and with them the writers of them; and into the other scale it puts three such lines as these:
“One place performs like any other place The proper service every place on earth Was framed to furnish man with” —— |
κόκκυ, μεθεῖτε· καὶ πολύ γε κατωτέρω
χωρεῖ τὸ τοῦδε
Have we still to ask,
καὶ τί ποτ' ἐστὶ ταἴτιον;[1]
The theory which we have just exhibited (more or less in our own way), and over which perhaps we have heated ourselves a little, seems to us a great advance on anything we have had before, and indeed in the main to be satisfactory. It satisfies us, because in it our wills attain their realization; the content of the will is a whole, is systematic; and it is the same whole on both sides. On the outside and inside alike we have the same universal will in union with the particular personality; and in the identity of inside and outside in one single process we have reached the point where the ‘is to be,’ with all its contradictions, disappears, or remains but as a moment in a higher ‘is.’
None the less, however, must we consider this satisfaction neither ultimate, nor all-inclusive, nor anything but precarious. If put forth as that beyond which we do not need to go, as the end in itself, it is open to very serious objections, some of which we must now develope.
The point upon which ‘my station and its duties’ prided itself most, was that it had got rid of the opposition of ‘ought’ and ‘is’ in both its forms; viz. the opposition of the outer world to the ‘ought’ in me, and the opposition of my particular self to the ‘ought’ in general. We shall have to see that it has not succeeded in doing either, or at least not completely.