the good, and the beautiful are that Self which is more than we are. It will be achieved. We shall consciously become one with the All good or with the 'moral All.' Our power will hereby grow in an unsuspected way, the duration of existence will increase, nay, the dream of eternal life become an actuality; a man without this hope is like an eagle with its wings clipped. At the commanding word of science religion will rise from its bier, it is not dead (Powell). But the development theory and the Christian faith have been made to approach each other with more modesty; in England the literature increases which makes use of the heading Christianity and Evolution.' We shall need to make up our minds under what sole conditions a real, honourable peace is possible: the merely clever institution of a relation between terms is little helpful, as, e.g., the juxtaposition of original sin and evolution in the proposition that we bring the ape and the tiger with us into the world as a result of evolution. Again, it is to be emphasised that the indefiniteness of the concept evolution allows of very various moral ideals, and that it is scarcely by more than a courteous etiquette that very

varied and contradictory ideas are recommended to the modern consciousness. Especially has that double tendency in ethics under the influence of physical science a not inconsiderable counterpart in present-day literature. Besides the tones which clearly recall Nietzsche, and in part are more intimately connected with the idea of heredity, right on to the extreme that we do not properly speaking live, but are creatures indwelt by phantom spirits, there are other commingling tones which laud love as the highest bloom so far of evolution, and as the ripening fruit, by its own inherent force, of the future, e.g."How shall I call it ?-self-sacrifice, self-suppression? It is somewhat that has to do with self, or rather is the antithesis of it. That impresses me, and so you can make much out of me (Sudermann); "and everything is indeed forgiven thee but that one thing, that thou hast no will" (Ibsen).

Positivism.

Positivism is the next most nearly allied to the ethics so far treated, the evolutionary. This peculiarly employed term is intended to mean that only facts of observation ought to give answer to the question: How are we to order our life? This so far nobody at all will deny, and the definition will be better understood by the converse: the facts only, with express exclusion of any inquiry as to the final Why? Wherefore? What the meaning of this is will be made clear by comparison with evolutionary ethics. The evolution idea remains undefined in its system, and many of its most logical exponents speak in the plainest possible way, and with a kind of enthusiasm, of the unattainability of any knowledge of final ends, and of how much of obscurity there is in the 'whence,' the past. Positive ethics says: Let us stand aloof from the unascertainable, let us shake ourselves free from the pursuit of the impossible and so employ our whole energy on the attainable. Let us determine the laws of conduct from the facts accessible.

Not only are the

gods dethroned, but also science, with its search for final causes and a final end, metaphysics as well as theology. Both these are dissolved by the third-the only science is the knowledge of the laws of actual life and activity, biology, i.e., in reference to the

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individual, sociology in relation to mankind. Mankind 'continued long to want' until it turned from the ought to be' to what really is. Ethics thus becomes social statistics, a theory of the self-ordering of society. The solution runs: Reverence the men of knowledge, and down with parties! The faith which we favour is a demonstrable one, when all the hollow idols of the old morality, such as freedom, lie on the ground. Now, what is the content of this demonstrable belief? Order and love, the sacrifice of the strong for the weak, reverence of the weak for the strong-in short, an altruistic realism. Providence, the moral ordering of the world, find their seat in the souls of men. The highest law which the science of sociology finds is the law of the organic union of mankind. Thus far positive ethics has designated itself the rehabilitation of Christian ethics without God. Man, the known nature of mankind, humanity, becomes men's God. So in the definition of the ethical norm this ethics has a point of contact with the Christian system. Love of our neighbour is often attractively lauded. Important authors like George Eliot, Loti, have, not without success, pleaded its cause. And what is more, it has not failed in works of mercy. In the French home of Positivism (Auguste Comte, Littré) homes for the poorest of the poor, for children suffering from incurable maladies, the result of social neglect, have been founded under its auspices. Whether that law of the social organism can really be derived from facts of observation only; whether it really is so plain as its adherents think, and further, how it may be carried out in individual wills, unless these are made into mere involuntary tools of a natural necessity; whether, finally, ethics can stop short of a clear, known, final End,-all these questions are here only noticed in passing.

Pessimism.

As 'Positive' ethics becomes most easily intelligible from the defects of the evolutionary, and is, so to speak, an abbreviated form of this system, so that the two often enough intermingle, and especially where the originally French principles of Positivism have found entrance into England and Germany; so we can best grasp the one more remaining system, that of conscious