LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Accession No . (oO r< / Claxs No. 
 
t/4 x2^> 
 
NOTE 
 
 IT is a pleasure to me to state that, if I have succeeded in what 
 Mrs. Browning calls "beating my music out," it is through the 
 help of the fine intelligence and unwearying patience of my 
 friend, Miss Rachel Challice, in transcribing and preparing my 
 MS. for the press. 
 
 
THE RATIONAL, OR SCIENTIFIC, 
 IDEAL OF MORALITY 
 
 CONTAINING 
 
 . 
 
 A THEORY OF COGNITION, A M ETA PHYSIC OF RELIGION 
 AND AN "APOLOGIA PRO AMORE" 
 
 BY 
 
 P. F. FITZGERALD 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 ' THE PHILOSOPHY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS " J "THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON 
 "A PROTEST AGAINST AGNOSTICISM"; ETC. 
 
 " We can only know the thing by and through the thought." 
 "We must not only be good, but good for something." THOREAU. 
 "Ethic has for its subject-matter the ultimate end and purpose, 
 the supreme Ideal of human life." 
 
 
 LONDON 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO, LIM. 
 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 1897 
 

PREFACE 
 
 present work might perhaps be more properly en- 
 A titled " The metaphysic of spiritual Idealism," only that, 
 far from being inconsistent with common-sense dualism, it 
 takes note of the sensible conditions of consciousness, as well 
 as of consciousness itself. Professor Ladd says, " Psychology 
 treats of the relations of feelings and thoughts to things and 
 to the brain ; but psycho-physical parallelism is so suffused 
 with metaphysics, that a science of consciousness i.e., a 
 psychological science without metaphysic is impossible," 
 and therefore absurd. The emotions of the unalterable 
 spiritual substance of humanity and the fundamental ideas 
 of reason refer to entities or vera causcz, not to the conditions 
 of perception, apprehension, and comprehension, our mental 
 representations being of the phenomenal modifications of 
 the abiding attributes or aspects of noumenal Being, i.e., 
 power, wisdom, and goodness. The word sensation indicates 
 a special molecular state of our brain ; a determinate group 
 of physico-chemical phenomena effected in the cells or 
 fibres of our cerebral substance, corresponding to each 
 state of our consciousness. " The psychologist confines 
 himself to a statement of the modus operandi of the mind ; 
 but this itself is only reflectively realized by the human 
 spirit" : consequently, as the majority do not employ the 
 faculty of reflection, they are not self-conscious, and 
 accordingly, have as little real knowledge of themselves 
 as of other people, and Being, without true self-respect, 
 
vi Preface 
 
 respect for others, or for Personality, as such, is incon- 
 ceivable to them. The difficulty of completely grasping 
 or apprehending the moral Ideal arises from individual 
 physiological idiosyncrasies ; hence it takes a different 
 complexion for each of us, and "no man's moral task is 
 exactly like his brother's," that task being out of inner 
 nature and outward circumstances to fashion a character true 
 to the abstract reflective Ideal of humanity, not letting 
 animality, or the pride of this life, get the better of our 
 higher and characteristic nature. Aristotle describes man 
 as "a thinking animal," all our rational generalizations 
 being from introspectively realized personal experiences. 
 Theology is like all science, reflectively arrived at. Dog- 
 matic religion and philosophy agree in the predicate that 
 by faith, love, and hope in noumenal, i.e., spiritual, Being, 
 and above all in the Supreme Being, man is saved from 
 doubt, malignity, and despair, which are the negations of 
 faith, love, and hope. It is only through the laws of 
 thought, or principles of reason, that we discern the order 
 of evolution that prevails throughout the world, else all 
 external nature would appear to us as confusion worse 
 confounded. 
 
 The correlativity of human spirits to each other, that are 
 compounded of opposite idiosyncrasies, is as chemistry to 
 mechanics, i.e., a finer, closer form of attraction than that 
 which is presented by mere sexual correlativity. 
 
 Man and woman are the two terms supporting the cor- 
 related elements of thought, or mental representation. As 
 in a single ray of light all the colours of the spectrum 
 are present, so a complementarily balanced, though finite, 
 personality sees Being and life as a whole ; whereas the 
 individual taken alone is handicapped by his inherited, and 
 accidentally determined, idiosyncrasy. 
 
 Thought is the type of relativity ; each of its component 
 
Preface vii 
 
 factors is related the one to the other so strictly that the 
 mental representation of them is synchronous. Although 
 reflective analysis can separately consider them, it cannot 
 decompose their relations to each other, but only observe 
 the variety of proportions in which their synthesis takes 
 place in each particular personal idiosyncrasy. An inherited 
 physical organism, or an hereditary tendency in a given 
 nervous system, determines the lines of least resistance in 
 thought and action in different individuals at different 
 epochs, and in different parts of the globe. The same 
 elements are held together in such different modes, that 
 only by holding things, or objects of thought, together 
 can we understand their relation to each other. The 
 Timbuctoo nigger and the Greenlander would not seem, 
 at first sight, to be of the same species as the Louis 
 Quatorze beau, or Shakspeare's fop, or as the great 
 philosophers and poets of Greece, Germany, England, and 
 France; yet the triple unity of consciousness (feeling, in- 
 telligence, and will) holds alike in cultured and uncultured, 
 as does also the synthetic unity of the Ego, reflectively 
 considered. Although the savage may not be exacting 
 as to the adequacy or sufficiency of a cause for a given 
 effect produced upon him, or regarding the true relativity 
 of efficient causation to the nature of the subject of the 
 effect, or as to what is the final cause or purport of all 
 rational activity, i.e., action for the conservation of the 
 integrity of Being; yet he none the less assumes causality 
 as a law of thought, or mental representation. And, 
 although the uncultured man may be absolutely ignorant 
 of what really constitutes the Good or Best for Being, 
 he still seeks for it as we do, the manner of the search 
 being determined by the law of evolution ; he therefore is 
 not a contradiction of the fundamental ideality of Being. 
 Hence there is no absurdity in supposing, as Mr. Balfour 
 
viii Preface 
 
 says in his Defence of Philosophic Doubt^ " that a moralist 
 may, in the course of speculations, hit on some entirely 
 new First Principle, which he has not held even obscurely 
 before, but which commends itself to his mind as soon 
 as it is presented to him." 
 
 I have quoted the above passage from this well-known 
 author of the present day, I will not say in apology for, 
 but in support of my own pretension to have discovered a 
 new (in the sense of a hitherto unrealized) principle of 
 moral evolution, namely, that of spiritually counterpartal 
 union between man and woman ; their constant action 
 and reaction upon each other being most favourable to 
 the moral development of both. In my previous works I 
 have dwelt more on the happiness that results from the 
 relation of true love or spiritual affinity, than upon its 
 important bearing upon individual evolution. But as the 
 perfect life and the happy life are one and the same thing, 
 I had myself never divided them in thought; for what 
 does happiness mean, if not the satisfactory exercise or 
 fulfilment of our faculties of feeling, intelligence, and moral 
 sense, or practical self-determination ? The sense of the 
 eternal in true love shows that it belongs to "the invisible 
 things that are eternal." The secret of true love's producing 
 perfect happiness, even in this imperfect state of Being, 
 may be illustrated by what travellers tell us of the in- 
 habitants of certain islands of the Pacific, who venture to 
 cast themselves headlong on the great outrushing waves, 
 apparently hurrying them to certain destruction, simply 
 because they know that in their equally certain ebb they 
 will be brought back to terra firma ; so man is instinctively 
 conscious that what appears to be the wild enthusiasm of 
 perfectly mutual, spiritual love, is no antagonist to reason, 
 but is, in truth, the most elevated and strongest form of 
 the sense of the fulness of Being and the joy of life, and 
 
Preface ix 
 
 so of our eternal, heavenly, or happy destination. For only 
 thus can a finite, limited, one-sidedly developed Being attain 
 to the equilibriated exercise of the faculties of feeling, 
 intelligence, and will, in which perfection of life consists. 
 
 The equality of the complementary halves is, of course, 
 a sine qua non of true or spiritual marriage. Naturally, 
 whilst women were left uneducated, it is not surprising that 
 they were picked up promiscuously by the stronger sex, 
 and kept in herds like cows. But now that the moral 
 equality of the sexes is recognized, morality meaning the 
 subsumption of feeling, intelligence, and benevolent will 
 in the unity of Being, the right of woman to look out on 
 her own account for a partner, in whom she can find the 
 delight and completion of her own life and Being, as well 
 as herself completing the life and Being of man, is now 
 sufficiently acknowledged for her no longer to be expected 
 to wait for the pocket-handkerchief of the Grand Turk to 
 be thrown at her, which was formerly considered to be 
 the Ideal of femininity. This does not mean that the 
 balance is to be overweighted on the side of woman, any 
 more than on the side of man. Suitability implies mutuality 
 of attraction and choice ; attraction, both in the physical 
 and spiritual world, being equal and opposite. As comple- 
 mentary colours bring each other out into typical brilliance, 
 and together furnish the full white ray, so when the three 
 attributes of Being are combined in complemental propor- 
 tions, human nature is fully represented, and our joy is full. 
 
 Nevertheless, as the left-hand glove cannot be put on 
 the right hand, nor the right-hand glove on the left ; so 
 no unnatural change of function can be expected or 
 desired from the union of complemental Beings ; rather it is 
 through the diversity of their several special capacities and 
 experiences, and through reflection on their several yet joint 
 lives, that they can best realize the world scheme and the 
 
x Preface 
 
 Divine attributes of power, wisdom, and goodness, as they 
 exist in the wholeness or holiness of the Absolute Being. 
 Woman can thus, being no longer handicapped by her 
 natural nervous tendency to undue sensibility, adore instead 
 of recoiling before the Ideal of justice; and man, rendered 
 gentler and more sympathetic through the influence of 
 woman, ceases to be dry-as-dust or hard and cruel. Thus 
 do they both awake to the possibility of universal love, 
 affinity with their own counterpart constituting a link 
 between them and their opposites in character. " The good 
 of each," says Marion Crawford, "is the triumphant enemy 
 of evil in the other; and the evil of both is gradually 
 driven out and forgotten in the perfection of the whole." 
 
 "Toi, par qui Dieu m'a complete," says Victor Hugo to 
 the woman he loved. This is the new view of marriage, 
 which the advanced intelligence of both man and woman 
 now requires to be taken account of, in opposition to the 
 present old-world social system, in which true love has 
 little or no part. 
 
 For what can be more despicable than a social system 
 that is an anachronism made up of survivals of antique 
 barbarism, and lagging behind the evolution of the moral 
 sense ? 
 
 I have divided this work into three parts, in order that 
 each note of the great chord of Being may be struck in 
 a variety of forms, so that not an aftertone of either be 
 lost, and not a stop of the great organ of life may remain 
 mute and irresponsive to the voice of conscience-^/^ 
 answering to the perception of existence or reality ; love 
 to the apprehension of the relativity of Being; and hope 
 standing rationally expectant of the comprehension of good 
 constituting the final purpose of action. Love is enough, 
 was the gist of the teaching of Christ, i.e., enough for the 
 perfect and the happy life in other words, for the fulfilment 
 
Preface xi 
 
 of Being and its eternal satisfaction. Upon these three 
 principles of thought conscience, or the moral sense, takes 
 its stand, these together constituting the only reflectively 
 conceivable sufficient reason for self-determination, which 
 we accordingly logically attribute to the Supreme Prototypal 
 Being in His great act of creation. As "the fear of 
 God is the beginning of wisdom," primitive devil-worship, 
 blood-offerings, etc., were appropriate to the early stages 
 of man's evolution ; but, finally, " all-conquering love," as 
 Shelley calls it, by Divine decree asserts its claim to be 
 Lord of all Love that is at once the path, the goal. Even 
 the animal creation is found to be more amenable to kind- 
 ness than to cruelty. How much less then can man, the 
 free agent in proportion to the development of his spiritual 
 personality, be amenable to anything less than love, which 
 is the fulfilment of his own Being ! 
 
 P. F. FITZGERALD. 
 
 75, CHESTER SQUARE, LONDON S.W., 1897. 
 
"Ye shall not find thought without Being." Parmenides the Eleatt. 
 
 "Self-conscious Being is the unifying principle of the universe." 
 
 "Being is the subject-object of Idealism." P. FG. 
 
 " Selfism and otherism are not grafts on the tree of life: they are of its origin." 
 
 DRUMMOND. 
 
 "If we ignore any essential fact of Being, our reasoning therefrom must be erroneous." 
 
 "The heart is the light" (and life) "of the true self." 
 
 " Oh ! Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves. Be ye a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to 
 the truth as a lamp. Look not for refuge to anyone beside yourselves ; but ye must be 
 anxious to learn." Buddhistic Book of the Great Decease. 
 
 " The dialectic system teaches that in the universe is realized the whole of reason, and 
 nothing but reason." 
 
 "The Platonic dialectic will be found to help the truth of Bacon's Inductive philosophy, 
 only applied to mental instead of to physical phenomena." 
 
 "Faith based on reason"/'.*, conformed to the nature of Being "will justify itself." 
 "Moral anarchy often betrays itself through the painted skin of prescriptive order." 
 "Nous is the intuitive faculty by which the detached attributes are cemented together 
 into the indissoluble unity of the true concept." ARISTOTLE. 
 
 "The root of the principle of sufficient reason is fourfold, comprising the three principles 
 of causality, and reflective inference therefrom." 
 
 "Although everyone must recognize the truth of a proposition of Euclid when he 
 understands it, he does not at once recognize it to be true." 
 
 " Every other principle in Nature has had a thousand prophets; but the Supreme dynamic, 
 the most stupendous force the world has ever known, has scarcely even begun to be investi- 
 gated. The rise of love, so far as science is concerned, is unknown, its history has never 
 been related ; but if any phenomenon, or principle, in Nature is capable of treatment under 
 the category of evolution, this is." Schopenhauer insisted upon this. 
 
 "Love is the supreme factor in the evolution of the world." 
 "Celui-lk seul est de tout point sense en qui 1'amour veille." 
 " Natural history cannot in any case cover the whole facts of human history." 
 "The love of reflective consciousness is the sense of dependence upon a counterpartal 
 Being for perfection of Being, hence the utterances of true love resemble those of religious 
 aspiration after the supreme good." P. FG. 
 
 Arthur Clough, the too-early-lost poet, admirably describes true love, or rather has presented 
 an ingenious image of it "This long time, slowly with trouble I have been building myself 
 up, and toilfully rising all on one side. Sometimes I find myself dreaming at night about 
 riches and bridges. Then I feel the great keystone coming in, and through it feel the other 
 part all the other stones of the archway joined into mine with a strange happy sense of 
 completeness." 
 
 "He who for love hath undergone 
 The worst that can befall, 
 Is happier thousandfold than he 
 Who ne'er hath loved at all; 
 For in his soul a grace hath reigned 
 That nothing else could bring." SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 
 
 "L'amour seul comble le coeur et remplit la pensee." (Thus the lover may be alone, but 
 never lonely). 
 
 "All thought begins in feeling. Wide in the great mass (or whole) of Being its base is 
 laid, and, narrowing up to thought, it stands glorified a moveless pyramid ; nor is he far 
 astray who deems that every hope that rises broadcast in the world's heart by ordered 
 impulse streams from the great heart of God." God not only hears us when we pray, but 
 also when we only feel. 
 
 "The heavenward gaze of souls sublime at once transcends and conquers time." 
 
 "It has been asked, 'What is the time for love?' The answer given was, 'Eternity.'" 
 
CONTENTS 
 fart I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A rational Ideal is an ontological expression . ... 2 
 
 Rational purpose ... ... 4 
 
 Rational joy . . . . . 6 
 
 The sufficient reason for moral action . . ... 8 
 
 Law of the Best for Being . . . . . . 1 1 
 
 The scientific, or rational, basis of morality lies in correspondence in feeling, 
 
 intelligence, and will with the reflective principle of sufficient reason . 17 
 
 fart a 
 
 THESIS. 
 
 Feeling, intelligence, and will conditioned by the afferent, sensorial, and 
 
 efferent nerves . . . (See also pp. 231-233) 22 
 Belief in the existence and nature of God, drawn from reflection on the 
 
 laws of thought . . . . ... 26 
 
 The superlative Ideal of morality . . . . . 38 
 
 The process of representation . . . ... 40 
 
 Order emanates from the integrating principle of the Good for Being . . 42 
 
 The ideas of reason . . . . ... 47 
 
 Rational concepts necessary, universal and eternal . . 50 
 
 Thought represents the consciousness of the Ego . . 65 
 Complemental union not only necessary for happiness, but for spiritual 
 
 evolution . . (See also pp. 79, 93, 119, 160, 299) 69 
 Self-love, social, and Divine, the combined data of moral ratiocination 
 
 (See also pp. 101, 123, 192, 196) 71 
 
 Each faculty has its accompanying intuited Ideal . . 81 
 
 Morality absolutely personal . . . . . . 130 
 
 True happiness the rationally conceived Ideal of the goal of evolution 
 
 (See also p. 291) 136 
 
XVI 
 
 Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The morality of an action involves the Good for Being (See also p. 218) 159 
 Ideal satisfaction is of the attributes of Being, i.e., of feeling, intelligence, 
 
 and will . . . . ... 169 
 
 The whole duty of man summarized in truth to the nature of spiritual 
 
 Being, and above all to the Supreme Being . . . 177 
 
 Difference between spontaneous and reflective reason . . .186 
 
 The religious sentiment characteristic of man's reflectively rational nature 
 
 (See also pp. 212, 289) 193 
 The three ideas of causality (feeling, intelligence, and will) known to man 
 
 through being present in his own Being . ... 204 
 
 Importance of the female element in civilization . . . .211 
 
 The principle of reflective thought is that of sufficient reason 
 
 (See also p. 324) 216 
 
 fart I3EJL 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 Morality, the crowning outcome of spontaneous and reflective Thought . 224 
 Faith in the ultimate trustworthiness of our own faculties of feeling, 
 intelligence, and will, and in the rational inference from the coherent 
 association of these in reflection, the key to our understanding of the 
 universe .... (See also p. 260) 227 
 
 Perception, apprehension, and comprehension convert sensible impressions 
 into emotional, intellectual, and moral ideas of causality, sufficient, 
 efficient, and final . . . ... 233 
 
 Being as a whole the ultimate datum of all inference (See also p. 277) 240 
 
 Love, the affirmer of immortality in the heart of man . . . 245 
 
 Psychical evolution, the development of our faculties of feeling, intelligence 
 
 and will . . . . ... 253 
 
 The principle of sufficient reason the principle of morality (See also p. 275) 259 
 True love, the unity of souls . . . ... 268 
 
 Truth, the Ideal of knowledge, harmony, the Ideal of feeling, and 
 
 goodness, the Ideal of action . . ... 272 
 
 The Ideal of virtue . . . . ... 290 
 
 The realization of the Ideal the completely rational act . . 297 
 
 The moral law of action for the Best for Being the rationale of our hope 
 
 for a happy future . . 308 
 
 Idealism not logically opposed to Realism . . . . 314 
 
 Idealism claims to explain the universe under the fundamental ideas of 
 
 reason . . . . . ... 324 
 
 Morality, or virtue, is the mean to the end, but Love is both path and goal 335 
 
RATIONAL, OR SCIENTIFIC, 
 IDEAL OF MORALITY 
 
 PART I. 
 INTROD UCTION. 
 
 IN my previous works I have considered the physical or 
 neural presentations, or thinking apparatus that con- 
 ditions, but does not constitute spontaneous mental represen- 
 tations, or thought proper. In my Treatise on the Principle 
 of Sufficient Reason, I have especially endeavoured to show 
 the synthesis of the spontaneously associated forms of 
 thought in the reflective introspective ontological representa- 
 tions of causality, which determine the science of logic. I 
 had wished to publish in their order the three fundamental 
 Ideals of reason : those of Truth, Harmony or Loveliness, 
 and Goodness, but as " art is long and life is short," although 
 the draft of the two first is written, I fear that my time may 
 fail ; and as I am most anxious to secure an immediate place 
 in the press for my Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality, 
 both because it summarises the two first, and because it is 
 the subject most in discussion at the present moment, I have 
 preferred to submit this first to the intelligent public. Only 
 when each man has reached the point of the evolution of 
 reason, at which he thinks his own thoughts, instead of 
 regarding and judging everything in the light of the received 
 opinion of the time and place to which he belongs, will he 
 be truly free. "He is the freeman, whom the truth makes 
 
 B 
 
2 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 free" neither king-ridden, nor priest, nor superstition-ridden, 
 but subject only to one true Master, the Creator, and Law- 
 giver of the universe ; this is the rationally anticipated goal 
 of evolution. Not in self-mutilation, but in worthy self- 
 actualisation in feeling, intelligence, and will, does the 
 service of God consist, and in this does man's responsibility 
 lie. The term a rational Ideal, may certainly be regarded 
 as an ontological expression, seeing that we owe the con- 
 ception of the Ideal in every possible form to our reasoning 
 from the positive representation of Being, to the comparative 
 and superlative forms of it. Moreover, as there is no 
 knowing without Being, so the word itself implies a standard 
 of ratiocination, and this is found in our own experience in 
 Being. This is the one datum for all reasoning concerning 
 Being. There must exist a positive real for the ideas of 
 comparative and superlative to appear in rational con- 
 sciousness ; and naturally neither of the two latter concepts 
 can be a contradiction of the first idea. Nature provides 
 us with positive egoistic presentations, or experience, and 
 Reason, the calculator, passes on through the comparative 
 recognition of similars to the comprehension (by reflective 
 substitution of similars) of an absolute type of Being the 
 support of relative existence. 
 
 The religious sentiment is the concomitant of, if not the 
 source of, religious belief. Conscience constrains us to bring 
 our outward lives into harmony with our inward convictions. 
 Disregard of reflective consciousness, under the principle 
 of sufficient reason, is felt by a rational Being to be more 
 shocking than disregard of momentary feeling, or natural 
 impulse ; for underlying the decisions of our reason is an 
 intuitive sense of responsibility to abide by them. There 
 are two sides to this sense of responsibility : the one has 
 been described as a fearful looking for of judgment to come ; 
 the other, its opposite, is the peace of the mens conscia recti, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 3 
 
 out of which "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." 
 The moral law, applying strictly to individual motive in each 
 self-determination of feeling, intelligence, and will, must 
 always involve making the personal equation. What is 
 possible to one is impossible to another, for, to use the 
 homely phrase: "What is one man's meat is another man's 
 poison " ; and as in the case of a physical disease, it is the 
 particular patient that has to be treated, so it is also in the 
 case of moral disease. But this psychological fact does not 
 affect the existence of a stable ontological standard of 
 morality, nor afford any basis for scepticism, cynicism, or 
 pessimism; it is simply an illustration of the scientific 
 doctrine of evolution. As the platform of intelligence, upon 
 which the infant stands, does not invalidate the essential 
 scope of human reason, but only, as it were, exhibits 
 it in its first small circle, such as that which water makes 
 when a stone is thrown into it, so it happens with each 
 one of us in the great scheme of evolution. We are each, 
 and all of us, surrounded by persons in various stages of 
 emotional, intellectual, and moral development, just as 
 Europeans in North and South America have, as next-door 
 neighbours, red and darker-coloured Indians. But a gather- 
 ing in Paris, or London, exhibits almost as great a variety 
 of individual types of character, as if they were of different 
 races ; so that when we stumble upon a person fairly 
 congenial to us, we feel greatly pleased, and so on in an 
 ascending scale until we find rest, and peace, and joy in the 
 discovery of our counterpartal self, the true alter ego. The 
 fulfilment of the will must be under the principle of identity, 
 /.&, the intuitive knowledge that the effect is of the nature of 
 the cause ; and, obversely, that the cause is predicable from 
 the nature of the effect. The rational demand for an adequate 
 cause, and sufficient reason for every effect produced on 
 our senses, emotions, intellect, and will, is " what makes us 
 
4 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 require absolute power, wisdom, and goodness, to account for 
 both the physical, and the spiritual order of the world. 
 
 Rational purpose is not the contradiction of the rational 
 desire, but its fulfilment in balanced measure feeling, in- 
 telligence, and will having to be equally represented in it. 
 Unless we know the purpose, or intended end, of any 
 performance, it appears silly to us, like the aimless skipping 
 and hopping of children just let loose from school, compared 
 with graceful and ingenious dances. Still the reflective 
 thinker sees even in the aimless antics of the young 
 obedience to the rational instinct to exercise the limbs freely 
 after some lengthy repression of the restless activity of 
 youth, which is necessary for the growth and healthy 
 development of the limbs. But if we happen to see 
 grown-up people violently dancing without any musical or 
 rhythmical accompaniment, the dancers seem to us like the 
 tarantula-bitten fanatics of the middle ages; for the very 
 idea, or ideal, of dancing is measured motion motion in 
 which many can combine in harmonious activity. 
 
 We call movements good when they correspond with a 
 rational purpose, or proposed end, whereas convulsive 
 movements are painful to behold. Now sociability, which 
 is the outcome of sympathy, is an integral part of the 
 realization and satisfaction of Being. Therefore civilization 
 should be based upon the recognition of this feeling in all 
 its various ramifications, instead of upon merely conventional 
 forms. If words were numerals, to which each and every 
 person attached the same ideas, the word free-will would 
 not have given, and still give, rise to such endless alter- 
 cation. To say that a man is free to follow either his 
 rational inclination, or his natural desire, is not to say that 
 he is free to essentially change his nature, like the beautiful 
 lady in the fairy tale, who turned into a white cat ; nor 
 does it mean, as Europeans believed in the middle ages, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 5 
 
 that men turned into were-wolves. The lower classes in 
 Persia still believe that a man may be changed by a sorcerer 
 into a wolf, a goat, or a tiger. But freedom essentially lies 
 in being able to be true to our own rational nature, to the 
 humanity in us, instead of being borne down by physical 
 force, 'or by unfair psychological influence being brought to 
 bear upon us from without, or by appetite and passion betray- 
 ing the citadel of our self-respect. The old Norse axiom, 
 " Keep yourself well in hand " means that Reason must hold 
 the reins of rational Being. Feeling and intelligence are 
 the swift -going steeds, but there must be no wild -eyed 
 charioteer. It has been well said that there is no Being 
 without knowing. " Je pense, done j'existe," said Descartes. 
 Perhaps he should have said, "done je sais que j'existe." 
 This is what the word self- consciousness indicates. It 
 is through self-consciousness that we are aware of the 
 ontological principles of causality, which involve the faith 
 in a First, Real, All-sufficient Cause, revealed through the 
 relativity of our own rational, although finite, Being, to 
 His Infinite, All -perfect Being; and also through the 
 reflective moral sense of the final cause of action being 
 for the good for Being, as such, not for its destruction, 
 deterioration, or suppression. Ethic is the name that has 
 been given to this science of " the end " the goal 
 towards which man instinctively struggles, and which he 
 reflectively sets himself to study, or investigate. This was 
 the summum bonum, so much sought for, and diligently 
 inquired into by the ancient Greeks. Both the emphatically 
 called religions, and the philosophic schools of the present 
 day, like hedonism, confuse the mere search after 
 pleasure with the state of enduring satisfaction of life, to 
 which I conclude St. Paul alludes when he says, " Rejoice 
 in the Lord alway ; and again I say unto you, rejoice." 
 Rational joy in such a world as this can only result from 
 
6 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 a fixed and perfect faith that our Creator, the Prototypal 
 Being, can never fail in the attributes of Being, and that 
 He therefore has a sufficient reason for all the trials to 
 which he subjects poor finite Beings here. This is the 
 principle upon which all rational faith rests, whether in 
 God, or man ; whilst the wild beast acts through fury, and 
 the Devil, or the imaginatively-pictured distorted Being, 
 acts from malice prepense. Only in proportion to the 
 integrity of persons, and their consequent sufficient reason 
 for whatever they do, can we depend on them for good- 
 ness, in which action proceeds according to the fitness of 
 things. But once given that we can trust in the perfection, 
 or wholeness of Being of our Creator and Lawgiver, it is 
 of the very constitution of a rational Being to be able to 
 live, however strenuously, through faith and hope in Him, 
 until the end anticipated by reason is accomplished. Evi- 
 dently the justice of God does not end here, nor is reason 
 justified of her children, here below. Before recoiling in 
 disgust at the word happiness, I must beg the altruist to 
 first listen to the rational definition of the much-abused 
 word. Perhaps if each of us kept to the exact meaning 
 of words, there would not be such incessant mutual con- 
 tradiction. "I am happy to see you," says a person, who 
 is perfectly indifferent to the one addressed, or "I am 
 happy to accept your invitation to dinner," writes another, 
 when the word glad would be much more appropriate ; for 
 happiness means that complete satisfaction of our real or 
 spiritual Being, which only the love of God and man, and 
 their unequivocal benevolence towards us can give us. There 
 is, moreover, a certain peace of God, which no man can 
 altogether take away from us. Happiness resumes the 
 satisfaction of all the essential elements of joy, namely, the 
 successful activity of the emotions, the intellect, and the 
 moral sense; and referring, as it does, to the essential 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 7 
 
 attributes of our spiritual Being, it is as enduring in its nature 
 as Being itself, and the Divinely instituted relations existing 
 between spiritual Beings. I do not here speak of material, 
 or blood, relations or of mere physical marriage ; only spiritual 
 marriage is the true marriage of souls. The Divine goodness 
 is exhibited in the fact that enjoyment is attached to the 
 exercise of each, and every, natural faculty, above all in the 
 reflective exercise of reason out of duty to God, in which lies 
 the peace of the mens conscia recti ; but our Creator has 
 made it the pursuit of each one of us to find out what, 
 through the natural gifts, with which He has severally 
 endowed us, we are capable of enjoying the most ; add 
 to this, what is ideally and generally held to be the summum 
 bonum of life. The principles and groundwork of our under- 
 standing, and of our mental representations, are feeling, both 
 sensible and mental ; intelligence of the relativity of cause 
 and effect ; and will, or the instinctive tendency of Being, 
 to act for the conservation of the integrity of Being, physical 
 and moral. The macrocosm itself is but one huge system 
 for the conservation, delectation, and development of noumenal 
 or spiritual Being. We are objectively or externally im- 
 pressed through our outward senses, as also internally by 
 our systematic sensations. These together produce in us 
 through a link between body and spirit, to us at present 
 unknown, sensible and emotional perception; intelligent 
 apprehension of the relations in which given objects stand 
 to the subject, as also to each other; and comprehension of 
 moral purpose, or of the purpose of the cosmos, being that 
 of the Good for spiritual Being, because both our instinctive 
 and Ideal tendency in action is always for the conservation 
 of the integrity of Being, physical and spiritual. Reflection, 
 according to these laws of thought, or mental representations 
 of causality, enables man as a rational, or calculating, Being 
 to ascertain the causes and effects of everything, both as 
 
8 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 to the past, and as to the future of his destiny. Plato called 
 reason " the sense of proportion," for man has to proportion 
 his activity in feeling, intelligence, and will to the measure, 
 or equilibrium, of Being, as well as to the qualities of the 
 person, or thing, wherewith he is dealing, as we measure our 
 physical efforts according to our own strength and to the 
 weight or the vis inertia of an object to be moved. Thus 
 we do not break a butterfly's wing with a sledge-hammer, 
 nor attempt to level a mountain by a single stroke, although 
 we may gradually bore through it, or lower it by the 
 appliances of science. 
 
 The sufficient reason for action morally is the combined 
 actualization and fulfilment of self-love, social and divine. 
 In the ages of faith, now unceremoniously termed the ages 
 of superstition, natural law was regarded as a grinding 
 instrument of torture, which man was created to writhe 
 under, and himself to apply to others, instead of being seen 
 to be nothing more than our statement of the relations that 
 exist between physical and psychological forces, designed and 
 created by God between spiritual Beings, between physical 
 man and matter, as also between man and the lower animals, 
 so that all may work together in harmony, which means joy, 
 and for the good of our spiritual Being, which means peace. 
 
 The riddle of the Egyptian sphinx, which stood along the 
 highway to devour the man who could not answer it, is still 
 put to each of us for solution, which solution I maintain, 
 according to reason, lies in triumphant sense-transcending, or 
 metaphysical faith in the absolute perfection of the Divine 
 nature, from which nothing but good can proceed. The 
 Hebrews spoke of faith in a Covenant God, Who, by en- 
 dowing man with self-conscious reason, has virtually made 
 a covenant of understanding with him, or pledged Himself 
 to fulfil all the noblest aspirations, which emanate from 
 transcendental Reason. Otherwise, why should He have 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 9 
 
 inspired us to call Him " Father"? Feeling, intelligence, and 
 will not being, or being only imperfectly and evanescently 
 fulfilled here, we are led confidently to expect their perfect 
 functioning under more favourable circumstances in a better 
 land beyond the grave. When we rise again in that better 
 land, rejoicing in ourselves, in our fellow-creatures, and in 
 God, shall we not then exclaim : " Surely the way was good 
 leading to this"? What, then, will become of the conventional 
 rules of the mere man of honour, and of the sad vocation 
 of the altruist ? With no need for hospitals, or ambulances, 
 no forlorn, despairing, disbelieving brothers to convert, no one 
 kicking against the pricks of a too-outrageous fortune, and 
 endeavouring by suicide to^ put an end to it, will he not feel 
 that there is no further raison d'etre for virtue, no field 
 of duty left ? Surely a human parent knows better than 
 this, for does he not rejoice over the healthy good child 
 as well as over the sick and untoward ? Is God, then, only 
 the God of the dead and the damned ? Does hope refer 
 to happiness or to misery? Why should one be called 
 upon to answer such self-contradictory questions ? Will 
 not the endless stretch of eternity furnish opportunities for 
 faith, love, and hope for ever ? But although man has 
 a prophetic soul, only the Creator can absolutely know 
 all that has happened, that is happening, and will happen 
 for ever and for ever ; therefore the faith in God, on which 
 true love and hope rest, will always conceivably have 
 appropriate functions. " I should have loved thee less, loved 
 I not God and virtue more,"* will for ever be the refrain 
 of every true love strain. For love to exist, faith will always 
 be required ; and hope without love, which is joy, cannot 
 endure, for without joy of life, desire of life faileth. All our 
 reasoning, physical and psychological, is from the play of 
 the cerebro-nervous system, and from emotional, intellectual, 
 
 * See p. 215. 
 
io Rational, or Scientific y Ideal of Morality 
 
 and volitional experiences. The former are living illustra- 
 tions of the principles of causality, the latter are "the 
 greetings of the spirit" (G. H. Lewes), with which these 
 psychological messages from the great Overseer and Guide 
 are received. The higher we climb the mountain path of 
 Reason, the higher are the peaks that are revealed to us, 
 and the further the line of the horizon is seen to extend. 
 If there be any of my readers who decline to make use 
 of their imagination, they can yet test my theory by 
 observing its application to the evolution of man from the 
 low-typed savage of Africa, or Australia, to the Christian, 
 or even pagan philosopher. Again, what other test could 
 he himself adduce in proof of the good government of 
 a country, if not the prosperous, cheerful, harmonious life 
 of the inhabitants : the only conceivable end of philosophy, 
 or religion, being the logical product of virtuous, happy 
 " world -citizens," as the Stoics designated men ? 
 
 Jesus illustrated the fact of analogy being the soul of 
 reasoning when He grounded His statement of the Heavenly 
 Father's not disappointing the rational expectation of good- 
 ness, or kindness implanted by Himself in His spiritual 
 offspring, on the impossibility of an earthly father giving 
 his son a stone for bread. Our apprehension of the relativity 
 of Being as involving love, or loving-kindness, is as intuitive 
 as is our perception of Being, and our comprehension of the 
 normal purpose in rational activity through our instinctive 
 tendency to act for the Best for Being. However deficient 
 in spirituality the Utilitarian Ethic may appear, it has the 
 merit of insisting on the axiom that "a tree is known by 
 its fruits." If we, being imperfectly good, give good gifts to 
 our children, can we doubt that the Omnipotent, Omniscient 
 Creator has provided a worthy consummation of our painful 
 evolution ? " The principle of utility," says Bentham, 
 "approves, or disapproves, of every action according to its 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 1 1 
 
 tendency to promote the happiness of private individuals 
 as of the State." 
 
 Insistence upon goodness of motive, or intention, does not 
 mean disregard of the real relations existing between 
 persons, in which efficient causation lies efficient causation 
 always meaning what is helpful to the end of happiness, to 
 which by Divine control all rational Beings tend. The 
 primary sense of Being itself, together with final causality, 
 as it is exhibited in the mechanism of the nervous system, 
 is self-protective, even before man's reflective reason has 
 been brought to bear upon it. It is this primal instinct, out 
 of which flows the rational inference that what is true of a 
 thing is true of its like, that makes us seek the Best for 
 Being, both for ourselves and others, under the penalty of 
 self-contradiction. Thus we are bound to sympathize with, 
 and respect the quest of it in other rational Beings. 
 
 Upon this law of the Best for Being all civil and political 
 institutions must be grounded. We do not have institutions 
 for the maintenance or protection of cannibals and cheats, 
 *>., for unfeeling, unintelligent, and malevolent persons, but 
 for that of good men and true. Even constitutional kings 
 and hereditary emperors have been dethroned and de- 
 capitated when, instead of furthering, they have threatened 
 the safety of their subjects ; but our sympathies with 
 human weakness require to be checked by justifiable 
 antipathy towards, and disapprobation of, criminality, or 
 we should ourselves contribute to the "disorganization of 
 society " (Fowler and Wilson). In the Principles of Morals, 
 by the same authors, it is said that " the sympathetic feelings 
 must be checked by the self-regarding feelings," an excessive 
 outpour of sympathy in one direction causing a deficiency 
 of the supply in other channels. There is also a great 
 demand for the application of the principle of sufficient 
 reason on the subject of the insincere eulogies which every 
 
1 2 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 well-bred person is expected to make of this sublunary 
 world, as it now is ; that is to say, of a world lying in 
 ignorance, wickedness, shame, or shamelessness, self-decep- 
 tion, and false ideals of every kind. " A mad world, my 
 masters!" exclaims the great English bard, who was not 
 given over to the maudlin sham of calling this the best of 
 all possible worlds. " A world in a very low stage of moral 
 evolution," says the rationalist a world in which the know- 
 ledge of good and evil, together with the will to choose the 
 Best, is being only very slowly grasped ; and a world of such 
 ghastly suffering and sorrow, that nothing but faith, love, 
 and hope in the goodness of an all-wise and powerful God 
 can enable one, who loves justice and mercy, to face it in the 
 small hours of the night, however we may be whirled along, 
 like autumn leaves, by the frivolity and thoughtlessness that 
 surround us in the day, so that we scarcely know what to 
 think of anything. Truly some have tasted even here, and can, 
 therefore, testify to the reality of the great joy, both human 
 and Divine, to which all are born, and which, therefore, Reason 
 expects will be ultimately shared by all. 
 
 " The ' What is it all for ? ' is," says Marion Crawford, " like 
 the death-rattle in the throat of the nineteenth century." To 
 this question Coleridge has already replied by saying in his 
 poem, " Love ": 
 
 " All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
 All are but ministers of Love, 
 And feed his secret flame." 
 
 But if this world were to be the end, what, indeed, would it 
 all mean ? When a person says : " It is all right," he means 
 that all is satisfactory to the feeling, the intelligence, and the 
 will of man. Can that be said of this state of existence ? 
 True, the love of God is manifested even now by His gift to 
 us of love, above all of spiritual, or true, love. Even the love 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 1 3 
 
 of the lower animals is a touching manifestation of affection ; 
 but what is that compared to the yearning for eternal, 
 ineffable, spiritual union felt by two complemental, or 
 oppositely developed supplemental souls for each other, as 
 ordained by the Maker of all perfect harmonies, the Master 
 of all music, and above all of what Robert Browning calls 
 "the music of man and maid"? But for such harmony 
 to exist in perfection, the loving pair must no longer be 
 dogged, and divided, by envy, hatred, malice, and all un- 
 charitableness, but must rather belong to a society in which 
 true love is held in proper estimation, it being the unique 
 relation that represents the perfect equivalence of Being, 
 and perfect reciprocity of feeling. There is no question of 
 equivalence in the relation between parents and children ; 
 and man's relation to his Heavenly Father does not con- 
 ceivably suppose equivalence. Friendship only asks for 
 sympathy in one or other particular tendency of our 
 nature ; but true love means complete spiritual correlation. 
 Wahlverwandschaft, like chemical affinity, is much closer 
 than molar, or general attraction. We can feel benevolence 
 for everyone, but only one do we call our "true love," our 
 " treasure," our " soul's delight." The free-will that our 
 Creator has given to us, means freedom to be true to our 
 natural tendency to act for the conservation of the integrity 
 of Being, as such, and for the promotion of the general 
 welfare, or happiness, of all rational Beings ; and freedom 
 to be true to the laws of thought, even whilst in the agony 
 of pain and sickness, or when suffering from the injustice of 
 others, or when sinking into the dark river of death, with 
 only faith, love, and hope for our guarantee against despair. 
 But where is the cruelty of being fast bound in such a fate, 
 seeing that it is the very condition of our spiritual evolution ? 
 Per aspra ad astra is our motto here ; moreover, we find our 
 pleasure in the mere exercise of the faculties that are the 
 
14 Rational, or Scientific ', Ideal of Morality 
 
 means to the end of obtaining what the Hindus call "the 
 desire of our desires." Should we prefer to have no rational 
 tendency in action whatever ? " grown worse than slaves in 
 lawless liberty." Should we rather choose such a style of 
 duty as the throwing ourselves under the Car of Juggernaut, 
 to be crushed to death by remorseless physical force, by way 
 of conciliating our Creator ? 
 
 If it be contemptible to be happy, why should we strive to 
 promote the happiness of our own children, and the interests 
 of those connected with us ? If to make others unhappy be 
 wrong, it must be right to endeavour to make both them and 
 ourselves happy as far as it is in our power, just as we send 
 for a doctor when we, or others, are in pain, to afford us all 
 possible relief; and action according to this principle in the 
 same rational spirit in the daily course of life, in the pursuit 
 of our own interests as well as for those of others dear to us 
 for humanity, whether represented by ourselves or by others 
 commands our regard and our respect. " Woe is me, for I 
 have hurt my own self," is inscribed on a Chaldean cylinder. 
 "If you try to help others out of the mud," says an old 
 moralist, " why should you stick in it yourselves ? " The 
 question, as to what is truly a rational course of action for 
 one person, is one which cannot be answered by another, 
 except in the most general or typical terms, which take no 
 note of idiosyncrasies the word idiosyncrasy indicating 
 a want of the perfect normal balance of feelings, and 
 rational ideas of causality, on which just action, or right 
 judgment proceeds. In this balance, lies the regulation of 
 the will according to prudence, justice, and righteousness, 
 or duty to God. "The individual's verdict as to possibility 
 of conception is determined by his previous habit of thought." 
 Who can pronounce on questions of mathematics, or even 
 of prize-fighting, who has had no preliminary practice of 
 thought on the subject, whatever it may be ? The test of 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 1 5 
 
 relative conceivability with regard to love, faith, and hope, 
 may be held legitimately to vary with the character of the 
 mind that applies it. What use is it to speak of love, to 
 one who loves not? of faith, to one who is incapable of 
 rational argument? or of hope, to one who has neither love 
 nor faith ? Not being trustworthy himself, how can he trust 
 even God ? Surely materialism, with its annihilation of the 
 individual, must be satisfactory to such an one: "the wish 
 is father to the thought." 
 
