[37] Compare, for instance, the anti-intellectualistic philosophy of Bergson, with its emphasis on planless spurts of energy, the irrationalist philosophy of Schopenhauer, etc.
[38] The above exposition is not a transcendental derivation of ethics. The ideal of the infinite society is a fulguration out of ethical experience, to be ever renewed in it. We build not only our world, but our universe. The ethical principle is not a working hypothesis, like those provisionally used in science. It is the outgrowth of the functional finalities. It is a postulate. The specific moral laws, or expressions of the ethical principle indeed, are changeable, being the product of the principle with the varying empirical conditions of human society. The fundamental principle is unchangeable.
The consciousness of universal interrelation is not to be described as mystical consciousness. The identity of the self remains intact; it is never lost in the One or the All. The ethical consciousness includes indeed the consciousness of other selves related to our own, in a kind of superindividual consciousness. But this is reached along the sunlit path of action (So act, etc.), and not along the dreamy flux of emotionalism or in the silent depths of quietism.
[39] The frequent recurrence gives us a sense of safety in expecting the consequent on the appearance of the antecedent. But the sense of safety should not be confounded with the sense of the certainty. We expect that day will follow night, because it has followed innumerable times. But no amount of repetition can warrant the assertion that it will and must do so. The Pragmatist view explains the sense of safety in expectation, but does not appear to account for the certainty in prediction, as for instance in the astronomer’s prediction of an eclipse.
[40] A hybrid conception, since in nature there are only happenings, but no ends.
[41] His efforts in some measure to remedy this defect in the Doctrine of Virtue are artificial and unconvincing.
[42] See Book III for a fuller development of this point.
[43] Difference in the ethical meaning is not to be confounded with mere idiosyncrasy, or originality, not to say eccentricity. It is the kind of difference which elicits correlated difference in all spiritual associates.
[44] Incidentally it may be remarked that in introducing the category of interrelation we remove the objection against freedom which remains unmitigable so long as freedom is supposed to be a kind of causality, competing with natural causality. Causality is the unity of a temporal manifold of sequent phenomena. The concept of interrelation is the concept of the unity of co-existent entities.
[45] See some fine remarks on the unattainableness in Tyrrel’s Christianity at the Cross-roads.