To such a final position do we come in following out the development of the idea of progress. The early assurance and dogmatic confidence which marked the early years of the century are followed by a complete abandonment of the idea of a guaranteed or assured progress, whether based on the operations of a Divine Providence, or on faith in the ultimate triumph of reason, or on merely a fatalistic determinism. Progress is only a possibility, and its realisation depends on ‘humanity’s own actions. Further, any mention of progress in future must not only present it as quite contingent, but we have to reckon with the fact that the idea of progress may itself progress until it resolves itself into another conception less complicated and less paradoxical, such as “the attainment of a new equilibrium.” Some effort must be devoted also to a valuation of criteria. Various values have in the past been confused together, scientific, materialistic, hedonistic, moral, aesthetic. Ultimately it seems that we shall find difficulty in settling this apart from the solution offered by Renouvier—namely, that true progress is not merely intellectual, but moral. It involves not merely a conquest of material nature but of human nature—a self- mastery. Progress is to be measured not by the achievements of any aristocracy, intellectual or other, but by the general social status, and our criterion of progress must be ultimately that of social justice. This itself is a term needing interpretation, and to this question of ethics we now turn.
CHAPTER VI
ETHICS
INTRODUCTION : Difficulties of the moral problem as presented in the nineteenth century—Recognised as a social problem—Influence of Comte important in this connection—Other influences—Christianity—Kant—The practical reason.
I. Taine and Renan—Renan’s critique of Christian morality—Early socialistic views—Change in his later life—Prefers criterion of beauty to that of goodness.
II. Renouvier the great moralist of our period—Relation to Kant —His Science de la Morale—Personality in Ethics—Justice.
III. Fouillée, Guyau, Ollé-Laprune and Rauh pass further from the Kantian rigorism to an ethic in harmony with the philosophy of idées-forces of life and action—Humanitarianism of Fouillée and Guyau—Idées-forces and Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction —Rauh’s doctrines—Other thinkers.
CONCLUSION: Action and belief—Ethics and Religion.
CHAPTER VI
ETHICS
Moral philosophy is probably the most difficult branch of those various disciplines of the human spirit summed up in the general conception of philosophy. This difficulty is one which all the thinkers of our period recognised. Many of them, occupied with other problems on the psychological or metaphysical side, did not write explicitly upon ethics. Yet the problem of ethics, its place, significance and authority, is but the other side of that problem of freedom which has appeared throughout this development as central and vital. The ethical consciousness of man has never been content for long with the assertion that ethics is a purely positive science, although it has obviously a positive side. The essence of morality has been regarded as not merely a description of what exists, but what might, should or ought to exist. Ethics is normative, it erects or endeavours to outline a standard which is an ideal standard. This is the characteristic of ethics, and so long as the moral conscience of humanity, individually and collectively, does not slumber nor die, it will remain so. This conflict between the ideal and the real, the positive and normative is indeed the chief source of pain and conflict to man, but without it he would cease to be human.
Whatever the difficulties, the philosopher who aspires to look upon human life as a whole must give some interpretation of this vital aspect of human consciousness. It is in this connection that a solution of the problem of freedom is so valuable, for under a purely determinist and positivist reading of life, the moral sentiments become mere data for an anthropological survey, the hope and tragedy of human life are replaced, comfortably perhaps for some, by an interpretation in which the true significance of ethics is lost.