 Existing in the present, love is joy ; existing in the past, it 
 is consolation ; for as what has been, may be again, it means 
 hope. "One end of the rainbow-arch touches solid earth, 
 and the other takes Heaven in its span " perhaps touching 
 the ocean of eternity. 
 
 Stuart Mill defined love as "the ever-present anticipation 
 of joy in, or through another." Now present joy in love, 
 with faith in its eternal continuance, is the test of real or 
 spiritual love. " Lust is of the earth, earthy, closing before 
 the grave closes over its object." 
 
 As love, divine and human, is what constitutes happiness 
 here, and as, according to Jesus, " Love is the fulfilling of 
 the law," how can we doubt that it will be so hereafter ; and 
 if such be the nature of happiness, why should we pretend that 
 we do not want happiness for ourselves, as well as for others ? 
 Prudence, kindness, and conscientiousness, or the sense of 
 responsibility to God, are the spiritual conditions of love, and 
 its concomitant of happiness. 
 
 No fool can be truly loved, or truly love others; and human 
 love, without divine love, is a house built upon the sand, which 
 cannot withstand the force of the waves and wind. Is it 
 not also natural for us to anticipate that we shall hereafter 
 be clothed with " a more glorious body," unlike the present 
 one, the constant prey to lesion by accident, or disease, and 
 always liable to the dissolution of death. No one, who has 
 
16 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 once tasted of the perfect satisfaction of Being, which is the 
 rational signification of happiness, wishes to have done with 
 existence. Hence, what Addison calls " the fond desire after 
 immortality," can only be known by the few who have 
 realized the perfect joy of being of perfect mutual love. 
 Hence it comes that bearers of " the tidings of great joy " 
 to man, are only believed by the few who are treading " the 
 mountain paths whence cometh light." The dwellers in the 
 plains, engrossed in dividing the earthly spoils of perpetual 
 combats for wealth and supremacy of some kind or other, are 
 ever disposed to disbelieve the message, and to stone the 
 messengers of peace and goodwill, rather than to listen to, and 
 entertain them. The reproach levelled at St. Paul, " Much 
 learning hath made thee mad," is the general greeting given 
 to the philosopher and the saint ; whereas philosophy lies in 
 the observation of nature, and the exposition of truth. 
 
 It must not, however, be forgotten that there can be no 
 knowing without Being. If one cannot really know what a 
 physical disease is without experiencing it, what a colour 
 is without seeing it, what sound is without hearing it ; how 
 can faith be comprehended by the untrustworthy and 
 fickle, love by the unsympathetic, or hope by the unbelieving 
 and the unloving ? What can God Himself do for us, 
 if we desire nothing ? But as essentially a social Being, 
 there is one thing that man always has desired, and always 
 will require, and that is companionship. As Ibsen says : " It 
 takes two to be happy." An isolated social, or even gre- 
 garious creature, cannot live even in isolation ; but the less 
 developed a man is, the better he can endure it, passing his 
 time in eating, drinking, and sleeping. But even he cannot 
 be merry without companionship, if only boon companion- 
 ship. Even as a physical Being he seeks his physiological 
 partner, and how much more deeply is the psychological 
 need of fellowship realized by human nature. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 17 
 
 Complementary attraction is the attraction of oppositely, 
 but not contradictorily, developed personalities. The affection 
 that we feel for our analogues is not of so satisfactory 
 a kind, although it also holds witness that of blood 
 relations and compatriots. Physiology exhibits the usual 
 attraction of people of opposite temperaments for each 
 other. 
 
 As in all times, man, as such, has been rational, we 
 assume that he has always had something that appeared 
 to him to be a reason for whatever conduct he pursued. 
 But what psychological, or rather pntological, science (i.e., 
 metaphysic) requires of him, is that he should have a 
 sufficient reason for all his resolutions and self-determinations, 
 both on a large and a small scale; both in the private and 
 the public conduct of his life. But this is only to be arrived 
 at through reflective reasoning, which deals with general 
 concepts of matter, and mind, which includes feeling, intelli- 
 gence and will, and self-conscious, voluntary, moral self- 
 determination, according to sufficient, efficient and final 
 causation, through which we rationally interpret the external 
 manifestations of Divine purpose. The scientific, or rational, 
 basis of morality lies in correspondence, in thought, word, 
 and deed, with the reflective principle of sufficient reason. 
 The origin of our individual conceptions on all subjects is 
 found in our own feelings, intelligence, and will our own 
 natural tendency in action naturally colouring our inter- 
 pretation of the motives of others, and our explanations of 
 their purpose in action. 
 
 Without religion the Ideal may not, and, in fact, does 
 not have immediate efficiency in most cases. " I see the 
 best, yet I follow the worst," has often been said by even 
 the wisest of men. It is as the sense of immediate responsi- 
 bility to an Omnipresent, creative Being, All -wise, and 
 All-benevolent, that morality is immediately and effectually 
 
 C 
 
1 8 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 binding upon us under all circumstances. Self-love, or 
 prudence, social love, or sympathy, and Divine love, 
 or adoration, all play their part in duty; for only 
 in our whole Being can it be fulfilled, or God's will be 
 done. 
 
 The personification of the Ideal is certainly emphatically 
 a reflective act, an act of man's introspective reason. It is 
 effected through the substitution of similars, or the necessary 
 postulation of the same cause for similar effects, and vice 
 versd. Hence conscience is manifestly a part of the 
 data, upon which all our reasoning proceeds ; social ex- 
 pediency is but a secondary motive neither essential nor 
 lasting. 
 
 The Ideal conception of Deity is the reflection of a 
 developed moral consciousness, of which religion is the 
 outcome and the sanction. In natures in which reflective 
 reason is little developed the Ideal of God is anything but 
 that of a just and benevolent Being. 
 
 Rights and duties are only implied in the idea of 
 Personality. They refer to personal, not to impersonal, 
 forces ; and they have regard to correlativity, relativity, 
 and justice, or reciprocity of obligation. The relations of 
 parent and child, and of husband and wife, are those of 
 correlativity; for in them we have reciprocity of obligation 
 in diversity of relation, to deal with. Justice treats of 
 obligation between similars. The harmony of spiritual 
 Beings, like that of matter and mind, is that from which 
 the happiness of social Beings results. 
 
 Hence Heaven means a state of perfection of Being, in 
 which all Divinely -established relations will hold without 
 contradiction, or hindrance of passing earthly expediency. 
 It will be the realization of an order both subjective and 
 objective, satisfying to the sense of the Ideal in all the 
 functions of Being. I am not here speaking of the Ideal 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 19 
 
 afforded by the mere imagination, which, as in the case of 
 beauty, treats merely of the harmonious adjustment of the 
 subject, or agent, to some idea of external, not essential, 
 order. The metaphysical ground of perfection is to be 
 found in the spiritual. nature of man, the nature of which 
 the Absolute Being is the Prototype. 
 
 " Be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect " ; 
 and our only explanation of our responsibility to be good, is 
 that of our feeling imputability of sin, or of voluntary dis- 
 obedience to God if we do not so. This is the raison d'etre 
 of morality, the sufficient reason for our requiring it of 
 others, as well as of ourselves, and of all our political 
 institutions. The problem of scientific ethic is to ascertain 
 the end, or proper purpose of conduct. As desire, the ethical 
 emotion, seeks the summum bonum as deliberate purpose, or 
 " categorical imperative of duty," it aims at perfection of 
 Being. The Ideal is made up of both essential subjective 
 perfection, and of objective satisfaction or happiness. 
 
 The moral Ideal of the Divine Government would not be 
 complete without objective, as well as subjective perfection. 
 I must, therefore, again point to the complementary union 
 of opposites as the great mean provided for the possible 
 approach of finite Being to the equilibrium of the attributes 
 of Being, in which perfection of Being consists. As man 
 redeems woman from inhuman frivolity and weakly 
 tenderness, and woman redeems man from immoral 
 sensuality and cruelty, the one, or the other sex, taken 
 alone, does not represent human nature fully. Neither 
 feminine nervous emotion, nor masculine profound learning, 
 can alone frame a true moral judgment ; which, properly 
 speaking, is only the outcome of the complete evolution of 
 the three sources, or principles of thought, i.e., feeling, 
 intelligence, and will. It is because morality, as being 
 reflective of self-consciousness, is thus synthetic, that we 
 
2O Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 become through it God-conscious, for we cannot rationally 
 conceive ourselves bound to obey a law which does not 
 involve the idea of a legislator ; and reason equally rejects 
 the conception of a Legislator Who is a living contradiction 
 of His own moral laws. For all related Beings an Absolute 
 Creator is required ; for the sum of finite Beings an Infinite 
 Cause. 
 
PART II. 
 THESIS. 
 
 T) EFORE stating my own conclusions with regard to the 
 -L* moral sense, which is so peculiarly characteristic of 
 humanity, I feel it incumbent on me to exhibit the processes, 
 whereby my conclusions are arrived at, as I believe them to 
 be satisfying to all fair questions. Of course, pure reasoning 
 is ontological and logical, not involving the material con- 
 ditionings of which psychology treats. Not only do what 
 Wordsworth calls " obstinate questionings " occur to an 
 intelligent man, who is perhaps hereditarily a born thinker, 
 but even among the great masses of men in all times and 
 places, what has been termed transcendental (i.e. t sense- 
 transcending) reasoning, has always prevailed, however 
 superstitious, or aberglaubig, may have been the imaginative 
 forms it has assumed. But it is reflective, introspective, 
 and apperceptive reason alone which can offer definite and 
 incontrovertible arguments concerning our origin, and destiny 
 here, and hereafter. 
 
 To begin then, as we must, with the reflex of the cerebro- 
 nervous system, "a given citation of the nervous system 
 suggests what is not itself, and becomes a sign, and acquires 
 sense." The mental response to nerve excitation, or reaction 
 to stimulus, is the attaching some meaning to that which 
 has affected us. Sensation is a referential process, which 
 is called by Mr. Welby, in Mind, for January, 1896, "sensi- 
 fying." " The child's natural demand for the meaning of, as 
 
 21 
 
22 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 well as the reason for, everything that he sees, or that 
 happens, is the best of all materials to work upon. As a 
 matter of fact, everyone of us is, in one sense, a born 
 explorer ; our only choice is what world we will explore." 
 Our inherited neurotic diagram probably determines the 
 choice of each of us, whether it shall be the world of physics 
 or of metaphysics to which we are to devote our attention. 
 But although we may decide upon the visible, instead of the 
 invisible world of man's inner life experience as the object of 
 our investigation, yet unless we have unconsciously, or 
 consciously, profited by the labours of generations of 
 philosophers, epistemology, or the science of the source of 
 knowledge, being unknown to us, we are sure to fall into 
 self-contradictions, perhaps deriding the metaphysical, or 
 supra-sensible ego within, which is the true subject of all 
 objective experience and realized knowledge. 
 
 There is no part of experience from which reason can be 
 warned off. Feeling plays its part in the structure of reality, 
 and in our reflective introspective reconstructive estimate of 
 it. There are ethical emotions and spiritual convictions 
 underlying all religious dogmas and speculative thought. 
 The subjective representations of causality are distinct 
 elements of our mental, or intellectual, experience. The 
 things themselves do not pass into knowledge ; they only 
 awaken in us ideas of causality, through which we perceive 
 things, or objects of thought, apprehend relations between 
 them, and between objects and the subject, or ego, 
 and, finally, comprehend their purport through our own 
 intuitive purpose in self-determination. Thought may be 
 defined as the exercise of our understanding of causality. 
 It is conditioned by sense and an unconscious psychical 
 mechanism (z>., the play of the afferent, sensorial, and 
 efferent nerves) for its content. Feeling, as vague pain 
 or pleasure, awakens the impulse to seek understanding ; 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 23 
 
 the intelligent consciousness of being affected by external 
 stimuli in proportion to their relativity to our own Being, 
 awakens in us desire, or aversion, sympathy, or antipathy 
 towards certain persons or things ; and the practical sense of 
 conduciveness of the end desired arises out of both these 
 principles, determining our conduct as a whole. These are 
 the unspoken principles of mental representation. From these 
 fundamental, or first, principles all our reasoning proceeds, 
 reflective reason taking them synthetically as her data for 
 the large discourse, or inferences, of reason, concerning what 
 man is, whence he comes, and whither he goes. Lotze held 
 feeling to be the source of our moral and religious ideas. 
 According to Lotze, it is subjective process that enables us 
 to reach an objective result. Thought has its ground of 
 coherence in the attributes of Being. Being itself is its 
 ground of unity. Thought is essentially constructive. With- 
 out the ideas, or representations, of reason, there would be 
 no objects for us of physical imagination, or of spiritual 
 conception. 
 
 Only out of truth to real feeling, i.e., really existing feeling, 
 can a theory of happiness be rationally constructed. Reality 
 can only be arrived at through man's spontaneous conscious- 
 ness. It is the Ideal that can only be realized by man's 
 reflective speculative consciousness. The statement of new, 
 and higher modifications of feeling by the few helps on the 
 ideal realization of them by the many. A science is a 
 rationally established system of facts and necessary infer- 
 ences from them, which, over a given range of objects, con- 
 fers qertainty, or the assurance of reason ; philosophy treats 
 of the cognition of the possibility, probability, or even of 
 the dubiousness of their existence. A negative solution is 
 even after its fashion a solution of a problem. We say a 
 thing is possible, or probable, by virtue of such or such 
 reasons for it, and such or such reasons against it. Philosophy 
 
24 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 properly includes universal speculation, as well as the special 
 sciences. Belief founded on mere imagination, or on emotion 
 unregulated by reason, unbalanced by intellection, or the 
 moral sense, does not count as scientific. Morality is the 
 translation of sentiment, with the intelligence of causality, 
 into action. It is the Ideal direction of action which results 
 from the very nature of reality. There is no Ideal without 
 a more or less explicit conception of the reality itself. To 
 act morally is not to act according to appearance, and the 
 relations of appearances ; it is to act in the world of realities, 
 and according to the inductive cognition, which we have of 
 this world. Only in the ratio of our possession of a fully- 
 developed consciousness of the standard of reality through 
 the intelligence, which is in ourselves, and according to 
 which, we judge every other existence, can we form right 
 judgments, or arrive at justifiable deductions. 
 
 "It must not be overlooked," says Alfred Fouille"e, "that 
 philosophy and science are not solely speculations, but also 
 actions and productions." There are representative con- 
 ceptions that are so intimately bound up with the reflective 
 intelligence of man, that he instinctively directs his life in 
 accordance with them, both with regard to his external 
 and his inner life. A sufficient cause for a sensible percep- 
 tion is a perepheral, or a systemic sensation, or impression 
 produced on us. The afferent cause, by which we apprehend 
 its particular relation to us, is the similarity of the nature 
 of the thing, by which we are affected, to our own physical 
 or spiritual Being. Our comprehension of its goodness or 
 badness arises out of our own intuition of final causa- 
 tion, or instinctive tendency to act for the conservation 
 of our own Being, either physical or spiritual. Action 
 for the Good for Being is hence regarded logically as the 
 normal tendency of intelligent minds. If the idiot, or the 
 mad person is malignant, we attribute it to the disorder of 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 25 
 
 his mental mechanism. When children, or uneducated grown- 
 up people are spiteful or unkind, we regard it as a natural 
 consequence of the want of development of their reflective 
 reason, with its concomitant sense of the ideal, i.e. t of typical 
 perfect Being. Only fhe pure in heart, and the developed in 
 intelligence and morality, can see God as He is. 
 
 Science, or organized knowledge, I hold to be the pro- 
 duction of the abstract reflective re -representations of 
 causality, sufficient, efficient, and final. Even the physical 
 conditions of real Being are under the law of causality, 
 and most obviously under that of efficient causation, or 
 of the relations, in which existences stand to each other. 
 
 The law of evolution is a striking illustration of the 
 synthesis between the physical and the moral world the 
 cerebral modifications of man's nervous system, corres- 
 ponding with his spiritual evolution. Herein lies the 
 explanation of man being made perfect through suffering. 
 Thus Epictetus appealed to his scholars : " If you will go 
 through what you do for success in the Olympic Games, 
 why will you not exercise the same control over yourselves 
 for virtue's sake ? " the virtue of a thing lying in its essen- 
 tial product. Our freedom of will lies between the mere 
 life of the lower animal, accompanied by a little art and 
 worldly wisdom, and the life of noble aspiration, Godward 
 and heavenward, full of righteousness and love, and peaceful 
 trust in the goodness of God, which is the peculiar privi- 
 lege of reflective reason. This is the foundation of true 
 religion, whatever imaginative or mythical forms it may 
 assume in different times and places ; this, philosophically 
 interpreted, means oneness with the Divine design, or will, 
 in our creation, and the consciousness of the unity between 
 our true self and the law of the universe, i.e., the moral 
 law of action for the Good for spiritual Being. 
 
 Faith furnishes no new judgment ; it affirms what 
 
26 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 has been experienced, and has reasons to offer for its 
 affirmations. 
 
 The peculiar province of science is to forecast and to realize 
 the future through its two methods of induction and deduc- 
 tion, with the personal verification which completes them ; the 
 hypothesis, which precedes them, enabling science to forestall 
 the future, and to direct it in the line of our desire. It is a 
 human duty, par excellence, to seek for the greatest amount of 
 certitude; but there is no other true certitude but the approval 
 or satisfaction of our understanding. This is a convertible 
 proposition, which is Locke's definition of truth ; for in what 
 but in the satisfaction of our understanding does certitude 
 consist ? Credo quia impossibile is not a maxim of science. 
 
 It is from reflection on the categories, or laws, that govern 
 thought, that we draw our belief in the existence and nature 
 of God. By idealizing Being, we mean forming a super- 
 lative estimate of it. Thus are we enabled to conceive a 
 Supreme, Absolute, and Typical Being, whom Christ bade 
 mankind to resemble; and it is because of our belief in 
 His perfect goodness, that we hope for another and a better 
 world, "wherein dwelleth righteousness" where wisdom 
 is justified of her children, and where the painful con- 
 ditions of this planet no longer existing for us, we shall 
 have a fuller revelation of the Joy-Giver, in other and 
 more beautiful mansions of the All-Father's house. 
 
 Descartes, " the father of modern philosophy," was the 
 first who fairly took his stand upon Self-consciousness as 
 the ground of all logical argument. 
 
 Existence, which is a felt reality shared by man and the 
 lower animals, is intensified into the abstract knowledge of 
 Being in the a posteriori form of self-conscious reflection. 
 
 When Descartes said, "Je pense, done j'existe," he must 
 particularly have had reflective thought in his mind's eye ; 
 but as an object must exist before it can be reflected in a 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 27 
 
 mirror, the very word / in the statement / think affirms 
 subjective existence. To be conscious is to know that 
 one exists. Our very idea of reality is derived from our 
 positive knowledge of our own felt existence, and from our 
 intuition or consciousness, of being able to produce effects 
 on other existences. No objective superstructure of 
 knowledge can stand if its subjective basis be withdrawn. 
 Professor Jevons defined reasoning as " the substitution of 
 similars;" but I hold that the spontaneous recognition 
 of similars precedes that act of reflective reason. How 
 can we feel for others if we do not first feel our own 
 existence? Their existence and its modifications can only 
 be thought of, or represented, by the mind under its own 
 categorical attributes of feeling, intelligence, and will. We 
 cannot see a soul as we can see a body, but only recognize 
 it through its manifestations. Sir William Hamilton held 
 that there must be a pre-existent condition of mind involving 
 in itself a consciousness of existence antecedent to the sugges- 
 tion of any object ab extra. He holds that eits is to be viewed 
 as a primum cognitum. A spirit entity must exist in us 
 for us to be able to recognize other spirit entities through 
 material phenomena. There is, moreover, a consciousness of 
 the bodily self being a material object like another. Thus 
 we say " my body " as we say " my arm " or " my foot." 
 
 All that we call accessory truths are but reflective deduc- 
 tions from the current actualities of our experience. But 
 although the spiritual entity has the capacity of conscious- 
 ness, if there be no object submitted to it, it must remain 
 without consciousness, unless it be of our systemic sensations, 
 such as headache or stomach-ache, etc. 
 
 Darwin said, " I have nothing to do with the origin of the 
 mental processes, but only with their development." 
 
 Thus the doctrine of evolution is no contradiction of the 
 doctrine of intelligent creation. 
 
28 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 The dog has the power of perception, but man alone has 
 that of introspective reflection or apperception, from whence 
 springs abstraction or generalization. The sensitive plant is 
 said to have sensitiveness, the lower animals consciousness, 
 and man self- consciousness. Hence a rational Being is 
 one that reasons from his own vital experiences in the ratio 
 of his sensations, emotions, intellection of similarity, and 
 intuition of causation, sufficient, efficient, and final. 
 
 Lotze says, "The one individual rational soul always 
 remains in an attitude of complete isolation." from which 
 only the felt sympathy of a Being like himself can relieve 
 him. In introspective reflection man has the power of 
 setting one state of mind before, or against another, and 
 of contemplating the relation between them, i.e. y of object- 
 ifying ideas. "Subjective life is that to which no animal 
 attains ; it is incapable of conception and prediction ; " * 
 for conception and prediction involve generalization and 
 abstraction. 
 
 As the last fashion in morality is to put the principle of 
 self-regard out of court, I must start with stating that I hold 
 proper self-regard, as self-respect, to be the Standpunkt of 
 rationality, and consequently of morality. This is well 
 illustrated by the following quotations : " The highest form of 
 self-regard is self-respect, or regard for our moral character, 
 and the fear to do anything to weaken or impair it. The 
 highest form of sympathy shows itself similarly in respect for 
 others, and fear of doing anything that can weaken or impair 
 true self-respect in them."t " Indignation, or resentment, is 
 felt when we conceive either ourselves, or others, to have 
 been the victims of hurt or injury, even when only through 
 inadvertence, and without provocation, or with insufficient 
 provocation." J Surely we have here moral judgments that 
 
 * ROMANES. t The Principle of Morals. Profs. FOWLER and WILSON. 
 1 Idem. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 29 
 
 indicate clearly what is right, and, conversely, what is wrong 
 conduct. Evidently then the good for our own Being, and 
 that of others, is what we not only actually desire, but also 
 what we ideally consider that we ought to endeavour to 
 accomplish ; but this can only be rationally effected, that is 
 to say, in the ratio of, of in accordance with, the constitution 
 of the human mind. " The Ideal end (of self-determination) 
 must be formulated in terms of our conscious inner experience." 
 How otherwise could we conceive it, or fulfil it ? Surely the 
 first condition for any possible happiness is that the integrity, 
 or wholeness, of the Being, who is the subject of happiness, 
 be preserved at any cost. " Idealism regards the world as 
 fundamentally rational." Were it otherwise, it would be 
 utterly unintelligible to us as rational Beings ; recognition of 
 similarity to our own Being, and logical "substitution of 
 similars," affording us the only possible clue to the compre- 
 hension of the cosmos, and of the absolute Being, conceived 
 by Reason as its only sufficient Source. 
 
 In the principle of moral evolution is involved the belief 
 that there is something final and reasonable in the sequence 
 of events and ideas. Hence there is an expectation of the 
 gradual approach to what is the Best for Being ; for to what 
 other finality does evolution point ? and to what other finality 
 does our striving after progress tend ? The rational creature 
 must needs look for the fulfiment of this aspiration in the 
 light of the principle of sufficient reason. One even asks 
 what one is pleased to term a "common" servant : " Why did 
 you do so and so ? " and great indignation would be expressed 
 if the answer was : " To hurt and injure you as much as 
 possible." The more general development, or culture, of 
 our reflective reason would make moral progress proceed in 
 geometrical, instead of arithmetical ratio. Already during 
 the last fifty years the mothers of the race have been 
 gradually endeavouring to think for themselves instead of 
 
30 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 being driven like sheep. What can augur better for the 
 men of the future ? 
 
 Every great thinker marks a phase of thought higher than 
 the thought of his predecessors. But unless appreciative 
 efforts are made by their followers for the scientific 
 actualization of this phase, it may virtually be lost to 
 mankind. Stuart Mill did this service for his master 
 Bentham, so also did some followers of Kant some years 
 after the first appearance of his philosophy. Evolution does 
 not depend upon the mere lapse of time. For Hegel real 
 and rational were synonymous terms. Hegel's Werden 
 anticipated the biological doctrine of evolution. "As self- 
 consciousness, or spirit, is more and more fully realized, 
 everything is taken up into the unity of spirit." This is 
 what Jesus expressed as "being born again to the Spirit." 
 Complete self-consciousness is the basis of scientifically, 
 or rationally, developed God - consciousness. Reflective 
 apperceptive consciousness is a unity of emotion, intellection, 
 and moral sense, resulting in the Ideal of pure Being and 
 the perfect life, which it is our duty to strive to realize, for 
 it is in that that our responsibility to our Creator lies. " The 
 human mind is no longer viewed as a self-consciousness, of 
 which feeling is merely an imperfect stage ; but as a self- 
 consciousness, of which feeling is a permanent factor."* This 
 applies equally to the love of the brother we have seen, and 
 to that of the invisible Father of spirits. 
 
 The pessimism, which is the incessant shadow of Idealism, 
 has lately taken the insidious form of exclusive altruism, 
 denying man's normal tendency (or Trieb) to endeavour 
 after his own welfare. Pessimism t adopting on this 
 occasion a mock humility that is regarded as very mag- 
 nanimous. An Italian writer speaks of it as la smania di 
 
 * S. W. DYCE, The Philosophical Review, January, 1895. 
 f " Der Geist der stets verneint "GOETHE'S Mephisto. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 3 1 
 
 abnegazione, which we may translate as the mania for self- 
 sacrifice. To start with, it is a direct contradiction of the 
 fundamental position of ontology, or metaphysic, the only, 
 or, strictly speaking, absolute, Standpunkt of which is self- 
 consciousness, i.e., immediate knowledge of our own states 
 of Being, from which alone all rational inference is drawn 
 as to other existences. How are we to know that our 
 neighbour wishes to be happy, if we ourselves have no desire 
 for well-being ? Where would be the logical substitution 
 of similars, which Professor Jevons defined as the essence of 
 reasoning ? But as La Rochefoucauld described hypocrisy 
 as the homage paid by vice to virtue, so I regard the per- 
 petual make-believe of being happy, so characteristic of " the 
 upper ten thousand," as an involuntary, or unconscious, 
 homage to the desire of our desires, viz., to be oneself 
 happy, and to see others happy, because what is true of 
 a thing is true of its like ; the syllogistic conclusion from 
 these data being action for the happiness of rational Beings 
 as such. Only those who, like George Eliot and Carlyle, 
 have not known happiness themselves, could conceive or 
 support such a doctrine, which is, in fact, an illustration 
 of ^Esop's fable of the fox that, having lost its tail, ran 
 about saying how much better it is to be without one. 
 Rational judgment means judgment in relation to a standard, 
 that standard being given in the first place in the intuitive 
 sense of our own experiences in Being ; whereas the standard 
 of reflective judgment is Ideal Being, which is the product 
 of positive, or Egoistic, comparative, or altruistic, and super- 
 lative, or Theistic, conception of Being. 
 
 The first faculty to go in madness is the last arrived at 
 in consciousness, which is the Ideal standard of thought, 
 which retires into the background of consciousness when the 
 competition, or the exhaustion, of physical states bears down 
 the exercise of reflective reason. Then it is that the moral 
 
32 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 will, or reflective self-determination, has but an insecure hold 
 on it. Hence also the moral sense, the most complex of 
 the faculties, is the first to suffer and succumb to the fury 
 of animal passion, as in drunkenness only the elemental 
 brute foundation of man's nature comes into full play. 
 
 Evolution, it must not be forgotten, is subject to relapse, 
 decay, and extinction in any individual organism. Physical 
 and psychical collapse go hand in hand ; but the spirit of 
 man returns to the Father of spirits. 
 
 Even man's primitive needs had but few available means 
 of satisfaction before the development of reflective con- 
 structive reason, with which come art, science, morality, 
 and critical logic, so that the lamp of knowledge is handed 
 on from age to age; in spite of the failing and falling away 
 of individuals, the progress of Rationality bears witness to 
 man's capacity for moral excellence. We are now more 
 than ever feeling after a rational resting-place for religious 
 belief; the place gradually being given to the principle of 
 sufficient reason in the human mind, which is seen in the 
 desire of all reflective persons to comprehend the meaning, 
 or purpose, of whatever exists, or occurs, points to it being 
 the keystone of the arch of thought. The one positive 
 fact immediately known to us is that of our own existence. 
 All inferences from past and future, from comparative and 
 superlative, is from that alone. 
 
 Of course, I am here speaking, to borrow Plato's expres- 
 sion (see Jowett's translation), " not of the outward man, for 
 all organism is doomed to decay, but of the inward, which 
 is the true self and concernment of a man'' Self-criticism, 
 with its praise and blame of our own conduct, according 
 as it approaches to, or recedes from, the Ideal standard of 
 Being, and our indignation against those who deteriorate, 
 or inflict wrong on their fellows, testify to the nature of the 
 Ideal as it is held in conscience. Hence in feeling the 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 33 
 
 categorical imperative of duty to be true to the Ideal of 
 reason, we conclude, with Kant, that the moral law is the 
 exhibition of the Divine will. For as, to use the words of 
 the New Testament, we " cannot by Beelzebub cast out 
 Beelzebub," so we cannot rationally conceive of a Divine 
 law out of harmony with a Divine will. 
 
 With the sense of our relativity to our Creator, the 
 comprehension of good and evil begins : to keep His 
 law appearing to us as the Good for Being, seeing that 
 our Creator has made self -conservation the first law 
 of nature, whilst disobedience to, or contempt of, the 
 moral law is regarded as evil doing and destructive of 
 Being. 
 
 Man's duty is only rationally conceivable as the working 
 towards God's will, as it is revealed in our own moral Ideal, 
 or standard of action. 
 
 The sense of our individual intelligence cannot outstretch 
 its own bounds ; but it is an outcome of man's reflective 
 intelligence " to seek knowledge and get understanding." 
 The sense of responsibility and the work of man expand 
 as the range of knowledge and of interest widens. " To be 
 a priest unto God" is to be a representer and executor of 
 His will, or purpose, concerning us. 
 
 St. Paul says it is the duty of man to be active in the 
 executive of the moral government of the world. This is 
 the only real ground endorsed by reason. This is the 
 common responsibility of rulers, and the rational ground of 
 their being accepted as such by consent of rational subjects. 
 The recognition of the Creator, or Supreme Being, as the 
 legitimate source of all law, is as much a part of reason as is 
 the recognition of the law itself the sense of responsibility 
 involves the law of impersonation. 
 
 When we attribute reason to our Creator, we logically 
 imply that His will, or nature, cannot be the contradiction 
 
 D 
 
34 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 of His nature. Hence all the religions of the world have 
 been influenced by the Ideals of their authors. 
 
 The universal prevalence of religion in some form or other, 
 however it may be defaced by superstition, shows that it is an 
 indefeasible part of the world's thought, and that morality, or 
 orderly conduct, is a necessary part of mental representation. 
 
 The more the dominion of the moral law takes precedence 
 of the physical law of brute force, the more are the claims 
 of humanity and justice acknowledged. Moreover, human 
 intelligence has always recognized that its ends " make for 
 righteousness," or integrity of Being, "the right meaning that 
 which is ruled " "truth to nature," as the Stoics taught the 
 nature of man being rational, not like that of the snake, or 
 the rat. Before the element of rational morality can appear 
 in our mental representations of external presentations, there 
 must be consciousness of sentient personality, of a subject- 
 object, susceptible of joy and sorrow, of hope and of despair, 
 but to whom gain or loss, physical pain and pleasure, are 
 secondary considerations, beside that of duty, or obedience 
 to the Divine law. " Fais ce que dots, advienne ce que pourra " ; 
 " If God be for us, who can be against us ? " Such are the 
 mottoes long current among mankind. 
 
 If pessimism were the order of the universe, we should 
 not feel ill-used at being unhappy, but rather look upon 
 happiness with contempt, not seeking it for our children or 
 ourselves. It is our protest against unhappiness, as a form 
 of injustice, that leads man to seek after God, if perchance 
 He may be found ; and the only possible object of appeal 
 is a Personal God ; only children beat the ground in anger. 
 
 If the object of our thought be purely a thing without 
 life and feeling, unassociated with the consciousness of per- 
 sonality, no moral idea appears. The moral idea applies 
 to the comprehension of benefit, or of injury, done to a 
 self-conscious Being. The lower animals have objective con- 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 35 
 
 sciousness. Sense images affect them powerfully, and they 
 are moved to action by them, not from the inner or spiritual 
 experiences of life, as we are. Thus they do not apprehend 
 the general relation in which one creature stands to another, 
 as man does, consequently they have no ability to see or 
 judge of the fitness of things, or of the harmony, or want 
 of harmony existing in the relations of the me to the not 
 me. As they possess no spiritual Ideal, they have no con- 
 ception of spiritual degradation, which is the worst form of 
 harm given or received, and so their existence is narrowed, 
 and simply limited to this earth. 
 
 Not without a sufficient reason do we draw the universe- 
 deep distinction between man and the lower creatures. Man's 
 affections, his intelligence, and his moral purpose mark him 
 as the son of the Father of Spirits. 
 
 Darwin has said, " It may be freely admitted that no 
 animal is self-conscious, if by this term it is implied that 
 he reflects on his own origin, or destination, or on what 
 in the abstract are life and death " ; whereas the speculative 
 reason of man judges from the present as to the past and 
 future ; and from the part to the whole, as the paleontologist 
 builds up a whole skeleton from its scattered members. 
 " He looks before and after, and sighs for what is not " ; 
 he is always looking for a time and place, where dwelleth 
 blessedness, and it is thus that he is able to co-operate with 
 his Maker in preparing the way, and making the paths 
 straight thereunto. 
 
 This may be said to be an illusion by the secularist, who, 
 seeing no chance of its complete fulfilment here, despairs 
 of it, and so contemns it as a mirage of desire ; but whence 
 then come "the pleasing hope, the fond desire, the longing 
 after immortality " of which Addison speaks ? 
 
 "Pourquoi cherchons-nous toujours des amide's et des 
 amours qui demeurent toujours, toujours?" Why, other- 
 
36 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 wise, this longing for the blessed and enduring life ? Time 
 and place, and various other sublunary conditions combine 
 to forbid the continuous fulfilment of such expectation in 
 this world ; "but the glimpses of the Ideal given (as Plotinus 
 said) to the lover, the poet, and the sage, make disbelief 
 in it impossible to the reflective judgment. 
 
 " Shall man be a living lie ? " asks Sir William Hamilton, 
 the great Scotch metaphysician. The highest Ideal con- 
 ception is that of goodness and benevolence. A good man 
 is one in whom the highest characteristics of humanity 
 are actualized ; and the nearer a person comes to this 
 standard, the more we believe that God created man in 
 His own image. " Why callest thou Me good ? " said Jesus ; 
 " there is none good but One," and that One was the Proto- 
 typal Supreme Being, in Whom we live, and move, and 
 have our Being. We logically assume perfect benevolence 
 in the Divine self-consciousness, for we cannot see what could 
 possibly deflect the needle of consciousness in the case of 
 an Absolutely Powerful, Wise, and Good Being ; whereas with 
 poor and suffering man, the flesh is weak, although the spirit 
 may be willing. Galileo having all his bones disjointed on 
 the rack, may be excused for failing in truth when he denied 
 the law he had himself discovered of the earth's rotation 
 round the sun. A lover, seeing his beloved in apparent 
 danger of deception and betrayal, or of death, may not wait 
 for legal permission to attack his enemy; and a Russian 
 Czar, driven wild by the constant fear of assassination, may 
 promiscuously condemn people to Siberia, thereby com- 
 mitting great injustice, without our pronouncing either, or 
 both, to be bad men; for we know how strong temptation 
 may be to indulge natural passion without reflection, in 
 moments of emergency. 
 
 But the Creator does not fear for Himself, whatever towers 
 of Babel may be raised against His power, and whatever 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 37 
 
 rocks may be flung at Him by the Titans of Greek 
 mythology. As to the Persian fable of Ahuramazda, the 
 power of light, and Ahrimanes, the power of darkness, if 
 there really were two contending powers in the universe, 
 constantly nullifying each other's plans, there could exist 
 no uniform order, no moral cosmos, but only terrible chaos. 
 The moral chaos of this world, naturally enough suggested 
 this doctrine ; but the gradual dawning of the principle of 
 evolution upon the minds of the thoughtful, both dispenses 
 with, and condemns it. It is our own Being that is specially 
 committed to our care, and for the development of which, 
 according to reason, or the sense of relativity to God and 
 man, we are especially responsible. If a man be in a 
 constant state of fury, even against wickedness, what shall 
 it profit him if, through the habit of anger passing into 
 chronic malevolence, he lose his own soul ? 
 
 For as St. Paul says, we may give all our goods to the 
 poor and our bodies to be burned, yet having not charity 
 it profiteth us nothing. Self-immolation in support of any 
 religious dogma, cannot be a substitute for the fulfilment 
 of the intention, or law, of our Creator, which is universal 
 harmony, and goodwill towards all men. The bulldog will 
 hold on till it is killed, rather than give up its purpose, 
 just as some men, through the pride of argument, will 
 maintain a wrong cause. But unless we clearly see that 
 justice or kindness is what is expected of us, how can we 
 follow the argument : "If ye then being evil" (or imperfect) 
 " give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your 
 Heavenly Father give good things to them that ask Him ?" 
 According to my theory of consciousness, the argument 
 of man's understanding consisting in the mental represent- 
 ation of the connate ideas of causality, is furnished by the 
 neural representations arising out of cranio-neural structure, or 
 I may say, by the play of the afferent, sensorial, and efferent 
 
38 Rational, or Scientific ', Ideal of Morality 
 
 nerves, which is the medium of consciousness, and itself 
 forms an illustration of sufficient, efficient, and final causality. 
 
 Even in man's introspective reflective consciousness, he 
 still deals with this primitive association of ideas ; only 
 here our representations are of emotion, intellection, and 
 moral purpose; these together supplying the synthetic 
 principle of sufficient reason, in which the whole of 
 man's Being is brought to bear, instead of the single 
 activity of one faculty. It is this master principle of 
 sufficient reason that suggests another state of Being to 
 man, in which emotion, intellection, and the sense of finality, 
 or the moral sense, will be fulfilled ; and their presence in 
 our nature, justified by one great and moral event the 
 universal happiness, which this state of Being fails to 
 accomplish. From the positively self-cognized, the spirit 
 passes through the relatively recognized similarity with 
 diversity in others to the superlative Ideal of morality, 
 which, through the law of impersonation, together with 
 the logical substitution of similars, leads to the conception 
 and logical postulation of an Absolute, All-Wise, Ail- 
 Powerful, and All-Good Being, as the fons et origo of all 
 we know; and as our own instinctive purpose is always 
 for the preservation, or conservation of the integrity of 
 Being, so we equally and rationally attribute the same 
 motive to the Divine activity this being our only 
 rational conception of spiritual activity, can the Giver of 
 reason be Himself irrational ? What now, are the rational 
 data, which, being granted, will explain man's intuitive 
 belief in a future state of existence ? 
 
 As only from life does life proceed, so only to an intelli- 
 gent Being can the creation of man's intellect be attributed, 
 only to a loving Being his passionate affections, and only 
 to a benevolent Being his good work, or will, for the Good 
 for Being. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 39 
 
 Surely if we are led to ask for a sufficient cause of 
 whatever happens to us, we must needs seek, if it be 
 possible, to discover who or what can conceivably be the 
 sufficient cause of our own Being, and the final cause for 
 which it has been given the conceivable always meaning 
 the comprehended under the categories of thought, or the 
 necessary postulation of reason ; and seeing that reason is 
 emphatically Zweckmdssig, or teleological self-determination, 
 we must surely inquire what that end is, which we are 
 inspired to actualize. 
 
 Now natural Trieb (tendency) to act for self-conservation 
 cannot conceivably be contradicted by reflective, or self- 
 mirroring reason ; hence the principle of sufficient reason, 
 under which it is conducted, being synthetic of our whole 
 Being, it insists upon Egoity, Altruity, and Deity, or 
 Deontology being alike and synchronously taken into 
 account these three together constituting the psychological 
 spectrum of reflective consciousness. 
 
 It is because of this that the wisest and best men of all 
 times and places have devoted themselves to ascertaining in 
 what the End, or summum bonum, consists, these two things 
 being indivisible in the understanding of man. 
 
 The points of contact between science and religion are the 
 a priori principles of sufficient, efficient, and final causation, 
 whilst the a posteriori principle of sufficient reason, by sum- 
 marizing all these, gives satisfaction to the whole of Being. 
 Even primitive man is an exhibition of animism as opposed 
 to mere animalism : if he have any pain, it arouses his 
 sense of indignation as against an injustice, so that he sends 
 someone directly to poison his enemy, to whom he unhesi- 
 tatingly attributes the suffering he is enduring, regarding 
 spirit as the only rationally conceivable sufficient cause for 
 designed action, and the Good for Being as the required 
 motive of all rational, or noumenal activity. Morality being 
 
40 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 only predicable of rational Beings, refers to noumena, not 
 to phenomena. 
 
 The process of representation is after this wise : 
 (i) Comes feeling, or the sense of being emotionally 
 impressed ; (2) intelligence of the relativity of things, and 
 of Beings, to our own nature ; and (3) spontaneous 
 tendency in action, which all are mentally, or rationally, 
 represented under the principles of sufficient, efficient, and 
 final causality ; that is to say, for every feeling a sufficient 
 cause is postulated, which is intelligised by us through its rela- 
 tion to us as efficient cause, and which determines our action 
 according to the law of the conservation of the integrity of 
 Being as final cause. It is only from the reflective synthesis 
 of these principles of thought that a complete judgment, or 
 conclusion, concerning the mode of causality of anything, 
 can be made. Judgments are strictly subjective, referring to 
 our own attributes of power, wisdom and goodness. Nature 
 only represents uniformity to us because of the exhibition of 
 the three modes of causality in the Divine design. 
 
 Psychology is a mixed science of physiological and 
 spiritual consciousness. Certain material conditions in some 
 occult way arouse in us the spiritual impressions, which 
 we call emotion, intellection, and volition. It is from volition, 
 as it is known individually in us, that the idea of causality 
 has emanated. Our sense of effort in voluntary action is 
 psychical, not ontological matter often interfering with 
 spiritual determination. The first attempt at a rational 
 explanation of the phenomena of Nature must have been 
 of an anthropopsychic kind, as we can arbitrarily will an 
 effect without consulting reason; it was thus that the 
 Creation was supposed to have been effected. But although 
 the absolute existence of God explains our relative existence, 
 it does not follow from our physical existence that the 
 Supreme Being is psychically recognizable. Only by pure 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 41 
 
 ontological science can we demonstrate the existence of 
 Deity. The relation of instruments to an end, purpose, or 
 use, the disposition of parts in regard to a whole which has 
 its own end, although itself a factor in an infinite whole, 
 imply the active design of an omniscient, omnipotent agent. 
 "The gradual development of living instruments, as dis- 
 tinguished from any sudden, or ready-made apparition, 
 would not in any way affect the argument of design."* The 
 laws of mental representation, i.e., those of sufficient, efficient, 
 and final causation, are not of our regulation ; they are 
 the subjective presentations determining all our repre- 
 sentations, and regulations, or ordering of things. Thus 
 are our perception, apprehension, and comprehension of 
 things accounted for. In a mind, or understanding, 
 connected with a nervous system that is organically, or 
 functionally deranged, the order of thought may be 
 disturbed, whereas the general order of Nature is under 
 a Power, in Whom there is no shadow of change, and for 
 Whom, what we call, accident does not exist. 
 
