of Ethics, of his attempt to find the end of conduct in some relation to the universe as a whole—to the Absolute? The main ideas of a philosophy of monism, or of identity, or of immanent dynamism are familiar to most philosophers, and there is doubtless in them all an element of truth. There is in the mind of man an inevitable tendency to think of the relation of the moral ideal to the world as a whole, or to the supreme principle of reality, and in view of the mere positivism and naturalism and humanitarianism of to-day, we cannot but praise Hartmann for his extended recognition of the necessity of a metaphysic of ethics. We must, however, refrain from discussing either the merits or the demerits of mere monism or mere theism, or of immanent dynamism or even of Christian or of Buddhistic pantheism. Our only criticism will be that Hartmann's metaphysic of ethics suffers from its extreme 'transcendentalism' as well as from what we have seen to be its extreme hedonism. He began, partly owing to the very necessities of his phenomenological point of view, by seeking some relation between human evolution considered as outside God, and God as a being outside human life, and he concludes with a philosophy of relief from pain and suffering based upon the idea that any relations that may be said to exist between man and God must be upon a pleasure basis. Now if God and man be conceived as wholly apart the one from the other, they naturally can be brought together only by forced and illogical methods; and, again, if the interest that man has in God, or in the divine consummation of reality, be merely a pleasure interest, such an interest can never (as Hartmann himself confessed in the first part of his book) be made the true basis or support of morality. And indeed it is not difficult to see[1] that Hartmann's metaphysics of ethics suffers from its illogicality, and its number of mechanical devices, and from its undisguised and ever-recurring hedonism.
(D) If we but reflect for a moment on the long quest after the supreme principle of morality, represented in this and the preceding paper, we shall soon realize that while we have in a sense been seeking for the basis of morality, we have also, but in a far deeper sense, been presupposing (or implying) its existence from
- ↑ Cf. supra.
