That the aesthetic culture of life is a legitimate element in Christian morality can hardly be denied by any one who has pondered the meaning in all its breadth of the natural simplicity and spiritual beauty of the manifestation of the Son of Man. The beautiful, the good, and the true are intimately connected, and constitute together all that is conceivably highest in life. Christian Ethics ought to include everything that is gracious and fair; and any theory of life that has no room for joy and beauty, for laughter and song, for appreciation of artistic or poetic expression, is surely deficient. But it is one thing to acknowledge these things; it is another to make them the whole of existence. We live in a world in which much else besides beauty and joy exists, and it is not by shirking contact with the unlovely phases of experience, but by resolutely accepting the ministry of sorrow they impose, {109} that we attain to our highest selves. The narrow Puritanism of a past age may need the corrective of the broader Humanism of to-day, but not less must the Ethic of self-culture be reinforced by the Ethic of self-sacrifice. We may not cultivate the beauty of life at the cost of duty, nor forget that it is often only through the immolation of self that the self can be realised.
(2) While the Romantic movement, of which Goethe was the most illustrious representative, did much to enlarge life and ennoble the whole expanse of being, its extreme subjectivism and aristocratic exclusiveness found ultimate expression (a) in the pessimism of Schopenhauer, and the arrogance of Nietzsche. The alliance between art and morality was dissolved. The imagination scorned all fetters and, in its craving for novelty and contempt of convention, became the organ of individual caprice and licence. In Nietzsche—that strange erratic genius—at once artist, philosopher, and rhapsodist—this philosophy of life found brilliant if bizarre utterance. If Schopenhauer reduces existence to nothing, and finds in oblivion and extinction its solution, (b) Nietzsche seeks rather to magnify life by striking the note of a proud and defiant optimism. He claims for the individual limitless rights; and, repudiating all moral ties, asserts the complete sovereignty of the self-sufficing ego. With a deep-rooted hatred of the prevailing tendencies of civilisation, he combines a vehement desire for a richer and unrestrained development of human power. He would not only revalue all moral values, but reverse all ideas of right and wrong. He would soar 'beyond good and evil,' declaring that the prevailing judgments of mankind are pernicious prejudices which have too long tyrannised over the world. He acknowledges himself to be not a moralist, but an 'immoralist,' and he bids us break in pieces the ancient tables of the Decalogue. Christianity is the most debasing form of slave-morality. It has made a merit of weakness and servility, and given the name of virtue to such imbecilities as meekness and self-sacrifice. He calls upon the individual to exalt himself. The man of {110} the future is to be the man of self-mastery and virile force, 'the Superman,' who is to crush under his heel the cringing herd of weaklings who have hitherto possessed the world. The earth is for the strong, the capable, the few. A mighty race, self-assertive, full of vitality and will, is the goal of humanity. The vital significance of Nietzsche's radicalism lies less in its positive achievement than in its stimulating effect. Though his account of Christianity is a caricature, his strong invective has done much to correct the sentimental rose-water view of the Christian faith which has been current in some pietistic circles. The Superman, with all its vagueness, is a noble, inspiring ideal. The problem of the race is to produce a higher manhood, to realise which there is need for sacrifice and courage. Nietzsche is the spiritual father and forerunner of the Eugenics. The Superman is not born, he is bred. Our passions must be our servants. Obedience and fidelity, self-discipline and courage are the virtues upon which he insists. 'Be master of life. . . .' 'I call you to a new nobility. Ye shall become the procreators and sowers of the future.'
While there is much that is suggestive in Nietzsche's scathing criticisms, and many passages of striking beauty in his books, he is stronger in his denials than his affirmations, and it is the negative side that his followers have fastened upon and developed. Sudermann, the novelist, has carried his philosophy of egoism to its extreme. This writer, in a work entitled Sodom's End, affirms that there is nothing holy and nothing evil. There is no such thing as duty or love. Only nerves exist. The 'Superman' becomes a monster. Such teaching can scarcely be taken seriously. It conveys no helpful message. It is the perversion of life's ideal.
As a passing phase of thought it is interesting, but it solves no problems; it advances no truths. It resembles a whirlwind which helps to clear the air and drive away superfluous leaves, but it does little to quicken or expand new seeds of life.