 All our social, or political, organizations, philanthropical 
 institutions, etc., are outcomes of our causative, or will power, 
 for the Best for Being, however various may be our interpre- 
 tations of what really constitutes it. From this idea, or ideal 
 conception of the law of action, no one but the more or less 
 mad man is free. We even judge a dog to be mad when it 
 bites everyone promiscuously. The uniformity of physical 
 nature is both an intuition of reason, and a postulate of 
 science, without which no science could exist. " Behind 
 appearances," says Kant, "there must also lie at their root 
 the things in themselves." Here we are transported into a 
 mundus intelligibilis. As relations between physical elements 
 are the ground of physical order, so harmonious relations 
 between noumenal Beings are the ground of moral order; 
 but spite of the parallelism between nature and spirit, the 
 
 * ROMANES. 
 
42 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 riddle of the sphinx lies in the question, "How can mind 
 affect matter, or matter mind?" The physical cosmos 
 cannot be made to supply its own explanation the 
 explanation of everything lying in some higher law. 
 Hence order must be regarded as emanating from some 
 one integrating principle, and that one integrating principle 
 can only be rationally conceived as that of the Good 
 for self-conscious and 6W-conscious Beings, to whom the 
 mighty argument is addressed, whose heart is the temple 
 of the Unseen, but rationally-inferred Holy, Absolute 
 Being, the All-Sufficient or Intelligent Cause of our own and 
 all other existences ; so only from the moral sense, or the 
 categorical imperative of our own action (i.e., action for 
 the Best for Being), can the will, nature, and purpose of 
 the Causa Causarum be rationally intuited. But given the 
 psychical idiosyncrasy of each individual without the 
 presence of a complementarily developed mind, his or her 
 judgment is little to be trusted. 
 
 The truth, that two heads are better than one, is universally 
 acknowledged. Hence, what the French call Le besoin a* aimer, 
 la nostalgic du bonheur, the wild yearning for a true alter ego, 
 for a complementariness within analogy of Being, without 
 which we trudge along, feebly and sadly, each one in the 
 groove of his, or her, own idiosyncrasy. Sense perception is 
 the interpreter of sensory experience through nerve and 
 muscle. Apperception, or reflective reason, comprehends 
 through glad or sad emotion, intellection of relativity, and 
 through moral, or through immoral purpose, through sym- 
 pathy, or through antagonism of spiritual Ideals. Hence 
 the personal equation should always be made. 
 
 As a variety of sensuous impressions will yield the per- 
 ception of a single sensible object, or image, so emotional, 
 intellectual, and moral impressions together yield the one 
 concept of noumenal, or spiritual Being. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 43 
 
 " Sensible discrimination is the limit of experience for a 
 great portion of organic life on the earth."* Reflective 
 conception is super-sensible, or sense -transcending discrimi- 
 nation, although embracing the experiences resulting from 
 psychological condition^. The conscious self-direction of 
 our mental activity, together with induction and deduction, 
 is what distinguishes speculative, or rational existence. The 
 speculative knowledge of man is primarily from induction, 
 on the basis of the generalisation of the particular experi- 
 ence, and deduction, or conclusion, from a generalization 
 already made. Both are based on the principle of non- 
 contradiction ; but in introspective, or pure reasoning, we 
 argue consciously from spiritual effect to spiritual cause, and 
 from spiritual cause to spiritual effect; from self-consciousness 
 (the negation of which is the absurd) to related consciousness, 
 even including the Supreme Reason. 
 
 Again, to limit our judgment to mere sensuous inference, 
 is also to fall into the absurd, or illogical. For the study 
 of the phenomena of intelligence, we must pass from the 
 objective working of the nerve and brain to reflective, 
 introspective self-consciousness, and to the ever-intensifying 
 and widening sense of the moral law, which we can no 
 more help bringing to bear on our own experiences regarding 
 the Providence of our Creator, than upon ourselves and 
 the rest of mankind. Man's rational intuitions are derived 
 from his emotions, intellection of causality, and frail purpose 
 in action. His instincts are fundamental intuitions arising 
 out of the bodily senses : to wit, those of self-preservation, 
 sexual desire, and regard for offspring. This last, in the case 
 of man, is not of a passing nature, like that of the lower 
 animals for their young ; but endures, as a part of the moral 
 sense of responsibility to the Creator (to use the words of the 
 New Testament) " to render an account of his stewardship." 
 
 * CALDERWOOD. 
 
44 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Without much apparent individual sympathy in gregarious 
 animals, their social instinct is ever present and persistent. 
 Uniform association with the species leads to uneasiness 
 in separation ; but can this mass-feeling without intelligent 
 discrimination and special passion, be classed with man's 
 soul-enthralling love for individual persons, above all for 
 the eternal companionship of one alone, that every poet 
 of the race has delighted in describing ; but which it has 
 remained for a deeper metaphysical science to define as 
 the complementary, indissoluble attraction of correlated 
 spirits striving after fulness and perfection of Being through 
 eternal union with each other ? 
 
 Nothing helps more the sublime realization of the Divine 
 attributes of power, wisdom, and goodness, than the strength 
 and dignity and joy of life that comes of such marriages ; 
 as a colour is enhanced in splendour by the presence of its 
 complementary, so it is with human characters. 
 
 Certainly those human Beings, who live not to the spirit, 
 but only to sight and imagination, might almost induce 
 the belief that they, like the lower animals, stand and fall 
 with the things of sense, passing away with them, as the 
 flower fadeth and the grass withereth. But some have 
 always been found to bear witness to the things of the 
 spirit : to its love, its hope, its spiritual hunger and thirst 
 after righteousness, and its despair, when nothing but chaff, 
 in the double sense of the word, is offered for its satisfaction. 
 But the scientific theory of evolution, that "what is in the 
 type is still potential," and will find its fulfilment somewhere, 
 and some when, if not diesseits jenseits, makes of despair a 
 disease of the mind instead of a proof of its nobility. Who 
 shall explain the marvels of the most differentiated structures, 
 from the germ cell to their perfect elaboration ? Witness the 
 development of the oak from the acorn ! Only a Creator of 
 material, as well as a Designer of form, could throw any light 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 45 
 
 upon these subjects. Man's noumenal sensibility is pro- 
 vided for by speciality of structure. Physiological condi- 
 tions are not merely connected with physical wants, but 
 also with psychological requirements. Appetites are 
 organic impulses, whereas morality is an after process of 
 reflective reason. It is the regulation of appetite, and 
 passion, by reason that is the theme of morality. Individual 
 differentiation is quite explainable through physiologically 
 inherited habitual strains of emotion, intellection, and 
 practice, together with the immediate influence exercised 
 upon the habits of adolescence by its immediate social 
 surroundings. As structure and instinct are correlated, so 
 psychical experiences are the premisses of psychological con- 
 clusions ; still muscular development has no scientific worth 
 for explanation of rational causality. It is impossible to 
 maintain identity of life from the lower forms of organism 
 up to the reflective exercise of reason concerned with 
 observational science, and with strivings towards an ethical 
 Ideal. Again, it is impossible to explain man's trans- 
 cendental reasoning within the area of the natural sciences. 
 It is through ontological discrimination of cause and effect 
 that we classify existences and interpret occurrences logi- 
 cally. It is through our capacity of realizing types, and 
 of forming Ideals of human life, that all progress in 
 civilization is effected. Each one's Ideals are the offspring of 
 his own particular spiritual evolution in feeling ; intelligence, 
 and will ; what wonder, then, at their various conceptions ! 
 Through reflection upon this "psychological spectrum," 
 we learn the exercise of transcendental reason, and endeavour 
 to govern ourselves according to it, subduing our animality 
 into an instrument of spirituality, realizing ideally the 
 immediate presence of the Creator throughout all the fields 
 of creation. On the testimony of consciousness, reflective 
 men of all times have recognized in themselves a duality 
 
46 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 of the physical and spiritual, and have, therefore, believed 
 in the separate existence of the soul ; and as no ideas are 
 conceivably rational, that are the contradiction of our own 
 experience, self-evidence being the ultimate to which we 
 can attain, materialism has always stood condemned by the 
 facts of conscience, or reflective self-consciousness. 
 
 The sensations in our consciousness consequent on the 
 sensory impression cause an image, but not a conception of 
 the thing. Our conception of a thing is made up by our- 
 selves through the automatic combination in a single repre- 
 sentation of all the effects produced on us by a thing, or 
 object, or by the description of an object; and as the 
 senses of each individual vary in perfection, so also do the 
 spiritual constitutive attributes of our Being. 
 
 Therein lies what may be called the fatality of idio- 
 syncrasy. Where fulness, or perfection of Being is wanting, 
 the conceptions of such Beings must partake of the one-sided 
 development of their nature. Hence the personal equation 
 has to be made on each individual case for a rigidly logical 
 judgment to be arrived at. " Eine Meinung ist keine 
 Meinung" is an old German saying, which shows the 
 necessity for a helpmeet for each individual man or woman, 
 the one serving in both cases as the complement or evolu- 
 tionary supplement of the other ; the qualities most 
 developed in the one being those least developed in the 
 other, they unite to form a more or less perfect whole of 
 Being, in which through the objectively-attained equilibrium 
 of subjective attributes, the Divine nature can be faintly 
 reflected as the wayside pool reflects the great disc of the 
 sun. The lower animal acts upon instinctive impulse, or 
 through immediate fear of pain, and desire of pleasure ; it 
 is always swayed from without by the images of things 
 external. But reflective man is a law unto himself, or 
 rather, through reflective reasoning, he is able to interpret 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 47 
 
 the Divine laws that order both the macrocosm, or external 
 cosmos, and the microcosm of his own Being, and with 
 knowledge of these laws comes the sense of duty to observe 
 and act according to them. Thus we pray that our hearts 
 may be inclined to keep the laws of God, or be true to the 
 Divine intention. The fundamental ideas of reason arising 
 out of our feeling, intelligence, and will, are the forms of our 
 knowledge, which we categorize in reflection as those of 
 sufficient, efficient, and final causality. The first answers to 
 the idea of Being as impressed, or affected, by a sufficient 
 cause, or another intelligent Being; the second answers to 
 the idea of intelligence through the relativity of one Being to 
 another ; and the third to the idea of the normal tendency, 
 or practical conatus, and reflective purpose of Being in rational 
 self-determination. Reflective reason resumes these categories 
 under the three queries : (i) To what class does the sufficient 
 cause of my being affected belong ? (2) How is it related to 
 myself and other Beings ? (3) Does it tend to Good or Bad 
 for Being, as such ? Shakspeare speaks of a man finding 
 " sermons in stones, and good in everything." This is what 
 a good man and true may feel. And as the geologist reads 
 the records of the stones to ascertain the order of our 
 planet's history, so does the sage consult the monuments of 
 human skill, and the written histories of our world, for 
 comprehension of the Divine Providence towards man, the 
 watchword of which seems to be spiritual evolution through 
 struggle with physical, and physiological difficulties, and 
 above all, through the struggles of souls with one another, 
 each one representing a different stage, or different phase of 
 spiritual evolution. "The term idea" says Locke, "stands 
 for whatever is the object of the understanding when a man 
 thinks" We cannot be properly said to think of anything 
 that is unintelligible by us through the ideas of reason, which 
 consist of the three distinct representations of causality : 
 
48 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 sufficient, efficient, and final. Thus when we think, the 
 mind is employed in a triform manner : (i) in feeling, 
 (2) in intelligence of relativity, and (3) in conation, or self- 
 determination in action. These are all represented in the 
 general conception of an object. Liebnitz says, " Material 
 monads are moved by efficient causes, and spiritual monads 
 by the principle of final cause." This last is the moral 
 law of action for the Good, or Best, of which Plato treats so 
 much that Best meaning that which is always the Best 
 for real or spiritual Being, not merely for the physical 
 organism subjected to it. This is the mild yoke of reason 
 that is imposed upon us by our Creator, which constitutes 
 us sons of God instead of sons of Mammon, or of the order 
 of the brutes that perish, and the grass that withers. To be 
 a son of man is not identical with being the offspring of a 
 beast. We are the sons of God by the token of our being 
 made capable of co-operating with Him in the ordering of 
 the spiritual and physical universe, of which the moral law 
 is the pivot, at whatever parallax we may view it. To have 
 no idea of a thing is not to be able to conceive it under any 
 of, or rather, under all, the laws of thought. No reflective 
 rational inference concerning anything is possible under 
 these circumstances. 
 
 The ethical sense of our responsibility to be true to the 
 reflective reason, which characterizes humanity, is itself a 
 fact of experience, that, as Kant asserted, tells its own tale, 
 or bears witness in its character of the categorical imperative 
 of duty, and to our instinctive belief in the existence, and 
 government of a Father of Spirits. Sensible discrimination 
 and rational discrimination are not the same thing. The 
 first is involuntary, the second is of our own endeavour or 
 purpose. As the eye cannot see itself except as reflected, so 
 the spirit cannot realize itself except in reflective conscious- 
 ness. We can reflect both on the neurally conditioned 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 49 
 
 impressions we receive and upon the processes of thought 
 induced by them. And as it is our cerebrally-associated 
 principles of causality which determine our mental represen- 
 tations of the microcosm, and the macrocosm, it is of the 
 utmost importance that education should be directed to the 
 elaboration of them. It is a maxim of science that existence 
 is known by its manifestations, as cause is manifested by its 
 effects, as faculty is known through function. Motion is the 
 law of the physical world ; emotion, or the active sense of 
 affection of our real Being is that of the spiritual world : 
 " Gefuhl ist Alles," said Goethe. Reason can but represent, 
 and re-represent in reflection what we feel, what the relation 
 is, in which the object of feeling stands to us ; and what we 
 ought to do in consideration of our feeling, and of the object 
 or efficient cause of it. We cannot make ourselves feel. 
 Both sensation and emotion are spontaneous phenomena of 
 our nature; but we can seek information concerning the 
 object of our feeling, and act according to feeling and 
 knowledge combined. " Physiological conditions," says Lotze, 
 " are the exciting occasions of the manifestations of the soul." 
 All man's knowledge is rationalized knowledge. To man 
 belongs free-will, i.e. t self-determination, through the voluntary 
 exercise, or through the voluntary suspension of the exercise 
 of the ratiocinative faculty. The reflective, practical, or 
 moral sense points to the sin of not exercising this most 
 important faculty of self-determination, according to the 
 laws, or associated ideas of causality, which, in reflection, 
 together constitute the principle of sufficient reason. This is 
 the order of the human understanding of both the spiritual 
 and physical universe. In self-determination, according to 
 the principle of sufficient reason, lies the categorical im- 
 perative of duty. Man is a cause-seeking animal (Ursach- 
 suchendes Thier) ; therefore he must be true to the triform 
 emotional, intellectual, and moral nature, which he has been 
 
 E 
 
50 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Divinely designed to summarize in reflection, so that the 
 inferences of his reason may be drawn from the whole of 
 Being. As spontaneous Ideation is through the attributes of 
 Being, i.e., feeling, intelligence, and will, so reflective abstract 
 Ideal conceptions are alike formed under these categories, 
 synthetically realized, and seen to be associated harmoniously 
 in the unity of Being, 
 
 Rational concepts are necessary, universal, and eternal. 
 Nor time, nor place, nor absence affects our abstract con- 
 ception of pure Being. The mere objective combinations 
 of sensuous impressions, which we call images, are like 
 dissolving views here at one minute, gone at another. On 
 them all is written "passing away," whereas of ontological 
 verities it may be said, as Jesus said : " Heaven and earth 
 may pass away, but My word shall not pass away." No, 
 not one tittle of the word (Logos), or expression of reason, shall 
 pass away. It is only to spiritual Beings that the Heavens 
 are telling the glory of God, and to whom the will of God 
 is revealed. The real temple of the Holy Spirit is within 
 the minds of His rational offspring. In spirit and in 
 truth must the All-Father be worshipped. None the less 
 has man been made an end in, and unto himself, as well 
 as a priest unto his Sovereign Creator. Who, then, can 
 rationally affirm that duty or allegiance to God, commands 
 self-disregard, self -suppression, or self- mutilation ? What 
 can be done by, or for a person in whom desire faileth 
 when not only the song of the grasshopper is a burden, 
 but life itself is anguish ? When we enjoy nothing, hope 
 for nothing, and aspire to nothing, how can we be grateful 
 to God, or delight in His law ? As there must be an 
 efficient cause for every special activity, so there must be 
 a sufficient reason for it in the very nature of our Being. 
 
 It is by being true to our own Being, that we are true 
 to the Creator and Designer of it. Truth to self-respect, to 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 5 1 
 
 sympathetic social regard, and to reverent adoration of our 
 Creator makes us true to the * end,' or proposed purpose 
 of our creation, which is for the complete actualization and 
 reflective realization of our emotional, intellectual, and 
 moral nature. Nothing short of this, can rationally be 
 supposed to fulfil the expectation of a rational Being ; and 
 it is because of its very imperfect fulfilment here, that we 
 look to the benevolence of God for a nobler and happier 
 hereafter ; also as reflective Beings, we know that the 
 objective, as well as the subjective conditions of happiness 
 have to be fulfilled, and it is to the principle of evolution that 
 we look for a new earth and a new heaven, wherein dwelleth 
 righteousness, and where the justice of God shall be fulfilled. 
 
 It is to the rationally -apprehended creative order of the 
 universe, that we owe the different words progress, salvation, 
 and redemption from suffering. Spiritual evolution com- 
 prehends all these, and indicates the goal of perfection. 
 
 Hence the horror felt at suicide ; for the various relations 
 felt between Beings and Beings, and Beings and things, 
 are all efficient causes in carrying out the evolutive principle 
 of final cause, />., the Best for Being. Qui vent la fin, vent 
 les moyens. Reflective reason furnishes us with the sense 
 of relativity to an Ideal, or superlative, standard of Being, 
 which is only essentially realized in an Absolute, or Perfect, 
 Being. But for finite or limited Being, a compensation 
 has been provided by the Divine wisdom, in the conjugal 
 union of correlated spirits, which is an efficient help to good- 
 ness and happiness, and the absence of which results in the 
 semi -consciousness of a one-sidedly developed creature; 
 and as a feeling, remaining latent, brings with it the 
 sense of an unsatisfied want, we feel all the dismalness of 
 loneliness. " It is a bitter thing to witness happiness first 
 in the eyes of others," says Shakspeare ; and the reason 
 of this is, that it awakens us to dissatisfaction with our 
 
52 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 own low estate of isolation. Sense feeling is spontaneous 
 and direct ; emotion is also reflective and composite ; for 
 feeling, intelligence of cause, and desire, or aversion, all go 
 to the result of emotion, intellection, and volition, which 
 are the three aspects of pure, or spiritual Being. It is 
 from the emotional element of speech that music is evolved. 
 Song is but the emphasised expression of the natural 
 language of the emotions, for true art, like science, is 
 reflective science, and the moral sense has its rise in the 
 religious sense of dependence and accountability. Harmony 
 supposes tones that are separably distinguished as agree- 
 able to the ear, but that in combination produce a more 
 beautiful sound, or one that affects us more satisfactorily. 
 Each artist receives his, or her, particular gift from the hand 
 of the Invisible Father ; hence we say, Poeta nascitur, 
 non fit. 
 
 It is because external harmony images spiritual, or internal 
 harmony, that it stirs in us the desire, or yearning, for such 
 true abiding harmony. Duality of Being is the requirement 
 of the finite creature. It takes man and woman to realize 
 the idea of humanity, which is only completely represented 
 by a man and woman complementarity developed. Hence 
 the sense of forlornness that attaches to loneliness. As it 
 takes all the colours of the rainbow to present the pure 
 white ray, which is so cheering and stimulating to all the 
 nerves of sight, so only complementary Beings can even 
 faintly represent the perfect, or Ideal Being. 
 
 The aesthetic sense concerns itself chiefly with the satis- 
 faction of the sensitive imagination, although it supposes 
 also some spiritual -mindedness. Mere aesthetic is the 
 cultured worldling's pleasure palace, in which he disports 
 himself without regard for spiritual sympathy, the moral 
 sense, or the religious sentiment; although the sense of 
 honour may be a sort of check to him. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 53 
 
 His maxim is "art for art's sake," not for the sake of 
 moralizing mankind : for making him nobler, higher, and 
 happier (in other words for humanizing man), but for the 
 satisfaction of the physical senses, and the gratification of 
 the sensuous imagination. The ruck of artists is perennially 
 thus constituted. Orfly the few, or the 6lite, among artists 
 throughout all time, have been great thinkers or moralists, 
 although they may have been super stitiously religious. 
 Artists, for the most part, like millionaires, forget the 
 end in the means ; so, spite of a keen remembrance of all 
 the beauties of colour, or of an exquisite sense of the shades 
 of sound, or of a vivid imagination, or of capacities of 
 concentration and devotion to work, worthy of the noblest 
 cause, they yet remain at the best, but gentle, instead of 
 rude, savages ; this is what is meant by la vie de Boheme the 
 gipsy life of artists. 
 
 Thackeray makes one of his characters say of Barnes 
 Newcombe, that although a man of fashion in England, 
 he had no more morals than a Choctaw Indian. This may 
 also be said of many artists ; although, on the other hand, 
 we have found amongst them some great thinkers, such as 
 Leonardo da Vinci, who was at once the great artist and 
 the distinguished natural philosopher ; Michael Angelo, who 
 was both a supreme artist and the supporter of Savonarola, 
 in the vanguard of the Reformation ; and Goethe, the great 
 worldly artist in poetry, also made discoveries in natural 
 science. But the great fact remains, that, quand tout est dit y 
 an honest, or virtuous, man is the noblest work of God. 
 
 All sensitive organism feels contact, and acts in response 
 to it. Man not only does this, but reflectively interprets 
 these experiences according to the Divinely ordered and 
 designed laws of mental representations. An Adapter and 
 Designer himself, he recognizes and assumes design, through 
 the substitution of similars. Thus for a similar effect he 
 
54 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 postulates a similar cause. Although man's sensory deter- 
 minations are involuntary, yet reason quickly shows itself. 
 Thus the burnt child dreads the fire, whilst the singed 
 moth succumbs to its attraction, as does the bird to the gaze 
 of the snake; and one daily sees the truth of the saying, 
 "Experience teaches fools, and reason wise men." Man, by 
 accumulating evidence through generalizations, is enabled to 
 spare himself many a painful experience by profiting from 
 the experience of others. 
 
 " What is true of a thing is true of its like " is a readily- 
 applicable axiom of reason : and, moreover, man shows his 
 reason in his faculty of language, whereby he fixes, or 
 crystallizes, his knowledge, by giving things names ; and by 
 written language he can transmit his experiences to later 
 times. The use man makes of the organs of speech exhibits 
 the exercise of the high power of reason. The senses also 
 are employed by, and turned to the uses of the reason, which 
 they themselves bring into play at the meeting point of soul 
 and sense. In all scientific observation there is rational 
 interpretation of the various effects of sensory impressions 
 upon the nervous system. We are always dealing with 
 human experiences, like and unlike, past and present ; always 
 recognizing sensorial, or external impressions, as subsidiary 
 to inward experience, or self-consciousness. 
 
 It is through comparison of sensible impressions that we 
 gain our knowledge of external things, whilst in internal 
 intellection we interpret them as being symbolical of ideas 
 of reason through our spiritual understanding or self-evidence. 
 In attending to our sensations our intelligence wakens up 
 to activity. We use our special sensations as a mechanic 
 uses his tools. Again, we use the laws of causality to inter- 
 pret our successive experiences. Even the unreflecting do 
 this, although attributing effects most frequently to wrong 
 causes, through ignoring the principle of sufficient or 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 55 
 
 synthetic reasoning, which is from our whole Being reflectively 
 considered. Scientific abstraction is from this alone. 
 
 Any readers who have followed me thus far, will under- 
 stand that although religion is a primeval instinct of the 
 human race, the reflective reasoning from self-consciousness, 
 which is the source of the moral sense comprehensive of 
 self-love, social, and Divine, is an a posteriori growth, and as 
 such is capable of finer and finer elaboration as the evolution 
 (svolgimento) of the individual, and the race, advances. 
 Great scientific and philosophic ideas are accompanied by 
 aesthetic and moral sentiments, which give them their practical 
 worth ; yet how few even in civilized countries, not to mention 
 the wide domain of the half- civilized and altogether bar- 
 barous, exhibit the cultivation of introspective, or reflective 
 reason, which is man's characteristic attribute, and through 
 which experiences of past blessedness, and also remembrances 
 of past sufferings, through errors of our own, and that of 
 others, can be garnered in, and serve as grounds of hope, and 
 as danger-signals of avoidance. We need not wonder at the 
 slow evolution of morality. Now that old creeds are rejected, 
 whilst the perfect work of reason is not yet accomplished, 
 we cannot be astonished at the present widespread un- 
 certainty as to the logical standard of faith and action, or 
 that pessimism flourishes on this dark borderland of thought, 
 which, although not without its uses to the world on its 
 present plane of evolution, forcing men as it does to face the 
 unsatisfactoriness of the present, after a past of childish 
 acceptance of punishment for what it could not understand, 
 has developed self-respect, sympathetic social regard, and 
 Divine reverential love or adoration, all of which must hold 
 full sway in the human breast before right reason can take 
 her stand of inference from human nature, and hold up a 
 truly moral standard that shall command universal acceptance, 
 and inspire faith and hope in the Goodness of God. 
 
56 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Then will what St. Paul calls "the fruits of the Spirit," 
 faith, love, and hope, appear in unassailable forms, for of the 
 Word of God, which is reason, not one tittle shall pass away ; 
 even though the fires of the sun be burnt out, and other stars 
 having played their part in the evolution of spirit have 
 passed in cinders out of sight. 
 
 " Nothing," says Shakspeare, " is good, but thinking makes 
 it so," thinking implying the recognition of truth, harmony, 
 or loveliness, and goodness (" Le vrai, le beau, et le bien," of 
 Victor Cousin), in which the high Ideal standard of perfec- 
 tion of Being consists. 
 
 Without a metaphysical standard of judgment, science 
 itself, when the receiving intellect is stuffed with foregone 
 conclusions, can only be said to be at the stage of feeling its 
 way to the general laws of subjective and objective truth. 
 To the vulgar, immorality means conduct that does not 
 conform to the conventional standard, current at any given 
 time, in any given place. For that is the moral high-water 
 mark of the majority, to whatever rank they may belong. 
 But as the general evolution proceeds, man outgrows the 
 superstitious Ideals of his infancy, as the snake casts its 
 skin. Although the Ideals of pure reason are latent in the 
 constitution of every human Being, before they have become 
 reflectively patent, people have been led to do as mischievous, 
 nay, even as murderous, things, through their false religions, 
 and distorted moral Ideals, as by their straightforward selfish- 
 ness, malice, envy, and ambition in other words by their 
 utter disregard of the Ideal of morality. Those who sneer 
 at Idealism from beneath have often opportunities of doing 
 so, seeing the played-out Ideals of an earlier day still 
 rampant amongst the uncultured Philistines.* When the 
 Ideals of the imagination, rather than of pure reason, are 
 seen to be at war with the simplicity of nature, the time 
 
 * BERNARD SHAW Quintessence of Ibsenism. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 5 7 
 
 is come for them to make way for better, nobler, and 
 
 truer ones. 
 
 " Ring out the false, ring in the true," 
 
 says Tennyson, in his New Year's Ode. The person who 
 adopts the accepted respectability because he dares not do 
 otherwise, is not the rational Ideal of a man after God's own 
 heart (i.e., a really moral, or good man), although he may be 
 the pet of his clique" a pillar of society," as it is at present 
 constituted, as Ibsen calls him. The reason of man eternally 
 proclaims the protestant rights of private judgment against 
 all national customs, and conventional habits, or the political 
 or religious institutions of the day and hour. From the 
 moment a man loses his faith in the current social Ideal, he 
 is no longer bound by virtue to act up to it, although he may 
 have to fall a tragic sacrifice to the violation of Ideals, still 
 held by others to be valid, and still held in honour where he 
 lives, or by the family to which he belongs. Duty is to our 
 Creator : neither to a Stuart, nor a Bourbon, nor a Pope, nor 
 a Jesuit chief ; and no Ideal that is a contradiction of man's 
 moral conscience, and rational free-will, ought to be tolerated, 
 or would be tolerated, in an Ideal society. 
 
 But it is only as man advances in reflective, or pure reason 
 ("Die reine Vernunft" of Kant), that he comprehends that the 
 finite too often invests the Infinite with phenomenal attributes^ 
 forgetting that only in spirit and in truth, can the Father of 
 Spirits be truly apprehended. But although conditioned, 
 alas ! so heavily by " this too solid flesh," the human Being 
 is not made like the ephemeral insect of a day, to flutter 
 here for an hour and then pass away for ever ; but he is 
 the outcome of the essential attributes of the Supreme 
 Being, and thus is he gifted with the power of Ideal con- 
 ception of the Absolute Being, in whom we live, and 
 move, and have our Being. Human reason being necessarily 
 of the same kind as the Divine reason from which it 
 
58 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 proceeds, our responsibility lies in our endeavour to be 
 true to it, and to help its evolution within us as far as it 
 is in our power so to do, by scientific and metaphysical 
 activity. "4 think the thoughts of God," said the great 
 astronomer, Kepler, when he felt that he had attained to 
 some comprehension of the order of the starry heavens. 
 Man's studies should alternate the formation of concrete 
 and contrasted notions with the unifying of these in the 
 philosophic wholeness of reflective self-conscious Being. 
 Hence the all-embracing time-honoured doctrine of the 
 one in the many, and the many in the one Being. 
 
 But in his religious exercises, man should suspend all 
 concrete imaginative material conceptions in adoration of 
 pure, absolute, or perfect spiritual Being. It is in living, 
 that we learn the laws of Being, as it is in seeing, that we 
 learn the laws of light. " No man," says Hartley, " knows 
 the real pleasure belonging to self-approbation, who has 
 not cultivated the feelings out of which the pleasures of the 
 moral sense have grown'' The moral sense is, in fact, the 
 offspring of introspective reflection on spontaneous, or 
 direct feeling, intelligence and will, from whence the 
 association of the Ideas of causality proceeds. The 
 deliberate self-determination, consequent on such reflection, 
 is altogether another thing from the mere animal impulse 
 of desire, which, in its higher human form, may count as 
 one factor in self-determination, but not as the only one 
 for it is reflection that is the throne of reason, or its crown. 
 It is in reflection that we react consciously on our spon- 
 taneous movements, endeavouring to conform them more 
 and more to the ever-clearer waxing standard of Ideal 
 Being, that arises in our mind through the tutoring of 
 experience. 
 
 Religion must appeal to sentiments already existing, as also 
 to the reason, which is an element in all reflective emotion. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 59 
 
 It was only when the distinctly moral feeling began to 
 develop itself in the mind that the moral sense came to be 
 regarded as an integral part of the Divine law. True 
 judgment can only exist under exhaustively exercised reason, 
 as obedience to this is what is inculcated by our sense of 
 duty, or responsibility to our Creator. The ordinary idea of 
 practical reason is that of a thing to be used like a cat's paw 
 to take the chestnuts out of the fire to save oneself from pain, 
 at the expense of others. But the starting-point of reason is 
 in the union of all the attributes of Being, i.e., feeling, intelli- 
 gence of relativity, and the Ideal tendency in action, which 
 is for the Best for Being, as such, even for that of our enemy. 
 
 Only through fidelity to our spiritual, or real, personality 
 can we logically arrive at faith, love, and hope in Being, as 
 such, and thus emphatically in the Ideal Prototypal Being. 
 Such faith is thus seen to be the highest exercise of the 
 rational faculty, instead of being, as it is the fashion of the 
 day to state, the contradiction of that faculty. The reflective, 
 practical, or moral sense points to the sin of not exercising 
 the important faculty of self-determination according to the 
 laws of causality, which, reflectively combined in the principle 
 of sufficient reason, constitute the order of the human under- 
 standing of both the spiritual and physical universe. In 
 self-determination, according to the principle of sufficient 
 reason so understood, lies the categorical imperative of duty. 
 The sense of self-approbation, and of the approbation of one's 
 kind, together with the trust that we have the approbation 
 of God, constitute the pleasures of conscience, or the moral 
 sense, which by the same token has also its pains in remorse, 
 when one knows one has stifled its voice in fear of one's 
 kind, or in disappointment of sympathy, or under unmerited 
 reprobation, and consequent painful self-distrust, or under 
 the sense of being forsaken of God these tending to 
 make the mens conscia recti so difficult, as to seem to the 
 
60 Rational, or Scientific^ Ideal of Morality 
 
 humble -minded impossible of attainment. The reflective 
 sense, out of which arises our conviction of the existence of 
 God, and our sense of duty to Him, so far from extermi- 
 nating spontaneous feeling, intelligence, and will (the three 
 associated presentations of Being in us), enhances them by 
 making us realize them ideally, as it does all natural and 
 artistic, or imaginative enjoyment, through the sense of 
 security and protection it affords, relieving us from the 
 terrible anxiety of " being in wandering mazes lost." Again, 
 if our fellow-creatures despitefully use us, what greater 
 support can we have than the thought, "If God be for 
 us, who can be against us?" The more we practise 
 benevolence, the more capable we are of enjoying its 
 pleasures, and the more natural to us it becomes to trust 
 in the goodness of God ; and the more we exercise the 
 Divinely-bestowed faculty of love for God and Man, the 
 more powerful and joy-giving becomes that faculty, just as it 
 is with "true love," i.e., the love of our spiritual complement, 
 or counterpart our alter ego, our better self, our real 
 guardian angel prepared for us from the beginning. This 
 love, however, is as yet but little understood, for it has 
 hitherto been confounded with physical appetite, which is 
 soon sated, and "hate sits close by sated lust." Such joys 
 have no place in the spiritual world, where we naturally 
 expect' the continuance of the spiritual satisfaction, which 
 only true love, together with Divine adoration, can give. 
 The Australian savage may dance to the tune of, " Let us 
 eat, eat, eat," and the Mahommedan may have his palace 
 full of houris ; but such pleasures cannot satisfy what the 
 Brahmins term the "twice-born," or those called by Christ 
 the " born again unto the Spirit." To them belong untiring, 
 ever- widening, sublime rapture, as the infinite power, wisdom, 
 and goodness of God are progressively revealed to them in 
 passing from one stage of existence to another ; and such 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 61 
 
 delights far outsoar all that mere animality can conceive 
 with its low tastes, however they may be enhanced by the 
 cultivation of the merely sensuous pleasures of the imagina- 
 tion. To the thoughtful alone are revealed "the uses of 
 adversity," for they know that, "as gold is tried in the 
 furnace, so the heart must be purified in the living fire of 
 suffering." 
 
 Probably, this planet is not destined ever to exhibit 
 the full consummation either of human virtue, or of 
 human happiness; but the promise of both is what 
 constitutes "the desire of our desires," to use the 
 exhaustive Hindoo expression of man's yearning here 
 sa nostalgic du vrai t du beau, et du bien in a word, 
 sa nostalgie de r I deal. As to the ascetic profession of 
 not taking one's own happiness into account, the words of 
 the Jewish scripture: "I will have obedience and not 
 sacrifice," are quite opposite to it. Buddha also protested 
 against asceticism, whatever his so-called followers may do. 
 But whilst Europeans take care to provide themselves with 
 food, house, and raiment, and amusements of all sorts, 
 we see that they are not in earnest, so that to argue with 
 them upon the subject is simply ridiculous. 
 
 The conduct of the modern ascetic rarely exhibits dis- 
 obedience to the first great natural law of self-preservation, 
 and the desire of Well-Being for himself, which shows his 
 doctrine to be a self-contradiction. But if the equally 
 fundamental conceptions of altruity and deontology, or 
 duty to God, be omitted, all the salt of the earth would 
 long ago have vanished from it, and it would only be 
 savoured by the real selfishness, which infringes the rights 
 of the neighbour, or deliberately sacrifices others to a 
 perverse self-desertion, and the unnatural delight in self- 
 sacrifice for its own sake, which, in the last resort, always 
 entails the sacrifice of those belonging to them ; whereas 
 
62 Rational, or Scientific ', Ideal of Morality 
 
 rational self-preservation in its reflective generalization, 
 becomes the key to our knowledge of the wants and 
 rational requirements of others. Hitherto, man has shown 
 but little sympathy for woman. In primitive times he 
 carried her off by force to his nuptial couch, and treated 
 her as a slave according to the right of the strongest, which 
 then so generally prevailed ; the only calling and specific 
 virtue of woman being held to be obedience to man, instead 
 of regarding her as equally worthy of education and culture 
 as himself, and as equally capable of progressive develop- 
 ment, and of holding with him a dignified place in the 
 creation. 
 
 But with man's own evolution, the educational evolution 
 of women is gradually being effected : the old state of 
 things is passing away, for the reign of equal rights and 
 equally faithful love. Now that men are ceasing to tolerate 
 slavery for their own sex, they are learning to be more 
 just to women also. The Divine purpose of self-revelation 
 is manifested only in, and through, our evolution in intelli- 
 gence, feeling, and power of reasoning therefrom. But as it is 
 said in the Jewish scriptures, God is only found by those by 
 whom He is sought ; neither do those who do not seek 
 understanding, find it ; nor do those who do not earnestly 
 desire the true and real Best for Being, for themselves, 
 attribute Goodness or Benevolence to God. The ancient 
 Greeks diligently inquired concerning the Summum bonum, 
 and in what it consists. The modern theory of evolution 
 shows that it lies in the realization of the Ideal standard 
 of Being, and only thus do we approach nearer and nearer 
 to the Father of spirits. For the external cosmos only 
 argues the existence of God through the light, that reason 
 sheds upon it, revealing what is invisible to the eye of 
 sense, to the spirit of man, namely, the wisdom and the 
 love of God. "Shall He, who shows the birds of passage 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 63 
 
 their way to safety," says the poet Whittier, "not befriend 
 man also?" 
 
 But even as the physical eye becomes incapable of sight 
 when deprived of light, so when the mind of man is deprived 
 of true knowledge, it can form no just ideas ; and so also, 
 when the voice of conscience is disregarded and despised, 
 it waxes fainter and more faint, until its actual or real 
 existence becomes doubtful to us. 
 
 Truth for man means conformity with the fundamental 
 principles of reason, through which only he is capable of 
 understanding it. Outside of this there are no means 
 of comprehension of the What ? How ? or Why ? of 
 anything. Yet even the little child steadily puts these 
 questions, and, unlike Pilate, waits persistently for answers 
 to them. 
 
 The principles of causality, sufficient, efficient, and final, 
 are drawn from the self- experience that are, as it were, 
 materialized in the structure of the brain, or cerebro-nervous 
 system : in the action, and, so to speak, aim of the afferent, 
 sensorial, and efferent nerve apparatus. For belief in 
 sufficient causation, we must have learnt to distinguish 
 between the mere conditions and the essential principles 
 of Being, as also between adequacy and inadequacy of 
 power. For efficient causation we must have observed the 
 interaction of persons and things upon ourselves, and upon 
 each other, through the various relations in which we stand 
 to each other; and for belief in final causation we must 
 be reflectively conscious of our instinctive, self -protective, 
 physical self-determination for the accomplishment of the 
 great aim of reason, which is the attainment of beatified 
 perfection of Being, through reflectively and progressively 
 realizing what is the Best for Being. 
 
 The science of " The End " or true morality is that, 
 whether we eat, or drink, or whatsoever we do, all should 
 
64 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 be done to the glory of God, which, of course, means 
 that we are to live to the Spirit, through which alone He 
 has enabled us to commune with Himself, and not merely 
 to the body, like the beasts that perish. This is the d 
 posteriori conclusion of reflective, introspective, synthetic 
 reasoning, which is not more generally worked out by 
 mankind than are the higher mathematics. But both are 
 none the less trustworthy; and reflection is not the antagonist 
 of common sense, but only the elaboration of it, and the 
 exhibitor of its various and infinite issues. The time-, but 
 not reason-honoured doctrine, that duty essentially consists 
 in the sacrifice of what we love best and desire most, is a 
 heritage of the barbarous days, which Tennyson recalls in 
 a poem, in which he represents the Druids telling a young 
 mother that her husband must offer up their child as being 
 his "nearest and dearest," whereupon the mother expostulates, 
 saying, "'Tis I that am his nearest, I that am his dearest." 
 Robert Browning makes Caliban, the earth-man, promise 
 his god Setebos to refrain from everything he likes best in 
 the way of eating, to conciliate his favour. 
 
 All savages begin with being cannibals, by way of offering 
 human sacrifices to their gods ; and the idea that duty 
 only means self-sacrifice is a survival from the old devil- 
 worship in a more insidious form. "Go and enjoy your- 
 selves," says the kind parent to his or her children, "but 
 be sure to be always good," i.e., rational ; and thus does 
 reason picture the All-Father to be rational, i.e., true to the 
 feeling, intelligence, and will for the Good for Being, with 
 which He has endowed His spiritual offspring. It is a 
 barbarous habit of thought, which has so infected our 
 education that it has taken the place of a natural instinct, 
 leading us to suppose that if a thing is agreeable it must 
 be contrary to law. Surely the Draco of Greek history, 
 whose laws were so severe that they were written in blood, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 65 
 
 was not much worse than that. This is no unmoral theology. 
 Metaphysic treats of ontology, or pure Being ; psychology 
 of mixed animal and spiritual Being; physiology of organized 
 life ; physics of unorganized matter and motion, together 
 with space and time relations ; logic treats of truth to Being, 
 i.e., of self-evidence ; aesthetic treats of the laws of harmony, 
 of the harmony of physical conditions with Ideal relativity ; 
 and ethic is concerned with the theory of the end of action, 
 and with the obligation to act according to the sufficient 
 reason for action. The motives impelling to the proper end 
 of action (which is for the Good or Best for Being) are 
 self-love, social and Divine. To apprehend this ontological 
 order is to be rational, and to act according to the principle 
 of sufficient reason, which is to be moral. 
 
 Thought represents the consciousness of the ego, which can 
 never be lost sight of in any train of thought ; otherwise 
 real thinking, or thought proper, ceases to exist. 
 
 In no case did primitive man conceive of the soul or spirit 
 as ceasing to exist with the living body ; tHis is quite 
 natural. Absolute non-existence is an idea beyond the 
 reach of the human intellect. It is even entirely opposed 
 to human thought ; whereas with regard to the body we 
 cannot expect a machine to maintain an unchanging power 
 beyond the strength and endurance of its parts. In fact, 
 the constructor of a machine calculates the finiteness of 
 its duration in his design of it. 
 
 By the word transcendental is meant sense-transcending 
 perception, or apperception. We must not confound sensible 
 facts with the inferences of our reflective reason therefrom, 
 for logic, once and for all, is ontological. 
 
