The Rationalistic Problem.—German thought inherited through both Roman law and the natural theology and ethics of the church, the conception that man's rational nature makes him sociable. Stoicism, with its materialistic idealism, had taught that all true laws are natural, while all laws of nature are diffusions and potencies of reason. As they bind things together in the world, so they bind men together in societies. Moral theory is "Natural Law" conceived in this sense. From the laws of reason, regarded as the laws of man's generic and hence sociable nature, all the principles of jurisprudence and of individual morals may be deduced. But man has also a sensuous nature, an appetitive nature which is purely private and exclusive. Since reason is higher than sense, the authority of the State is magnified. The juristic point of view was reinstated, but with the important change that the law was that of a social order which is the realization of man's own rational being.[109] If the laws of the State were criticized, the reply was that however unworthy the civic regulations and however desirable their emendation, still the State is the expression of the idea of reason, that is of man in his true generic nature. Hence to attempt to overthrow the government is to attack the fundamental and objective conditions of moral or rational life. Without the State, the particularistic, private side of man's nature would have free sway to express itself. Man's true moral nature is within. We are then left, from both the English-French and the German sides, with the problem of the relation of the individual and the social; of the relation of the inner and outer, of the psychological structure of the person and the social conditions and results of his behavior.
LITERATURE
See the references on the scope and methods of ethics at the end of ch. i. of Part I., and also, Sorley, Ethics of Naturalism, ch. i., and his Recent Tendencies in Ethics; Fite, An Introductory Study of Ethics, ch. ii.; Bowne, Principles of Ethics, ch. i.; Seth, Ethical Principles, ch. i.; Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, Vol. I., Introduction; Hensel, Problems of Ethics, in Vol. I. of St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science.
FOOTNOTES:
[107] On the practical side, this was always, as we have seen, the prominent problem of Hebrew thought. But we are concerned here with the statement of the problem by Plato and Aristotle from the theoretical side.
[108] The Ten Commandments, divided and subdivided into all their conceivable applications, and brought home through the confessional, were the specific basis.
[109] The idealistic philosophic movement beginning with Kant is in many important respects the outgrowth of the earlier Naturrecht of the moral philosophers from Grotius on.