painfully mechanical theory of a super-added, and strictly superfluous,1 theological sanction. The fruitful idea of the self as at once the author and the subject of moral legislation —as laying down a law not only for the single self but for all men and, indeed, as Kant says, for all rational beings— naturally suggests the question whether such a self can still be treated as an isolated individual.

2

I may illustrate my argument by a reference to certain statements of Dr. Martineau upon this very point. Martineau, who was steeped, like Kant, in an inherited individualism, denies this doctrine of the autonomy of the will on the express ground that it violates the unitary and exclusive nature of personality. 'It takes two', he says, 'to establish an obligation. . . . The person that bears the obligation cannot also be the person whose presence imposes it: it is impossible to be at once the upper and the nether millstone. Personality is unitary, and in occupying one side of a given relation is unable to be also on the other.' Hence he concludes that the sense of authority means 'the recognition of another than I, . . . another Person, greater and higher and of deeper insight.' This is the God of Deism, introduced to make good the sheer individualism of the self as a unitary personality'; and apart from this presupposition the argument has no force. That such is the presupposition is plain from the hypothetical examples by which Martineau seeks to justify his contention. He supposes the case of one lone man in an atheistic universe', and asks whether there could really exist any authority of higher over lower within the enclosure of his detached personality'; and he not unreasonably concludes that an insulated nature', 'an absolutely solitary individual', cannot

1 Superfluous, and indeed noxious, so far as ethics is concerned. The reference to God seems in Kant solely connected with the attainment of the summum bonum '—' the desired results ',' the happy consequences', which God guarantees (see Abbott, p. 226).

2 Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii, pp. 96–9.

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be conceived as the seat of authority at all. But the rejoinder is that such an individual is a pure myth, the creature of a theory, and is certainly improperly spoken of as a self or a person. If any being were shut up, in Martineau's phrase, within the enclosure of his detached personality,' he would be a self-contained universe in himself, or rather he would be one bare point of mere existence. If intelligences were simply mutually exclusive points of subjectivity, then indeed they could not be the seats and depositaries of an objective law; they could not be the subjects of law at all. As I have said elsewhere,1 'consciousness of imperfection, the capacity for progress, and the pursuit of perfection, are alike possible to man only through the universal life of thought and goodness in which he shares, and which, at once an indwelling presence and an unattainable ideal, draws him "on and always on ". The authority claimed by what is commonly called the higher self is thus only intelligible, if the ideals of that self are recognized as the immediate presence within us of a Spirit leading us into all truth and goodBut the immanence of the divine was an idea foreign to Kant's whole way of thinking. Instead, therefore, of revising his conception of the self in view of its legislative function, he simply tells us that, while in ethics we must regard the law as self-imposed, we may go on in religion to regard its precepts as the commands of a Supreme Being, the reason assigned for so regarding them consisting in the fact that only through such a Being, morally perfect and at the same time all-powerful, can we hope to attain the summum bonum.

ness.

But after we have discarded the eighteenth-century framework of the Kantian scheme, the central and permanently important position remains-the idea of intrinsic value as ultimately determinative in a philosophical reference, as yielding us, in the Kantian phrase, an intelligible world, which, when recognized, sets limits to the exclusive pretenThe Philosophical Radicals and other Essays, pp. 97-8.

sions of the world of sense-perception, and defines the mode or degree of reality which belongs to that world in the total scheme of things. This conception of intrinsic value as the clue to the ultimate nature of reality is the fundamental contention of all idealistic philosophy since Kant's time. It is the living assumption at the root of the great speculative systems to which the Kantian theory immediately gave rise in Germany. This is obvious in Fichte's case, to whom the consciousness of the moral law is the ultimate evidence of his own reality, and the universe itself only the material of duty. If it lies less on the surface in Hegel, it is merely because in him Idealism is no longer militant but triumphant, and because the system as a whole is the explication of the supreme conviction on which it is built. In this respect, what the great German idealists substantially did was to enlarge and complete Kant's conception of intrinsic value by making it include all the higher reaches of human experience. The moral experience is still predominant in Fichte: the aesthetic comes to its rights in Schelling, with perhaps even an over-emphasis. In Hegel the claims of the theoretical and the practical (Truth, Beauty, and Goodness) are more evenly balanced, while the stress laid on religion as the bearer of human culture, and as presenting, in its own form, the substance of philosophical truth, goes far to refute the common criticism that the intrinsic values of concrete experience are sacrificed in his system to a logical abstraction.