 Apperception is axiomatic, although based on self-intro- 
 spection, yet re-representing synthetically the abstract 
 principles of thought, apart from individual psychological 
 idiosyncrasies. Thought represents Being, the relativity of 
 
66 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Being, and the tendency of Being ; reflection taking them 
 together in the unity of Being, and the order of conscious- 
 ness. We derive the idea of order from the method, or rule, 
 of human reason in self-determination according to typical, 
 or Ideal Being : as Epictetus said, " apply the rule as though 
 it were a carpenter's rule." Professor Huxley once illus- 
 trated what the comparative exercise of reason would be 
 in the case of a death-watch (which is the name given by 
 superstition to a small insect that makes a repeated sound 
 like the ticking of a watch to attract the notice of its mate), 
 and of a human Being, at listening to the ticking of a clock^: 
 the consciousness of the insect, referring only to the senses 
 objectified by the imagination, would interpret the clock- 
 ticking as the answer of its mate; whilst the sense-trans- 
 cending consciousness of man recognizes in it an exercise 
 of human intelligence, by which man measures the move- 
 ments of the heavenly bodies, particularly those of the sun. 
 In man we have a Being who takes the universe into account 
 in its determinations. The only sufficient reason conceiv- 
 able by him for all that exists and happens is reference 
 to noumenal Being : to its requirements, its satisfaction, or 
 rejoicing in Being, and, moreover, as we have only recently 
 learnt, to its evolution, which is effected through the struggle 
 for the realization of finite spiritual Being, and for its 
 actualization in carrying out its purposes or designs. 
 
 A world thus interpreted by reason involves the idea of 
 the duty of submission to an Infinite Creator, by being 
 true to our natural emotion, intellection, and the moral 
 sense, or rational tendency to act for the Best for our own 
 Being, and that of those in whom we are interested, and 
 finally for the Good for noumenal Being, as such, in what- 
 ever form it may be found. This is what constitutes Tightness 
 in action, and righteousness in character. Therefore 
 reason takes its stand upon noumenal Being as the final 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 67 
 
 principle of the universe in which it is placed. Experience 
 is coherent in the organic unity of reason, leading us to 
 infer that a Supreme Rational Being is at the heart of 
 things and their infinite contingencies. According to our 
 virtual solution of this problem our surroundings and 
 our future are viewe'd with an ineradicable expectation 
 and hope, or with unutterable doubt and despair arising 
 from all seeming to be without meaning, or uninterpretable 
 by human reason. When we lose sight of the moral prin- 
 ciple of sufficient reason as the supreme principle of thought 
 and action, we have to substitute a physical and moral 
 chaos for the physical and moral cosmos, the dim percep- 
 tion of which is already awake in the first exercise of our 
 senses. Witness the child's imperative queries, "What?" 
 "How?" "Why?" and his persistent waiting for the ex- 
 pected answers to them, which testifies to his instinctive 
 desire to understand the universe in which he finds him- 
 self. Natural theology is a metaphysical or ontological 
 science. It is arrived at through introspective reflection 
 on our own human nature, not through the study of snails 
 and worms, cats or dogs, trees or mountains. When we 
 pronounce that a Gothic cathedral is necessarily the work 
 of a Being capable of emotion, science, and religion, we 
 are making a metaphysical, ontological, and logical infer- 
 ence, not a physical one. Even the science of mathematics 
 is itself only one of the great triumphs of the human 
 mind. What is presentable to the senses is representable 
 by the imagination. But an emotional, intellectual, and 
 moral Being is only representable under the category of 
 vera causes, i.e. y living, loving, benevolent, and reflectively 
 rational, or self-conscious Beings to live being to feel; 
 to love being to sympathize with; and to be benevolent 
 being the logical outcome of self-love and social. Reflective 
 sense-transcending reason takes its start from the contem- 
 
68 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 plation of Being in the abstract, and from the recognition 
 of the self-identical in power, wisdom, and goodness, accord- 
 ing to the law of impersonation, and that of the logical 
 "substitution of similars," whereby for similar effects, or 
 manifestations, we postulate a similar cause. 
 
 The ultimate problem of aesthetics rests upon a meta- 
 physical, or ontological, basis, and therefore belongs to logic. 
 The real relations existing between things, or objects ol 
 thought, are involved in the comprehension of the End. 
 Relativity is the mean to the End, or perfection of Being. 
 Hegel discovered the absolute correspondence of the laws 
 of thought and the laws of Nature, and held that the 
 objective world is the manifestation of the same principle, 
 of which we are conscious in ourselves. The metaphysician 
 has to do with the " Why ? '' or sufficient reason of things, 
 for matter gives no explanation. The method of the meta- 
 physician is that of logical inference through reflection upon 
 the phenomena of experience, or consciousness. 
 
 The intuitive system presented is always that of inductive 
 and deductive judgment. The former is from the particular 
 instance to the general law, and the latter is from the general 
 law to the particular instance ; but so limited is each indi- 
 viduality by his own idiosyncrasy, that it has not been 
 unfairly said of the different systems of philosophy that the 
 message given by each to the world is but the logical 
 development of his own view of life, just as the poet or 
 artist's work is the reflection of his own way of regarding 
 relations his given temperament being congruous with a 
 given aspect of truth or beauty. 
 
 Evolution is progressive towards ideal, although relative, 
 perfection of Being, with its accompanying universal harmony. 
 
 A metaphysic of spiritual Idealism is what I contend for. 
 The Kingdom of God is emphatically within us. It is a 
 spiritual agent who is the subject of the phenomena of 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 69 
 
 self-consciousness, whether mental, or physiological. Each 
 individual Ego faces the world from his own imaginative, 
 emotional, intellectual, and moral standpoint of evolution. 
 Hence unless the individual views the spiritual and physical 
 universe in union with a counterpartal, or complementary 
 spirit, he or she inhabits a region of half-truths, limited to 
 the groove of his or her own idiosyncrasy. 
 
 Locke wrote : " We cannot grasp the conception of unity 
 without experience of the pleasant satisfaction that is part of 
 its contents." 
 
 Spinoza says that the Knowledge of the Good is a 
 synonym of reason. It embraces the whole of Being. 
 
 "As questions of social morality are merely questions of 
 personal morality, so questions of social happiness are merely 
 questions of personal happiness."* As each individual has 
 prejudices of physical temperament, so also no doubt, 
 through inherited cerebral organism, each individual is 
 psychologically idiosyncratic, and nothing can counteract 
 this one-sidedness, and establish equilibrium of develop- 
 ment, but steadfast union with a complementary nature, 
 which is at once our joy and our perfectioning. " Mio bene," 
 says the Italian to his beloved ; and " Du bist die Freude 
 mir bestimmt," says the German. Thus only is the will 
 made holy, as embracing the whole of goodness. The 
 tendency to one extreme in the case of the one, being 
 counterbalanced by an opposite tendency in the case 
 of the other, "the golden mean"f of the will is thus 
 achieved between them. It is in the Unity of the Ideal that 
 man seeks for the perfect harmony, together with perfect love 
 of his kind. But our own external life here is too chequered, 
 and our sympathy with the sorrows of others is too deep for 
 even perfect love to be able to produce sustained happiness 
 here below. Hence our expectation of a better land beyond 
 * GARNET SMITH. t ARISTOTLE. 
 
70 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 the grave : what the Buddhists call " on the other bank " : 
 the "happy hunting grounds" of the Red Indian. Pascal's 
 beautiful words: "Thou wouldest not seek me, didst thou 
 not already know me," is equally true of the instinctive 
 need for beatitude as of the soul's search after God. The 
 realization of happiness, for however brief a season, is part of 
 the stock-in-trade of poets and novelists ; and the regenera- 
 tion of the soul through Divine and human love, as opposed 
 to sexual animal appetite, is the peculiar, and great 
 characteristic of human life. 
 
 But as God must be desired in spirit and in truth, instead 
 of being propitiated by burnt-offerings and sacrifices, so no 
 new-fangled doctrine of promiscuous altruism can take the 
 place, or fill the void of the sweetest life and radiant light 
 of true conjugal love, as the supreme source of joy to the 
 spirit of man. For true love is the divinely-designed 
 satisfaction of spirit from the perfect affinity of complemental 
 souls for each other. 
 
 " 'Tis then the soul's delight takes fire, 
 Face to face with its own desire." 
 
 Therefore, love cannot be bought at any price; not even 
 the willing and utter j^-sacrifice of one Being to another 
 can avail, if love be not the reciprocal and the essential 
 attraction of opposites towards each other. This does not 
 mean that a lover of truth can love a liar, or a wise woman a 
 fool, for that would be attraction of contradictions. The 
 instinctive demand for immortality is also a moral 
 postulate, or rational demand for a life in which goodness 
 and happiness shall coincide. If the will, or motive, in 
 action were not as essentially determined in man by his 
 Creator, as are his feelings and his intelligence, no one 
 could understand the motive, or aim, in action of another. 
 If undesirous of well-being, or happiness, man alone would 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 7 1 
 
 be aimless in the creation, for the lowest sentient creature 
 endeavours after the preservation of life and increase 
 of enjoyment these answering to rational man's reflective 
 endeavour to realize, or actualize, his Ideal of Being in 
 its full intensity. Ennui is the sense of intolerableness 
 that comes of unused faculties of heart, or mind, or will. 
 Ethic is the introspective reflective science of the mind's 
 relations to the universe, and to its Designer. To be true to 
 reason in practice is what we are each one of us responsible 
 to our own Master, Whose we are, and Whom we serve. 
 Logical method consists in the examining of our ideas, 
 and acts so that they may tally with the automatic neural 
 presentations, which thought represents under the categories 
 of causality, which are the attributes of Being. Happiness, 
 or Well-Being, cannot be obtained at the expense of con- 
 gruity with the human understanding, or of consistency with 
 the laws of thought. 
 
 Logic is subjective, and relative to ontology. The 
 immanent finality (Zweckmassigkeit) that Schopenhauer 
 supposed in Nature is its relativity to rational existence. 
 As health has been said to be the happiness of the body, 
 so sorrow is the negation of the spiritual health or satisfac- 
 tion, which arises out of the positive realization of Ideal 
 life ; hedonism takes no account of this. 
 
 Variety of sensation and occupation is a palliative that 
 tends to ward off too-concentrated reflective self-conscious- 
 ness. The dual life is also a chronic preventive of this ; 
 although, of course, not excluding general sociability, still 
 less can the presence of God ever be dispensed with. 
 
 Self-love, social, and Divine, are the combined data of 
 moral ratiocination. " All thought begins in feeling." * 
 
 Leopardi says : " Nature will not allow us to hate 
 ourselves," i.e., to suppress the natural endeavour after 
 
 * LOWELL. 
 
72 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 happiness. The discernment of moral truth, as of all other 
 truth, is progressive. Hence we need not wonder at men 
 differing on this as on other points. The express function 
 of logic is avoidance of self-contradiction. " That is truth," 
 said Schiller, "which reason admits as in harmony with 
 itself." Practice, to be logical, must be in accordance with 
 the theory of thought. What we want is a synthesis of 
 thought and life. As we love the rational in others, so 
 we love it in God. Hence we say God is our home, where 
 is no contention arising out of contradictions of reason. 
 What we desire, or yearn for, is that spirit and nature 
 should coincide together with philosophy and religion, 
 knowledge and conduct. This would be the case, and is so, 
 when the Ideal life is realized: as Shelley said, "The poet 
 has seen it in his passionate dreams," and Plotinus maintained 
 the sage realizes it through reason, and the lover in the 
 absolute satisfaction with life. 
 
 Matthew Arnold has transcribed into English Sophocles' 
 choral strophe : "Oh ! that my lot may lead me in the path of 
 holy innocence of word and deed, that path which august 
 laws ordain, laws that in the highest empyrean had their 
 birth, of which Heaven is the Father alone ; neither did the 
 race of mortal men beget them, nor shall oblivion ever 
 put them to sleep ; the power of God is mighty in them, 
 and groweth not old." 
 
 "I would that we were all of one mind, and that mind 
 good," says Shakspeare. 
 
 "The true philosopher," says Plato, "is content, if only 
 he may live his earthly life pure of injustice and un- 
 righteousness, and quit the present scene in peace and 
 kindliness with bright hopes'.' 
 
 "Must we not persevere in our essence, and is not our 
 essence that of character and self-respect ? " 
 
 As Pindar said : " It is our duty to harbour goodly hope " ; 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 73 
 
 and true self-love is the aspiring, yet timid yearning after 
 perfection. 
 
 " Even to the sunshine love lends lustre." 
 
 " Love is the reconciliation of opposites." 
 
 " A meeting of the eyes, and surprised by happiness, I 
 could sing on my homeward way." The Melancholy of 
 Stephen A Hard. 
 
 "Love is the only line which leadeth men to the fount 
 of wisdom," says an Elizabethan poet. 
 
 Love is the intelligence that maketh all things new, as we 
 see La Vita Nuova of Dante. 
 
 " More than the love of art and beauty is the love of man" 
 
 " Spirit would with spirit blend." 
 
 " What man wants is man," said Carlyle. 
 
 The intelligence that comprehends the greater good reacts 
 upon the desire to attain it, nor can it remain content with the 
 absence of it. "As the efforts of men to secure Well-Being, or 
 happiness, prove their desire for it, so their efforts to avoid, 
 or escape, discomfort, misery, and misfortune represent the 
 negative side of the same principle of action." And yet, 
 according to the doctrine of the day, "nous avons change 
 tout cela" the subject that perceives apprehends its relation to 
 the object, and comprehends motives through substitution 
 of similars is now to be altogether suppressed. 
 
 Each moral philosopher, of whatever time or place, 
 assumes the function of reviewing the moral code of his 
 day, of estimating its previsions in direct reference to its end, 
 and of pronouncing on its logical validity, or invalidity, its 
 title to observance, or its need of alteration or abrogation. 
 The most cherished sentiments and the most venerable 
 institutions have to be referred to the fundamental principles 
 of pure reason. "Recurrence has to be made to the end, 
 for which the rules exist" The less instructed part of the 
 community is indebted to the better instructed for its almost 
 
 
74 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 unconscious progress, which, alas ! is often only skin deep : 
 "Grattez le Russe et vous trouvez le Tartare." 
 
 The immediate successors of Socrates the cynics taught 
 that " not without, but within the soul are the issues of life." 
 Happiness, they maintained, is to be sought within, in virtue 
 of excellence of character; not in pleasure, for pleasure makes 
 man the slave of fortune, the servant of circumstance. " For 
 each thing that only can be good which belongs to it." 
 
 Socrates and Seneca both taught that no evil can happen 
 to a good man, for the man's proper inner good no outward 
 evil can touch. 
 
 The text of the Stoic morality is the supremacy of the 
 human spirit over circumstances, and the mastery of reason 
 over passion. " The rational self acknowledges no rule but 
 reason," that being the rule of our Creator; such, at least, 
 is the theology of the philosopher. 
 
 Mental science is seen to be metaphysical in that it treats 
 of noumenal Being, *>., sufficient causation ; of the relativity of 
 Being, z>., efficient causation ; and of the tendency of Being, 
 or final causation. These are the vercs causes underlying 
 psychology and even the physical cosmos. The fundamental 
 postulates of the human understanding, arising out of his 
 feeling, intelligence, and will, idealized in reflection, are the 
 legitimate preliminary assumptions with which every student 
 naturally starts his scientific inquiries, and are also the last 
 words of science and philosophy. " We can find nothing 
 in the world which we are not prepared to ask of it, by 
 virtue of our own internal development," says Fouillee. 
 
 The assumption of mental, or noumenal, Being, or spiritual 
 agent, is the equally legitimate and necessary metaphysical 
 standpoint of psychology. The physiology of the lower 
 animals does not furnish them with the abstract idea of 
 causality. Only in reflective self-consciousness is the idea 
 of a Being that is conscious necessarily implicated. No mere 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 75 
 
 cerebral psychology throws even a glimmer of light upon 
 the psychological, not to say epistemological, problems in- 
 volved in such states of consciousness. It is the cerebro- 
 nervous system in which the passive registering of impressions 
 from without goes on, which is liable to the disturbance 
 through disease, or accident, which we call mental insanity, 
 or madness. Epistemology treats of the modes, or forms, 
 of the activity of mind, which we call knowledge. All 
 reality, whether of matter or mind, is only knowable by me 
 through my consciousness. The intelligible to me, and all 
 like me, stands in strict relation to my, and their, intelligence. 
 To think is to intelligize causality ; to be thoughtless is not 
 to do so, or to interpret impressions carelessly or irrationally. 
 In reflective thinking we find the meaning of the universal 
 prevalence of the religious sentiment, which belongs to the 
 spiritual substance of humanity, but which is generally 
 distorted in its conceptions by superstitious imaginings. 
 
 Faith in God means belief in the inferences of reason 
 concerning our own creation, and that of the objective 
 universe. Hence the moral sense, or sense of duty, that 
 springs from the contemplation of, and meditation on, the 
 fundamental attributes of Being as they are idealized in 
 the Supreme, or Prototypal Being duty lying in fidelity to 
 the feeling, thinking, and willing, or self-determining, nature 
 by which our Creator has put us in communion with Him- 
 self, and established the Covenant of Reason between 
 Himself and His spiritual offspring. 
 
 It is in realizing and actualizing the Ideal self, or Ideal 
 of our nature, as thinking Beings, that we .live to the 
 honour and glory of God our Creator, and find our own 
 joy of life and continuous happiness. 
 
 Apperception, or reflective perception, is of the subject- 
 object, or Self. It does not necessarily involve sense- 
 impressions. In the religious practice of self-examination 
 
76 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 we do not necessarily represent our own body, dress, or 
 worldly possessions ; even le respect humain does not count 
 here, but only our own conscience, whether as obeyed, or as 
 suppressed. 
 
 It is only the pure Ego that we represent to ourselves 
 as we recall it at different times, and under different cir- 
 cumstances, as being under the influence of reason, or as 
 being in opposition to it, this being the seat of our responsi- 
 bility to our Creator, Who takes no note of our compliance 
 with accidental customs or etiquette, its conventionalities, 
 or the fashion of any particular time or place, but only of 
 our being true or untrue to the essential attributes of our 
 Being, i.e. y self- respect, social sympathy, and practical 
 obedience to the Divine will, as recognized in the estab- 
 lished order of the universe. We should, of course, when 
 it is called for, reason about our physical or physiological 
 impressions, about external objects or even about worldly 
 expediency, political economy, etc. ; but we can never be 
 said to reason about what does not, or could not, be 
 rationally supposed to exist, or concerning subjects of 
 which we can form no idea. "Certain categorical pre- 
 dicables must always be assumed, before we can possibly 
 think, or reason together." To scoff at the categories of 
 causality, which are the predicates of the human under- 
 standing, is to scoff at all possible thinking; for thought, 
 like the external cosmos, has its necessary conditions, and 
 its fundamental laws ; its conditions lying in our cerebro- 
 nervous system, and its laws being discoverable in the 
 attributes of feeling, intelligence, and will, including the 
 supreme act of reflective introspection; faith in the rational 
 inferences or conclusions drawn therefrom, being the ground 
 of the moral sense, or principle of sufficient reason for all 
 self-determination. It is not from mere animal nature, 
 "red in tooth and claw," that we derive the Ideal of 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 77 
 
 goodness, which, by the law of Impersonation, we rationally 
 attribute to our Maker, but above all, it is from the principle 
 of finality, or final cause (the true Good for Being), that we 
 find rest and hope in our Creator. Out of it proceeds the 
 vital elaboration and evolution of the spiritual universe, 
 the will comprising the tendency of the whole Being. 
 "The lie in the soul" that pretends satisfaction with the 
 actual imperfection of things, as opposed to the Ideal per- 
 fection of Being, thought, and life, which is the characteristic 
 yearning of humanity, is the greatest stumbling-block in 
 the path of evolution. Social * make-believe,' together with 
 the intimate life-defiance of the creature towards its Creator, 
 must all finally pass away and make room for true love, 
 universal benevolence, and the unwavering trust in God, 
 and obedience to reason, which alone brings right action 
 with it. The ancient philosophers believed in the second 
 death of those who do not attain to this state of mind 
 here, and it was to men of good-will that the Gospel of 
 peace was proclaimed. 
 
 " Ignorance is the parent of error, and error of evil days/' 
 says Dante. " There is no peace for the wicked," or breakers 
 of the Divine Law, said the Hebrews. "They know not 
 the things that make for their peace," sighed Jesus; and 
 " I must be about My Father's business," was Christ's 
 definition of His mission, and the instinctive operation of 
 the religious sentiment in all times and places. 
 
 No lighting up of our streets to artificial daylight at 
 night, nor sending messages with the speed of lightning, 
 nor art, nor physical comfort carried to the highest pitch, 
 can take the place as joy-givers of good-will towards men, 
 and due adoration of God our Creator. 
 
 The automatic action of the nervous system is self- 
 preservative, or for the preservation of Being; and as we 
 reason from our own experience to that of others, so we 
 
78 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 argue that action for the Best for Being is as much 
 desired by others as by ourselves in other words, the 
 law of rational conduct is taking the means to the intuited 
 end of action, i.e., perfection of Being in the case of others, 
 as well as in our own. 
 
 It was Cain, the first murderer, who said : " Am I my 
 brother's keeper ? " Each of us stands in the moral relation 
 of justice and kindness towards each, and every fellow- 
 creature ; but it unfortunately often happens that the mere 
 philanthropist pays too little heed to the dry light of intelli- 
 gence, and thus becomes "goody-goody"; or he may fall 
 into the other extreme of intellectual distortion, and become 
 a sectarian persecutor of his kind ; nor, indeed, can any 
 individual striving of a finite Being, limited by his own 
 idiosyncrasy, which tends to play so great a part in the 
 individual sympathies of Beings for each other, free itself 
 from a one-sided judgment of persons and things apart from 
 a counterpartal, correlative spirit. 
 
 The seat of free-will is man's reflective reason. This 
 it is that furnishes him with the distinctions of positive, 
 comparative, and superlative, and beckons him on to the 
 Ideal, or the perfection of Being. 
 
 " Psychology," said Professor Hoffding, " like every other 
 science, must be deterministic." We have not to create a 
 world, but to understand and describe it as it exists ; and 
 above all to notice the tendency common to all sentient 
 creations to self-conservation, which in man takes the- form 
 of the preservation of the integrity of real, or spiritual Being. 
 Reflective intelligence is conducted under the principle of 
 sufficient reason, which requires us to take stock of our 
 own capabilities, and instinctive self-determination. 
 
 The old-world wisdom, " Know thyself," always remaining 
 valid, Christianity has adopted the form of the moral duty of 
 self-examination at the close of every day. Of course the 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 79 
 
 personal equation must be made in our own case, as well as 
 in that of other men; for each and all of us are so far 
 "bound fast in fate," that we cannot altogether escape 
 the one-sidedness of our own idiosyncrasy. Therefore the 
 means vary, by which each one instinctively seeks to bring 
 about the desired end of all rational Beings, namely, well- 
 Being, or satisfaction of Being, as opposed to ennui, suffering, 
 and dissatisfaction with Being, or existence ; and conse- 
 quently with the Giver of life and Being. This is the 
 moral tether by which each one is bound. As the cripple 
 cannot aspire to being a perfect athlete, so even a philoso- 
 pher cannot be an Ideally perfect sample of humanity, for 
 a constant exercise of mental speculation precludes an 
 alertness to the practical side of life ; whilst the practical 
 philanthropist can neither be expected to be a transcendental 
 metaphysician, nor a mathematician of special celebrity. 
 
 Hence I repeat that for the required equilibrium of the 
 attributes of Being in the practice of morality, the true 
 marriage of souls is the one hope of mankind. Each person 
 acts in the ratio of his own feelings, intelligence, and will ; 
 and even the conscientious person who endeavours to act 
 according to the required synthesis of these, in reflective 
 self-consciousness under the principle of sufficient reason 
 for self-determination, has yet to have a make-weight, or 
 supplement, to compensate for his particular shortcoming 
 in feeling, in intelligence, or in will. Hence the saying, 
 "Two heads are better than one." Creative power cannot 
 be attributed to abstract ideas, although A. Fouille"e speaks 
 of des idees forces. It is feeling that is the supreme moral 
 force, feeling referring to the sense of Being as a whole, 
 including desire, and reflective volition, which presents the 
 Ideal as the standard of self-determination. Ethic does 
 not merely mean dynamic power, but action for an ideational 
 object, with an Ideal of what that end should be. By the 
 
8o Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 word mind we mean the principle of reason, dialectic 
 proceeding from essential causation in its three modes, 
 together with their synthesis. The character of a man's 
 mind is dependent upon his knowledge, hence the im- 
 portance of a good education. Rational conduct is conduct 
 stimulated by the full view of the end of rational activity, 
 which is for the Good, or Best for Being, as such. A man 
 can quite as easily be unjust towards himself as towards 
 others, or towards his Maker. To belittle himself, or to waive 
 his claim to respect, is degrading, and therefore displeasing 
 to God. Of this course it may be said : " Is thy servant a 
 dog, that he should do this thing ? " 
 
 Self-respect, as well as social regard, and Divine adoration, 
 oblige us to a certain line of conduct. Mere spontaneous good 
 nature cannot dispense with the principle of sufficient reason 
 in relation to volition, which seeks to determine whether the 
 remote consequences of action may not bring more evil than 
 may be compensated for by present good. Carpe diem sed 
 memor ultimi, said Horace. What we call conscience was 
 called by the Greeks ethic: the pursuit of the I deal end in action. 
 The moral sense may be defined rationally as the reflective 
 introspective sense of duty, or obligation to be true to our 
 rational nature, which takes in the whole of Being, including 
 emphatically the religious sentiment. Reason is the measure. 
 " Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto 
 God the things that are God's," said Jesus. Plato defined 
 reason as " the sense of proportion." It requires the equili- 
 briation of the . faculties of feeling, of intelligence, of the 
 relativity of Being, and of the practical sense of the tendency 
 of Being, or will in action, which is as much for the conserva- 
 tion of the integrity of our spiritual Being, as the automatic 
 activity of our nervous system is for our bodily preservation. 
 
 Self-actualization is through desire, and when desire faileth, 
 the heart is dead, and the sense of the end becomes vague, 
 
* Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 81 
 
 and fails to spur us to action. The evidence of reason is 
 spontaneous self-evidence. We cannot deny facts of feeling, 
 of intelligence of similarity and difference, or the reflective 
 consciousness of the identity of cause and effect; neither 
 can we deny that spontaneous self-determination is for self- 
 conservation, and for joy of life, or that reflective, rational 
 self-determination is under the principle of sufficient reason, 
 i.e., the Best for Being as a part of a universal whole. Hence 
 ethic is the comprehension of this Ideal end, and is always 
 regardful of the means to the end. 
 
 Reflective reason calls into play the mind's power over 
 passing desires, and its sense of responsibility to act rightly, 
 whatever may be the difficulties of passing circumstances. 
 
 Each faculty of man has its accompanying intuited Ideal. 
 "Feeling, or the sense of Being, postulates integrity, or truth, 
 to Being ; intelligence of the relativity of Beings one to 
 another postulates sympathy, or love for other Beings ; and 
 will, or the sense of the instinctive tendency within us to act 
 for the Good, or Best, for our own Being, postulates benevo- 
 lence and beneficence towards all rational Beings, as such, 
 under the rational principle of the substitution of similars. 
 
 Reflective introspection argues the existence of a sufficient, 
 or intelligent cause-agent, voluntarily self-determined to a 
 given end; and it also brings with it the consciousness that 
 we stand in the relation of spiritual offspring to the Cause of 
 all causes, which induces in us the sense of responsibility to 
 carry out what we believe to be His purpose, or aim, in our 
 creation. Truth, or fidelity to our Ideal conception of typical 
 Being, is that which is enforced upon us as the rule of reason, 
 and by this standard we judge both our own actions and 
 those of our fellow-creatures; nay, even those of our Creator, 
 for thus has He constituted us to be His children, not His 
 slaves. 
 
 Our sense of moral obligation in others is due to our 
 
 G 
 
82 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality * 
 
 requiring a sufficient reason for their self-determination in 
 feeling, intelligence and will these three combining in one 
 comprehensive judgment of right, or wrong conduct, for 
 from these attributes of Being do we reason concerning all 
 things, the existence and nature of the Deity included, 
 asking, What do they mean ? What are we to conclude from 
 this or that fact ? Every judgment regarding self-determina- 
 tion is either unmoral, moral, or immoral. Mr. Balfour 
 defines an ethical proposition as one which prescribes an 
 action with reference to an end. The German word Zweck- 
 massigkeit is another name for design, and what end, or 
 Zweck, has reason, but the Good for self-conscious Being ? 
 One is unmoral when ignorant of the law. 
 
 But if your motive, aim, or end, be the Good for Being, 
 as such, you are moral ; if it be the bad, or injurious to 
 Being, you are immoral. 
 
 Punishment is for the evil-doer's own sake as well as for 
 the protection of the good, for there is no peace, or real joy, 
 for the wicked. 
 
 As the spontaneous impulse of the nervous system is for 
 the conservation of the physical organism, pain and pleasure 
 standing at the helm of the life and health of the body, 
 warning, or encouraging to a certain course of action ; so 
 reflective voluntary action is for the conservation of the 
 integrity of spiritual, or real Being, through obedience to 
 the sense of Right and Wrong, or of what is Divinely 
 ordered, and thus rationally intuited by us, which finally 
 determines for us what is the Best for Being. 
 
 Christ's definition of a right disposition was to love one's 
 neighbour as oneself, and the Lord our God with all the 
 heart and mind. In other words, rational self-regard, 
 sympathetic social regard, and reverent Divine adoration. 
 
 The idea of well-Being, or happiness, is implied in that of 
 perfection of Being. Why should the flinching of our nerves 
 
Rational, or Scientific ', Ideal of Morality 83 
 
 point to the instinctive avoidance of suffering, if we are to sit 
 down contentedly under it ? If we liked being unjustly and 
 cruelly treated, external or civil authority would be deprived 
 of its functions as it now is ; it is only such through the 
 authority of the internal law of self-regard, or self-protection, 
 and the further moral obligation of doing unto others as we 
 .would be done by. The internal authority of reason, or 
 conscience, is Divinely supported by fear and remorse (the 
 Eumenides of the Greeks) when we are conscious of having 
 defied its injunctions. The very grounds, or motives of 
 action, are self-love, social and Divine. Take away, stamp 
 out these three feelings, and what impulse to action would 
 remain ? Should we even drink or sleep ? The lower 
 animals have the instinct of self -protection tempered by 
 either affectionate or cowering submission to man's melior 
 natura. As to Divine love, Christ said the last word on 
 the subject when He laid down the axiom, " If ye love 
 not the brother whom ye have seen, how can ye love 
 the Father Whom ye have not seen ? " but only Ideally 
 recognized. The positivists have been so far right, that 
 inferences of reason can only be drawn from actual, or 
 positive experiences ; and even pessimists have acted in the 
 spirit of the Jewish prophet, who in the name of the Lord 
 said, " I will be enquired of for these things," namely, for 
 all the evil and suffering in the world. Science has cut this 
 Gordian knot in showing Evolution through struggle. 
 
 The conceptions of a man wanting in feeling are as vague 
 as are his impressions, leaving no mark behind ; those of a 
 man deficient in intellect are confused and misunderstood ; 
 and those of a man whose practical power of self-determina- 
 tion is undeveloped, are undefined and hesitating because 
 vacillating. 
 
 Without the bulwark of a strong will, a man is driven by 
 passion to the obscuring of his understanding at one 
 
84 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 moment, or bows irrationally to the will of others at another, 
 through the want of resolute self-determination to control 
 himself or others. Shakspeare speaks of such a man as 
 "passion's slave," whether it be the passion of love, or the 
 passion of fear. 
 
 Then again we have " the dry as dust," and the resolute, 
 perhaps pigheaded, perseverer in his own narrowly-conceived 
 purpose, deaf to pity, or consideration for himself or others, 
 and indifferent to abstract argument. Truth to Being means 
 consistency with the fundamental attributes of typical Being. 
 The particular, or several, representations of these cannot 
 be the contradiction of Being as a whole. The truth of any 
 system of philosophy lies in its being carefully deduced from 
 the synthesis of these principles of reason, from its being 
 consistent with them. 
 
 The ground for thinking anything doubtful is founded, in 
 the last resort, upon some apparent inconsistency with one 
 or other of those principles upon which all science proceeds. 
 Our own particular faculties for truth, for harmony, and for 
 goodness, determine our Ideals, and colour our systems of 
 philosophy. 
 
 The parrot-like echoing of the Ideals of others does not 
 count as spiritual evolution, which is emotional, intellectual 
 and volitional. Only through individual development are 
 our present approaches to Ideal truth, harmony, and good- 
 ness achieved; and only through the continuation of such 
 moral evolution can we hope to emerge into the perfect day 
 of righteousness. 
 
 Thus do we climb step by step up the great altar-stair of 
 Being, nearer and nearer to the Great White Throne, where 
 sits our Father, and our Judge. 
 
 Our endeavours after progress show an instinctive tendency 
 towards faith in evolution, the culmination of which is found 
 in perfect love, both human and Divine. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 85 
 
 Scientific beliefs result from the operation of material 
 causes on our sensitive organization. 
 
 As the shock of contact with a hard body informs us of the 
 relation in which it stands to our physical Being, so the chill 
 of want of sympathy reveals an antagonistic personal 
 relationship to us. Science is, in the last resort, self-evidence, 
 for this is the measure of reason. 
 
 That Being should become* what it is typically con- 
 sidered is the sufficient reason for everything that exists. 
 Our inductions are from effects produced on our mind by 
 necessarily postulated causation. Our deductions are from 
 these principles of thought, subsumed under the principle 
 of sufficient reason. The infant struggles to lift an object 
 far too weighty for it to move, and in its ignorance of 
 distance, tries to grasp the moon ; but as reason, the 
 measurer, dawns within, it does not. as do some stupid 
 children of a larger growth, attempt the impossible, it 
 even ceases to desire the impossible. We call the principles 
 of sufficient, efficient, and final causation a priori, because 
 they are already in play in the cerebro-nervous system, 
 through which we conceive them ; whereas reflective judg- 
 ments are a posteriori conclusions from these experiences. 
 
 All our rational convictions rest on a basis of existential 
 essential experiences. " The expression, laws of phenomena, 
 involves the idea of a subjective consciousness, as well as 
 an objective existence." Spontaneous induction from the 
 effects produced on us to homogeneous causes is the 
 empirical origin of our various notions. Deduction from 
 known causes is to effects conceivably producible by them. 
 Conception being a result of our reasoning faculty, we 
 cannot be said to conceive the irrational, which means 
 the inconceivable. But for our intellection of causality, 
 objects would be mere groups of sensations to us, or 
 * HEGEL'S Werden. 
 
86 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 classes of mental affections, as Berkeley and Hume suggested. 
 The fundamental beliefs of reason are the products of 
 psychological laws, of the association of neural presenta- 
 tions with mental representations, which are subsequently 
 reflected on under the principle of sufficient reason. If neural 
 presentations are distorted by cerebral disease, the accom- 
 panying mental representation is consequently affected 
 monstrously, or out of the natural order. 
 
 Being is the one thing positively cognized, and the 
 relativity of it is equally recognizable ; and the tendency of 
 it to self-conservation and sympathy with kind, and action 
 for the Best conceived, is undeniable. 
 
 To say that what the trinary principle of causality repre- 
 sents is the 'modification of the attributes of Being, and to 
 say that Being is the only ' vera causa ratio sufficiens' of 
 all that exists, is an identical proposition: the word cause 
 being a strictly metaphysical term. The external cosmos, 
 with its extension in time and space, is but a condition 
 of, or field (Shauplatz) for the manifestation of the attri- 
 butes of Being, just as a clock is but an instrument for 
 the manifestation of a particular exercise of man's ingenuity 
 for carrying out the purpose of ascertaining the exact 
 moment of the sun's evolution round the earth, so that he 
 may profit by its light, and know when to expect it. 
 
 To state that the physiological organism of each man 
 depends greatly upon inheritance and environment, evolu- 
 tion binding up these two into a progressive whole, which 
 thus becomes more and more susceptible of fine discrimina- 
 tions, with an accompanying concourse of mental repre- 
 sentations, is not to state that man has no spiritual essence 
 apart from, and different from his mere passing animal 
 form, which he shares with the lower creation, so as to be 
 rendered capable of a certain degree of communication 
 with him, both for service, and for pleasure. But seeing that 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 87 
 
 the lower animals have no Ideal or reflective consciousness 
 to act up to, as a sufficient reason for all their actions or 
 self-determinations, they are evidently capable of nothing 
 further than their present consciousness, the sole application 
 of which is to this particular planet. They do not act upon 
 the principles of Fais ce que dois arrive ce que pourra, and 
 noblesse oblige, nor do they rejoicingly state : Tout est perdu 
 hors Vhonneur; neither do they feel inspired by the abstract 
 ideas of truth and harmony and goodness. They cannot 
 foretell the appearance of comets hundreds of years before- 
 hand, or the eclipses of sun and moon ; and they can 
 conceive of no Ideal Being, "whose service is perfect free- 
 dom/' because it is the fulfilment of their real nature. 
 
 If it were not for the rationally-intuited order of causality, 
 which indicates noumenal Being, its joys, and its purposes, 
 as le mot de Venigme de I'univers, even the external order 
 of Nature would not be recognizable, or interpretable by 
 us. Thought proper, or real thought, is the mental repre- 
 sentation of the really existing, or of the inferentially possible 
 in relation to real Being. 
 
 The inner life of man alone has the secret of real Being, 
 and so of the logical consistency of the universe. What 
 would a lower animal think of a glass factory? and what 
 would a fool think of the Dialogues of Plato ? " The unity of 
 consciousness is necessary for an experience." Without it 
 even bodily pain would not be registered or classified. Only 
 a reflective self-conscious Being has a clear apprehension 
 of the relations in which persons and things stand to him. 
 Many individuals never actually develop this reflective 
 self- consciousness, which, including the before, or past, of 
 memory, looks to the beyond, or hereafter, through hope 
 or expectation of reason. The mere idea "/," in reference 
 to all other ideas, whose collective unity it makes possible, is 
 the transcendental, or sense - transcending consciousness, 
 
88 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 realized but by the few. It is this transcendental ego that 
 requires God to steer its course by, as the mariner's compass 
 is governed by the pole-star. To it alone does the word 
 conscience, or moral sense, apply. Nothing can be mentally 
 represented, or, properly speaking, thought of, except in 
 relation to this sense - transcending ego. This world is all 
 a passing show, so indeed are our bodies ; but mental 
 representation is of the modifications of our real or spiritual 
 Being, in feeling, intelligence, and will. These are, moreover, 
 reflectively compared with the abstract Ideals of truth, love- 
 liness, or harmony with Being, and goodness, or integrity of 
 purpose, which reason upholds as typically binding upon 
 us. For thought is by syllogism, the conclusion having to 
 harmonize with the major and minor premisses. Thus 
 Egoity, Altruity, and Deity, or Deontology, are our ultimate, 
 concordant, mental representations. The blind man shares 
 these representations with us ; he is " a man for a' that " he 
 cannot see chairs, tables, mountains, or lakes ; but where 
 self-respect, and sympathy for others prevail, the data for 
 reasoning being given, Divine love can also exist. 
 
 The human mind, when the physiological organism is in 
 good working condition, is such that it necessarily believes 
 in causality, although the uncultured individual often 
 overlooks it, and believes in the impossible, or rationally 
 inconceivable. Our belief in sufficient, efficient, and final 
 causation is the necessary connate outcome of the play of 
 the afferent, sensorial, and efferent nerves, to which feeling, 
 intelligence, and will correspond ; for all these there must 
 exist an adequate cause, for a sensation, as well as for the 
 accompanying emotion. The link of similarity of substance 
 existing between our physical organism and the external 
 object explains, in some degree, our perception of the 
 physical world ; but it could not appear as a cosmos to us, 
 excepting for our metaphysical comprehension of it. As to 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 89 
 
 the relation between matter and spirit, death alone can solve 
 that mystery, together with that of the Omnipresence of God. 
 
 We spontaneously and necessarily postulate our own 
 instinctive and reflective motive in action as the universal 
 motive for rational activity, the contradiction of the ego 
 not being rationally conceivable. 
 
 Not to have for motive of action the Best for Being is 
 to be illogical, although our sense of the Best may be 
 mistaken or morally distorted ; and when the distortion 
 reaches a certain point, the person becomes the object of 
 human antipathy, or alarm. Formerly the immediate judg- 
 ment of God was expected to descend on him ; nowaday 
 we simply infer that his brain is diseased, and that his 
 ideas are consequently so confused and distorted that he 
 must be put under control of others as incapable of proper 
 self-government. 
 
 The elements of mental representations are unquestionably 
 feeling ; intelligence of the identity of cause and effect ; and 
 will, or normal self-determination for the conservation of the 
 integrity of Being : the synthesis of these, in introspective 
 reflection, furnishing a sufficient reason for faith in Being 
 and Truth; for love of Being, or the delightful sense of 
 harmony ; and hope of joy, which arises out of the typical 
 tendency to benevolence in noumenal Being. Obviously, 
 then, there is no petitio principii in reasoning or argument, 
 which is based on the nature or attributes of Being. Hence 
 the Stoics made truth to human nature the definition of 
 virtue ; and hence Jesus defined the summary of duty in 
 the words, "Be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is 
 perfect," as true to the rational Ideal of Being. 
 
 Ethic is a part of logic, both inductive and deductive, 
 logic being ontological. In requiring self-evidence for the 
 validity of any propositions, it follows, that rational or 
 logical inferences from such propositions, share the validity 
 
90 Rational^ or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 of the self-evident proposition. " It follows/' says Balfour, 
 in his Defence of Philosophic Doubt, " that philosophy must 
 consist of two main departments, one of which deals 
 with ultimate, or self-evident, propositions, the other with 
 modes of inference." The incoherent is not conceivably 
 the true, and inferences not contained in data do not 
 answer to the Ideal of truth, any more than discord, or 
 want of harmony, between notes constitutes music, or than 
 uncongeniality between persons constitutes the Ideal of 
 social intercourse; neither is malevolence the ethical Ideal, 
 or science of the end, malevolence being destructive of 
 life and Being, instead of being preservative of their in- 
 tegrity. Psychology does not necessarily include the reflec- 
 tive principle of sufficient reason, seeing that we speak 
 of the comparative psychology of man, and the rest of 
 the animal creation psychology being, in fact, the science 
 of mere consciousness. The satisfaction of the principle of 
 sufficient reason, which is in fact the definition of morality, 
 is the additional requirement of a reflective autonomic or 
 Self-conscious Being. 
 
 Metaphysic is the product of reflective consciousness in 
 the "Ding an sick und fur sick" ; not in the tapeworm, or 
 in the carrion crow, nor even in the elephant, or the dog, 
 not to mention the ape, the physical form of which may 
 indeed be said to ape that of man, is the principle of 
 sufficient reason found, which shows that the secret of crea- 
 tion does not lie in a skeleton, or even in a nervous system. 
 Philosophy is the offspring of reflection on the Ideal of Being 
 under the principle of sufficient reason. "There is no 
 doubt," says Balfour, "that in constructing a philosophy, 
 previous psychological inquiry may be required ; but by 
 the performance of psychological inquiry, we must not 
 suppose that we absolve ourselves from philosophical, 
 or speculative reasoning." Even the discovery of the 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 91 
 
 n euro -cerebral association of ideas, or the application of 
 the doctrine of evolution to heredity, is but preparing the 
 ground for reflective reasoning. 
 
 On Aristotelian principles, the man of letters is a man 
 of action, because he shows the Ideal to the thoughtless. 
 To think, is therefore to act in the highest sense. It is in 
 the highest sense practical, although it requires " the solitude 
 that is the cradle and the cross of genius," as Lamartine 
 said, for the elaboration of the ideas of reason. Yet Cowley 
 bestows a virtuous wife on his "happy solitary"; for unblessed 
 by human, as by Divine love, there is no happiness or satis- 
 faction of Being for a social or related Being. 
 