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II
IDEALISTIC TENDENCY
1. Modern Idealism was inaugurated by Kant. Kant's significance for thought lies in his twofold demand for a new basis of knowledge and morality. He conceived that both are possible, and that both are interdependent, and have but one solution. The solution, however, could only be achieved by a radical change of method, and by the introduction of new standards of value. Kant's theory of morals was an attempt to reconcile the two opposing ethical principles which were current in the eighteenth century. On the one side, the Realists treated man simply as a natural being, and accordingly demanded a pursuance of his natural impulses. On the other side, the Dogmatists conceived that conduct must be governed by divine sanctions. Both theories agreed in regarding happiness as the end of life; the one the happiness of sensuous enjoyment; the other, that of divine favour. Both set an end outside of man himself as the basis of their ethical doctrine. Kant was dissatisfied with this explanation of the moral life. The question, therefore, which arises is, Whence comes the idea of duty which is an undeniable fact of our experience? If it came merely from without, it could never speak to us with absolute authority, nor claim unquestioning obedience. That which comes from without depends for its justification upon some consequence external to our action, and must be based, indeed, upon some excitement of reward or pain. But that would destroy it as a moral good; since nothing can be morally good that is not pursued for its own sake. Kant, therefore, seeks to show that the law of the moral life must originate within us, must spring from an inherent principle of our own rational nature. Hence the distinctive feature of Kant's moral theory is the enunciation of the 'Categorical Imperative'—the supreme inner demand of reason. From this principle of autonomy there arise at once the notions of man's freedom and the law's {112} universality. Self-determination is the presupposition of all morality. But what is true for one is true for all. Each man is a member of a rational order, and possesses the inalienable independence and the moral dignity of being an end in himself. Hence the formula of all duty is, 'Act from a maxim at all times fit to be a universal law.'
It is the merit of Kant that he has given clear expression to the majesty of the moral law. No thinker has more strongly asserted man's spiritual nature or done more to free the ideal of duty from all individual narrowness and selfish interest. But Kant's principle of duty labours under the defect, that while it determines the form, it tells us nothing of the content of duty. We learn from him the grandeur of the moral law, but not its essence or motive-power. He does not clearly explain what it is in the inner nature of man that gives to obligation its universal validity or even its dominating force. As a recent writer truly says, 'In order that morality may be possible at all, its law must be realised in me, but while the way in which it is realised is mine, the content is not mine; otherwise the whole conception of obligation is destroyed.'[13] If the soul's function is purely formal how can we attain to a self-contained life? Moreover, if the freedom which Kant assigns to man is really to achieve a higher ideal and bring forth a new world, must there not be some spiritual power or energy, some dynamic force, which, while it is within man, is also without, and independent of, him? 'Duty for duty's sake' lacks lifting power, and is the essence of legalism. Love, after all, is the fulfilling of the law.
2. To overcome the Kantian abstraction, and give content to the formal law of reason was the aim of the idealistic writers who succeeded him. Fichte conceived of morality as action—self-consciousness realising itself in a world of deeds. Hegel started with the Idea as the source of all reality, and developed the conception of Personality attaining self-realisation through the growing consciousness of the world and of God. Personality involves capacity. The {113} law of life, therefore, is, 'Be a person and respect others as persons.'[14] Man only comes to himself as he becomes conscious that his life is rooted in a larger self. Morality is just the gradual unfolding of an eternal purpose whose whole is the perfection of humanity. It has been objected that the idea of life as an evolutionary process, which finds its most imposing embodiment in the system of Hegel, if consistently carried out, destroys all personal motive and self-determining activity, and reduces the history of the world to a soulless mechanism. Hegel himself was aware of this objection, and the whole aim of his philosophy was to show that personality has no meaning if it be not the growing consciousness of the infinite. The more recent exponents of his teaching have endeavoured to prove that the individual, so far from being suppressed, is really expressed in the process, that, indeed, while the universal life underlies, unifies, and directs the particular phases of existence, the individual in realising himself is at the same time determining and evolving the larger spiritual world—a world already implicitly present in his earliest consciousness and first strivings. The absolute is indeed within us from the very beginning, but we have to work it out. Hence life is achieved through conflict. The universe is not a place for pleasure or apathy. It is a place for soul-making. No rest is to be found by an indolent withdrawal from the world of reality. 'In one way or another, in labour, in learning, and in religion, every man has his pilgrimage to make, his self to remould and to acquire, his world and surroundings to transform. . . . It is in this adventure, and not apart from it, that we find and maintain the personality which we suppose ourselves to possess ab initio.'[15] The soul is a world in itself; but it is not, and must not be treated as, an isolated personality impervious to the mind of others. At each stage of its evolution it is the focus and expression of a larger world. A man does not value himself as a detached subject, but as the {114} inheritor of gifts which are focused in him. Man, in short, is a trustee for the world; and suffering and privation are among his opportunities. The question for each is, How much can he make of them? Something above us there must be to make us do and dare and hope, and the important thing is not one's separate destiny, but the completeness of experience and one's contribution to it.[16]