SELF-REALIZATION AS THE MORAL IDEAL.
If one turn to any of the important ethical discussions of hardly a generation ago, he finds the center of interest in the origin of moral judgments. It was assumed, as matter of course, that ethical theory always has been and always will be divided between two schools–the empiricists and the intuitionalists, and that this division exhausts the whole realm. It was assumed that the opposition between utilitarianism and intuitionalism is essentially this question of the origin of our knowledge of moral distinctions. Indeed, I do not know a discussion of that period which even suggests the fact so obvious to us, that the division of ethical theories into these two kinds is a cross-division, one relating to the ethical criterion, the other to the method of arriving at knowledge of it. Three main influences were at work, however, in shifting the center of attention to the question of the nature of the moral end itself. Utilitarianism tended to call attention to the character of the end involved in action; the appearance of intuitive utilitarian systems, like that of Sidgwick, showed the insufficiency of the old disjunction; finally the introduction, from Germany, of a mode of ethical thinking which was neither utilitarian nor intuitive, yet agreeing with the former in holding that the morality of all acts is measured by their efficiency in establishing a certain end, and falling in with the latter in holding that moral ideas are not the result of mere association, but of something in the facts themselves, brought in new problems and new controversies.
In the newer contentions regarding the moral end, the idea of ‘self-realization’ insists upon its claims. The idea seems to me an important one, bringing out two necessary phases of the ethical ideal: namely, that it cannot lie in subordination of self to any law outside itself; and that, starting with the self, the end is to be sought in the active, or volitional, side