 " The soul is great in virtue of its sentiments." The word 
 sentiment applies only to the reflective consciousness of man. 
 Thus the first flush of animal passion must not be taken for 
 love. Only what satisfies the heart, or reflectively speaking 
 the sense of relativity, can give satisfaction to the intellect 
 and the moral sense ; and for true conjugal love, there must 
 be, moreover, the sense of exclusive correlativity between 
 two spiritual Beings.* Emotional knowledge is the highest 
 knowledge ; but the quality of the passions depends on the 
 quality of the heart which conceives them. Sensual appetite 
 and emotion must in no way be confounded. 
 
 The principles of thought that constitute the mind of man 
 are not contradictory. Their joint reflective outcome is the 
 moral sense, which is of the typical, or Ideal, end of self- 
 determination : the categorical imperative of duty, on which 
 Kant builds emphatically his faith in God, and which points 
 to a more perfect future state of Being for man love being 
 the hostage, or actual realization of harmony in a world of 
 discord, what wonder that it keeps us spellbound ! But 
 
 * " Though he and I were one in kind, 
 Yet he was rich where I was poor ; 
 And he supplied my wants the more, 
 As his unlikeness fitted mine." TENNYSON. 
 
92 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 to use Mrs. Browning's words, "The breath of God must 
 ever be between true lovers." Conscience proceeds upon the 
 fulfilment of the reflective conception of Ideal Being. The 
 Ideals of the sensuous imagination have no part or place 
 in conscience. The requirement of self-respect, of personal 
 worth, is its primary characteristic. If man were not gifted 
 with the sense of the Ideal or perfect, at what could he 
 aim ? Yet for the possible conception of the superlative, 
 the positive and the comparative must first be known. 
 
 Humanity is not fairly represented by a man or woman, 
 taken alone, the one sex being the required complement of 
 the other, as the one human spirit must, be of the other. 
 "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impedi- 
 ments," says Shakspeare. 
 
 The goal of philosophy is synthesis : the synthesis of man, 
 the universe, and God ; this is the perfect work of reflective 
 reason. The meaning of the absolute, as opposed to the 
 relative, or correlated, is the utterly and ever complete self- 
 sufficing unity of the Divine Being. " Why callest thou Me 
 good ? " said Jesus, " there is none good but One." Hence 
 the Supreme Being is to the philosopher "the Good One." 
 " Philosophy is individual reason, which has been purified of 
 dross by the discipline of the sciences, by the conscientious 
 heroism of religion, by the fair and noble intuitions of art." 
 The philosophic Ideal of truth is that which challenges 
 rational belief everywhere, at all times ; and this we hold 
 because the contradiction of the attributes of Being, and 
 so of our essential intelligence, is the inconceivable. 
 
 Hence we predicate from the uniformity of the nature 
 of noumenal Being the uniformity of truth. Faith in Being 
 brings with it faith in the invisible to the eye of sense, 
 but clear to the eye of reason, or sense of relativity, the 
 Prototypal Absolute Being, Fons et Origo of the universe, 
 in Whose reason man has been constituted to share. The 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 93 
 
 law of impersonation is as much a necessity of thought as 
 the moral law responsibility only existing between persons. 
 
 There may exist such a thing as intellectual hypnotism, 
 as well as the worship of the flesh and the devil of selfishness 
 and temporal success, or Mammon-worship, inducing us to 
 work out only one vein, or attribute of our Being, to the 
 neglect, or exclusion of the other attributes, which, both 
 for the integrity and the beatitude of Being, must exist 
 all together, and be synchronously developed. But the very 
 ground of idiosyncrasy is one-sidedness ; and this neither 
 can be, nor was meant to be, extirpated, but only compen- 
 sated by Divine decree through the conjugal tie, or joy-giving 
 attraction of opposites for each other, the twain constituting 
 one spirit representative of humanity in its entirety. The 
 objects of abstract belief are the categories of thought ; 
 the object of faith, love, and hope is only found in noumenal 
 Being. This is the object-matter of philosophy, as reflection 
 is on real entities, treating of them as opposed to the mere 
 objects of sense perception, which is of material phenomena, 
 or of the relations existing between external things to our 
 physical organism, to which the science of the present day 
 particularly refers, limiting itself to the actual conditions of 
 our present life. 
 
 In ancient civilization ontology and its accompanying logic 
 were the sciences in vogue ; now physics take the lead, which 
 tends to materialistic faith. But even for the physical world 
 a designer is required, and a fortiori for the conscience of man. 
 
 Primitive fetishism and devil-worship were the outcome of 
 the emotion of fear, instead of love or adoration. Reflection 
 is properly upon the totality of human impressions, and on 
 the rational conclusions therefrom. Hence the moralizing 
 effect of the union of man and woman. "Each by turn is 
 light to each." 
 
 When each one sits in the isolation of his appointed task, 
 
94 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 that being properly determined by each one's psychological 
 organization, only a fraction of life is obvious to them, and 
 consequently shared in by them. What wonder, then, at the 
 delight that comes of true love, -which makes all things new, 
 by giving us, as it were, two pairs of eyes instead of one. I 
 allude here neither to the merely domestic affections, nor to 
 the extravagant futilities of the imagination connected with 
 a person being statuesquely formed, or "ruddier than the 
 cherry," nor to the crapule of mere animal sexuality ; but to 
 the spiritual affinity which brings with it that real gratitude to 
 God, which can only be the fruit of true and abiding joy for 
 the happiness of a completed life and doubled Being. Hence 
 it is in the thrill of this deepest of the emotions that human 
 nature catches for a moment a faint reflection, not only of 
 Ideal Being in the abstract, but of the Ideal Being, Who is at 
 once its Creator and its Prototype. " Only at the touch of a 
 beloved hand," says Matthew Arnold, " do we know whence 
 we come, and where we go." We then know that we come 
 from the Good One, or Joy-Giver, and that He is ever with 
 us. The absence of Ideal emotion brings a lowered tone, a 
 perverted aim, a confused judgment in the actual life. " As 
 the function of philosophy is the unification of all belief into 
 an ordered whole under the stress of reason" so the function of 
 true love is the production (through the union of the comple- 
 mentary pair) of an equilibriated play of the spiritual 
 attributes of Being, to which no single finite Being could 
 attain, and in which the perfection of Being, with its 
 accompanying beatitude, consists. At present, child-bearing 
 is often supposed to be the one raison d'etre of marriage. 
 Here we have the clue to the existence of concubinage, and 
 of homeless homes, where the heart cannot live, and sex only 
 is rampant. Complementary affinities are, of course, between 
 contrasts, or oppositely developed natures, affinity being 
 stronger than the mere cohesion of analogues. The cohesion 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 95 
 
 of analogues is not chemical, or essential affinity. Ana- 
 logues fall off like drops of water from each other in the 
 presence of a real affinity or counterpart. Blood -relations 
 are more or less analogous, therefore they can more or. less 
 comprehend each other; hence blood is said to be thicker 
 than water. But as the eye delights in the pure white ray 
 in which all the nerves of sight are exercised, so nothing but 
 the Divinely-designed .conjugality of finite Being produces 
 equilibrium of the trinal rhythm of feeling, intelligence, and 
 will, which alone gives rest, peace, and joy to the spirit of 
 man the idiosyncratic development of a single attribute 
 inducing the atrophy of another. " Equilibriation is attained 
 through continuous differentiations and integrations." It is 
 through " mingled Being " that " the will to live " reaches its 
 height, and renders the idea of an eternity of joyous inter- 
 action exquisite instead of awful, as it might otherwise be, 
 seeing that in the solitude of a crowd one is, as much as in a 
 solitary spot, exposed to the feeling of loneliness as Byruo 
 says, " With none to bless us, none whom we can bless ; this, 
 this is solitude." It was, as we know, pronounced in Eden, 
 " not good for man to be alone," even with the greater revela- 
 tion of God's presence, which was supposed to exist in the 
 beginning of things, as it is hoped it will again in the end. 
 The end is always, as in a syllogism, like the beginning ; for 
 the beginning comprises the idea of the end. The origin of 
 all general beliefs is personal experience. Even the beliefs 
 of a philosopher are personal in the sense that the aspect of 
 truth most emphatically taught by him will be strictly 
 congruous with his own congenital tendency. "To com- 
 prehend the systematizer is to comprehend the system." 
 Only union with a spiritual counterpart, or complement, 
 can redeem us from the individual one-sided leaning, in which 
 justice does not consist. Both the natural desire for happi- 
 ness, and the reflective love of virtue combined, constitute 
 
96 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 instinctive and rational motives for desiring the conjugal tie. 
 It is le besoin a" aimer par excellence. 
 
 The moral sense is unyielding in its demands for the 
 actualization, even here as far as may be, of the ultimate 
 Divinely-implanted Ideal of perfection of life and Being. 
 Ontological belief is intuitive, and is the ground of all 
 knowledge. We do not require to be taught to say, "I 
 am," "I have," "I feel," "I desire," or "I hope"; but 
 without some degree of reflective self-realization, know- 
 ledge of personality is not really evolved. "The abstract 
 idea of mind, such as all human minds really are, is con- 
 structed by processes of reflective thinking carried to their 
 utmost limits."* Self-knowledge, although it comes as the 
 result of a development, implies a knowing Being argument 
 being but a series of mental processes that succeed each 
 other according to the laws of the mind's procedure. The 
 mind functions spontaneously in belief, and reflectively in 
 inference from intuitive conviction or beliefs of reason. Self- 
 knowledge is implicit in instinct or spontaneous reason, 
 and explicit in reflective reason. " If we try to tear out of 
 the phenomena of knowledge, as opposed to mere instinct, 
 the ontological postulate, which is of the very essence of 
 knowledge, we do not lose the knowledge of our own real 
 Being simply ; but we lose all Being and all knowledge 
 at once.""I* Man as a knowing subject is metaphysical in 
 respect of the knowing function. "All real objects are 
 given to him as being real in the form of objects of his 
 knowledge" \ It is impossible to give the indubitable 
 character for reality, which things have, any preference 
 over that which is known to belong to mind, i.e., the meta- 
 physical element which in the subject is called belief, or 
 inference of reason with reference to reality. The pos- 
 tulates of reason, that is of sufficient, efficient, and final 
 * LADD. f Ibid. Ibid. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 97 
 
 causality, are ontological, as Beings are the only verce 
 causes. With regard to remembered things, or occurrences, 
 the clear and vivid knowledge of what was present originally 
 in immediate consciousness, when reflectively considered, as 
 respects the indubitable content of reality, is tantamount to 
 the immediate consciousness which involves the existence of 
 a conscious subject, who is the patient of true psychological 
 phenomena, these furnishing the data for the rational 
 conclusion of the reality of the existence of an enduring 
 spiritual substance as the necessary support of these psycho- 
 logical phenomena. That which is typical in noumenal 
 Being is imperishable ; but that which is abnormal, or con- 
 tradictory of the true self, must sooner or later pass away. 
 
 Looked at from the centre of things, nothing should be 
 called supernatural. If all that happens in external Nature 
 be the immediate issue and expression of supreme active 
 reason immanent in all, the distinction between natural 
 and supernatural in the end disappears ; but not, there- 
 fore, the distinction between what is physical or sensuous, 
 and what is spiritual. Final cause, or sufficient reason, pre- 
 supposes the perfect ordering of Nature in accordance with 
 the higher spiritual law. If the universe be in its ultimate 
 principle Divine, or proceeds from a Supreme Being, it 
 cannot contradict reason. Hence theology is natural to 
 man as being the expression of man's belief in a Sufficient 
 Cause, or Intelligent Being, to account for his own existence. 
 Locke regarded theology as a branch of philosophy, "the 
 same arguments being employed in it, as in politics, physics, 
 and morals." 
 
 The immanence of rational order is the foundation of all 
 revelation, whether it be called natural, or supernatural. 
 The recognition of the Omnipresence of an Infinite Absolute, 
 really felt and acted upon, is the only real security for man's 
 upward progress, and his truest and highest welfare. For 
 
 H 
 
98 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 man is necessarily, or fatally, determined in his life and 
 activity by his conception of the final meaning and purpose 
 of life ; moreover, this must be consciously and vigorously 
 adopted by him, so as not to be led astray by what is merely 
 speculatively, imaginatively, or traditionally held by those 
 about him. The realization of the Ideal of rational protec- 
 tion, as of responsible dependence, is what he requires for 
 peace and virtue. The Ideal, par excellence, of any given time, 
 or place, is the product of the then state of Being ; the quality 
 for which there is then and there the greatest need, becomes 
 the Ideal of the hour. Courage is ever the virtue held most 
 in esteem in primitive phases of society. Fortitude is a form 
 of it specially advocated under the Roman emperors, when no 
 man could count on an hour's safety from capricious tyranny. 
 
 When Christ appeared, humility, as opposed to autocracy 
 and aristocracy, was the step necessary to true godliness ; 
 but this is a virtue which people are fonder of inculcating 
 or impressing upon others than they are of practising it 
 themselves ; but the extreme of self-humiliation, which is 
 occasionally preached, is irrational and degrading, rather than 
 elevating to humanity. Even the Creator is represented as 
 saying to His rational offspring : " I will be enquired of for 
 this thing," " Come, let us reason together," etc. 
 
 The Greek's fatalism, and the Moslem's servile un- 
 questioning submission, and the Oriental self-infliction of 
 torture to obtain holiness, are all fertile in cruelty to others^ 
 just as we see a person's servility to one person outweighed 
 by his haughtiness to another. 
 
 "The gods themselves admire the good man struggling 
 with adversity," says Seneca. 
 
 The Ideal of the emotions is love; the Ideal of the 
 intellect is understanding, and the Ideal of the moral, or 
 practical sense, is good-will shown in action for the Best for 
 Being, as such, which results in the understanding that good- 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 99 
 
 will is the only rationally conceivable motive of the Creator 
 in our creation. 
 
 The Werden of Hegel is tantamount to the evolution of 
 the fundamental attributes of rational Being, and corres- 
 ponds with Zweckmdssigkeit, or endeavour to advance 
 towards the goal of creation, i.e., universal happiness, or 
 perfection of Being. Glucksfahigkeit, or the capacity for 
 happiness, is seen in the actualization and satisfaction of our 
 rational nature. Such is the rational explanation of die 
 Sehnsucht or Heimweh of our spiritual nature, or of what 
 has been called our " Divine despair," or " noble rage," at 
 the suffering and evil prevailing within and around us in 
 this, our preparatory school of Being. Rightness, or 
 righteousness, is the point of our responsibility, and for 
 this we must not allow ourselves to be hag-ridden by super- 
 stition, or be the slaves of animal appetites, or drawn away 
 from the light of reason by the fen-fires of the imagination, 
 which dance from spot to spot, betraying us into the 
 quagmires of folly and sin. As the bull is endowed with 
 strength, and the fox with cunning, so, says Aristotle, is man 
 specially endowed with reason, or the power of thinking ; and 
 it is therefore for the use of this, his characteristic faculty, 
 that he is accountable to his Creator. 
 
 Wherever there is reflective revival, there is ideational 
 revival. Reflection is a voluntary re-representation of a 
 whole experience, or of abstract experiences, which we 
 choose to dwell upon separately for more complete analysis. 
 Re-representation stands in inverse order to spontaneous 
 mental representation. In this case, " L'etat affectif n'est 
 evoque que par 1'interme'diare des e"tats intellectuels auxquels 
 il est associeY' 
 
 Our whole Being is taken into account in reflective self- 
 consciousness ; whereas sensation is only directly felt. An 
 emotion may- be the consequence of the automatic working 
 
ioo Rational) or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 of the laws of mental association, or of the voluntary recall 
 of an experience in obedience to the laws of apperception 
 or introspective combination. Imaginative representation 
 follows the play of the afferent, sensorial, and efferent nerves ; 
 whereas Vorstellungen, or mental conceptions, are of the very 
 essence of our Being, as sufficient, efficient, and final cause. 
 
 Volition, or reflective will, takes Being as a whole, em- 
 bodying the complete manifestation of our Being under any 
 given event. Hence it probably is that such memories do 
 not arise in the teeth of a contradictory state of present 
 experience, but are summoned from the past by present 
 sympathetic experiences. A person bowed down by the 
 immediate bereavement of the beloved, cannot then even 
 picture past joy, conception partaking of present emotion. 
 
 Intellectual reproduction is a necessary preliminary to 
 effective revival. The real emotion caused by an Ideal 
 object, and the Ideal emotion, are identical. Strange it is 
 that the word Ideal, which stands for the climax, or superla- 
 tive, of the actual, should be generally construed as the 
 unreal, or contradictory of the real. 
 
 " Le plaisir et la peine suivent la tendence comme 1'ombre 
 suit le corps ; le plaisir et la peine sont des signes de 
 tendences satisfaites ou contrariees."* Reason rejoices in the 
 sense of fitness. 
 
 Our belief in our real, indivisible, permanent essence is as 
 purely Ideal as is our belief in God. In other words, as 
 images result from sensations, so personifications result from 
 the necessary unification of the attributes of Being. 
 
 Our religion arises out of our belief that we are related to 
 the Absolute Being, through what is spiritual and enduring 
 in our nature, as we are related to the lower animals through 
 the lusts of the flesh, and power of imaginative representation. 
 Hence arises the doctrine of a future state of Being. Our 
 
 * RIBOT. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 101 
 
 reason in this matter particularly takes its stand on the 
 moral sense, which does not find its justification here, where 
 wisdom seems to entail ill-treatment, and folly kindness ; for 
 the world loveth its own. " Psychological presentations have 
 two aspects : that of content, and that of meaning." Our 
 neural, or physiological, presentations refer to the objective 
 content, or to something outside themselves quite as 
 spontaneously, and as inevitably, as they imply a subjective 
 reference to meaning interpretable only by noumenal 
 Being. Subjective apperception is the correlative of objec- 
 tive perception, apprehension and comprehension of purpose. 
 Subjective tendency in self-determination gives the purport 
 of objective selection. 
 
 The reflective subject, or Ego, is involved in its observation, 
 and memory of its own changing states of consciousness. 
 Its relativity of Being enables it to recognize other Beings, 
 and its tendency to self-conservation enables it to compre- 
 hend Divinely imposed purpose or obligation. Egoity, 
 Altruity, and Deity, or Deontology, constitute the threefold 
 influence at work in us. 
 
 These are the three presuppositions and postulates of 
 thought The unbalanced recognition of one of the three 
 over the other two in feeling, thought, and action, is the chief 
 source of error and moral disorder. And it may be said 
 that life is good and happy in proportion to the due practical 
 acknowledgment of all three. When the Ego is virtually 
 effaced, scepticism is the general result ; and when religious 
 feeling makes egoity, altruity, and sympathy, or love, to be 
 disregarded, cruel superstition becomes rampant. Locke 
 speaks of man's threefold knowledge of existence ; what I 
 insist upon is man's intuitive knowledge of the three aspects 
 of existence, or Being, together with their synthesis in reflec- 
 tion. The attempt to resolve these three into one is at once 
 to take a step into the unintelligible by common sense. If 
 
IO2 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 we cannot unhesitatingly say : " I am I, you are you, and 
 there must exist an Absolute Being for our relative existences 
 to be possible, or accounted for by reason," no possible mean- 
 ing conceivable by reason exists for us. Man thinks the 
 realities of existence in this threefold fashion. Locke also 
 says : " The knowledge of God, or Eternal Mind, is self- 
 evident as founded on a logical demonstration, or conclusion 
 of reason, as evident as any conclusion in mathematics." To 
 say that I feel involves the concept that I live, and that I 
 feel pleasure or pain, and am affected joyfully or sadly. To 
 think is to apprehend an external cause for my feeling : and 
 to act upon this spontaneously for the preservation of life 
 is to fulfil the law of my Being. Kant made the moral 
 sense, or the categorical imperative of duty, the stronghold 
 of religious faith, this being supported by the sentiments of 
 remorse, and fear of judgment to come, which also suggests 
 the idea of a future state with the expectation of punishment 
 for evil doing, and reward for good hereafter. It has been 
 asked : " How can an Infinite Being be inferred from facts 
 regarding finite Being?" The idea of a Cause of causes 
 forecloses all ulterior inquiry as to the cause of His existence. 
 It is the idea of Self-consciousness that Personality represents. 
 Hence an Infinite Being cannot be represented under any 
 finite genus or species, but remains the unconditioned Absolute 
 from Whom all relative Beings are necessarily derived. 
 
 It is from our emotional and logical needs that we pass 
 to a postulation of a cause for whatever effects are produced 
 upon us. Thus the relative seeks for an Absolute Being on 
 Whom to depend ; and, intellectually speaking, it is to meet 
 man's sense of incompleteness in the finite that an Infinite, 
 as an only All-Sufficient Cause, has been postulated. Again, 
 seeing how little can be known, or accomplished, in a mortal 
 life, liable to be cut short at any moment, man's Ideal of 
 Being has naturally been that of a Perfect, i.e., Absolute, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 103 
 
 or Infinite, and Immortal Being, to Whom all things are 
 possible, save only self-contradiction, which is the con- 
 temptible, for such a Being would be unintelligible, and 
 therefore unintelligized by us. " In Him is no shadow 
 of change," says the Jewish scriptures. Hence man's 
 characteristic habit of prayer in all times and places, and his 
 rude, votive offerings, such as skulls of his enemies, living 
 creatures sorrjetimes human, sometimes of the lower animals. 
 
 Surely if our own agonizings or needs suggest sufficient, 
 efficient, and final cause, or purpose, to be fulfilled in our 
 Being, reason points to the All-Sufficient Cause for certain 
 satisfaction. " The Eternal Mind is so far related to me," says 
 Locke, "in the way one person may be related to the other 
 person, so far as is necessary to the true end of my Being 
 and the great concernment of my happiness." 
 
 The idea of the ultimate realization, either of reward or 
 of punishment, is the concomitant of the sense of worthiness, 
 and of the desire of approbation, and the sense of forfeiting 
 approbation, which brings with it a certain sense of un- 
 worthiness, or self -mistrust. The moral sense has itself 
 been said to be derived from the feeling of approbation, 
 which arises within us when a man is true to his human 
 nature, to its Ideality instead of its animality ; and to the 
 feeling of disapprobation, which ensues from seeing himself 
 drag his higher nature in the dirt. 
 
 "The confident heart's still fervour is more than the 
 mouth's culled sweetness " ; and the belief that " severed 
 selves" will be reunited, keeps joy 'alive in the bereaved 
 heart, until death restores true lovers to each other "in the 
 smile of God." This true love is the most powerful aid to 
 hope and faith ; whilst mere sensuality, being " of the earth 
 earthy," does not partake of the nature of real Being, having 
 its close even before the death of the animal body. Hence 
 the talk about the fickleness of love in both sexes each 
 
IO4 Rational^ or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 accusing the other of it in no way applies to true love, but 
 only to the physiological side of man. The fickleness of 
 sensual passion, from being condoned in a man, owing to 
 his having had the exclusive organizing of social institutions, 
 is taken for granted in him, whilst it is punished as immoral 
 in a woman inexpedient, or inconvenient with regard to 
 offspring, is what is really meant. Hence real civilization 
 is still in its cradle. Such survivals of a past of violence, 
 when might meant right, cannot surprise us any more than 
 do the superstitions remaining among the uncultured. We 
 must console ourselves with thinking that qui va piano va 
 sano is as true of moral evolution as of other things. 
 
 Aristotle called Well - Being the summum bonum ; and 
 certainly, according to our definition of happiness, which is 
 the reverse of ill, distorted, or despairing Being, he can 
 hardly be gravely contradicted. As by a good servant we 
 mean one who does his work well, so, until we are absolutely 
 loyal to the Master of Life, we cannot expect to enter 
 into the rest prepared for us from the beginning. But, in 
 anticipating rest from the perpetual warfare of this stage 
 of Being, we must remember that as rest is only seen in 
 physics, where two equal forces balance each other's action, 
 so it is with the spiritual forces of man. Perpetual motion, 
 through absence of external resistance, has not the life-giving 
 joy of concerted reciprocal action, in which life never stales, 
 but is for ever new and renewed. On the other hand, the 
 intellect is stamped out through perpetual opposition, which 
 results in the suppression of its exercise ; and where the 
 heart is empty of love, desire fails, and the will is broken. 
 This. I call the negative proof in favour of Aristotle's doctrine 
 of the summum bonum. The nature and purpose of an 
 individual life is the exhibition of what a person's Ideal consists 
 in at the stage of evolution to which he has actually arrived. 
 The ethical demand upon us is to be our best in feeling, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 105 
 
 intelligence, and will; the reflective, voluntary self-deter- 
 mination towards the Best for Being, as such, for ourselves 
 and for others, is goodness, because such is obviously the 
 will of our Creator. As to scarifying our own backs, or 
 putting others on the rack, and confusing their intellect with 
 pain, virtue has nothing to say to it, but only autocracy and 
 priestcraft 
 
 Practical ethjc is grounded on the philosophy, or rationale 
 of Being. To demand self-contradiction of anyone, or the 
 contradiction of the Ideal self of human nature, is not 
 only wrong, but ridiculous, as being illogical the Self-con- 
 tradictory, being the material from which all our jokes are 
 made. As reason is ontological, referring to real Being, 
 so is morality ontological, not monstrous, nor an abstract 
 existence, although an abstract Ideal. The special function 
 of ethic is, however, to support the teleological point of 
 view, and to help others to understand and actualize the 
 summiim bonum. The conception of right is, of course, 
 coloured by the stage of emotional development, to which 
 an individual, or a nation, has arrived thus cruelty dimin- 
 ishes with intensified sympathies ; and with the increase of 
 benevolence, comes increase of beneficence. 
 
 Our thinking must be conducted on the first principle of 
 reason, that of identity and contradiction. (A is A, no A 
 is not A, and nothing can be at once A and not A\ which, 
 although only explicit in reflection, is implicit in perception, 
 apprehension, and comprehension. Thought proper is always 
 Self- consistent, or Self- identical; the Self- contradictory 
 being the inconceivable or unthinkable representation being 
 according to presentation. Neither the artificial nor the 
 deceitful person really thinks. The formal opponents of 
 right-thinking, are stupid fanaticism, and dishonest scepticism, 
 or sophistry. " We seem to touch and have communion with 
 an invisible world, one of us in one way, or at one point, 
 
io6 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 and another at another,"* one through emotion; another 
 through intellection ; and another through practical reason, 
 or the moral order of finality. "The man," Bradley also 
 says, " whose nature is such that by one path alone his chief 
 desire will reach consummation, will try to find that path, 
 whatever the world may think of it "; " if he does not do so, 
 he is contemptible." 
 
 After the lapse of one or two generations, the Ideals of 
 men change in the proportion of their evolution emotional, 
 intellectual, and moral. Reflection acts like a prism on a 
 ray of light, breaking up the white ray of Being as a con- 
 scious whole, into a thrinoid of attributes, i.e., feeling, 
 intelligence, and desire, or will each one of these shading 
 off into innumerable shades the one into the other, like the 
 colours in the solar spectrum. Being maintains its dignity 
 only as a whole; but we view it from these three differ- 
 ent points, according to how we are ourselves immediately 
 affected, whether emotionally, intellectually, or morally, just 
 as the perception of an object comes to us only through 
 its relation to a physical organ whether visual, oral, or 
 tactual ; and that organ our own, such as it is, or may be. 
 "What appears is there, and must be dealt with; but 
 materialism has no rational way of dealing with appear- 
 ances."^ The appearance of plurality of qualities in 
 persons and things results from their relations to our own 
 several noumenal attributes and physical qualities. A fact 
 of experience is the result of a process. Relation is essential 
 to our perception of similarity and difference ; a separation 
 by abstraction is no proof of real separateness. A thing 
 is an object resulting from the application of the funda- 
 mental principles of thought, to the explanation of sensible 
 impressions. 
 
 Mental representation of causality is relative to essential 
 
 * BRADLEY. t Ibid. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 107 
 
 presentation, or effects produced on us. Emerson says, 
 " Himself from God, man cannot free." This is also the 
 testimony of David, the Hebrew psalmist. 
 
 The inferences of reflective reason are entirely from 
 our introspective experiences in emotion, intellection of 
 the relativity of cause and effect, as also from our 
 exhibition of tendency in volition, or self-determination, 
 which is always for the supposed Good for Being, or the 
 conservation of the integrity of Being. But feeling is 
 both the primary and the final cause of the inferences of 
 reason, and of man's search after a sufficient reason for 
 anything and everything. It is through reflective inference 
 of reason that the unphenomenal, or noumenal, Self infers 
 the existence of a noumenal creative Being to account for 
 its own existence and consciousness. Professor James Seth 
 says, " Science, not less than philosophy, is the thinking view 
 of things. What the man of science seeks to comprehend 
 is the meaning of facts and occurrences." As an adequate 
 cause is required by us to account for sensation, so a 
 sufficient cause is required for the elicitation of an emotion. 
 Thus only the fact of personality, or real Being, in ourselves 
 can produce the recognition of it in other similar Beings. 
 The efficient cause of emotion is always the relativity 
 of the object to the subject, or rather the particular relation 
 in which one noumenal Being stands to another in feeling, 
 intelligence, or will ; whilst the final cause of emotion is 
 the fulfilment, or satisfaction of Being, which is the only 
 conceivable raison d'etre of creation, and the only sufficient 
 reason that can rationally be conceived to account for the 
 existence of finite Beings, and for the submission of them to 
 such dire vicissitudes by an Infinitely wise and good Creator. 
 This, of course, refers only to self-conscious, or rational 
 creatures. The lower animal not being self-conscious here, 
 has no unsatisfied Ideal of a better life to be fulfilled hereafter. 
 
io8 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 As all human knowledge is relative to the individual's repre- 
 sentations of the modifications of his Being in feeling, 
 intelligence, and will, there is nothing disheartening in 
 the fact that our belief in God is a rational inference from, or 
 implication of, reflective thought. Just as it is only through 
 our five senses that we can image a natural object of 
 perception, so it is only through reflective introspection, 
 or apperception, that we believe in the existence of our own 
 spirit apart from its deciduous organism. The scientific 
 assumption of causality necessitates alike the one and 
 the other conclusion ; but the source of the idea of causality 
 is our own physical, as well as noumenal, Being. The instru- 
 ment of creation is the creative imagination, as the created 
 imagination is the instrument of its representation. New 
 forms of the imagination will no doubt be revealed to us 
 in another state of Being, but ontological representation 
 is of one and the same object. Asceticism, both in its 
 Oriental and Western forms, has always aimed at self- 
 extinction, or self-suppression ; whereas Being has a trinity 
 of aspects which have all to be brought to bear and evolved 
 continuously. 
 
 "To the preference and desire of private happiness by 
 all Beings nothing more is requisite than that they 
 should know what happiness is, or consists in." Whilst 
 they are ignorant of this, their striving is vague and sub- 
 conscious. 
 
 Self-actualization is what every intelligent Being really 
 requires. This at once proves the immorality of slavery 
 in the case alike of man and woman. 
 
 To speak of art for art's sake, or knowledge for know- 
 ledge's sake, or even of morality for morality's sake, is as 
 sounding brass or tinkling cymbals, conveying no motive 
 or melody ; but, like disassociated notes, meaningless. Art, 
 the product of feeling and imagination, is for joy of Being ; 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 109 
 
 science is for the understanding of Being; and morality is 
 for the essential fulfilment of Being. 
 
 Knowledge is self-regarding, sympathetic, and teleological, 
 or deontological. Desires arising out of instincts essential 
 in the nature, and to the conservation of Being, we de- 
 nominate passions. "La fin de I'etre est en raison de son 
 commencement? Hence the culture doctrine of Goethe. Real 
 self-culture emphatically comprehends the sense of our rela- 
 tivity to our fellows and to the Supreme Being. 
 
 But although the feelings of faith, love, and hope spring 
 spontaneously in the human breast, they must be con- 
 sciously and steadily associated in action, until the reflec- 
 tive principle of sufficient reason is habitually brought to 
 bear upon our every thought, and word, and deed. It 
 must always be remembered that social welfare implies 
 individual welfare. One of the Italian words for love is 
 voler bene. Such is the love of the parent for the child, 
 and such appears to us to be the relation in which the 
 All -Father stands to His rational, or self-conscious, and 
 consequently, God-conscious offspring. Friendship is a 
 faint and partial approximation to the love of counter- 
 parts for each other, or true love, which is all-embracing, 
 comprehending the whole nature of the united pair. Before 
 the affinity of souls for each other, the ties of blood sink 
 into insignificance in a Christian, or in any country that 
 is not a survival of barbarism, such as Japan, India, and 
 Turkey, and other Mahomedan countries. Maarten Maar- 
 tens says : " There may be two social laws for high and 
 humble, two civil laws for rich and poor; but there are no 
 two laws of right and wrong with the Judge of all the 
 earth." The laws of mind, or of mental representation, 
 avenge the neglect of them by making the untruthful man 
 incapable of faith, the unloving unbeloved, and the malig- 
 nant incapable of hoping in the goodness of his Creator. 
 
no Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 It is by making a man's higher feelings stronger, not by 
 silencing them, that we really increase man's knowledge ; 
 for feeling is the motor of action : " 'Tis life of which 
 our nerves are scant." Reason exhibits the relations in 
 which objects stand to the subject, the observation of 
 realization of these being the efficient causes, or means to 
 the end, of the conservation of the integrity of Being, 
 which lapses, or falls back into latency, when the feelings 
 stagnate ; nay, more, arrested evolution brings degeneration. 
 We only call those actions reasonable which are really 
 effectual to the promotion of the true ends of life; for 
 no vicious act, however much it may conduce to the 
 attainment of some, or other, of the minor ends of life, is 
 worthy of the term reasonable if it be contradictory of 
 that end to which all this passing show is subsidiary, viz., 
 to the evolution of the moral sense, and the knowledge 
 of the science of the Best. Of course the name of reason 
 may be taken in vain, as Madame Roland said of liberty, 
 <: Oh ! Libert6, que de crimes ont etc* commis dans ton 
 nom sacre* ! " Thus in France, un mariage de raison signifies 
 a marriage devoid of love, whereas love is the only sufficient 
 reason for marriage. The empirical investigation of given 
 thought shows that it is causal relations which condition 
 consciousness of thought ; but they must be vera causa, 
 not passing external conditions, physical, or conventional. 
 " It is surely impossible to appear with, or as something, 
 which one in no sense has or is"* Yet the art of ' make- 
 believe' is carried to such perfection in society that this 
 can scarcely be regarded as axiomatic. 
 
 Connections, or relations, are taught us by experience, 
 observation and experiment Through memory of sense- 
 impressions we can mentally repeat them, and combine 
 them differently ; but we must always be dealing with our 
 
 * BRADLEY. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 1 1 1 
 
 old acquired material. Hence there is logic to be observed 
 in works of the imagination. Man is only an adapter, or 
 readjuster not a Creator, hence his limited comprehension 
 of the Creator. Man's sense of his physical organization, 
 or body, which is a part of extension, is the point through 
 which he stands in relation to the physical, or extended 
 whole. But excepting as sensitive, the rest of man's 
 psychical -nature remains aloof from the physical universe, 
 of which a man, deficient in one or more of the senses, can 
 have but a very imperfect idea : yet he may be a truly human 
 Being capable of conceiving the essential attributes of 
 man and God. But the imperfect is not the wholly unreal. 
 "Every distinct partial aspect within a whole is possessed 
 by that whole, but they cannot each alike be said to 
 qualify the whole directly and simply."* 
 
 As I have stated in the Introduction, the Ideals of Reason 
 are three, answering to the- attributes of Being. Truth 
 is the Ideal form of reality, loveliness is the Ideal form 
 of harmony, and goodness is the Ideal form of self- 
 determined action. Goodness comprises justice, or the 
 sense of reciprocity and relativity to the end expected 
 of us by our Creator. From our possession of certain 
 faculties, we naturally assume that opportunities for their 
 exercise will be given. "Wait thou the Lord's leisure," 
 sang David. "Be strong, and He shall establish thy 
 heart." 
 
 Given the natural appetite of hunger, it would seem 
 unnatural, and what we call terrible, if no food should be 
 discoverable or attainable. How much more terrible does 
 it seem when the wants of the spirit are left unfulfilled, 
 and their satisfaction seems unattainable ! But as God can 
 wait, because He is eternal, so also does man wait for true 
 life beyond the grave. Correlated with the duty of self- 
 
 * BRADLEY. 
 
1 1 2 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 conservation is the right of self-defence, even to the death. 
 Were not this also admitted, it would be farcical to make 
 a duty of the first, for it would simply be impossible. When 
 men leave off being unjust, murderous, and treacherous, no 
 one will want to subject another to death or imprisonment ; 
 for man is naturally sociable, taking great pleasure in the 
 society of kindly people. But even war is not held to be 
 necessarily malignant, but simply self-protective, or for the 
 purpose of preventing malignant action. Integrity, by the 
 term, means wholeness of being, involving the normal play 
 of the association and equilibrium of the attributes of Being. 
 Without the exercise of intelligence, emotion is wild-fire, 
 not a steady, holy, spiritual flame; and without emotional 
 life, intelligence has nothing but the sensuous to work upon, 
 and the real causality of noumenal, or spiritual Being, is 
 unapparent, and the will, instead of being the seat of the 
 moral sense, becomes "a ruinous force." Unless emotion, 
 intellect, and volition act together in the unity of Being, 
 the moral sense is turned into the sense of expediency, or 
 of conventionality, under which the eleventh commandment 
 is said to be : " Never be found out." It is reflective sense- 
 transcending reason that is the source of the spiritual 
 postulate of responsibility to Deity, to become, or to be, 
 what He constituted us to be : true, loving, good, or obedient 
 to the order of reason, which is the moral law. The very 
 idea of a benevolent Creator has its chief source here; and 
 our own sense of obligation to be true to Divinely-ordained 
 emotion, intellection, and deliberate volition for the Good 
 for Being as such, is, as it were, a hostage for the goodness of 
 God towards us. 
 
 Reflective self-consciousness, and our power of inference, 
 or of drawing conclusions therefrom, regarding the universe, 
 ourselves, and our Creator, is not to be classed with the 
 slyness of the fox, or the cleverness of the monkey, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 113 
 
 making use of reason, as a cat's paw, to draw the chestnuts 
 out of the fire, and simulating the real order of reason. 
 
 Meditation on the Ideal of Being, is the true ladder 
 of Jacob, up and down which, the eye of Faith sees 
 the angels ascending and descending in constant com- 
 munication with the Great White Throne. Surely the 
 beloved and the good, who have gone before us, may 
 appear to us in such a light, which may in some way 
 explain the widespread prevalence of ancestor-worship. 
 
 Kant spoke of "probing more deeply the nature of 
 reason." We must begin with the fundamental beliefs of 
 common sense, with which, philosophy cannot be at variance. 
 These are ascertainable only through reflective introspective 
 observation, and analysis. Self -observation, faithful and 
 patient, is of the essence of empirical psychology, as self- 
 examination is of Christian progress. 
 
 Sensations must be carefully distinguished from the per- 
 ceptions which they suggest. What we mean by perception, 
 is the intuitive cognition of there being a sufficient, or 
 adequate cause for every sensation sensation being but a 
 sign, or indication, of its presence in activity. If we receive 
 a blow on the face, we may not perceive the hand of the 
 person who inflicted it, but the emotion of anger that it 
 arouses in us, refers to the personality from whom the 
 injury or insult to us proceeds ; for cognizing, as we do, 
 that if we struck such a blow ourselves, it would be due 
 to the passing hate of anger, or to steady want of bene- 
 volence towards a person, we ^-cognize the demonstration 
 of ill-feeling in such an attack from another. Hence, when 
 causality was more imperfectly understood, every pain, 
 ache, or trouble, was supposed to befal poor mortals, 
 because of the anger of some deity ; but we have gradually 
 learnt to see that physical conditions must not be con- 
 founded with psychical facts, the former being greatly out of 
 
 I 
 
H4 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 our own control, whereas obedience to reason, or con- 
 science, is voluntary, and from it we are learning more 
 and more, to see the bearing of our sufferings on our 
 spiritual evolution. 
 
 Perception is a psycho-physical process. Only the image 
 of a physical thing, like the image on the retina, has to 
 become present to the mind through the play of the 
 nervous system, and from it we infer the idea, or draw 
 the conclusion, that an intelligent purposive cause for a 
 sensible impression exists outside the imaginative mind, 
 corresponding with the image produced on us. Reflective 
 apperceptive consciousness affirms the existence of a per- 
 manent identical subject of the changing states of sensitive, 
 imaginative excitation, and of the accompanying passion 
 or emotion. But in reflective self-consciousness, apper- 
 ception is of the sense-transcending Ego, to whom, alone 
 in the sensitive creation, belongs the moral sense, or practical 
 conviction, that action must be for the Good, or Best, for 
 rational self-conscious Being as such, seeing that in it is 
 the crown, or culmination of creation : the lower animals, 
 and even the physical world, having been in many ways 
 submitted to man's domination. 
 
 But man himself is in part dependent upon woman, 
 firstly, for the possibility of being born at all ; and 
 secondly, because she is the correlate or complement of 
 his Being, conditioning his living rightly and happily. But 
 through the prevalence of might over right, man originally 
 supposed himself to be bound to include woman under his 
 absolute dominion. But this savage phase of thought is 
 gradually making way for a better and more spiritual one. 
 The Hindu logic lays a special stress upon the knowledge 
 of a relation between the subject and the object as the 
 indispensable psychological source of inference. From the 
 knowledge of the normal co- existence of two attributes, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 1 1 5 
 
 we infer one from another. "Negation is always correlated 
 with a positive affirmation." There is no such conception 
 as the absolute existence of negation. Negation is simply 
 a privative term. There is certainly evidence of a negative, 
 as well as a positive kind. Thus pain, want, and involuntary 
 dissatisfaction, testify to the existence within us of an Ideal 
 standard of life and Being, which reason prompts us to 
 realize. -But had we no positive experience of good health, 
 wealth, and joy of life, we should be at a loss to understand 
 our sense of dissatisfaction, at the absence of these impor- 
 tant conditions of a right estimate of life. Is not the 
 question frequently asked : " Is life worth living ? " 
 
 The activity of the internal sense, or mind, is conditioned, 
 not caused, by the play of the sensory, cerebral, and motor 
 nerves. It is therefore liable, like the external senses, to 
 physiological disturbance, just as when a piano is out of 
 tune, it cannot render either the harmonies or melodies of 
 the composer. Thus the diseased and disordered brain 
 deflects our sensation and imagination, and makes our 
 mental representations of things and persons distorted and 
 discordant, not answering true to the external stimuli. The 
 absent seems present, the present absent, and so forth ; in 
 the worn-out cerebral system of the very aged it not only 
 fails to assimilate fresh sensations, but it lets fall also the 
 logical sequence of ideas. 
 
 Intuition of reason includes internal and external per- 
 ception, i.e., perception of the real external objects underlying 
 sensible phenomena, and also the apperception of the 
 internal Ego, which is called self-consciousness the true Ego 
 that reflects not only on its sensations and physical states, 
 but also on the phenomena of the mind in the abstract. 
 There is, moreover, what the Hindus call the inference 
 relation between the physical and the metaphysical Ego. 
 Thus physical marriage is, or should properly be, an 
 
1 1 6 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace of 
 true, or spiritual love ; hence it is assumed always to exist. 
 
