Page:Modern Rationalism (1897).djvu/157

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RATIONALISM IN ETHICS.
157

pure or speculative reason was wholly subjective in its operation, but declared the objective value of practical reason or conscience. His fundamental principle is that duty must be done for duty's sake, and the criterion for determining individual duty is: "Act according to that maxim (or subjective principle) alone which thou canst, at the same time, will to be a universal law." This "categorical imperative," or sense of obligation, implies the freedom of the will; "thou shalt" implies "thou canst." Thus the moral law convinces us of freedom, though, in reality, the moral law is simply the law of the will itself, and the will is free when acting under this law. From the sense of obligation he deduces also the existence of a Supreme Legislator, and the necessity for a future life in which morality will be adequately vindicated.

However, by the time that the English Broad-Churchmen had adopted Kantism it had been superseded in Germany by the teaching of Hegel. Hegel held with Kant "that duty or good conduct consists in the conscious realization of the free reasonable will which is essentially the same in all rational beings. But Kant's ethical principle, owing to his purely formal conception of reason itself, does not admit the connection he sought to give it with practical life. His followers attempt to remedy this by still basing morality in reason, but seeking its content and realization in practical life and its institutions. Hegel conceives the universal will as objectively presented to each man in the laws, institutions, and customary morality of the community (for he is both pantheist and evolutionist), not applied by a subjective principle, as Kant thought. If concience conflicts with the common sense of the community, it must be resisted. Conscientious individual effort is self-deceived and futile unless it attains its realization in harmony with the objective social relations in which the individual finds himself placed. A compound of the teaching of Kant and Hegel, such as is worked out by T. H. Green, is now usually received in England and Germany. In his "Prolegomena to Ethics," published in 1883, Green attempts a combination of the two. "The ultimate standard of worth," he says, "is an ideal of personal worth;" yet "it is equally true that the human spirit can only realize itself, or fulfil its idea, in persons, and that it can only do this