already within itself, passes beyond itself and unites with its opposite in a product higher than either. But such a transcendence can have no meaning to popular Ethics. That has assumed without examination that each finite end, taken by itself, is reasonable; and it therefore demands that each, as such, should together be satisfied. And, blind to theory, it is blind also to the practical refutation of its dogmas by everyday life. There a man can seek the general welfare in his own, and can find his own end accomplished in the general; for goodness there already is the transcendence and solution of one-sided elements. The good is already there, not the external conjunction, but the substantial identity of these opposites. They are not coincident with, but each is in, and makes one aspect of, the other. In short, already within goodness that work is imperfectly begun, which, when completed, must take us beyond goodness altogether. But for popular Ethics, as we saw, not only goodness itself, but each of its one-sided features is fixed as absolute. And, these having been so fixed in irrational independence, an effort is made to find the good in their external conjunction.
Goodness is apparently now to be the coincidence of two ultimate goods, but it is hard to see how such an end can be ultimate or reasonable. That two elements should necessarily come together, and, at the same time, that neither should be qualified by this relation, or again that a relation in the end should not imply a whole, which subordinates and qualifies the two terms—all this in the end seems unintelligible. But, again, if the relation and the whole are to qualify the terms, one does not understand how either by itself could ever have been ultimate.[1] In short, the bare conjunction of inde-
- ↑ The same difficulty will appear if an attempt is made to state the general maxim. Both ends are to remain and to be ultimate, and hence neither is to be qualified by the other or the whole, for to be so qualified is to be transcended. I may add that a negative form of statement, here as everywhere, serves no purpose but to obscure the problem. This is, however, a reason why it may be instinctively selected.