 The recognition of similars is the ground of immediate 
 knowledge, or intuitive reference, whilst the substitution of 
 similars is the law of reflective speculative inference what 
 Shakspeare calls "the large discourse of reason." Those 
 persons who confound Ideality with Unreality should bear 
 in mind that not only is our belief in the Absolute, or 
 Perfect Being, an Ideal, or reflective, but logically necessary 
 construction, but so is also our belief in the existence of 
 our own spirit, or mental personality, apart from the 
 physical conditionings of our life in time and place. 
 
 Our reflective conceptions are the results of the classified 
 and combined cerebral presentations with their accompany- 
 ing mental representations, which being taken together, 
 constitute the datum for argument or reasoning concerning 
 the questions : " Whence do we come ? " and " Whither do 
 we go?" and "To whom are we rendered accountable by 
 the categorical imperative of duty, or the internal sense of 
 responsibility, for good-will and right action ? " 
 
 The a priori of metaphysic and logic must not be con- 
 founded with the mixed idiosyncrasies and hereditary 
 tendencies of a single individual, who may be morbid, or 
 diseased. The particular judgment of each individual, if 
 he be capable of argument at all, always refers to his own 
 particular feelings and thoughts, or to some local social 
 standard, that holds sway for the moment around him. 
 Axioms are abstract postulates from our normal discrimina- 
 tion of identity and difference; and through our reflective 
 conception of the identity of cause and effect, together with 
 the self-evident affirmation of ground and consequent 
 datum and inference, we unhesitatingly formulate them. 
 
 Of course a cause may not be exhaustively represented 
 in an effect, any more than a substance is exhaustively 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 1 1 7 
 
 represented by one of its attributes ; but the connection 
 between an effect and its cause remains, as does that of the 
 attribute with its substance, patent to all intelligences. All 
 the attributes of Being are self- consistent, neither incom- 
 patible with, nor contradictory of the other. The laws of 
 thought are synthetically endorsed in reflective conscious- 
 ness, and applied in the abstract to the construction of 
 general.propositions of incontrovertible veracity, eliminating 
 merely physiological or pathological conditions of belief. 
 Only thus considered are they norms for all thinking. 
 
 When we use the word make, we mean giving to things 
 a nature that fulfils a purpose. Now the making of man 
 and woman is not only related to the physical purpose of 
 procreation, but also to the mental purpose of spiritual 
 perfectioning through the correction of individual, or morbid, 
 mental idiosyncrasies by the closest of all unions with a 
 spiritual affinity, or chosen psychical counterpart, which 
 complements individual shortcomings, and thus prevents a 
 one-sided view of life being presented to the moral judg- 
 ment. But it must be remembered that "it is through one 
 point only that a parallel can be drawn to a given straight 
 line" so there can be no plurality of counterparts. Hence 
 only true love is the ever-new love " in Zeit und Ewigkeit." 
 Infidelity is physical of the earth, earthy. Jealousy is a 
 part of our animality. Causation in its primary, or 
 sufficient sense, is what we attribute to the acts of a self- 
 conscious, self-determining, noumenal, or intelligent Being. 
 Material force is automatic, mechanical. We have nothing 
 in our language which corresponds to the French ex- 
 pression, "se rendre raison." The Englishman says "I 
 understand"; but if asked to define what that means, would 
 be at a loss to do so ; whereas to say " I must render myself 
 a reason for a judgment, or self-determination," is to assert 
 one's knowledge of right, or duty, as a rational Being. 
 
n8 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Both causal and mechanical relations condition the occur- 
 rence of thought. The laws of contradiction and excluded 
 middle, are based on the impossibility, which we feel, of 
 simultaneously affirming two contradictory propositions, the 
 normal play of the cerebro-nervous system standing like 
 a lion in the way. Yet as we find that two positively- 
 magnetized ends of two steel bars placed in opposition, and 
 in close contact with each other, lose their virtue : so a mind, 
 in which the arbitrary associations of habit have taken the 
 place of the real mental association of the fundamental 
 ideas of reason, ceases to require a real cause, sufficient, 
 efficient, or final, for whatever happens. A foregone con- 
 clusion, or a blindly -endorsed dogma ousting the normal 
 exercise of reason, may then be accepted as a demonstrated 
 truth of reason : the accidental juxtaposition of two mental 
 representations being mistaken for the essential causal 
 relativity of ideas. Thus rational Beings are no longer 
 supposed to act autonomously for the Good for, or for the 
 conservation of, the integrity of Being, but only with the 
 fantastic purpose of perennial self-sacrifice, either as a sop 
 to the Cerberus of fetish fate, or to play Providence to 
 others, as if the Supreme Being were incompetent. Self- 
 suppression and self-mutilation are thus supposed to be more 
 pleasing to God than fidelity to truth and honesty. I ask, can 
 what is contradictory of the natural grounds of correct belief, 
 and of the laws of the human understanding, be rationally 
 supposed to be agreeable to our Creator? "If any man 
 will do His will " (i.e., obey God's laws) " he shall know of 
 the doctrine," said Jesus. Ascetic fanaticism, as it is 
 contrary to nature and reason, cannot be said to be His 
 will or law. 
 
 The PERSON is the ultimate end and unit. The social 
 state should be the medium of the ethical life of the individual, 
 "The question of ethics," says Professor Seth, "is this : What 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 119 
 
 is the true, normal, or typical form of human selfhood f or 
 what is man's chief end ? " The merely negative and highly 
 indefinite principle of self-denial has no right to call itself 
 an ethic of reason, seeing that self-realization, or self- 
 actualization, according to the Ideal standard of reflective 
 reason and conscience, is the categorical imperative of duty. 
 To be perfect does not mean to be irrational. Personality, 
 with its sensibility, emotion, spontaneous intelligence of 
 identity and difference, and reflective intuition of causality, 
 sufficient, efficient, and final, is the subject-object of out 
 responsibility, and of the penalties as well as the rewards 
 of the moral law. The final compensating dual personality 
 effected through the physical and spiritual marriage of " true 
 souls" both facilitates our spiritual evolution, and is the one 
 haven of rest, peace, and joy permitted here below to 
 tempest-driven souls this is the one actual hostage of our 
 future blessedness. " True to the kindred points of Heaven 
 and home" must the soul be that truly lives. 
 
 Neither in logic, or mathematics, do we get beyond 
 reflective self-consciousness, or the knowledge deducible 
 from reflective self-observation, from which alone springs 
 the obedience mentioned in Hosea as preferred by the 
 Creator to sacrifice. , 
 
 Only through the rational conception of the Fatherhood 
 of God have we experiential data for our judgments con- 
 cerning His attitude towards His spiritual offspring. "If 
 your son ask for bread, will ye give him a stone ? " asked 
 Jesus. A fortiori, how much less shall the Heavenly Father 
 deny the spiritual satisfaction, which He has made us crave 
 of Him so earnestly, to those that ask of Him, for man 
 cannot live by bread alone. 
 
 The old-fashioned idea that to unite two persons in 
 marriage is to ensure their being fond of each other, is 
 contradicted by the incessant exhibition of the fact that 
 
I2O Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 repulsion intensifies into hate under the influence of a 
 continually irritating presence upon the principle of accumu- 
 lation. Any theory which leaves out of account the 
 existence, somehow and somewhere, of forethought and 
 purpose in Nature, does not fail to land those who propound 
 it in self-contradictions. If reason has no standard in real, 
 or positively known existing Being, what ideas of com- 
 parative and sense-transcendent Being could we have ? 
 How could we ever have arrived at the last link in 
 ratiocination, by which we conceive faith, love, and hope 
 in an Absolute, or Perfect Being ; for, according to Plato, 
 and, indeed, according to Christ, a high and perfect human 
 love leads to the realization of Divine love ? 
 
 When mental representations, or thoughts, are clearly seen 
 to represent the modifications of our own Being in feeling, 
 intelligence, and will, either through the influence of external 
 circumstances, or through our own exercise of reflective 
 reason, together with the fresh conclusions we draw from 
 our own fresh experiences, then we shall understand what 
 we think, and how we think, and why we think so and 
 so, instead of forming our judgments haphazard ; and so 
 reflective consciousness will be seen to be as authentically God- 
 given as animal instinct. 
 
 " The sense of duty unfolds with the unfolding of the reason. 
 In making us accountable Beings, it brings us into the moral 
 Kingdom of God'' The little child has it in the simple 
 form of feeling bound to do what it is bidden to do by 
 those to whom it looks for protection and guidance, not to 
 mention reward and punishment the great stimuli also 
 employed with the lower animals. 
 
 The adolescent exhibits it in obedience to general rules 
 of conduct admitted in his country and class of society to 
 be right, or proper. Should he be of a reflective disposition, 
 he manifests his conscientiousness by applying to books, or 
 
Rational, or Scientific ', Ideal of Morality 121 
 
 to accepted literary authorities, for counsel where his own 
 judgment fails to decide what is best in thought, word, or 
 deed. Beyond this, perhaps only the few (quei pochi} ever 
 advance at any period of their earthly career. Only the 
 person in whom some emotion, or some scientific tendency, 
 is so strong as to amount to genius, ventures to pioneer 
 alone, through blame and contradiction, into the untrodden 
 wildernesses of thought. As the Knights of King Arthur 
 went on the quest of the Holy Grail, so do such fine spirits 
 dare, as Shelley dared, at all costs to press through the 
 jungles and morasses of speculation, so as to throw wide 
 the gates of the Ideal to their kind. Without this yearning 
 after the Ideals of truth, harmony or beauty, and goodness, 
 of the few some in the quiet seclusion of the study, others 
 " in the lost battle, borne down by the flying," how could pro- 
 gress take place? Again, great physical disfigurement and 
 bodily suffering have driven poets, like Byron, Leopardi, and 
 Heine, into clinging more firmly and desperately to the Ideal. 
 
 Heine's cynicism is redeemed by touches of exquisite 
 pathos ; the author of Don Juan was nevertheless a true, f 
 poet ; Leopardi wrote two magnificent poems, one on true 
 love, entitled " II pensiero dominante," and another called 
 " II risorgimento." 
 
 Man is, indeed, essentially subject to the law of evolution, 
 which may be formulated with the addition that no one can 
 stand still on one spot ; either he develops, or else he 
 retrogrades through the want of exercise of his spiritual, as 
 well as of his physical faculties. In the Christian parable 
 of the Seven Talents, we know it is said of the man who 
 had not employed his one talent, " Even that which he hath 
 shall be taken away from him." 
 
 Even the courtly Goethe says, " He alone knows the 
 Heavenly Powers who has eaten his bread in tears"; for 
 nothing real is found by those who never go on the quest of 
 
122 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 the Ideal, and make no effort to attain to it. It is the 
 eternal effort of man to compass that which his instinctive 
 tendency in action teaches him to be the designed end, or 
 purpose, of his creation, to which all progress, or evolution, is 
 to be attributed. 
 
 Idealism is the science of the relativity of human percep- 
 tion and conception to the- idealizing thinking subject. With- 
 out our mental representations of the modifications of our 
 own Being, the thing itself would remain unknowable by us. 
 Poetic Idealism, or the superlative concept of the Best, and 
 so of the "ought to be" in conduct, relates primarily, and 
 ultimately, to perfection of real Being. To this the ideals of 
 the imagination are subsidiary, or secondary. Unhappiness 
 implies the sense of want, or severance. It has thus been 
 truly said that "le besoin d'aimer est la nostalgic du bon- 
 heur"; for love given and received is the most delightful 
 state of mind we can possibly realize. Self -reverence, 
 sympathy for kind, and grateful adoration of our Creator, all 
 find their satisfaction here, and these are the joy -givers, 
 without which there is no true realization of God through 
 grateful affection, moral approbation, and reverent rejoicing 
 worship. Gratitude and obedience are the truest praise, 
 and the only form of it one can rationally regard as accept- 
 able to the Self-existent, Self-Sufficient, Perfect One, Who 
 having no rival in the Absoluteness of His Being, can alone 
 stand without being reassured by others concerning His 
 Almightiness, His wisdom, and His goodness. 
 
 Although all creatures are relative to the Absolute, 
 Creative One, yet no one can hold the place of the 
 beloved alter ego, or complemental half of oneself: for 
 as Theodore Parker, the American divine, said, "Heavenly 
 love cannot take the place of human love, any more than 
 human love can be substituted for Divine love." To 
 renounce the Ideal desire of happiness, and to seek peace 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 123 
 
 in its stead, is folly, for perfect peace is only the result of 
 perfect happiness. Neither fatalistic, nor Christian resigna- 
 tion is synonymous with the peace of real happiness. 
 " Dove il desio finisce," says Dante there is the third 
 Heaven of perfected existence, of perfect love, representing 
 both faith and hope. Hope and fear are both called the 
 torturers by Shelley ; and without perfect love, they certainly 
 are so. Metaphysic is the systematization of the principles 
 of Being and Knowing. It is the science of sciences. In 
 it only are found the scientific bases of morality. They have 
 to be reasoned out from the reflective synthesis of feeling, 
 intelligence, and will. But as most people fly from re- 
 flection, they express grave doubts of the existence of such 
 a science. The desire for Well-Being, or for the spiritual 
 satisfaction of our Being, which is what is meant by 
 happiness, presents itself to our normal experience so as 
 to hold its place in the logical understanding. 
 
 Kant bases the moral law on the need of reason to keep 
 free from self-contradiction^ which in spite of its affording us 
 the enjoyment of the sense of the ridiculous, is as painful to 
 our nervous system as to our reflective reason. The egoistic 
 and the altruistic impulses, together with their combination 
 in action for the Best for Being as such, are integrated in 
 human nature by the moral sense, or sense of the fulfilment 
 of the Creator's law in both cases, and do not really contra- 
 dict each other, or the duty of Divine adoration. On the 
 contrary, self-love, social, and Divine, are the three forms 
 of love that have to be actualized before we can have a 
 conception of Ideal blessedness. Although, of course, 
 Divine love is first in dignity, it does not come first in 
 the order of natural consciousness, but is evolved from the 
 intellectual sense of egoity, and the affectionate sense of 
 sympathy with kind, and from the practical intuition of 
 deontology, or of duty to our Creator. 
 
1 24 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Plato held that a soul healthily constituted, and happily 
 acting out its proper destination (which depends on tem- 
 perament and the proportion of its component parts), is 
 virtuous, whether its harmony be the result of native aptitude, 
 or of strenuous training and reflection. But however favour- 
 ably conditioned by birth and circumstances a man may 
 be, only his own conscious efforts can rnake him a really 
 conscientious, and, therefore, a really good and happy man. 
 Hence the statement that a man must work out his own 
 salvation is a strictly rational one ; also that no man can 
 save another's soul. To confound this self-consciousness 
 with selfishness is simply the absurd. Where would then 
 be the wisdom of the injunction on the temple of Delphi : 
 " Know thyself " ? and what would become of the Stoic and 
 Christian doctrine of self-examination ? How can we be of 
 use to others if we are ourselves ignorant and prejudiced ? 
 The aristocrat despises the canaille for its want of self-respect, 
 although he and his class are the cause of it ; and even the 
 democrat admires the courageous self-assertion of the 
 aristocrat. Witness Emerson's eulogy of it in one of his 
 latest essays : Above all be a true man, or woman, for that 
 is where our duty lies. Even our Creator has not made of 
 us His slaves. " Give me thy heart, my son," we find 
 written in the Book of Ecclesiastes. 
 
 Is it as a beggar through self-neglect that we are likely 
 to be loved, or sought after, or that we can profit others ? 
 Only in self-love, social, and Divine, lie the springs of rational 
 action and of poetic and religious aspiration ; so in reflection 
 on the fundamental principles of reason, or the normal laws 
 of thought, or mental representation, we find a sufficient 
 reason for faith in their fruition and fulfilment. 
 
 Whilst the life of the lower animals simply answers to 
 the sensory perception of images relating only to their own 
 life, the life of the human, self-conscious, or apperceptive 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 125 
 
 person being spiritual, can enter into the counsels and designs 
 of the Father of spirits, as deep unto deep, one spirit answer- 
 ing to another in sympathetic comprehension of the scheme 
 of evolution, and ultimate redemption from ignorance and 
 sin. It is from our own yearning for strength and guidance, 
 from our sense of dependence on our Creator for all we are 
 and all we have, that we arrive at the conception of an 
 Absolute, All-powerful, All-wise, and All-Benevolent Being, 
 the continual Protector, Preserver, and Benefactor of all 
 rational Beings. The supreme reality of this intuition is 
 developed by our constant search to understand His 
 Providence, z>., to justify it to our reason. "I drew 
 them with cords of a man, with bands of love " 
 (Hosea xi. 4). It is through the fact that self-impersona- 
 tion and Ideal realization are of the very nature of 
 intelligent Being, that we have a ground for judgment 
 regarding right or wrong in self-determination and in action. 
 According to the logical postulate, that what is true of a 
 thing is true of its like, we feel bound to do unto others 
 as we would be done by. Our sense of duty consists 
 essentially in action in accordance with the subjectively- 
 realized Ideal nature of Being : Vir bonus is a man of good- 
 will. Self-reverence, social regard, and the sense of duty 
 to God, are the fruits of reflective reason. 
 
 All knowledge is, in the last resort, the sense of the relation 
 of the non-ego, or objective world, to the combined faculties 
 of human comprehension, which comprises emotion, intel- 
 lection, connate tendency, and reflective volition, from which 
 all inference, or logical conclusion, is derived. 
 
 Our sense-transcending conceptions are results of our 
 emotional, intellectual, and moral nature, combined in 
 the Self taken as a whole of Being. Only thus can we 
 say : " I logically conclude." As it is in the union of the 
 attributes of Being that individuality, as personality, lies, 
 
126 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 so it is in the equilibrium of these attributes that abstract 
 morality lies, of which Egoity, or self-respect, Altruity, or 
 sympathy for others, and Deontology, or the sense of the 
 claim of our Creator to our adoration and obedience to His 
 will, are the components ; and as we are all children of the 
 same Heavenly Father, love, human and Divine, becomes 
 the fulfilment of the moral law, and the practical exhibition, 
 or expression of morality. 
 
 To the moralist belongs the enforcement of the necessity 
 of goodness, or benevolence, as the only Tightness, or 
 righteousness; for without it the fulfilment of the Divine 
 purpose, or end, in the creation of rational Being, which 
 is the perfection of Being, or beatitude, is, as was seen by 
 the Greeks of old, unattainable. This does not prevent 
 that to the end of our evolution lies the path of sorrow, 
 and that path alone leads to the land where sorrow is 
 unknown. 
 
 Still it is of the utmost importance that man should 
 "taste and see" through the bliss which God has prepared 
 for him, even here, in the satisfaction of the human heart, 
 that He is indeed a loving Father, and not merely a just 
 Judge. Any person who has consciously made life a loath- 
 ing to another is answerable to God for the frustration of 
 His purpose in the creation of that person, as well as for 
 the voluntary abuse of his own nature. Little as we may 
 often like it, mixed experiences are absolutely necessary for 
 the evolution of faith, love, and hope the Divine trichord 
 of Being, without which no place could be Heaven. With- 
 out love the man of science becomes a " dry as dust " ; 
 without morality, the artist drifts into degrading sensuality 
 which leads to the virtual extinction of his spiritual nature ; 
 and without faith in the goodness of God, the moralist 
 becomes a cruel pedagogue, or a torturing inquisitor, want- 
 ing in the large discourse of reason, and the clear discernment 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 127 
 
 of the science of the "End," which is the time-honoured 
 name for ethic. 
 
 Rational self-determination, or pure reflective volition, 
 hinges on the abstract principle of sufficient reason, which 
 must be clearly comprehended and endorsed before it can 
 be acted upon. It is man's faculty of abstract ideation 
 or generalization of the principles of thought derived from 
 the attributes of Being, that distinguishes his human nature 
 from merely animal nature. When Jesus said, "Be ye 
 perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect," it was not 
 of the perfection of the body that He spoke, but of that 
 of the will. For of what use are power and intelligence, 
 without the beneficent activity which is the expression of 
 them ; and without the transcendental, or sense-transcending 
 religious sense, which knits us to the All-Father and to a 
 Heavenly home, to which all our hymns of praise and 
 jubilation point ? For certainly, merely to fall piecemeal into 
 the grave, weighed down with sorrow and physical pain, are 
 not rational prompters of religious devotional aspiration. 
 
 The Word of God is the word of reason. Language is 
 but the physical expression of thought and reasoning. He 
 Who implanted in us love, intelligence of causality, and 
 good-will, or benevolence, also gave us the power of reflec- 
 tion on these, and the instinct to reason therefrom. And 
 studiously has the human mind to be conned, comparing 
 actual and past experiences, individuals, and races, for 
 indications of what is to be done, and what is to be left 
 undone. Without the spiritual hope of immortality, the 
 vanity of passing things would not be revealed to us, any 
 more than the true nature of God. 
 
 Once deprive man of the Ideal of the ultimately to be 
 fulfilled Good, and Best for Being, he would sink down to 
 a lower level, and come to be satisfied, like the beasts of 
 the field, with mere eating and drinking and struggling for 
 
128 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 the largest share of worldly prizes. Thus, instead of being 
 only a " little lower than the angels," he would become 
 only a little higher than the anthropoid ape. But higher 
 Ideals demand for their perfect fulfilment a better world 
 than this ; therefore we believe ourselves immortal. 
 
 As the law of life is that of evolution, the child, like 
 the savage, is wanting in the development of the faculties 
 that constitute them responsible human Beings ; still, in 
 spite of their shortcomings in reason, children have the 
 germ of reflective, as well as of spontaneous, reason in them 
 witness their amenability to the rules of rightness, or 
 goodness. The law of the Good for Being, and our sense 
 of our responsibility to fulfil it, is that which underlies all 
 civil law, and gives it validity ; for the motive, and the end 
 of action, are one ; were we indifferent to suffering, malevo- 
 lence might reign unchallenged. 
 
 Reflection, or speculative reason, inquires into what is 
 the truly Best for Being, so that its standard becomes 
 higher and higher with the evolution of the race or races. 
 In reflection, the mere animal tendency to self-preserva- 
 tion takes the form of obligation to preserve the essential 
 integrity of Being, under the principle of sufficient reason 
 in feeling, in thought, and in volition, or action. The 
 obedience of the child to its parents becomes later on the 
 sense of duty to keep the moral law, or order of God. 
 
 This sense of obligation in its threefold aspect is summed 
 up in the words : " Whether ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever 
 ye do, do all to the glory of God," i.e., in everything be 
 mindful of the rational nature with which God has en- 
 dowed you. It is in the faculty of reflection that man 
 is seen to be gifted with free-will, or reflective freedom of 
 choice between the right and the wrong, i.e., the rational, 
 and the irrational course of action in all personal, social 
 self-determination. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 129 
 
 Only reflective reason represents the whole of Being, 
 out of which rights and duties arise. As we protect our 
 face, arms, and body from harm, so must we protect our 
 feelings, intellect, and will from deterioration, i.e., aberra- 
 tion from the abstract Ideal of morality. 
 
 An act, or exercise of individual reason, is always pre- 
 supposed in whatever is done, even to the resolution of 
 surrendering one's moral responsibility (if such a thing could 
 be done) into the hands of a priest, or father-confessor. 
 
 It is through our own power of self-determination or 
 will, that our Creator has enabled us to co-operate willingly 
 with His will in the pursuit of our own welfare, and that 
 of our kind. Moreover, we have even been left free to do 
 evil, and work iniquity, so that we may learn from the 
 consequences of such actions how destructive they are to 
 our own real happiness and that of others. 
 
 The basis of morality is the fact that the morality of 
 each person hinges on his own voluntary self-determina- 
 tion according to reason, which should be enlightened by 
 the study of the universal experiences of the race ; for this 
 is pedagogic education given to the young in addition to 
 the education of daily experience. It is through getting 
 knowledge that we get understanding. The comparison 
 of past and present, of far and near, of the actual with 
 the Ideal, enables us to winnow our own particular ex- 
 periences, and thus separate the pure gold of reason from 
 the dross of animal and morbid pathology the wheat 
 from the chaff of life. The obverse of the moral sense or 
 the shuddering sense of imputability of evil, or wrong- 
 doing, is the sense of responsibility to act according to 
 reason, the neglect of which brings a sense of self-degrada- 
 tion, remorse. As we ourselves desire the Good or Best 
 for our own Being, so instinctive sympathy and reason 
 teach us that our similars, or neighbours, also feel the same 
 
 K 
 
130 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 need ; in furthering this, then, our duty of obedience to our 
 Creator lies ; for this is to carry out His will, or purpose, 
 in the creation of all rational Beings. The aim of all 
 our desires being happiness, or beatitude, indicates this to 
 be the Divine intention regarding us. If anyone can con- 
 scientiously declare that they desire Ill-Being for them- 
 selves, or those they love, let them spread this counsel of 
 perfection, and teach a new doctrine of the "End" to an 
 astonished world. If this were indeed truth to human 
 nature, why do we instinctively desire a penalty to be 
 inflicted on the person who maliciously hurts us, or one 
 we love ? Why do we also have a fearful looking for 
 judgment to come from our fellow creatures, when we 
 have ourselves injured them in word or deed ? To be 
 unjust is to disregard the relation in which we stand to 
 our fellow-creatures, and in so doing we ignore the Divine 
 order of things, and are false to our sense of duty to God. 
 Now responsibility, or duty, is only conceivable towards a 
 person, for it is necessarily the result of a reflective judg- 
 ment, which hinges upon self-conscious Being, and refers not 
 to arms or legs, sticks or stones, but to introspective self- 
 consciousness, and the recognition of similarity of some kind. 
 It is in reflective reason that the abiding distinction 
 between man and the lower animals consists. That morality 
 is the law of human life, is unmistakably evident from 
 the fact that each element of our nature is meant to 
 contribute to the enjoyment of life, and that the desire 
 of our desires is for a perfect life, one that shall satisfy 
 our logical sense both subjectively and objectively. There 
 may be some who will regard this as a shocking idea, 
 like the beadle in Oliver Twist, crying, " What ! more 
 gruel, Oliver, more water-gruel ! " As an altruist Oliver 
 would only have desired gruel for others. I can only say 
 that this must ultimately lead to our saying with the man 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 1 3 1 
 
 in Holy Writ : " I knew thee to be a hard man, reaping where 
 thou hast not sown," or in other words, requiring thank- 
 offerings for the gift of a hard and joyless life. 
 
 Rational action is action relative to, or corresponding with, 
 an acknowledged' standard of Being, and Epictetus compares 
 reason to a carpenter's rule, repeatedly saying : " Apply the 
 rule,.the measurer." 
 
 This standard is the Ideal of Being, from which all other 
 Ideals are reflectively arrived at. Sensation, and emotion, 
 and desire, and volition, are functions of Being that can be 
 differentiated, and separately considered. All our knowledge 
 is rationalized, or is relative to Being, for that which is out 
 of relation to our own Being, we can in no wise assimilate, 
 or understand, any more than our stomach can digest 
 stones, as the ostrich is said to do. 
 
 Hence, the superlative conception of Absolute, Supreme, 
 Infinite Being, seems more comprehensible to us, than is 
 the want of spirituality of Being in the lower animals. 
 
 " Science is man's rational view of God's action," says 
 Hinton, for it is based on the principles of causality, which 
 are the constituent elements of our understanding, and 
 which are, accordingly, recognizable by us in the order of 
 the external cosmos. Despair of good brings spiritual 
 death, which ensues from the inertia of desire and aspira- 
 tion. Without faith in Being, in its attributes of power, 
 wisdom, and goodness, there is no love, no life, no hope. 
 The shifting so-called love of the senses, leads to despair of 
 joy ; and who wants life hereafter, without joy ? Surely the 
 Buddhistic doctrine of annihilation would then be welcome. 
 
 Our comprehension is directly of our own actual, or 
 positive, Being, and mediately through the recognition 
 of similars, of the experiences of others. But when the 
 attributes of Being are not actualized in us, but remain 
 latent, or merely potential in us, we can neither realize 
 
132 Rational \ or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 faith, nor love, nor hope the substitution of similars in 
 this case, meaning weakness, ignorance, and malignity, or 
 cruelty, such as we find in the religion of the ancient 
 Mexicans ; and many other nations have had such con- 
 ceptions of their gods, or god. 
 
 Our mental representations being of life, without vital 
 presentations we cannot comprehend life. For in order to 
 comprehend anything, we must have it in us we must have 
 lived it. There is a living death, worse than that of the 
 body, viz., that of the spirit, when it is unnourished by love 
 and knowledge, and the benevolent will. When these are 
 wanting, as Swedenborg says: "1'ange en I'homme meurt 
 lentement." "Beware of a man who has been unkindly 
 treated as a child," said Bulwer Lytton. If, however, he 
 has had one brother of the soul, or sister spirit, he is saved 
 from scepticism, or the doubt of human and Divine good- 
 ness. Morality is not only the science of the end, but it 
 is also the categorical imperative of duty, to keep the law 
 of benevolence. Hence, Jesus comprised the whole of duty 
 in self-love, social, and Divine, when He said : " Thou shalt 
 love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all 
 thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength," 
 and "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." 
 
 Hence our own purpose, or final cause, in self-determination, 
 has been made to be the pursuit of the perfect life, in which 
 true joy consists ; such also must have obviously been the 
 purpose of the Author of our Being and the Giver of our 
 conscience. Judging from our own parental feelings, what 
 purpose more Divine can have prompted the creation of a 
 universe than the production of universal beatitude ? 
 
 There is nothing hard or arbitrary in requiring a creature 
 to act for the best for itself and others, in accordance with 
 its nature. The yoke of morality is not the yoke of a cruel 
 taskmaster laid upon us, but rather an inspired purpose 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 133 
 
 fitting us for the ways of pleasantness and the path of 
 peace. 
 
 The desire we have to realize the constituent elements and 
 essence of our Being shows what makes for our peace ; cer- 
 tainly it does not lie in the extinction of our nature. All that 
 our rational nature requires of us is truth to normal human 
 feeling, truth to intellect, which naturally seeks understanding, 
 and' truth to practical reason, or the tendency within us to 
 act in accordance with feeling, intelligence, and the will for 
 the Good for Being, as such, which therefore includes that 
 of our neighbour as well as our own, and this for God's sake 
 as well as our own sake. 
 
 The beatitude intuited, and desired by us as our Divinely- 
 ordained destiny, can only be conceived or realized by us 
 here below, by bearing patiently the mild yoke of reason 
 until that which is perfect shall come. As the happiness 
 of a child is not attained by disobedience to the discipline 
 required of it by kind parents, so also it is with us children 
 of a larger growth. Shakspeare and the Stoics were at one 
 upon the point that truth to the Ideals of human nature, 
 and primarily to our own nature, is what reason represents 
 to be goodness ; for the virtue of a thing lies in the exhibition 
 of its essence. The perfume which has lost its essence is good 
 for nothing. When virtue quits a man, nothing but a lower 
 animal or a devil remains. Perfection of Being, with its con- 
 comitant happiness, is the reflective science of the " End," and 
 affords the raison d'etre, or sufficient reason, for the creation 
 of finite, rational Beings, and for the existence of all things 
 subsidiary to their existence and their spiritual evolution. 
 
 To arrive at a valid conclusion, or inference, of reflective 
 reason, the balance must be preserved between the three 
 ultimate factors of thought. Introspective reflection is 
 the complement and corrector of spontaneous mental 
 representation. "Whilst no one of the three can wholly be 
 
134 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 explained away, any one of them may be so exaggerated 
 as to paralyze the moral influence of the others, and thus 
 distort the true conception of human life." Who would 
 propose the accomplishment of various athletic feats to a 
 man who had one side or even one limb paralyzed ? How, 
 then, can we expect a logical conclusion to be drawn from 
 the imperfect data furnished by one idiosyncratically deter- 
 mined personality? We may indeed limp about with one 
 leg, or do work with our hands when our legs are paralyzed ; 
 but the soul, or spirit, is not divisible like a material sub- 
 stance, although it may be considered under different phases, 
 or aspects. The intellectual requirement of the representation 
 of the three principles of causality, which are present in 
 Being under the notion of Personality and moral purpose 
 although it may compel us to the conception of a Supreme 
 Being, cannot be supposed to afford us an exhaustive con- 
 ception of a nature supra-generic. But knowledge, although 
 not exhaustive, may be, and to be knowledge at all, must 
 be real as far as it goes. Hence, to raise an altar to an 
 Unknown God is a contradiction ; for, although the Absolute 
 source of all related existence, recognizable by us through 
 the reason with which we are gifted, and which permeates 
 the whole creation, cannot be fully represented by us through 
 the logical principle of substitution of similars, yet know- 
 ledge through the recognition of similars, although imperfect, 
 is real, and absolutely trustworthy as -far as it goes: that is 
 to say, it is not to be contradicted without self-contradiction, 
 which is the unpardonable in logic, the reductio ad absurdum. 
 All external things or persons are knowable by us through 
 the relations in which they stand to us (*>., by their points 
 of similarity to us). Beyond these our real knowledge 
 cannot pass. The external cramming of knowledge only 
 results in parroting. Thus, when we say a man is the 
 creature of circumstances, we mean that he is developed 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 135 
 
 through, or according to, the different relations, and kinds 
 of relations in which he has stood to others in the course 
 of his life from his babyhood, individual and social progress 
 depending on the evolution through exercise of the under- 
 standing, through which interpretation of external nature 
 and circumstances takes place. 
 
 " Without the supremacy of the Divine principle of moral 
 order, which subsumes the physical order on which the 
 universe of change is presumed to depend, and on which 
 we repose in faith as the basis for thought and action, both 
 morality and natural science must be paralysed." And it 
 must never be lost sight of that moral order is compounded 
 of the essential attributes of Being, feeling, intelligence, 
 and will, or normal tendency in action for the Good for 
 Being. If either of these are distorted or deflected, -however 
 slightly, from the simplicity, or truth of nature or justice, 
 the compound motive of action must fail in integrity ; 
 that is to say, it could in no wise be laid down as 
 exhibiting a canon of action for human Beings as such, 
 and must fail to produce the sense of satisfaction and 
 delight in Being, which is the creative purpose. 
 
 Hume says : " A mental world, or universe, of ideas, 
 requires a Cause as much as does a material world, or 
 universe of objects." The existence of God is presupposed 
 tacitly in all self- consciousness. For this one to us one 
 positively-known spiritual Being, a Sufficient, or Intelligent, 
 Creator is rationally required, as also a Final Cause or 
 purpose relating to what Locke calls " the great concern- 
 ment of my happiness." 
 
 When we use the word Absolute Being, it is in opposition 
 to all the related finite Beings and existences, to which we 
 know no limit. Related and dependent Beings argue an 
 Absolute and Independent Source. The word God means 
 the Infinite Being, Whose existence forecloses all ulterior 
 
136 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 inquiry as to the cause of His existence. As the numeral 
 one expresses an ultimate conception, behind which we cannot 
 go, so the human mind itself, conditioning although not 
 causing our conceptions, we can no more pass its limits of 
 comprehension than we can get a nearer view of ourselves 
 by going behind the mirror that reflects us. Reason has 
 its starting-point as well as its acknowledged limitations in 
 our own Being. Man's sense of incompleteness arises out 
 of his intuition of Ideal Being for which he postulates a 
 really existing Prototype, on Whom he can absolutely 
 depend as All -Sufficient Cause, and Whose will furnishes 
 him with a sufficient reason for obedience to the moral law. 
 This is the essential analysis of the word God, which is a 
 necessary conception of our reflective reason, and therefore 
 as natural to man, as is his belief in an external world, as it 
 is given us by the senses. We believe in facts and axioms, 
 we have full faith, or trust in the goodness of a person. 
 
 " Man's science depends at every step upon inferences. 
 These inferences are permeated through and through with 
 metaphysical hypotheses, and they lead toward the hope 
 of a knowledge that must ever walk largely by faith. 
 They concern real Beings, in which changes, wholly out of 
 power to put themselves in evidence as mere phenomena, 
 are assumed to be taking place."* 
 
 A happy, harmonious, righteous, or God-serving universe 
 of self-conscious Beings is the supreme, rationally-conceived 
 Ideal of the goal of evolution. If anyone thinks he can 
 improve upon this, let him suggest an amendment of it to 
 the sincere and intelligent. As for the insincere, they have 
 no standard or test of truth. 
 
 A government that offered nothing but mental support 
 to its people, without care for their physical welfare, would 
 not be considered good; therefore contempt for external 
 
 * Philosophy of Mind. Professor LADD, Yale. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 137 
 
 goods cannot be true to nature. On the other hand, we 
 do not judge of the external world of human life, such as 
 it is presented to our observation, entirely from the external 
 point of view, but according to our rational interpretation 
 of its meaning or evolutionary function. Thus we do not 
 doubt the goodness of God because some days are dark 
 and dreary. The storm and the earthquake, both physical 
 and spiritual, being factors in evolution, they are not 
 rationally regarded as the contradiction of the law of action 
 for the Best for Being. Even the child will accept a present 
 disagreeable thing with the hope of some future good 
 attaching to it. 
 
 It is because of the harmony of human reason with the 
 Divine reason, that we claim to be made in the image of 
 our Maker. Thus it is through sympathy that we are His 
 beloved children, rather than mere servants, or slaves, having 
 reluctantly to obey His will. 
 
 As we can only understand those who have something in 
 common with us, or, in other words, are similar to us to 
 a certain extent, so the degree in which we are able to 
 understand God's laws is the measure of the similarity 
 existing between ourselves and the Prototypal Being. 
 
 Hence we feel more at home in the study of Divine 
 nature than in the study of the lower animals, for the 
 individuality of self-conscious reflection is wanting in them. 
 
 But in treating the question of similarity, it must always 
 be borne in mind that the similarity on which mutual 
 understanding is based, refers specifically to noumenal, or 
 spiritual Being, not to the physical organism, in which we 
 resemble the lower animals. Anthropomorphism belonged 
 to polytheism, but has nothing to do with monotheism, 
 the rational worship of the Father of spirits, who must 
 "be worshipped in spirit and in truth." The coming of 
 God's kingdom relates to spiritual evolution. The greater 
 
138 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 the similarity existing between the organism of man and 
 that of the anthropoid ape, the more obvious it is that 
 mere resemblance in external form does not establish iden- 
 tity of essential nature between man and brute. Seeing 
 the rdle that the lower animals take in the drama of 
 creation, we cannot wonder that points of meeting should 
 exist between man and beast, for them to be able in any 
 way to communicate with each other ; such resemblance 
 being the condition of the lower animals being subdued, or 
 tamed by man, thus subserving many uses for him. 
 
 Religion and morality are reflective representations of 
 our relation to the only Sufficient Cause of causes, and of 
 the relation in which our will stands to our Maker's will, 
 providing us with a sufficient reason for action. 
 
 Religion points to the Lawgiver, whilst morality treats 
 of the law. 
 
 Perfection of Being, with its concomitant happiness, is 
 the law, or goal of evolution. Love and desire must 
 needs fail in the person who repudiates this belief in the 
 moral law and Lawgiver. 
 
 Government is only possible because men have some 
 degree of understanding in common as to what the goal of 
 action must be, and their common interest in attaining it. The 
 secret of law-abidingness is that an identical consciousness 
 envelopes the whole nation like an invisible net, and brings 
 the force of the whole against any offender against the order 
 of what is then and there held to be the Best for Being ; the 
 slave is deprived of this rational point of view. 
 
 The different relations in which man stands to his fellow- 
 creatures and to the universe have all a moral influence; 
 and basic among these is our relation to this terrestrial 
 globe. Only through our own bodies being related to 
 everything comprised in the primary elements of physical 
 nature are we sensible of the earth's existence; but so 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 139 
 
 secondary is this existence to the needs of our spirit, that we 
 often become quite insensible to our sensations when given 
 over to the higher life of emotion and intellection and 
 moral purpose, or religious sentiment. Hence there have 
 been martyrs to science as well as to love, human and Divine. 
 
 In ancient times Aristotle is said to have fallen a victim 
 to his curiosity about the cause of the tidal wave ; and 
 Archimedes, intent upon solving a mathematical problem, 
 let himself be killed, unheeding, by a Syracusian soldier. 
 Lord Bacon incurred a fatal illness from cold in the pursuit of 
 scientific research; and Pasteur became paralyzed through 
 his sustained investigation of the life of bees. 
 
 Herbert Spencer says that morality is due to the empirical 
 modifications of the inherited physical organism. Darwin 
 maintained that it is owing to the evolution of the social 
 instinct, whilst other philosophers have attributed its growth 
 to the struggle with the conditions of external existence, 
 which man, and especially primitive man, had to undergo. 
 But seeing that morality relates emphatically to the intuitive 
 internal motive of action, rather than to any objective 
 activity in particular, none of these theories of morality 
 that have no reference to the Absolute Being, Who has so 
 constituted us as to pursue the Good, and, later, the Best, 
 for real Being, on the ground that such is His will, are 
 satisfactory to the conscience of man. 
 
 Certainly but for the religious sentiment, with its hope 
 of a more blessed existence beyond the grave, which we 
 expect from God's goodness, not from our own deserts, 
 man would appear as essentially only forming a higher 
 part of the animal creation, just as the dog is above the 
 wasp or the earwig. Moreover, man would, of all animals, 
 be the most to be pitied, because his life is a perpetual 
 conflict and torment on account of his speculative reason 
 and his moral sense being liable to outrage at every moment. 
 
140 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 For man does not live by bread alone, but by satisfaction 
 of the spirit, through faith, love, and hope; and the death 
 of the spirit, consequent on the deprivation of these, is 
 worse than that of the body. Nothing short of the belief 
 that all makes for good to those who are true to their 
 rational nature of self-love, social, and Divine, and that all 
 things work together for the Best for Being, or the happi- 
 ness of the whole rational creation under a kindly 
 Providence, can give a rational Being strength to suffer 
 patiently, and fight bravely and hopefully in the battle of 
 life, in which we seem to be finally worsted by death. 
 This belief can only be attained through faith in an al- 
 together righteous, and powerful Being, Who, according to 
 the law of attraction of similars, loveth all His rational 
 creatures, and Who has revealed Himself to them in the 
 fleshy tablets of the heart ; and Who has, moreover, given 
 them reflective introspection, by which they can enter into 
 His counsels, and work together with Him for their own 
 salvation from ignorance and evil. It has been said that 
 the world loveth its own just as the dog may be attached 
 to, and serve a bad master ; but only spiritual love, 
 wisdom, and justice can attract the truly rational Being. 
 Although persons without principle may like to herd 
 together like gregarious animals, the law of attraction of 
 similars holds true universally. 
 
 Now the law, under which the rational Being, par excellence, 
 lives, as opposed to that of the lower animals, is above all 
 things the law of progress; and what does progress really 
 mean, if not moral and religious, or spiritual evolution ? This 
 is what is signified by the bruising of the serpent's head of 
 appetite, or lust, with its cunning, cruelty, and destructiveness, 
 so that man may stand like Saint Michael, or Saint George, 
 triumphant over the dragon, the prostrate beast of the 
 primeval slime, knowing good and evil, like unto God, and 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 141 
 
 approaching ever nearer to the Ideal, or Supreme Being, 
 through growing more and more like unto Him. This is 
 what true progress means, as opposed to the mere advance 
 in physical comfort, in which so-called civilization consists, 
 supplemented accidentally by the social convenances, or 
 fashions, of each particular time or place. 
 
