THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
could approximate. Even the most difficult parts of his teaching, that dealing with the intelligible world, intelligible character, and freedom have a remarkable relationship to the morality of the Gospels. His system approached also German popular morality through its rational character, its dualistic basis, and its attention to practical problems.
Schleiermacher moves in a thoroughly different world. He deals with moral being, moral impulse, moral feeling, moral activity, and, above all, moral process. Nature becomes reason and reason, nature. The highest good is the unity of reason and nature, so there exists no specific difference 3. Schleier- between natural law and moral law.
macher's Over against natural law stands not Basis. the moral law but the law of reason, but a distinction is not made between what happens and what ought to happen. The moral law is the law given by reason itself, respect for the law determines it to be the law. This internal recognition is of more importance than the external act; it is the real element of moral being, in which the phenomenal act may share more or less completely. The moral law is a law then that determines being, not simple obligation; morality is the being or becoming demanded by this law. The first stage has been entered upon, but the transformation of reason into nature is not yet completed. The question arises whether the subject of this being or becoming is man alone. Schleiermacher is not an individualist. The morality of the individual man is only a part of the morality of the collective person, the family, the State, the Church. It is wrong, he says, to make the individual the subject and the substratum of moral life. Man's acts can not be isolated; individuals are to bs regarded as organs and symbols of reason which really deal with the whole of nature. It is not easy to see why God, who is the cause of the opposition between reason and nature, is not himself the subject of the moral process. It will be seen that Schleiermacher's discussion of morality takes up exactly that sphere and occupies those interests which were entirely neglected by Kant. The field of history is made the field of ethical investigation. Schleiermacher's ethics, therefore, must be regarded as being a religious philosophy, a discussion of civilization, a view of the world and its progress, as much as a system of morality. He treats the subject as an organic whole. Moral predicates are associated with the phenomenal world, with its things and its processes. Anything which can serve its special end can be called good, can have a value. This extension of the application of the term morality to finite being under the power of reason leads really to Hegel's position by which all being is found to be reasonable, in whose system ethics 1-as properly no place. The highest good is, according to Schleiermacher, the unity of the being of reason in nature. It comes into consciousness only through the mutual relations of all examples of good. He shows remarkable power in bringing together for this purpose the whole of life in its various concrete forms. Elementary moral conceptions are prior to the conception of morality. The activity of the form-
ative functions, as in friendship, hospitality^ community of class interest, produces an identity of type seen in all. He gave a wider significance to Christian ethics than was accorded to it in philosophic systems. For him it meant the orderly arrangement of rules by which the member of the Christian Church directs his life. Without experience no moral rule is possible. In regard to religion, he insisted on the full independence of religion from morality. As distinguished from Kant, his view of the ethical element in facts had a broader horizon, but the obligatory element in morality seems to be dissolved in the study of its static relations.
It is plain, therefore, that Kant supplies a more important and purer type of ethical knowledge. Kant is normative where Schleiermacher is descriptive. Apart from Kant's formulation of the categorical imperative, ethical inter- 4. Relation est finds itself without a guiding prinof Morality ciple in the wide survey of moral to Moral values, powers, and aims. The con- Law, ception of duty is all-important, and without moral autonomy duty is impossible. Moreover, the character of duty can not be decided by investigating its origin, its necessary character is not related with its historical manifestations. History has established the right of this autonomous treatment, but it does not explain the secret. After all biological, psychological, and sociological methods of investigation have been drawn upon, that very factor without which the whole moral world can not be grasped at all is still left in obscurity. The problem of freedom can not be solved in this way, for in the sphere of natural law there is no freedom. Nobody has brought out this contrast better than Kant, who insisted upon the natural capacity of the human will to lay down moral laws for itself. On the basis of these laws freely given there arises a realm of good persons, voluntarily true to duty, setting no other law for themselves than what can be a maxim for their neighbors also. Kant's moral man is not the individual man, but the universal man. This capacity of laying down the moral law in universal terms can not be drawn out by some mysterious power from within; it depends on education, on instruction of every kind. Philosophy and history must contribute their share, especially history. But a clear idea of what morality is must exist before the matter supplied by history can be justly discriminated. Is there not in this a danger of simple relativism? Is not to comprehend everything to pardon everything? So one sees in monism how the distinction between good and evil is faint or passes away altogether. The only solution is in practise. The constant exercise of the feeling of duty with its practical discrimination leads to virtue. Christian morality is, in the first place, autonomous, dependent on nothing outside of it. The morality of Jesus and of Paul is concerned with the inner man, is deep, pure, and true. Its expression is conditioned by the prevalent ideas of the time as is seen in the eschatological expectations of the early Christians. The characteristics of Roman Catholic morality are its dependence on authority and its casuistic develop-