And if the idea of value thus operates as an assumption in Kant's immediate successors, it becomes still more markedly the watchword of Idealism in the long duel with an encroaching Naturalism, which was the engrossing concern of the nineteenth century, and which has shaped for us the specific form in which the theistic problem, as the ultimate question of philosophy, presents itself to the modern mind. All through the period mentioned, the problem of constructive thought has been the relation of

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EXISTENCE AND VALUE

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our ideals or values to the ultimate ground of things. So Sidgwick, lecturing in the 'nineties in his carefully balanced way on 'The Scope of Philosophy', defines its 'final and most important task' as the problem of 'connecting fact and ideal in some rational and satisfactory manner '.1 And at the present day, philosophical discussion is carried on more explicitly in terms of value than at any previous time. Take for example two such representative thinkers as Höffding and Windelband, than whom it would be difficult to name two contemporary writers more balanced in judgement or more catholic in their outlook. Höffding's Philosophy of Religion lays down the conservation of value', or 'the conviction that no value perishes out of the world', as the characteristic axiom of religion, while the problem alike of religion and of philosophy is said to be 'the relation between what seems to us men the highest value and existence as a whole '.2 And Windelband expresses the present philosophical situation thus: We do not so much expect from philosophy what it was formerly supposed to give, a theoretic scheme of the world, a synthesis of the results of the separate sciences, or, transcending them on lines of its own, a scheme harmoniously complete in itself; what we expect from philosophy to-day is reflection on those permanent values which have their foundation in a higher spiritual reality above the changing interests of the times.'3

I have said that the debate between Naturalism and Idealism dominates the whole of the second half of the nineteenth century, and that it has bequeathed to us the peculiarly modern form of the theistic problem. We shall see in the following lecture how the formulation of the issue was determined-determined, I think, unfortunately-by specific features of the Kantian philosophy. In the meantime,

1 H. Sidgwick, Philosophy, its Scope and Relations, p. 30.

2

pp. 6, 9-10 (English translation).

• In his lectures, published in 1909, Die Philosophie im deutschen Geistes

leben des 19ten Jahrhunderts, p. 119.

if we recall briefly the larger aspects of this perennial philosophical antithesis, it will be seen that the idea of value is central and decisive throughout. It is, at bottom, the question of the divineness or the undivineness of the universe. Is the universe the expression of a transcendent Greatness and Goodness, or is it, in ultimate analysis, a collection of unknowing material facts? In the plain impressive words of Marcus Aurelius- The world is either a welter of alternate combination and dispersion or a unity of order and providence. If the former, why do I care about anything else than how I shall at last become earth? But on the other alternative, I reverence, I stand steadfast, I find heart in the power that disposes all.' From our human point of view, this alternative must necessarily take some such form as this: 'Is the spirit of the universe or the ultimate nature of things akin to what we recognize as greatest and best, or are such standards and distinctions but human parochialisms, sheerly irrelevant in a wider reference?' Somehow thus we must express it, for we have no other criterion which we can apply than the values which we recognize as intrinsic and ultimate. Hence the immediate form of the question-the form also which discloses the intensely practical interest which inspires it—is as to the relation of man and his human values or ideals to the universe in which he finds himself. Is our self-conscious life with its ideal ends but the casual outcome of mechanical forces, indifferent to the results which by their combinations they have unwittingly created, and by their further changes will as unwittingly destroy, or is it the expression, in its own measure, of the Power that works through all change and makes it evolution? Is the ultimate essence and cause of all things' only dust that rises up and is lightly laid again', or is it the Eternal Love with which Dante closes his vision, 'the Love that moves the sun and the other stars'? On the one hypothesis, as Mr. Balfour has put it in a passage