 The fated guardian-angel of man is his spiritual correlate, 
 or conjugal counterpart. In sex is exhibited elementary 
 animal counterpartism, as in personal idiosyncratic com- 
 plementariness we have its spiritual culmination. True love 
 is of the very essence of the moral law : all other relations, 
 except that of the human spirit to the Father of spirits, 
 are secondary to the conjugal relation ; and it most cer- 
 tainly is the condition of the "Earthly Paradise," being 
 realized here by man, as equally no doubt, it will remain 
 the crown of the joy of the Heavenly Paradise, as 
 Swedenborg teaches. Mere sexual instinct relates simply 
 to propagation of kind ; but as man is not merely an 
 animal, human marriage supposes spiritual selection. 
 
 Where people, brought up under certain conditions of 
 civilization, pursue an orderly, mapped out, or organized 
 routine of life arranged for them by others, without being 
 moved by the Spirit to love, or justice, or religion, they 
 resemble colonies of constructive insects such as the ant 
 or the bee, or certain animals like the beaver, etc., with- 
 out having any more real claim to be called moral than 
 these have. What Matthew Arnold calls "a power that 
 makes for righteousness," is one, the essence of whose 
 Being is benevolence or love. 
 
 Even a colony of insects can only exist by virtue of 
 its truth to its instincts, i.e., truth to its real nature. But 
 when a Being like man goes in for nothing but mechanism, 
 or such servile imitation as a monkey or a parrot exhibits, 
 he does not live up to his real, instinctive, rational nature, 
 
142 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 nor to the design of "the Divinity Who shapes our end," 
 which is true happiness through true love, human and 
 Divine, to which understanding is the main contributor. 
 According to Plato, virtue can be exhibited even in the 
 satisfaction of the appetites, when moral restraint produces 
 moderation. When the attributes of personality are exer- 
 cised in due proportion to the relative value of each 
 judgment or act, each one of them may become a condition 
 of virtue. Plato speaks of "courage regulated by a just 
 conception of the proper objects of fear as the acme of 
 impulse, or high-mettled vitality," whilst reflective reason 
 controls both self-restraint and courage in accordance with 
 the principle of sufficient reason, which requires the satisfac- 
 tion of the three associated principles of causality, i.e., 
 feeling, intelligence, and will. 
 
 Self-knowledge, generalized in reflective reasoning, in- 
 cludes the act of comparing the positively known with 
 the relatively and superlatively, or Ideally intuited, together 
 with the opposite degrees of negation of attributes, exhibited 
 in the science of comparative anatomy, which includes the 
 study of the lower animals. Thus, self-knowledge is not 
 only a necessary constituent of morality, but is really the 
 pivot upon which our responsibility hinges. But before this 
 stage of evolution is attained, the simple religious sentiment 
 is what unites men in social communities. 
 
 A social reformer ought to be well-informed, or his 
 thoughts are not good for much; and the majority is 
 then wise in holding to its own customs. 
 
 "Mine eyes prevent the night-watches, that I might 
 meditate in Thy word," said the sweet Psalmist of Israel. 
 Ignorance must always be put to confusion. Without study 
 of the laws of Nature and of human nature, there can be 
 no knowledge of them, or true conception of the Master 
 of life, nor of how action, in accordance with reason, must 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 143 
 
 be conducted. Hence, an uncultured human Being may 
 be religious, but cannot be called moral. 
 
 The notion of evil is summed up in the idea of action 
 contrary to the synthesis of our rational nature. But volun- 
 tary respect for, and action in harmony with the laws of our 
 human nature logically argues respect for our Creator. 
 
 It is only when our activity relates simply to our animal 
 nature, and regardless of our spiritual nature, and its rela- 
 tivity to our Maker, that it altogether loses the character of 
 morality. 
 
 The suppression of the truly natural, and, therefore, 
 rational impulses of our heart, and the repression of our 
 intelligence, altogether enfeebles our activity for good ; 
 and then mammon worship is substituted for morality 
 the social practice of each place and time giving the law 
 to man. Well may Confucius say, " It matters not how 
 soon a man die if he have once looked upon the Ideal 
 and loved it." 
 
 Unnatural, anti-social, and therefore evil, passions require 
 self-correction, and failing that, the person will fall under 
 the law of the land, which, however it may vary in different 
 times, still has no rational object but maintaining the Good 
 for Being. But so various have been the conceptions as to 
 what constitutes the Best that in old times, he who ventured 
 to think out things for himself was burnt like Giordano 
 Bruno, poisoned like Socrates, banished like Anaxagoras, put 
 on the rack like Galileo, and stoned or imprisoned like the 
 Jewish prophets. As we know, the Jewish priests regarded 
 Christ as a blasphemer, and the superstitious Romans perse- 
 cuted Him as a destroyer of the public peace. Even now, 
 if an original thinker has not the self-respect and power 
 to stand alone, he may be driven to madness through 
 what Mrs. Browning calls "the treacherous forsaking of 
 mankind," or through voluntary isolation, such as that 
 
144 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 into which Rousseau retired. But the world's opinion 
 (le respect humain), or its neglect, is a poor guide in 
 the path of duty, tending rather to the broad and flowery 
 way "that leadeth to destruction," than to the straight 
 and narrow path that leads to the life eternal. 
 
 Did our duty, as is generally supposed, refer merely to 
 our fellow-creatures who may rob, or murder, or otherwise 
 ill-treat us, instead of to the Perfect and Absolute Being, 
 our Creator, to Whom we are related not only as the 
 created to its Creator, but also as His spiritual offspring, 
 being participators in His reason, the sense of responsibility 
 would indeed be inexplicable and too heavy to be borne ; 
 responsibility ceasing where reciprocity of justice ceases. 
 
 But what matters who is against us as long as He, Who 
 created us rational Beings, is with us ; and whilst we believe 
 that we are in the hands of Him Whose reason knows no 
 eclipse, and Who is always strong to save, and ready to 
 forgive the repentant sinner. 
 
 Though all men may differ from us, and angrily oppose 
 us when we bring forward some new idea, we need only 
 pray more earnestly for "the confidence that reason gives," 
 and that " reason may be justified of her children." 
 
 To this the perfect man adds: "Father, forgive them, 
 for they know not what they do." 
 
 There are few indeed who illustrate the counsel of 
 Solomon : " Get knowledge, and therewith, above all, under- 
 standing, for it is more precious than rubies." Most people, 
 on the contrary, consider it as a danger to society that 
 the poor should get knowledge or understanding. Perhaps 
 the children of this world show themselves in this respect 
 wiser than the children of light, not hesitating between God 
 and Mammon, and not attempting a compromise, but 
 making straight for their mark, which is the subservience 
 of others to them. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 145 
 
 Morality is bound up with the reflective postulate that 
 " reasonable purpose is at the root of the whole," that being 
 " the only true interpretation of all that is, and all that is to 
 happen." The primary postulates of sufficient, efficient, and 
 final causation are comprehended in the unity of Being, as 
 it is introspectively contemplated in reflection ; " the reason- 
 able purpose" discernible in the creation meaning that the 
 living spirit, found or apperceived, incarnate in man, is the 
 primary object in the universe and its final goal, because 
 of its obvious relation to the Absolute Intelligence, that 
 is intuitively intelligized by us. 
 
 Anaxagoras was the first among the Greeks who recog- 
 nized active reason as the supreme cosmic principle. This 
 is what is expressed in the homo mensura of Protagoras. 
 All external things have no other purpose, or meaning, but 
 the carrying out the evolution of the finite spirit, and 
 stimulating its activity ; the physical universe being but a 
 means to that end, or a condition of spiritual activity. 
 Spiritual Being alone is the Ding an sick und fur sick, and 
 it is, therefore, that man is called the " son," or spiritual 
 offspring of the Father of spirits, because of the spiritual 
 relation in which he stands to Him, in, as Kepler said, 
 " thinking His thoughts," i.e., understanding the order of 
 the physical and spiritual universe. 
 
 The rational Theology of Cicero was based on a 
 theological idea of the world. Our inferences from the 
 principle of causality have for us the certainty of the 
 threefold principle of sufficient reason itself; and the most 
 purely rational inference that it is the privilege of man to 
 draw from it is, that as from life only does life proceed, so 
 only from an Intelligent and Benevolent Source can our 
 intellect and good-will proceed. 
 
 "Who hath believed our report?" has ever been the cry 
 of exalted souls, and maybe it will continue to be so for 
 
 L 
 
146 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 ages yet to come ; for this planet is but a nursery, or, at the 
 utmost, a school for souls, each individual having to fight 
 by himself, and for himself, the good fight of faith, love, 
 and hope against ignorance, malice, and lowering disease, 
 accident, and death. 
 
 Inherent in the essence of each existing thing is an 
 endeavour to persist in its existence. The very plant 
 climbs towards the sun ; for the first law of Being is self- 
 conservation, without which there could be no question of 
 duty to others or to God, for we should all disappear out 
 of the world before having risen above a state of savagery. 
 Although we have to rise out of nature, or the natural man 
 up to God, the natural man at least makes a hard struggle 
 against the extinction of the individual, without whom the 
 race could not exist. Right reason, therefore, endorses the 
 doctrine of self-love, social, and Divine, and the common 
 maxim, " Love thy neighbour as thyself " ; for certain it is 
 that if we love our neighbour as ourself, and adore God 
 above all, the future of the race need not be despaired of, 
 either with regard to its virtue or its happiness. 
 
 Plato said, "a soul may be saved by a sense of pro- 
 portion," and no doubt the great requirement of the woman 
 of to-day is to be redeemed from her old-world slavery 
 by the cultivation of her logical faculty, of which mathe- 
 matic is but a function, important as it is. 
 
 Only when this is effected, can what Browning called 
 " the music of man and maid " (quoted elsewhere) be 
 realized ; and only from the true conjugal tie, or spiritual 
 bond between man and woman, will the true harmony of 
 home, country, and nations proceed. 
 
 Bayard Taylor, the American poet, wrote a sort of epic 
 on this subject "Toi par qui Dieu m'a complete"/' says 
 Victor Hugo. It is neither good nor fitting to the dignity 
 of the Being, made in the spiritual image of the Father 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 147 
 
 to be a sort of Procrustes to himself, cutting himself down, 
 or stretching himself out to any fanciful dimension, or 
 degree of vitality, that may chance to be the fashion of the 
 time to set it up as an Ideal; one might as well become a 
 clown or an acrobat, always turning somersaults. The last 
 fashion of the present day, is for men to pretend to give 
 up, once and for all, the idea of happiness ; each one is 
 to become a sick- nurse to someone else. This is surely 
 no recognition of the goodness of God. To say we do 
 not desire well-Being is simply farcical. If we have no 
 objection to be diseased, or to be physically and spiritually 
 mutilated ourselves, why do we turn to a doctor, and why 
 should the law prevent our mutilating others for any purpose 
 of our own ? Why have men, from of old, called God Father, 
 if such be the picture, we make to ourselves, of the order of 
 the universe ? What human father would contrive such a 
 home for his children ? Ideal or perfect human nature is our 
 only standard of reasoning. Truth, Love, and Goodness le 
 Vrai, le Beau, et le Bien. This is the standard of reason. 
 
 If you hold your own, you have the power of giving 
 others their due ; but if you renounce it in over-humility, 
 or recklessly squander it in unconsidered charity, you can 
 be of little use to anyone ; and you, moreover, run the 
 risk of becoming a helpless burthen on others as time goes 
 on. Mr. Meredith cleverly describes the derision heaped 
 upon the feather-stripped ostrich, by the wearers of the 
 feathers taken from it, which is an illustration of my 
 meaning. The fool is without self-reverence; the selfish 
 are without sympathy, or social regard ; whilst those 
 wanting in adoration of their Creator, are false to one of 
 the fundamental principles of the understanding, and have 
 no hope in Him, who made the covenant of reason between 
 Him and His spiritual offspring. 
 
 Among the Jews, it was, as we know, considered a crime 
 
148 Rational, or Scientific , Ideal of Morality 
 
 for a man to sell his birthright, nor do we now respect a 
 man who does so. But I not only protest against the 
 laudation of uncalled-for sacrifice, but I also come forward 
 to protest against it being termed 'mean' to seek joy, or 
 well-Being. Even the anticipation of Heaven is nowaday 
 made a reproach to Christianity. Self-neglect is, perhaps, 
 more fatal to intelligence than neglect of others. Hence 
 a fool is said to be more dangerous than a knave. To 
 what end is a man given his powers and faculties, if 
 not to use them first for himself, and then to utilize them 
 for the advantage of others ? Thus only can we co-operate 
 with the Divine Idea, or creative plan, and out of the joy 
 that comes of so doing, the sweet fountain of gratitude to 
 the Joy-Giver springs. What the moral sense, or sense 
 of duty in man, rationally concerns itself with is the 
 creative will, or design, in the constitution of finite Beings, 
 so that reflective reason, instead of being simply egoistic, 
 as it is so often accused of being, is strictly relative to its 
 fons et origo. As the construction of our towns, with their 
 public libraries, law-courts, churches, etc., is all for the use 
 of rational Beings, for their comfort and delectation, and 
 above all for their moral education, so, judging from 
 analogy, we rationally regard the stars of the firmament, 
 as abodes prepared for the evolution and enjoyment of 
 immortal rational spirits. What we see here now is only 
 a part of a general scheme; and death lets down the 
 curtain at the end of this life, which is but an act of the 
 Divina Commedia of man's destiny. Of course, it is 
 emphatically as a social Being that man stands in the 
 current of the Divine intention. As Nature abhors a 
 vacuum, so does the soul of man abhor isolation. 
 
 " Come, and I will make you fishers of men," said Jesus 
 to the toilers on the sea of Galilee. 
 
 Only when loving, and beloved, does man truly live. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 149 
 
 Only a kindly man becomes truly intelligent, trustful as he 
 is truthful, and brave as he is affectionate and benevolent. 
 
 Hope is love's cradle, despair is its grave. Love and 
 hope are the hostages of joy to come. 
 
 Perhaps what ascetic altruists unconsciously mean when 
 they say they don't want joy for themselves, is that love 
 .being alone the joy -giver, they want only the joy of 
 benevolence. 
 
 It is certain that only on the basis of love, human and 
 Divine, social progress can proceed and be remoulded for 
 good. The moralist is the true protestant 
 
 Cicero represented justice as true regard for social rela- 
 tions, not as arithmetical equivalence. The last idea 
 would lead us to the standpoint of Shylock, or to the 
 Judaic idea of "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." 
 But the days of the inquisitor, the oligarch, and the serf, 
 are passing away, having done their work of breaking the 
 ground, so that good seed may be sown therein the good 
 seed, namely, of worthy, because self-respecting, affection- 
 ate, benevolent, and God-serving individuals. 
 
 Slavery, autocracy, and the Romish Papacy at least drew 
 men together into combined action, whereas the solitary 
 must have died out a prey to the brute animals and brute 
 forces of the earth, had he remained isolated. 
 
 By the juxtaposition of natures, in which mental inertia 
 comes into contact with superfluous vitality, by the law of the 
 attraction of opposites, spiritual equilibrium and evolution are 
 facilitated, and no fortune can be called evil that has developed 
 in man the rational sense of the solidarite humaine. Even the 
 pessimist, whilst despairing of God, recommends his followers 
 to cling close together, and be helpful one to another. 
 
 Professor Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, counts even 
 tyrants and brutal fathers as useful in having exercised 
 the important function of immediate punishment for dis- 
 
1 50 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 obediertce ; and Carlyle's view of things was much the same. 
 The present business of the moralist is to improve society 
 from what it has hitherto been a reign of terror, not to 
 improve human nature off the earth, as it has been con- 
 stituted by the Creator. 
 
 As a man would naturally avoid a lion or tiger in his 
 path, so would he also naturally endeavour to prevent 
 another person running the same risk of destruction. 
 
 But if, as Buddha is said to have done, a man lets a 
 tiger eat him, because it has its whelps to feed, he would 
 equally let the tiger eat any other man, from the same 
 irrational standpoint. 
 
 Charity, or consideration for others, does not mean, or 
 warrant the disregard of our own rights, or rational require- 
 ments as a human Being; each one requires a home for 
 himself as a starting-point for the widening circle of benevo- 
 lence. 
 
 As we are all the children of God, so no man must harbour 
 the malignity of private revenge, but rather refer his case 
 to the cooler judgment of disinterested persons; for so is 
 justice best fulfilled. To despoil oneself of the rights of 
 a human Being is as unjust as it is to be wanting in 
 sympathetic consideration for others. The suppression of 
 any spiritual faculty is as fatal to spiritual evolution as 
 keeping a limb swathed in tight bandages is to its physical 
 development, or growth. " It is the statement of our best 
 thoughts and convictions that makes most for Theism, and 
 induces new courage and will force ; whereas the constant 
 suppression of natural emotions, and the intuitions of reason, 
 as well as the reflective conclusions therefrom, means the 
 paralysis of feeling, intelligence, and will, and thus no moral 
 action ensues, and scepticism and scoffing consequently gain 
 ground as a logical result."* 
 
 * EMERSON. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 151 
 
 The world is not illogical in professing agnosticism ; for 
 reality, or truth to human nature, is unknown to it. It cares 
 not for realities, nor for "the eternities and immensities" 
 of Carlyle, but oddly enough it stringently requires make- 
 believes of goodness under civility. 
 
 The Buddhistic tendency to suppress oneself, or one's own 
 individuality or personality, with its needs and rights, may 
 be in accordance with pantheism, but it certainly is not in 
 accordance with the monotheism that recognizes the affinity 
 between man and his Maker, and consequently regards 
 man as God's vicegerent here below, accountable for his 
 stewardship to his Lord, the Master of Life, for the use of 
 his talents and the exercise of his reason. 
 
 Placing ourselves, through reflective reason, voluntarily 
 under the shadow of the Almighty's wings, we feel assured 
 in saying: "Not my will, but Thine be done," that we are 
 thus ensuring, instead of forfeiting, our true welfare. Here 
 is no ontological suppression, but the rational actualization 
 of the finite creature's best and highest self. The heroic 
 championship of our own rights heralds the championship 
 of the rights of others, duties being correlative with rights. 
 This is what reason requires of us. Quietism and fatalism 
 are not inculcated in the words of the Jewish scripture : " I 
 will be enquired of thee for these things," saith the Lord ; 
 " I will have obedience and not sacrifice." We are not 
 required to improve upon the Creator's design, but to carry 
 it out. The habitual suppression of emotion and rational 
 volition is fatal to true morality, which is not mechanical, 
 but of the spirit, full of life and joy, as well as armed by 
 hope for great emergencies. 
 
 "Give me thy heart, my son," says the still small voice 
 of conscience. Yet how many are there who associate the 
 idea of morality either with humdrum and boredom, or with 
 submission to arbitrary power, or to the pressure of external 
 
152 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 circumstances the suppression of Heaven-implanted desire 
 being their whole Ideal of virtue. 
 
 It is from the desire to escape from the inquisitors of the 
 spirit, not to break loose from the order of reason, that the 
 odes and invocations to liberty have gone up like incense 
 to Heaven wherever the weight of custom, tyranny, or 
 conventionality have pressed too heavily on the spirits of 
 the magnanimous. 
 
 " Le principe d'identite* est 1'expression de la substance et 
 de ses modes" is an admirable definition of the logical prin- 
 ciple of identity. Man requires freedom to be able to follow 
 the dictates of reflective reason, to be able to be true to his 
 natural characteristics. The service of God has been rightly 
 termed " a service of perfect freedom," it being in fact self- 
 fulfilment through the exercise of man's natural faculties. 
 The tyrant is one who desires to trample the nature of 
 others under foot for his own purposes. " La loi de re'cipro- 
 cit garantit la vie sociale." This is also the law of true 
 marriage. The ridiculous doctrine of the supremacy of man 
 over woman has hitherto prevented this essential fact being 
 recognized. Equality is the essence of the sense of mutuality 
 of duty, and so of the sense of joint dependence on the 
 Creator's will. If we ignore our responsibility to carry out 
 our Maker's design by respecting the constitution of humanity, 
 what common standard of action should we have ? From 
 what ground of reason should we take our flight to higher 
 and still higher altitudes in the scale of virtue, and in the 
 elevation of character? 
 
 " Wir singen von Lenz und Liebe von sel'ger goldner zeit, 
 Von Freiheit, Manner Wiirde, von Treue und Heiligkeit, 
 Wir singen von alien Siissen was Menschenbrust durchbebt, 
 Wir singen von alien Hohen was Menschenherz erhebt." 
 
 Such is Uhland's description of the mission of the poet, or 
 idealist. Without the Ideal of pure being, what other Ideals 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 153 
 
 could exist ? Of what do Ideals treat, or consist, but of the 
 perfection of the attributes of noumenal, or spiritual Being ? 
 All the merely imaginative Ideals of art must be subsidiary 
 to these fundamental principles of reason. 
 
 We ought to understand that whatever may be the 
 physical or mental gifts that a young person may have 
 inherited from his, or her, forefathers, they are but a given 
 platform from which to ascend to greater moral heights 
 than can be commanded by a less gifted personality; the 
 power belonging to physical position, is thus gained for 
 morality. Through an inherited fine physiological organism, 
 a man is, as it were, helped forward towards the realization 
 of social Ideals, which a member of the struggling, starving, 
 ignorant, and therefore helpless, multitude, only reaches in 
 very exceptional cases of great genius, always be it remem- 
 bered in the lines of, or in accordance with, the Ideal to 
 which a man's individual soul most turns desire being the 
 most potent lever by which we can move the world. A 
 man is bound to address himself to that for which, having 
 the most taste, he is best adapted. This shows the import- 
 ance of respect for individuality. 
 
 Aristotle says that magnanimity and liberality are more 
 fitting to the rich and powerful man than parsimony and 
 timidity. The eyes of others are turned anxiously upon 
 the man favoured by fortune, looking to him for aid and 
 support. Their appeals may be regarded as " the great 
 King's messengers" to those whom it has pleased Him to 
 honour. It is only in the degree of man's sensitiveness 
 to the requirements within himself of vital action and 
 enjoyment, that he seeks to supply the same needs in 
 others, for only thus does personality become a vibrating 
 point of transmission of some special quality of life; and 
 such a man is thus, in respect of his fellow-creatures, a 
 positive distributor, rather than a passive recipient of force,. 
 
154 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 just as in a thunderclap, one cloud transmits its electricity 
 to another when it is itself overcharged with it. Only such 
 a man sees when the growth of perfect nature has been 
 hindered in some particular respect through a man's misap- 
 prehension of the truths of life, and he allows free play to his 
 own intuitive conviction that his own gain in sensitiveness 
 and clearer knowledge, must become a universal gain ; and 
 "thus he daily attempts that which may spread abroad 
 through human life, the thing by which he has triumphantly 
 realized his own life and Being." 
 
 Emerson seems to think that America owes her greatness 
 to the rough pioneering beginnings of a society that had 
 passed through no previous paralysing stages of autocracy, 
 or aristocracy. "For," he says* "men here (in America) 
 have been too near to the wolf and the snake for them to 
 be able to think of lording it over each other in a dismal 
 swamp " ; so that at last, respect for worthy individuals, for 
 the individual human person as such, and above all for 
 women, arose and became disseminated throughout America 
 en premier lien ; but the old Adam still showed himself 
 rampant in the continuation in America of the slavery 
 system, which still prevailed in our West Indian colonies. 
 Only where individuals are honoured in proportion to their 
 real moral worth and works, not merely according to their 
 name and estate, can rational social communities be said 
 to exist. 
 
 Reverence for man as man, with all his human qualities, 
 is akin to reverence for Divine attributes. "If ye love not 
 the brother whom ye have seen," said Jesus, "how can ye 
 love the Father Whom ye have not seen ? " True love has 
 been called "the love of attributes," as opposed to the 
 gratification of the senses and the imagination. 
 
 So august is man when not made abject by slavery, 
 conventionality, or vice, that he has always regarded 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 155 
 
 humanity as God-like ; and what is it but the attributes 
 of Being, only existing in absolute perfection, that we adore 
 in our Creator and Judge ? With the sense of la solidarite 
 humaine, comes universal kindness, and sympathy ; and 
 morality grows in force and intensity in the degree that 
 it has been embraced, and generally actualized. 
 "- This is what may be called right-mindedness, the aberra- 
 tions from which are infinite. The expression, "a mind 
 distraught/' signifies a dislocation of the nerve processes, 
 through which finite Beings firstly perceive substances, 
 secondly apprehend relations between the self-conscious 
 ego and them, and also as inductively cognized between 
 these amongst themselves ; and thirdly, comprehend what 
 form their own activity should take. The afferent and 
 efferent nerves communicate directly with the cerebro- 
 neural, and the neura-muscular system. The brain, or 
 sensorium, is the seat of classification according to the 
 relations in which objects stand to the subject ; and 
 reflective reason generalizes the concepts thus derived 
 according to the law of Ideality. Feeling, intelligence, 
 and will are conditioned in their exercise by the nervous 
 system, and thus do our ideas of threefold causality arise. 
 The mind can never, without subjective experience, find 
 the sort of cause in the effect, or the sort of effect in 
 the cause. Reflective introspective apperception has the 
 subject-ego for its object. Here man becomes the minister 
 and interpreter of teleology, and consequently of theology. 
 This is the place of demonstration of reason, or self-verifica- 
 tion, beyond which science cannot go. The search for cause 
 cannot be confined to a search for the sensibly-perceptible 
 conditions, which precede, or accompany each perceptible 
 change. Causation is something more than the .sort of 
 sequences and co-existences visible among material phe- 
 nomena. The ideas of sufficient, efficient, and final cause 
 
156 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 arise out of the very nature of a self-conscious agent. 
 They are a priori ideas of the reason, whereas the reflective 
 principle of sufficient reason arises d posteriori out of the 
 contemplation of them, each successive generation reflect- 
 ing it in the measure, or in the place, of its own spiritual 
 evolution. As we know, man at one time looked to the 
 flight of birds, or consulted their entrails for a sufficient 
 reason for action, or self-determination. 
 
 The sense of individual duty to God, with concomitant 
 fidelity to our social nature shown to every individual 
 according to the degree and the kind of relation in which 
 he stands toward us, is the true characteristic of moral 
 progress. 
 
 In truth the suppression of feeling not only stunts the 
 growth of feeling itself, but also that of the intellectual and 
 moral faculties morality having reference emphatically to 
 the will, which represents both the motive and the final 
 cause of rational activity, i.e., the desire for the Good for 
 Being, as such, not merely our own. Truth to nature 
 means truth to man's whole nature, not excluding his 
 physical nature, although always keeping in view that 
 it is but transitory, and subsidiary to our enduring, or 
 immortal spiritual Being. 
 
 People who will not make the slightest sacrifice for the 
 physical comfort, or the real happiness- of others, are very 
 fond of holding up the standard of asceticism, or self- 
 mutilation, to others, as their Ideal of morality. 
 
 "Let us hold the banner of the Ideal high," says a 
 most self-indulgent man in one of Ibsen's plays. "We 
 have chosen the highest," says a woman of the world in 
 one of Zangwill's novels, when abandoning her lover to 
 marry a rich man. 
 
 It is certainly easy to preach the Ideal when nothing 
 of the struggle of its practice is known. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 157 
 
 In a barbarous state of society there is a constant con- 
 flict concerning the rights of individuals, whereas civiliza- 
 tion tends to equilibriate and harmonize our existence in 
 relation to persons, as well as to establish material weights 
 and measures. But the reason, which has made us com- 
 prehend the order of the universe has for its supreme 
 function the predication of the duty, as well as right, of 
 righteous self-assertion, this answering to force in atoms, 
 by means of which each one is enabled to hold its own 
 place as an individual, or indivisible existence. Surely self- 
 conscious man should equally hold his own place with 
 conscious dignity. But if self-assertive or repulsive force 
 existed alone, unbalanced by the principle of attraction, 
 or altruistic force, there would be no cohesion of any of 
 the parts of the universe, physical or social; and chaos 
 would re-appear. But when, instead of proper self-regard, 
 which virtually involves both social and Divine love, self 
 becomes rampant to the actual extermination of the other 
 two factors of consciousness, we accuse a person of selfish- 
 ness, and say he would set his neighbour's house on fire 
 to roast an egg for himself or his belongings. 
 
 It is such selfishness as this that is for ever clutching 
 at what belongs by natural right to others. Such a feel- 
 ing is indeed a legitimate object for attack and punish- 
 ment ; but this does not necessitate its confusion with the 
 fundamental principle of rational self-consciousness, which 
 underlies all the conceptions of reason, and is the con- 
 dition of love, both of our neighbour and our Maker. The 
 selfishness that is "cruel as the grave" would indeed make 
 any place a hell, and too much cannot be said in con- 
 demnation of it ; but proper self-respect is the source of 
 order and beauty. Again, if either self-regard or sym- 
 pathy for others be left unrestrained by morality, or the 
 reflective sense of responsibility to God to keep the order 
 
158 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 or law of our nature, it would quickly reduce the world 
 to a scene of wild disorder and moral chaos. As Jesus 
 said, " Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's." 
 Theodore Parker said, "The love of God cannot take the 
 place of the love of man, any more than the love of man 
 can take the place of the love of God. Self-suppression, 
 or self-neglect, leads to an uncertain standard of action, 
 and, consequently, to self-degradation ; self-contempt always 
 entailing the contempt of others. The right reconstruc- 
 tion of society would be in accordance with self-love, 
 social, and Divine. The absolute power, perfect wisdom, 
 and infinite goodness of a Supreme Being, are the only 
 ground of our rational expectation, or postulation, of a 
 future state of blessedness for the spirit of man ; for " the 
 accurate final rights of man," says Carlyle, " lie in the far 
 deeps of the Ideal." The idea of the " ought to be " and 
 so "must be" is the birthright privilege of man. 
 
 For action to be right, the motive must be good, i.e., it 
 must have regard to the good for self and others, and, 
 above all, to the loving and trusting obedience, which is 
 due to the Creator of the universe, our continual Pre- 
 server and Benefactor, from Whom all spiritual gifts pro- 
 ceed, such as love, which is joy, and hope, which is the 
 hostage of the endurance of it. "He who is not with 
 Me is against Me," said Jesus : so to doubt God's good- 
 ness is in other words not to love Him and for those 
 who hate there can be no Heaven. "Myself am Hell," 
 says Byron's Lucifer. 
 
 Surely we should be able to feel towards our Creator 
 the confidence shown by Alexander the Great to his physi- 
 cian, whose draught he drank, in spite of having been 
 falsely warned that it was poisoned ; for indeed God is the 
 good Physician, and as Jesus said : " The cup that My 
 Father hath given Me, shall I not drink?" It is, indeed, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 159 
 
 only such a faith as this that can enable us to face all 
 the ills that flesh is heir to. 
 
 For an action to be moral, the idea of the Good for 
 Being must be present in it. Morality is the science of 
 the " end "; and the intuition of reason, from the existence of 
 faith and love, is the hope that the end will be good. 
 
 Right action requires reverence for our emotions, not 
 the extinction of natural feeling ; and due regard for our- 
 physical frame, which, as the living vehicle of the spirit, 
 must be wisely trained and kept in purity. Given the 
 idea of the Father of spirits, the idea of the general 
 brotherhood of humanity naturally follows. Hence slavery 
 in any form stands condemned. The parental relation 
 trains us early to the Ideal of obedience to power, wisdom, 
 and goodness, greater than our own ; our hearts open to 
 every rational claim of universal brotherhood, and to holy 
 and just tolerance for ignorance and temptation, to which 
 we may ourselves not be exposed. 
 
 Self-respect, social regard, or sympathy, and adoration of 
 our Creator, shown in loving obedience to His law of love, 
 rather than in constant genuflexions and other ceremonies, 
 best answer to the Ideal of justice, or the rendering of their 
 due to each and every Being, according to the various 
 relations in which we stand to them. It is, indeed, offensive 
 to reason to act otherwise. To act in accordance with the 
 Stoic Ideal of truth to our rational nature, is the rightful 
 attitude of every child of man, as the sharer of the Eternal 
 Reason. Awful, indeed, is the thought that any rational 
 Being should renounce his birthright, and voluntarily de- 
 scend to the lower level of mere animal life, saying, " Let 
 us eat, drink, and be merry," like chattering parrots and 
 monkeys, without regard to any pain inflicted on others, 
 nor to the sense of responsibility our Creator has laid 
 upon us to live up to the Ideal of Being, which each of 
 
1 60 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 us possesses in some form or other. Thus it is said, " There 
 is honour among thieves": that is to say, they have respect 
 for some Ideal of conduct. To mar the nature God has 
 given us by physical excesses, or to abuse our understanding 
 through superstitious beliefs and observances, is to wrong 
 ourselves, just as to deprave another's judgment is wrong. 
 
 "Seek knowledge, and withal get understanding," said 
 Solomon the Wise. Only by so doing can the rational 
 Ideal be attained. In the realization and actualization of 
 the moral Ideal lies the fulfilment of the moral law. Only 
 by striving after integrity, or wholeness of Being, can man 
 be of the pure in heart, who alone can see God, and so 
 love Him, and know of His doctrine. "A man is what 
 he knows," said Plato. 
 
 When we have lost touch of excellence ourselves, we 
 cannot recognize it in others ; and the weakly yielding 
 that comes of too impressible a nervous system, may be 
 quite as offensive to reason as the stubborn impassivity 
 and resistance to the feelings of others that comes of a 
 stolidly phlegmatic, or of a wilful disposition. Both of 
 two opposite temperaments have to be, what the Norseman 
 called "kept well in hand," the spirit of man having to 
 control the weakness of the fleshly temperament for the 
 required equilibrium of attributes. This however can, as 
 I have before said, only be fairly represented through the 
 complementary union of opposites, for the due presentation 
 of the type, which man properly represents. 
 
 It is through long consideration of this, that I have 
 arrived at my particular doctrine of the moral necessity of 
 the union of complementary Beings for any approach to the 
 faint shadow of perfection, or equilibrium of faculties, 
 which alone enable the idiosyncrasy-ridden finite individual 
 to reflect the Divine nature in its holiness, or wholeness of 
 Being. Only thus can "the golden mean," which, according 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 1 6 1 
 
 to Aristotle, constitutes virtue, be realized by a Being other- 
 wise condemned to move always in the groove of his own 
 idiosyncrasy. Hence "it is not good for man to be alone," 
 nor woman either: only together can they find the path 
 of duty, a path of light and love, for certainly duty stands 
 in the most intimate relation to the fulfilment of our deep- 
 est instincts, among which the conjugal relation is supreme, 
 but often asserting itself in a low animal form, if sense 
 be not permeated by the spirit of man Divine. It is from 
 true, or spiritual, love that the highest sentiments emanate. 
 Surely our duty is to represent worthily the humanity in 
 us as opposed to mere animality ; for thus only do we 
 live to the honour and glory of God certainly not by 
 eradicating, or ignoring our fundamental spiritual nature. 
 Even the physical, as subservient to this, must be rationally 
 studied, and not irrationally ignored. 
 
 A really good person is one on whom we can depend 
 for the instinctive play of goodness, in that it is the 
 expression of an habitual and deliberate choice of good- 
 ness, which needs a mind reflectively self-conscious, i.e., 
 conscious of its own feelings, and capable of making in- 
 telligent selection among them, according to their claims 
 to rational preponderance on any given occasion. For it 
 is the voluntary source of action which alone qualifies such 
 action for approval, or reprobation, and not the actual 
 effect it may produce. This is the real meaning of the 
 old world axiom : fiat justitia^ ruat coelum. This is 
 opposed to grovelling utilitarianism ; for as Jesus said, 
 " What shall a man give in exchange for his soul ? " 
 
 I think it will be evident, from what has been said on 
 the relativity of goodness to Being, to its essential tendency 
 or normal purpose, that feeling, intelligence, and moral will 
 must all be fairly developed in a person for him to be 
 deserving of the epithet of good ; for only thus can the 
 
 M 
 
1 62 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 > 
 
 purpose of the Creator in our creation be realized ; and a 
 thing or object of thought is always considered good in 
 proportion as it actualizes the end or purpose for which it 
 was constructed. 
 
 Good feeling, good or typical intelligence, and good or 
 benevolent purpose these are the requirements for perfection 
 of Being. But such is the very nature of human idiosyncrasy 
 that it is actually constituted by the breach of equilibrium 
 in a character, i.e., by the preponderance of one of the three 
 attributes of personality at the expense of another. Hence 
 will degenerates into obstinacy, weakness of will into childish 
 indecision, and tenderness into maudlin, hard-headedness into 
 cruelty, etc., etc. 
 
 Thus it is that we see the truth of the old German proverb: 
 "Eines Mannes Meinung ist keine Meinung." The grand 
 design of the Creator is seen in its greatest perfection in the 
 creation of complementary pairs, making marriage a duty 
 as well as a delight when the counterpart Being is found. The 
 marriage of rational Beings cannot be rationally regarded as 
 the mere scene of the play of physiological forces. The 
 idiosyncrasies of individuals must ever be taken into account ; 
 and as perfection of Being is determined by the equilibrium 
 of the three attributes of Being, the two persons proposing to 
 be thus united must be of complementary natures. But for 
 this, neither physical nor physiological scales need be applied. 
 Instinct directing, as it does, the lives of the lower animals, is 
 equally strongly felt by man, only his natural selection is 
 aided by reflective reason, and the conscious possession of an 
 Ideal of Being and of happiness, not to be disregarded with- 
 out incurring the penalty of disappointment of joy of life. 
 " Only by the gentle bond of love, and love alone, should 
 life to life be linked." "A helpmeet unto him," as it is 
 termed in Genesis, is what man requires, and without this, 
 love is never known or tasted. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 163 
 
 God created humanity, male and female, complementary 
 in mind as well as body. It may, indeed, be that it is the 
 complementariness of their physique which determines the 
 evolution of spiritual correlativity, as the union of opposite 
 temperaments and tendencies is conducive to the evolution of 
 the race. 
 
 Hence, in primitive communities that have arrived at 
 some degree of civilization, marriage is obligatory, as of 
 the utmost importance, both from a civil and religious 
 point of view, but in some places it is only contracted 
 between members of different tribes. In old Peru the 
 State paid the man a sum of money on his marriage, and 
 on the birth of each of his children. Amongst the Jews, 
 marriage was considered indispensable at the age of 
 nineteen ; and as to the Hindoos, the moment a child is 
 born, a partner is provided for it ; yet superstition under 
 different forms has advocated celibacy from the priests of 
 Cybele down to the monks of the middle ages. Feudalism, 
 also, in its desire to aggrandize the heir to the family estates, 
 supported this view by putting the daughters of the great 
 houses into convents ; and nowadays, worldliness, through 
 its requirements of pomp and luxury, renders marriage 
 difficult and comparatively rare, which leads to the support 
 of concubinage, or to loveless unions. 
 
 As a proof that morality refers to the consideration of 
 the purpose inspiring an act rather than to the act itself, 
 engines of destruction, which are welcomed by civil authori- 
 ties for legitimate war purposes, are regarded as diabolical 
 when used for the private assassination of political or social 
 foes. 
 
 The attributes of noumenal or pure Being must indeed 
 be conceived to be the same throughout the universe. We 
 summarize these in their characteristic aspects of power, 
 wisdom, and goodness, or as love, intelligence of causality 
 
164 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 and action in accordance with intelligent love, as being 
 required by the Creative will. The Comtist stops at the 
 enthusiasm of humanity ; but the true object of enthusiasm 
 is Ideal, or typical, Being, which, according to the law of 
 impersonation of attributes, culminates in the idea of God, 
 to Whom we owe our ideal conception of Being. The 
 motto of him who strives after perfection of Being is Altiora 
 peto, or Excelsior. 
 
 The phenomenal Ego is, as it were, the grub, out of which 
 the butterfly, the psyche, springs to the empyrean the mortal 
 passes into the immortal. To know God is to enter the life 
 eternal by virtue, or through the recognition of our being 
 made in the likeness of our Maker ; and it is this recognition 
 of his Divine origin that separates man by an impassable 
 gulf from the lower animals. 
 
 To the exercise of each virtue, or characteristic quality 
 of humanity, the Divine benevolence has attached a definite 
 gratification. 
 
 Active industry and resolute self-dedication to unswerving 
 uprightness, instinctively suggest trust in the integrity of 
 others, without which the society of our fellow- creatures 
 could give us but small enjoyment ; as, if we are destitute 
 of loving-kindness, our neighbour could have but small hope 
 of enjoyment from us. All good feelings are pleasures in 
 themselves, even leaving out the consideration of their good 
 results. They also satisfy our sense of duty to our Creator, 
 as being in conformity with the law of reason. Again, to 
 be loving and benevolent induces a belief in the love and 
 benevolence of God. These are satisfactions of the spirit, 
 more truly peace and joy-giving than are any pleasures of 
 the body. The needs of the body pass away with the body ; 
 but the needs of the spirit are as eternal as the spirit itself. 
 "Ich liebe dich in Zeit und Ewigkeit" is the expression of 
 true love. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 165 
 
 "Why should I doubt that God will be my friend, for I 
 have been the friend of all men ? " said a dying king in the 
 palmy days of Persia. " Man is the citizen of the universe," 
 said the Stoics. "We are pilgrims passing upwards," says 
 the Christian. "Surely," writes the American poet, Bryant, 
 "He who has taught the birds of passage to find their 
 way across the trackless deep will lead my soul aright" 
 through the mazes of time and space, through the pangs 
 of evolution, to its goal of ultimate beatitude. As the 
 automatic action of the nervous system is self-preservative, 
 so the Good, the Best for Being is the only aim and end of 
 rational activity. 
 
 " He serveth best who loveth best 
 All things, both great and small," 
 
 said Coleridge. But to whom is it given to have the vision 
 of the Ideal, or highest good ? The Neo-platonist answers : 
 " To those who seek for it." " Those that seek me early 
 shall find me," says Solomon. " Seek and ye shall find, 
 knock and it shall be opened unto you," is the New 
 Testament doctrine ; whilst all philosophy regards the 
 ultimate realization of the Ideal as the necessary logical, 
 or rationally to be expected result of the creative plan. A 
 Persian poet said : " Even if the poet has not actually 
 realized the Ideal life, he has dreamed of the might have 
 been"; and he who has lived the incomparable life knows 
 that what has been may be again. 
 
 Civil and political legislation is only concerned with the 
 protection of persons from other persons ; but morality is 
 a personal, or individual sense of the relativity of man to 
 his Maker and Lawgiver, with which le respect humain, as 
 the French termed respectability, cannot interfere. To it 
 belongs the peace, which the world can neither give nor take 
 away, and of it the Creator only can be the competent 
 
1 66 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Judge, as He alone can read all the secrets of the heart. 
 In certain actions we often do not know ourselves what 
 our motives really are, for there is as much involuntary, 
 or unconscious, self-deception always going on within us, as 
 there is designed deception with regard to others carried 
 on outside. The Ideal of society is reciprocity, and at 
 least it is certain that la soctitt repose sur le principe de la 
 reciprocity ; and until that is carried out, there will be no 
 really good, or enjoyable society. The reciprocity of revenge 
 holds barbarous tribes in order ; but when that which is 
 perfect is come, i.e., when the Ideal of love is fulfilled, that 
 which is imperfect passeth away. Thus private revenge is 
 no longer regarded as honourable, and deliberately-weighed 
 and socially-organized justice takes its place. Though the 
 fear of God may be the beginning of wisdom, it is the 
 love of God that is its proper end. 
 
