Dialectic elaborates given forms.—Forms are abstracted from existence by intent.—Confusion comes of imperfect abstraction, or ambiguous intent.—The fact that mathematics applies to existence is empirical.—Its moral value is therefore contingent.—Quantity submits easily to dialectical treatment—Constancy and progress in intent.—Intent determines the functional essence of objects.—Also the scope of ideals.—Double status of mathematics.—Practical rôle of dialectic.—Hegel’s satire on dialectic.—Dialectic expresses a given intent.—Its empire is ideal and autonomous. Pages [187]-[209]
PRERATIONAL MORALITY
Empirical alloy in dialectic.—Arrested rationality in morals.—Its emotional and practical power.—Moral science is an application of dialectic, not a part of anthropology.—Estimation the soul of philosophy.—Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable.—A choice of proverbs.—Their various representative value.—Conflict of partial moralities.—The Greek ideal.—Imaginative exuberance and political discipline.—Sterility of Greek example.—Prerational morality among the Jews.—The development of conscience.—Need of Hebraic devotion to Greek aims.—Prerational morality marks an acquisition but offers no programme. Pages [210]-[232]
RATIONAL ETHICS
Moral passions represent private interests.—Common ideal interests may supervene.—To this extent there is rational society.—A rational morality not attainable, but its principle clear.—It is the logic of an autonomous will.—Socrates’ science.—Its opposition to sophistry and moral anarchy.—Its vitality.—Genuine altruism is natural self-expression.—Reason expresses impulses, but impulses reduced to harmony.—Self-love artificial.—The sanction of reason is happiness.—Moral science impeded by its chaotic data, and its unrecognised scope.—Fallacy in democratic hedonism.—Sympathy a conditional duty.—All life, and hence right life, finite and particular. Pages [233]-[261]
POST-RATIONAL MORALITY
Socratic ethics retrospective.—Rise of disillusioned moralities.—The illusion subsisting in them.—Epicurean refuge in pleasure.—Stoic recourse to conformity.—Conformity the core of Islam, enveloped in arbitrary doctrines.—The latter alone lend it practical force.—Moral ambiguity in pantheism.—Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires a mythology.—A supernatural world made by the Platonist out of dialectic.—The Hebraic cry for redemption.—The two factors meet in Christianity.—Consequent eclecticism.—The negation of naturalism never complete.—Spontaneous values rehabilitated.—A witness out of India.—Dignity of post-rational morality.—Absurdities nevertheless involved.—The soul of positivism in all ideals.—Moribund dreams and perennial realities. Pages [262]-[300]