 Our present application of the term "good society" is 
 really too farcical : ignorance, mammon- worship, lovelessness, 
 and greed being its general characteristics, the malign pre- 
 vailing over the good. See Byron's beautiful lines on the 
 solitude of a crowd. Selfism and socialism, both in an 
 abstract and philosophical sense, are the ground of theism, for 
 in them are revealed to us Being, and the relativity of Being. 
 These are the major and minor premisses of the great 
 conclusion as to the existence of an Absolute, or Perfect 
 Being, Who has imposed on us for self-determination in 
 judgment or action, the reflective logical principle of 
 sufficient reason, that principle being found alone in the 
 logical fulfilment of the attributes of Being. 
 
 The sexual relation is the archetype of correlativity, i.e., 
 of the existence of the one arguing the Being of the other, 
 spiritual affinity producing fulness of Being, and joy for 
 ever. 
 
 In Wahlverwandschaft (elective affinity) lies the assertion 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 167 
 
 of spiritual individuality as opposed to mere sexuality. 
 This is the great medium of happiness, and of evolution 
 in the race of men, as opposed to mere uxoriousness or 
 domesticity in marriage. It is in this supreme spiritual 
 correlation that human marriage properly consists. This is 
 the one ground of fidelity, which has expressed itself in 
 all times in the familiar utterances of love. 
 
 There can be nothing contemptible in the endeavour to 
 supply rational wants, i.e., those requirements that arise out 
 of the very constitution of our humanity. Why then, as 
 Max Nordau says, "is love regarded as the unspeakable?" 
 On the contrary, open reverence for it bears on it the 
 stamp of strict rationality, and that it should be thought 
 fine to despise what is rational, is the inconceivable. There 
 is nothing fine, therefore, in repudiating either self-love, 
 social love, or Divine love. To say that a want is 
 natural, is to say that it is of Divine ordinance. Mental 
 and spiritual wants are no more artificial or vicious than 
 are physiological, or natural appetites. Le besoin d'aimer, 
 and the requirements of justice, and benevolence, categori- 
 cally answering to our desire of happiness, are as much 
 integral parts of our Being, as are the physical appetites 
 for food, exercise, rest, etc., which keep the race alive and 
 actively employed. " Le besoin est I'origine du droit. Le 
 droit est le besoin clairvoyant oppose" a Taveugle desir. 
 Dans le cas du devoir, il s'agit du besoin d'autrui," of their 
 claims upon us for justice, or for gratitude and trustful 
 obedience, these being both human and Divine according 
 to the relation of the subject to the object. 
 
 As the old German chorale says, " Ein fester Burg 1st unser 
 Gott," for it is from our Creator that we draw courage 
 to meet misfortunes, together with the cheerfulness that 
 comes of trust in His goodness under the many trials of life, 
 certain that each and all are fraught with teaching necessary 
 
1 68 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 for our evolution, or salvation from ignorance and sin. 
 St. Paul classes those who mistrust God with evil-doers. 
 
 When a thing is adapted to an end, endorsed by our reason, 
 we willingly adapt ourselves to it by voluntarily embracing 
 the means necessary to its accomplishment. "Qui veut la 
 fin veut les moyens "; whereas one who servilely, and without 
 sufficient reason, hugs his fetters, is despised as being 
 unworthy of the name of man, and his fetters are riven 
 more and more deeply into his flesh without pity ; for he 
 who mutilates his emotional, intellectual, and moral nature 
 to suit the fashion, or conventionality, of his day, is as 
 untrue to humanity as the Hindu santon, who stands still 
 for so long a time that the birds can build their nests in 
 his hair, or the Buddhist devotee, who is swung from a 
 height by the flesh of his back to conciliate his idols, are 
 irrational in their ideas of duty. 
 
 Human personality being inviolable in its essence, he who 
 deserts himself may almost be said to be deserted of God, as 
 allowing the desecration of the temple of the Holy Spirit 
 at all events he will certainly be deserted by other men. 
 
 "To thine own self be true, 
 And it must follow, as the night the day, 
 Thou canst not then be false to any man," 
 
 says Shakspeare, and the converse is true also. He who does 
 not respect himself, does not know how to respect others. 
 
 No man who lets himself be made little of, either by 
 his relations, or by strangers, is thought very much of, 
 even at the present day, in spite of the professed admira- 
 tion for altruistic, or Buddhistic, ignoring of self ; for instinct 
 is stronger than conventional profession. Calderwood says, 
 in his work on Evolution : " Regard to animal sensibility, 
 whatever the species, is a constant necessity for successful 
 training. Only in this way can the conditions be maintained 
 which favour the action of intelligence undisturbed." The 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 169 
 
 gain of confidence is essential for success in training 
 monkeys, as they are restless, timid, and suspicious, and 
 are, therefore, not highly susceptible of modification. How 
 much more, then, must self-conscious man require perfect 
 faith in his Creator for moral evolution ! Victor Hugo 
 says ; " Quand Tamour s'en va, 1'esprit fuit." " Fear and 
 fondness are the two governing forces of animal nature." 
 In the human Being, the former must be replaced by the 
 perfect love that casteth out fear. 
 
 As "man cannot live by bread alone," so also he cannot 
 live by passion alone ; intellect and the moral sense have 
 equally to be satisfied in him. As it has been said the 
 slave-holder becomes more corrupt than the slave, so 
 irreverence is more fatal to the person who feels it, than 
 to the one who is the object of it. Longfellow warns us 
 against "irreverence for the dreams of youth." What, 
 indeed, are they but the rudimentary Ideals of love, and 
 peace, and joy, that many a noble soul has finally realized, 
 leaving glorified footprints behind him ? What really 
 differentiates the present from the past, is the general 
 recognition of the solidarity humaine. Egoity has its just 
 claims, " Se os hace de miel os comeran las moscas " (if you 
 make yourself of honey, the flies will eat you), say the 
 Spaniards ; and of altruity it has been said, " L'altruisme 
 nous oblige les uns envers les autres, sous peine de la disso- 
 lution sociale, qui entrainerait celle des individus." 
 
 "Le juste," says the positivist Littre, "est de 1'ordre 
 intellectuel de la nature du vrai." Hence we see more 
 kindness than justice in the world. Ideal satisfaction is 
 of the attributes of Being, of feeling, intelligence, and 
 will. This is the scientific reflective basis of morality, 
 the sufficient reason for self-determination, which we 
 attribute equally to the Divine Being. The necessarily, 
 or, rationally conceived Supreme Being Vente possibile 
 
 
170 Rational) or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 of Rosmini can alone afford the abstract nature of man 
 this supreme satisfaction ; but the idiosyncratic com- 
 plementariness of one human Being for another, by 
 which the particular weakness of each is supplemented, 
 constitutes for us the earthly paradise, enlarging our 
 sympathies, and consequently our benevolence, and stimu- 
 lating our love of God. Hence the joy of true love cannot 
 be dispensed with. Emerson says : " To have an interest 
 and trust in oneself is to conspire with the Divine purpose "; 
 but when this interest is shared by another, true self-respect 
 appears, because it banishes altogether self-distrust, the sister 
 of Giant Despair. Neither Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Martin 
 Luther, nor any other hero, or reformer, was ever diffident. 
 No innovator, or pioneer in art, or science, can be self-dis- 
 trusting. Emerson lays great stress on the manners of the 
 English aristocracy, as symbolic of the dignity of humanity 
 proper. This should be represented by every member of 
 the race. It is the office of culture to show man that no 
 part of him was made in vain, and to domesticate man 
 in his true place in Nature and the universe. 
 
 The mutilation, which is deterioration of the rational 
 Ego, or true self, is as immoral, because more illogical, as 
 the wilful injury of another's person; just as self-murder 
 is regarded as immoral as the murder of another person. 
 
 The Stoic virtue of self-respect can no more be neglected 
 than sympathetic regard for others : the integrity of Being, 
 as such of my Being as well as of your Being is the 
 object of morality. Plato said " God is Reason," Jesus said, 
 " God is Love." Both statements are right ; for love is 
 rational, and reason is loving and lovable. Self-love, social, 
 and Divine, are each and all reasonable. " Tuer 1' I deal est 
 un mauvais moyen pour 1'approcher." Evil can only be 
 overcome of good. What shall it profit a man if his own 
 deterioration be the price of undue self-sacrifice or self- 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 171 
 
 suppression, even in a good cause ? The demand for liberty 
 is based on the sense of the right of the individual to the 
 normal exercise of the faculties that characterize humanity 
 nay, more to the exercise of his idiosyncratic gifts in 
 particular. This also applies to the legitimate possession 
 of the fruits of our own labour, and to the right of 
 bequeathing the property which we have legitimately 
 acquired, or which has been given to us by another who 
 also acquired it by legitimate or moral means. This does 
 not sanctify the appropriation of property by the dishonest, 
 or the gifts of provinces by despots to their mistresses, 
 nor that hereditary bondsmen should always remain bonds- 
 men. The right of the slave-and-serf-holder is no longer 
 held valid in the eye of the law in this respect, as the 
 child of a robber cannot be said to have a right to the 
 fruits of his father's crimes. Cyples says, "The intimate 
 purpose of conscience" (the moral law of obedience to 
 our rational nature) " is the attainment of true delights " ; 
 for herein, not in worldly vain-gloriousness, or making 
 little of others, is found the peace of reason arising out 
 of conformity with the will, or purpose, of God. Conscience 
 is the sense of obligation, or duty to our Creator, to 
 submit ourselves to, and be governed by, the reflective 
 reason, which distinguishes man from the rest of the 
 animal creation. The abuse of our faculties is sin. 
 
 Reflective reason in receiving, re-representing, and associa- 
 ting the witness of our feelings, of our intelligence of causa- 
 tion, and of our spontaneous tendency towards the Good 
 for Being, determines our will faithfully to express our 
 whole Being in compliance with the principle of sufficient 
 reason, and it is from this that we derive our faith in the 
 enduring reality of Being, our love of related Beings, and 
 our hope in the intuited goodness of Being. As St. Paul 
 said, "The fruits of the spirit are faith, love, and hope," 
 
172 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 arising out of the apperception of truth, beauty or har- 
 mony, and goodness. The saving sense of proportion of 
 which Plato speaks, is shown in the rational estimate we 
 form of the relative authority of our several springs of 
 volition, or action ; and thus it is that conscience reveals 
 the categorical imperative of duty, since, as Mr. Sidgwick 
 says, the moral sense of mankind regards the subjective 
 Tightness, or righteousness of an action, as of more impor- 
 tance than the objective results of it. These it would be 
 impossible for the finite mind always to conceive. Hence 
 the before- quoted maxims, "Fais ce que dois, arrive ce 
 que pourra," " Fiat justitia, ruat ccelum." 
 
 Just as in the mental development of the individual 
 and the race, the faculties of external perception are exer- 
 cised earlier than those of reflective introspection, or apper- 
 ception, so it would seem that moral judgments are the 
 last at which our race arrives; only the religious senti- 
 ment, or intuition, has helped mankind from the beginning 
 to the acceptance of certain general rules of conduct, 
 supposed by different nations to be pleasing to their own 
 particular deities. 
 
 To learn truly to distinguish between good and evil is 
 the slowly-matured fruit of gradually-developed reflective 
 reason. Contact of one country with another through war, 
 or trade, led to the comparison of religions, and to their 
 gradual modifications, the one by the other. 
 
 Meanwhile, the wise men or philosophers of all times have 
 always striven to arrive at a general standard of morality 
 in conduct. This, of course, can only be found in strict 
 psychological analysis, and deduction therefrom. There 
 are abstract laws of thought and art, to which art to be 
 true must conform ; so there are principles of Being that 
 are the ground of man's belief in the Ideal, or Absolute 
 Being, the Father of spirits, of Whom rational man is 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 1 73 
 
 believed to be the beloved son. Both Brahmins and 
 Christians speak of the twice-born; and both have the 
 institution of a spiritual fatherhood, under the respective 
 names of guru and godfather, to keep alive in each person 
 the remembrance of his spiritual nature " der Gedanke von 
 wo sein Ursprung war." 
 
 The witness of our consciousness to the rational order of 
 the world is found in reflection on our spontaneous intelli- 
 gence of causation sufficient, efficient, and final. That of 
 conscience is found in the categorical imperative of duty, 
 to obey, or carry out, that order through the conservation 
 of the integrity of our Being, which involves self-love, social, 
 and Divine, as the fulfilling of the law ; looking always to 
 the Giver of reason for protection and ultimate salvation 
 from suffering and evil, through diligently pursuing the 
 appointed path for the evolution of our spiritual Being. In 
 the old Chaldean story of Job the Patient, we read, " I know 
 that my Redeemer liveth, and that my spirit will see God." 
 How could we otherwise toil on and upward through loneli- 
 ness and evil repute of men ? Surely reason will be justified 
 of her children, and so, also, will the Providence of God. 
 
 Conscience not only reveals that this is a moral world 
 through the insistence upon our obedience to the reflective 
 principle of sufficient reason, but also through the hope 
 that good is the final end of passing ill, which makes man 
 die trusting, although he may have lived fasting. 
 
 To strive against metaphysical convictions is to strive 
 to produce chaos in the mind of man, just as to aim at 
 suffering for oneself and others as the final cause of 
 activity would be the flat contradiction of a natural or 
 instinctive tendency to the bettering of our Being, progress, 
 or improvement, and would result in a moral chaos. 
 
 To say that all we desire is to relieve the sufferings of 
 others is quite as contradictory as to say that we do not 
 
1 74 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 want food, drink, exercise, and sleep for ourselves, but only 
 for others. " Le besoin d'aimer et la nostalgic du bonheur," 
 still persist in us, however much indifference to joy we 
 recommend to others as a counsel of perfection. But 
 " magna est veritas et prevalebit." Fidelity to the Creator's 
 plan, as it is interpreted by reason, will surely one day 
 prevail with all other forms of truth. A stolid indifference 
 to the trials imposed upon us here below will in no wise 
 answer the creative purpose of our evolution. " Blessed are 
 they that mourn," said Jesus, " for they shall be comforted." 
 Of course, those that do not mourn need no consolation. 
 " If whipping with rods does not avail, whipping with 
 serpents may," seems to apply to them. 
 
 " Zweckmassigkeit " (the pursuit of the end) is involved 
 in a judgment of conscience. Have you failed of the mark, 
 or have you hit it? That the proper end of action may 
 be attained, all that conscience requires of us is to have 
 right or rationally-ruled feelings to seek understanding, to 
 act in accordance with it, and to trust in the goodness of 
 God as to the result, whilst walking humbly before Him. 
 
 The utilitarian school particularly insists on our actions 
 being determined by the relative worth of objects, as well 
 as by the praiseworthiness, or blameworthiness of subjective 
 motive ; this really is involved in the seeking understanding 
 of the nature of things and of the universe, of which we 
 form a part. We must, moreover, be absolutely candid in 
 rational intellection, having no arrive pensee, making no 
 reserve of vested privileges or prejudices ; and, again, we 
 must be true to our moral sense of intelligized kindness 
 for righteousness, or duty's sake. Many civil, and even 
 religious institutions take no heed of this, the coping-stone, 
 the key of the arch, of finite Being. A good man, who 
 fulfils the Divine idea in his creation, although his personal 
 idiosyncrasy may deflect from the pure type of Being, always 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 175 
 
 struggles to submit it to the Ideal, or Divine, standard of 
 humanity ; and should he know what makes for his peace, 
 will seek for a helpmeet for himself. 
 
 There is a high and a low conception of utilitarianism. The 
 latter is not within the scope of this work, as I am treating 
 of the moral Ideal. The former was emphatically taught 
 by John Stuart Mill, the great disciple of Bentham. It did 
 not enter into his high heart to conceive the expediency of 
 making faith in noumenal Being, together with love for it, 
 and hope in it, subservient to the base ends of appetite and 
 worldliness, of self-conceit, and the cruel depreciation of 
 others. Like Socrates, the utilitarianism he preached was 
 merely opposed to farcical traditions and arbitrary dogmas, 
 believing, with Locke, that " what we know of the relations 
 between the human and the Divine mind is all that is 
 necessary to the true end of my Being, and the great con- 
 cernment of my happiness." 
 
 Of course, the natural, or animal, instincts, when not per- 
 verted, are not blameworthy. Conscience even upholds them 
 as right, because natural, when exercised steadily under the 
 control of pure, or reflective reason. Seeing that we did not 
 make ourselves, it must be a Divinity that has shaped us, and 
 so our every member. But it must never be lost sight of that 
 these are only instruments for carrying out the evolution of 
 our higher, or spiritual nature and interests not ends in 
 themselves, any more than art merely is for art's sake, but 
 rather for the delectation and amelioration of our Being. 
 
 There exists, however, a certain half-way house between 
 animality and virtue. It is called honour. The Chevalier 
 Bayard, the flower of chivalry, as we know, died of thirst 
 on the battle-field rather than have his thirst gratified 
 through the traitor Bourbon. 
 
 Loss is willingly suffered for honour's sake, or for virtue, 
 or for God's sake; but self-sacrifice and the sacrifice of 
 
176 Rational, or Scientific^ Ideal of Morality 
 
 others must be rational in having an end, which explains, 
 or justifies it. The Spanish Don of Old Castile would be 
 hewn in pieces rather than yield up his sword. This is 
 admirable as opposed to the merely animal craving for 
 bodily safety, admirable as testifying to the existence of a 
 higher Ideal. But the Ideal of pure virtue, as being in 
 accordance with the Maker's will, is of a different kind, and 
 of a higher reach. But how should the poor, unidealizing 
 soldier die at the post of duty, were there not, midway 
 between the God-consciousness latent in man's intelligence 
 and moral sense, a required obedience to a constituted 
 authority, and an accepted obligation of allegiance to an 
 earthly potentate ? Certainly this very allegiance to military 
 duty may be grounded on the supreme duty of allegiance 
 to our Creator and Heavenly Father, Whom we safely trust 
 with our ultimate welfare in our painful fidelity to estab- 
 lished order, even when that order rooted in disorder stands. 
 
 Christianity exchanges the calm of the mem conscia recti 
 of the Stoic for the belief in the Divine promise of the New 
 Testament : " Lo, I come, and My reward is with Me ; enter, 
 thou good and faithful servant, into the joy of thy Lord." 
 
 The conscientious man, or man of strict integrity, is he 
 who consciously, reflectively, and voluntarily always acts 
 for the Best for real or spiritual Being as such. For it is 
 to this that conscience emphatically refers the moral sense, 
 or sense of responsibility, pointing to the dictate of true 
 religion : " Whether ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, 
 do all to the glory of God." Now it is in acting according 
 to reason that we show our reverence to the will of God ; 
 hence the virtue of temperance, soberness, and chastity. 
 
 Reason does not teach us to live to eat, but rather to eat 
 to live ; as also we do not dress for dress' sake, but for the 
 decent clothing of our bodies. All activity must have 
 intrinsic regard to our noumenal or spiritual Being ; at least, 
 
Rational \ or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 177 
 
 such is the teaching of reflective reason. Neither for the 
 body's sake, nor for art's sake, but to co-operate in the moral 
 order of the universe for God's sake such is the complete 
 summary of the whole duty of man. The one thing needful is 
 to be real, or true to the nature of spiritual or real Being ; and, 
 above all, to the Supreme Being, our Creator, Preserver, and 
 continual Benefactor. " Be real (i.e., true) men, and mighty 
 powers will express themselves in your words and works ; and 
 even your solitude will be waited on with scenes greater than 
 all the theatres of Europe ever represented, or can represent ; 
 and a sublime object will be a necessity to you'' * 
 
 "To carve human life into nobleness, requires as much 
 thought as making hard marble assume a shape of majesty 
 and grace," and for right thought, the heart must be attuned 
 to right feeling, and to the sense of duty to God. Therefore, 
 it is the principle of sufficient reason, or reflective synthetic 
 thought (i.e., the reflective representation of Being as a 
 whole) that can alone furnish us with exhaustive materials 
 for a judgment, or become the test of our own motive in 
 all the activities, whether small or great, in which we are 
 daily engaged. And if we, like Titus, can feel that not a 
 day has passed in which we have not done a good action, 
 or one that can produce a good effect on someone, whether 
 in the realm of speculation, or in concrete daily life, or 
 in the endeavour to resist any evil propensity in ourselves 
 or others, we have the peace and the hope of the just, for 
 we are at one with what Matthew Arnold called " the 
 power that makes for righteousness" in the universe. The 
 good man is one who never loses sight of the duty, or 
 subjective sense of responsibility to his Creator, to preserve 
 the integrity of his own Being or character. To this 
 supreme obligation, Christianity has given the name of 
 saving our own soul. This was implied in the writing on 
 
 * EMERSON. 
 
 N 
 
1 78 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 the old Chaldean cylinder, " Woe is me, for I have hurt 
 my own self." Seneca maintained that nothing outside a man 
 can hurt him really ; but only he himself in sinking into 
 mental apathy through indolence, indifference, or worldliness, 
 or by allowing himself to be driven past self-control by lust, 
 or passion, or greed for gain, etc. Reason teaches us that 
 we should be as our Creator intended us to be. "Look 
 at the perfect man, and behold the upright," loving justice 
 and mercy, and walking humbly before his Creator. 
 
 It is essential to the integrity of mankind, that the 
 individual should not resemble a perfume, the essence of 
 which has evaporated for want of proper preservation; 
 but that he should be representative of typical human 
 nature, possessing his soul in peace, ever able to say "what 
 matters it who is against me, since God is with me?" 
 Thus, however admirable may be the altruism, nowaday 
 so much preached, but so little practised, the motto "Dieu 
 et mon droit," is no mean standard, although an antiquated 
 one ; for he who knows nothing of his own rights, is not 
 likely to comprehend or respect the rights of others, not 
 being able to sympathize with their feelings. A slave or 
 a serf, who consents to having his rights as a human being 
 ignored, can have no very vivid apprehension of what 
 constitutes justice; and the continual complacent endur- 
 ance of injustice is as corrupting to the inflicter, as to the 
 sufferer of it. Outraged nature always avenges itself in 
 the long run. The healthy indignation of reason against 
 injustice, has its source in outraged natural feeling, and 
 reflective reason. Not only is it through the recognition 
 of similars that we judge of the needs and requirements of 
 others, but even our knowledge of the Maker Himself is only 
 through the logical substitution of similars, although in this 
 case we substitute Infinite for finite power, Absolute for 
 relative knowledge, and Perfect for conditioned goodness. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 1 79 
 
 He Who is the Inspirer of our feelings, desires, hopes, and 
 aspirations, by the very fact of their finding no satisfaction 
 here, has crowned them with the rational expectation of a 
 more blessed hereafter, through faith, love, and hope in Him. 
 
 True progress, or moral evolution not wealth, or position, 
 or refined sensuality is the proper object and aim of our 
 reflective reason. This is the polestar of our night, as love 
 is the magnet of our course, as spiritual love is life's elixir, 
 and the secret of happiness. Without reflective self-con- 
 sciousness, there could exist no Ideals of reason, and 
 without an Ideal of Being, man is drawn hither and thither 
 at the mercy of the winds and waves of circumstance. 
 How can he help others, except through vital and reflective 
 experience of his own ? Is it not for this, that old age 
 has always been regarded with respect ? Of course the 
 saying, that "no fool is so great as an old fool," because 
 of being past improvement, is another view of the question. 
 
 Ferrier says that the doctrine that man is furnished by 
 Nature with a conscience, as he is with a ready-made 
 sensational apparatus, is one which we cannot but regard 
 as erroneous ; for conscience is the later growth of reflec- 
 tive reason, which requires the fostering care of parents 
 and teachers, and our own subsequent self-culture. But 
 man comes into the world with feelings alive to pain and 
 pleasure, enjoyment and suffering ; whereas thought, or 
 the representations of the causes of these, must precede 
 reflection on thought, so that we say even to the child, 
 " Don't be thoughtless." In the manifold of sense there 
 may exist great variety; but reason is our life-form rigidly 
 defined in its exercise by the cerebro-nervous system. 
 Momerie says in his work on Personality, "A purposeful 
 series of causes, if traced back to a volition, has had a 
 sufficient cause at the beginning." Thus instead of saying, 
 " It is Kismet," we say : " It is the Divine Will of the 
 
180 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Father ; therefore not my will, but Thine be done, O Lord " ; 
 certain that the fulfilment of the Divine Will is what is 
 really best for us. 
 
 Purpose in Nature is no less in the hand of God because 
 He has committed its fulfilment to the conditions of exist- 
 ence, or rather to the natural forces, to work it out for 
 Him more gradually than if He had spoken each creature 
 into existence by a single creative fiat. God has thus made 
 the universe intelligible to His rational creature, man, and, 
 therefore, to a certain limited extent under human control, 
 all our creations proceeding upon an established order. 
 
 Things are evidently intended, because they are adapted 
 to work together for the production of the Good, or Best, 
 for rational Being, which is the pre-eminent design, if 
 not always the direct end, of all activity. The regard for 
 the preservation of Being is even shared by all sentient 
 creatures, to whom a certain amount of instinctive reason 
 is given, or they could not maintain their existence. We 
 have no experience of rational combinations and results, 
 except as a consequence of rational purpose. As a mechan- 
 ism involves the idea of a mechanic, so a design or definite 
 purpose in view implies the existence of a Designer, or 
 conscious Creator. Being, or the nature of Being, is the 
 exponent of, or key to, the explanation of purpose. 
 
 It is the contradiction of experience, and of the rational 
 conceptions that flow from it, that constitutes a surd, or 
 an absurd proposition. Whithersoever our rational conclu- 
 sions lead, there we must follow, it is to our own cost and 
 the cost of others, if we do not do so. Reason is the one 
 light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. 
 But psychology differs from ontology in that it has to 
 take note of physiology, and the possible disturbances of 
 the nervous system of each person, as well as of pure 
 Being, or the internal Ego that feels with anguish the 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 181 
 
 approach of such disturbances, and the gradual decay of 
 its physical organism. 
 
 To suppress individualism is to annul the idea of society, 
 of which differentiation, not homogeneity, is the essence. 
 "If the predicate makes no difference it is idle." Even 
 gregarious animals have sufficient individuality for the 
 shepherd to be able to identify a particular sheep. Ruskin 
 says that no two leaves on a tree are exactly alike, each 
 having had its own peculiar portion of light and heat, 
 wind and rain. 
 
 Hypnotized consciousness comes under the head of 
 neurotics, or neuropathy. It is a state of partial con- 
 sciousness which excludes the exercise of reflective reason, 
 of which our own personality is the object. For only 
 through reflective reasoning upon the subject, or Ego, do 
 we arrive at the generalized concept of Being, and of the 
 human soul the spiritual substans, or changeless substra- 
 tum of life and Being. 
 
 Thought, or belief, under hypnotism is an illegitimate 
 product of a disordered neural mechanism. The hypnotised 
 patient is sensitive only to suggestion from without, instead 
 of being moved by an impressible, reactive, self-determining 
 spirit from within. Of the suppression of autonomy, or self- 
 directed exercise of will-power, Coleridge, the opium-eater, 
 the lotus-eater, wrote : 
 
 " O Friend, too well thou know'st through what sad years 
 The long suppression had benumbed my soul, 
 Me on whom fell the utterance of thy love, 
 As a dear woman's voice to one cast forth 
 A wanderer with a worn-out heart forlorn, 
 *Mid strangers passing with untended wounds? 
 
 Hafiz said he was taught manners (la petite morale) by the 
 unmannerly. And thus it is when our rational wants, or 
 rational instinctive requirements, are disregarded by others, 
 
1 82 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 that we turn in upon ourselves, and reflect upon the meaning 
 of morality ; the soul that is wronged rises up like a man 
 in wrath, protesting : " I have felt" ; yet it is only upon 
 reflection that we fully realize, or idealize, what is due to 
 ourselves, and (through the apprehension of their relativity, 
 or similarity to us) what is due to others. The law of the 
 syllogism, or of synthetic reason, postulating that what is 
 true of a thing is true of its kind, even carries us on to 
 the religious sense of duty to our Creator, in Whose 
 spiritual image we say we are created, because we have 
 entered into the counsels of His wisdom, and understand 
 His goodness. 
 
 The relativity of all rational Beings to a common type 
 argues an Absolute, or Prototypal, Being, to Whom we are all 
 related by certain points of similarity. When we speak of 
 the justice of God, we mean that He is necessarily true to 
 His own nature of perfect power and wisdom, which is the 
 combination of love, knowledge, and goodness, or action 
 according to these ; whereas, though the spirit may be 
 willing in us, the flesh is weak, and therefore always liable 
 to error and failure. 
 
 Cicero defines justice as action in accordance with the 
 particular relation in which one person stands to another 
 particular person ; and St. Paul says : " Owe no man any- 
 thing, but to love one another," or, in other words " Be 
 kind to all " ; for this is the debt we logically owe all of our 
 kind, and particularly those with whom we are united most 
 closely. 
 
 Christ's injunction to love one another is not only a 
 counsel of perfection, but in it rests the fulfilment of the 
 condition, or law, of happiness, for without loving-kindness 
 we are not ourselves truly human ; and not being so, our 
 lives are equally a burden to ourselves and to all those 
 with whom we have to do. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 183 
 
 The whole of rationally-altruistic morality is represented 
 in the axiom : " Do unto others as you would they should 
 do unto you " ; z>., in the proportion of reason, or as 
 supposing oneself in their circumstances. In the more 
 primitive form of conscience, Confucius taught : " Thou shalt 
 not do unto others what thou wouldest not that they should 
 do unto thee " ; for all primitive teaching is mostly negative, 
 as is the decalogue. Socrates said that his Demon only 
 checked, but did not initiate his actions ; but Christ said : 
 " Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and 
 pray for them that despitefully use you." 
 
 The categorical imperative of duty, which we call con- 
 science, becomes clearer and clearer the more it is listened 
 to and obeyed ; but, alas ! it also, pari passu, becomes less 
 and less audible to the ear that pays no heed to its testimony 
 that we should be true to the feeling, intelligence and moral 
 tendency, which constitute our human nature, as opposed 
 to mere animality, with its selfish greed to which it un- 
 hesitatingly sacrifices others, metamorphosing even reason 
 itself into fox-like cunning. 
 
 Descartes was right, upon the whole, in classing the lower 
 animals with plants as physiological machines instinctively 
 carrying out the purpose of the Creator, rather than 
 autonomously exercising their own choice ; fear and fond- 
 ness are their exclusive motives to activity. It is indeed 
 through this possession by the lower animals of sensations 
 and instincts similar in some respects to our own, together 
 with the^feelings of pain and pleasure, that we are enabled 
 to have some degree of control over them ; as it is through 
 his reflective reason that man is admitted into the counsels 
 of the Divine Providence. 
 
 " Order is Heaven's first law ; this understood, all has 
 been, and all will be, good." But until science had pro- 
 mulgated the doctrine of evolution, this was no doubt a 
 
184 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 hard saying, difficult of comprehension ; however, now we 
 see in it an argument for the anticipation by the spirit of 
 man of a sphere beyond the grave in which reason will be 
 justified of her children. Dr. Martineau says : " The fact 
 that a part only of the moral scale is present to particular 
 persons, one might say to particular classes of persons, 
 explains the divergences of ethical judgment without com- 
 promising in the least the uniformity of moral conception, 
 throughout the race." In the case of individuals, heredity 
 and elective affinity in marriage are agents in the psycho- 
 logical idiosyncrasies of their offspring. 
 
 It is impossible to imagine a Being gifted with a sense 
 of harmony, delighting in discords, or in monstrosity ; or 
 a Being endowed with the intelligence of causality, dis- 
 pensing with the requirement of a sufficient cause for every 
 effect produced upon him ; and given the cultivated tendency 
 to act always for the Good for, or the conservation of the 
 integrity of Being, there is the felt necessity to inquire 
 into the nature of the Creator, and His ways towards 
 man, the meaning of the universe, and his own destination 
 in time and space. At all events, history shows that there 
 have always been some who have inquired, and have as- 
 sumed the existence of some supernatural Being, deity, or 
 deities, to explain their own Being and position in the 
 cosmos, in which neither our spiritual affinities, our object, 
 end, nor our tendency in action, are of our own ordering. 
 Then there are the relations of duration and of co- 
 existence in space, which, whilst we are under the influence 
 of the planet we at present inhabit, must continue to 
 impress us, although they are but the accidents of Being : 
 useful for its evolution, but not affecting its pure essence. 
 Again "sense is a feeling that passively befalls us" for 
 which we are consequently not responsible unless we pur- 
 posely place ourselves under physical conditions, that are 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 185 
 
 overwhelming to our reason ; or, in other words, .put our- 
 selves into temptation too strong for us. The whole nature 
 of Being is liable to be cerebrally affected beyond personal 
 control. Our responsibility lies greatly in not willingly 
 exposing ourselves, without a good reason, to what may 
 be too much for us, and make us lose our self-control. 
 
 The only sufficient reason for whatever we undertake, is 
 in relation to the nature and the interests of noumenal, or 
 real Being. For the sake of this, all has sometimes to be 
 risked, and even lost. Francis I., the French king, wrote to 
 his mother, " Tout est perdu hors 1'honneur " ; " Homo 
 mensura," said one of the seven sages of Greece. Things 
 are meant to correspond with, or to minister to, the evolu- 
 tion and delectation of spiritual Being. At least, such is 
 the lesson of reflective reason. It is in this sense that we 
 interpret the universal order. 
 
 With regard to physical beauty in man or woman, as 
 fine features and a powerful body suggest dignity and 
 strength in a man, so golden hair and soft blue eyes suggest 
 brightness and sweetness of character in a woman. It is 
 this arbitrary association of physical with moral effects 
 that often leads us into mistaken feeling and action. 
 
 The Greek philosophers mostly held that those who 
 live only to the body, die like the lower animals with the 
 body ; for as Swedenborg said, " L'ange dans I'homme 
 meurt lentement s'il ne substante pas son etre veritable." 
 Powers of mind certainly fade if unused, just as a limb 
 withers if contorted or too tightly bandaged. Such a 
 one seems to come physically under the same sentence as 
 that which was passed on the barren fig-tree of the 
 New Testament and on the unprofitable servant who hid 
 away his talent in a napkin, instead of putting it out to 
 interest. Again, there is a confusion of the brain produced 
 by the constant contradiction of reason, in the substitution 
 
1 86 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 of the ideas of accidental sequence or juxtaposition for 
 the fundamental principles of the understanding, which are 
 those of causality sufficient, efficient, and final. 
 
 The sudden cerebral distortion, produced by an accident, 
 can only refer to our present state of existence here, 
 where, alas ! we are too often spirits imprisoned in an 
 ignoble body, and slaves to morbid bodily tendencies 
 resulting in mental infirmity. 
 
 Just as the explanation of the difference between sight 
 and hearing is, that the eye and the ear are affected after 
 different fashions by similar material vibrations, so the 
 explanation of the difference between spontaneous and 
 reflective reason is, that whilst our spontaneous reason, 
 under the three heads of feeling, intelligence, and will, 
 deals with separate experiences as sufficient, efficient, and 
 final causation, reflective reason comprehends in its apper- 
 ceptive judgments, our whole Being, and is therefore more 
 exhaustively equipped for argument under the principle of 
 sufficient reason for belief, or expectation of reason. For it 
 is through the affections of our spiritual Being, that we pro- 
 nounce judgment on character and appearance. Our sense of 
 beauty is relative to the standard, or hope conceived by us in- 
 dividually or nationally, or according to any particular clique. 
 
 The difference in the judgments arrived at by different 
 individuals involves in part the question of whether we are 
 ourselves in harmony with their particular idiosyncrasy. As 
 the unmusical ear is insensible to music, and the colour- 
 blind eye to colour, so is the feeble mind unappealable to 
 by argument. Each individual mental organism is more- 
 over affected greatly and variously, through the particular 
 presentations and imaginative representations afforded him 
 in the course of his education. These greatly influence 
 our judgment as to what is truth or falsehood, amiability or 
 unamiability, goodness or badness, piety or wickedness. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 187 
 
 Moreover, forms of heredity, and what Tennyson calls 
 " faults of blood," together with an habitual conformity to 
 a particular social medium, tend to our being repelled by 
 manners that are not in accordance with certain Ideals, 
 however superficial or unworthy this form of judgment 
 may be. 
 
 If we feel more intensely, see more clearly, and act more 
 kindly from having associated with a particular person, we 
 feel moral approval of him; but moral approval can only 
 be felt by a person morally qualified to apply the moral 
 standard of judgment. Marcus Aurelius specifies individually 
 the persons he had to thank for his moral development. 
 Attraction of similarity is all that the majority of men are 
 capable of. Thus Horace says, " The ass to the ass, and the 
 pig to the pig is beautiful " ; so also is the fool to the fool. 
 
 " The world loveth its own," said Christ. The clever 
 rogue is admired by his fellows, and the dandy is the 
 admiration of the frivolous. 
 
 The idea of beauty, or loveliness, is always resolveable 
 into that of the harmony of the object that impresses with 
 the subject, impressed. In the case of Idealists, it is the 
 harmony of the object with the Ideal standard held by the 
 subject that delights. The Kaffir monarch requires obesity 
 of his spouse; the Arab, gazelle-like eyes in his charmer; 
 the Scandinavian and Saxon, the forget-me-not blue eyes, 
 " image of the north, tender and true " ; whilst the mere 
 votary of fashion sees no beauty in anything that is not 
 "up to date." Spiritual or moral beauty is found only in 
 the equilibrium of the attributes of Personality; rarely if 
 ever does this exist in early youth. 
 
 Power alone may be horrible ; intellect alone may be 
 hard and dry ; and love, without intelligence and morality, 
 must prove a delusion ; but true love, embracing, as it does, 
 our whole nature, partakes of the eternity of our spiritual 
 
1 88 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Being. What we feel to be best for us must ever be desired 
 by us. 
 
 It is true that many feel the charm of an effect without 
 intellectually realizing its cause or causes. Hence the French 
 speak of a " Je ne sais quoi " that makes them delight in 
 one person more than in another. This is now seen to be 
 complementariness of Being with our own Being. Though 
 we are so constituted that there is a felt beauty for us in 
 identity, z>., proportion or symmetry of ratios, yet, for general 
 harmony with individual requirements to be obtained, those 
 requirements must be of an Ideal nature, just as there must 
 be perfection in each individual tone for the composition of 
 a perfect chord in music, or a complete harmony in colour. 
 " Order is Heaven's first law " hence disorder is always 
 shocking to the reason. 
 
 Any true type of Being gives us a sense of perfection 
 of its kind, whilst any flagrant breach of the required 
 conformity with type is a shock to our general ideas of 
 beauty, or harmony, of which truth to nature is an essential 
 element. It is, perhaps, owing to the shock of surprise 
 given to the nervous system, or cerebral organism, by 
 reformers of religion, or conventionality, that they are so 
 much hated by the slaves of habit. The sense of simi- 
 larity in difference is, on the other hand, agreeable to us, 
 as is that of unity in variety, and of variety in unity. It 
 strengthens our sense of the relativity of finite Being to an 
 Absolute Prototypal Being ; whilst a comprehended end in 
 view is another form of uniformity, which enlists our interest 
 pleasure arising out of the fulfilment of our own expecta- 
 tion, as well as out of the harmony of nature, in the abstract. 
 Above all do we derive delight from a human nature, that 
 seems one with our own ; for only such an one redeems us 
 from the sense of isolation which the soul of man abhors 
 in Zeit und Ewigkeit. 
 
Rational) or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 189 
 
 The first to propound a new counsel of perfection is at first 
 looked upon with suspicion, as one running counter to the 
 accepted, generally held Ideal of the proper, or fit. Only 
 when he is gradually seen to have elevated, instead of 
 lowered, the old point of view, or standard of judgment, 
 is he regarded with respectful admiration as a genius. 
 
 The concept of morality is but gradually evolved, as 
 reflective introspective reason is necessarily preceded by 
 the stumbling exercise, or practice, of separate faculties 
 under spontaneous reason. 
 
 The very essence of morality is truth to the typical, 
 reflectively -attained Ideal standard of self-determination. 
 Therefore the child is necessarily unmoral, although good 
 early training, and firm, though gentle, control may prevent 
 its growing up perverse. Plato did well to recommend the 
 early inculcation of the Ideals of Being in the forms of 
 the imagination. No one can be said to break the law 
 of righteousness, who does not know in what it consists, 
 and immorality involves the idea of purposive departure 
 from it. Obedience to human order is the one virtue of 
 a child, as obedience to the Divine order is the crown 
 of adult experience. 
 
 To the reflective person, morality means the maintenance 
 of the integrity of his own spiritual Being, in spite of 
 sensuous and worldly temptations, and the obstacles thrown 
 in his way by human injustice or cruelty, and because 
 of the doubt and misgiving that will haunt him in this 
 vale of tears, as to the happy end of virtue and the 
 justice of God. St. Paul counts disbelievers in the good- 
 ness of God with blasphemers. "Maintenant que Dieu 
 m'a conduit vers toi je crois a 1'amour et au bonheur, et 
 ce serait une blaspheme que d'en douter." 
 
 As no one section of the universe can be rationally 
 conceived to be a contradiction of another, the moral 
 
igo Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 law must hold universally throughout all the fields of 
 space, wherever rational Being exists. The old English 
 expression, "I have a mind" to do such and such a 
 thing, contains a deeper truth than is commonly realized, 
 namely, that it is the quality of the mind itself that 
 characterizes our actions, and our judgments, and causes 
 us to will benevolently, or maliciously. " Myself am 
 Hell," says Byron's Lucifer. The worm of the malevolent 
 dieth not, nor is their fire quenched. Such as we are, so 
 do we each of us feel, think, and act, righteously or un- 
 righteously either as a rational Being obeying its Creator's 
 laws, or like the builders of the tower of Babel, each doing 
 what he chooses, without regard to the moral law, or the 
 Law Giver. Surely self-culture (the seeking knowledge, and 
 getting understanding) is as important a part of morality 
 as sympathy for others ; nor can we with impunity disregard 
 our Creator. 
 
 The proverb : " What is one man's meat is another man's 
 poison," is strictly logical, as indicating the differences 
 existing between physical constitutions ; equally does the 
 saying, "What is possible to one person is impossible to 
 another," point logically to the various proportions in which 
 feeling, intelligence, and will exist in different individuals. 
 Neither is the saying, "What can a man do more than he 
 can do ? " silly, but only a truism. Hence no man should 
 say to another "Thou fool!" We are all lost under the 
 same stars, in ignorance and weakness. A material object 
 is not as truly perceptible to one person as to another, when 
 one or other of the physical senses is weaker, or perhaps 
 deficient in one or other case. Short-sight in judgment, which 
 is as common as that of vision, arises out of idiosyncratic 
 deficiency of either emotion, intellection, or of the practical, 
 active will ; or out of neglect of the synchronous action 
 of the three in the reflective moral sense. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 191 
 
 The morality of an action lies in the purpose of the 
 agent, not in the overt act, or the soldier would be as 
 blameable as the highwayman ; nor is it to be found in 
 the superficial estimate of the onlooker hence the saying, 
 " Trust not appearances " ; only believe half what you see. 
 
 Individual action depends on the elements characteristic 
 of a given character, as it has been moulded by heredity, 
 time, place, and social environment. The decisions of the 
 judgment are in like manner affected by the character 
 and experiences of the individual. Hence the felt require- 
 ment of a jury, composed of few or many, to represent the 
 various sides of a question for the judges consideration. 
 If this be so, how then can the individual conduct his life 
 properly, handicapped as he is by his own indefeasible idiosyn- 
 crasy? I must again repeat only through the provision 
 made by Providence for the rectification of his one-sideness 
 of development by spiritual, or really human marriage as 
 opposed to the passing gratification of mere animal appetite. 
 
 Because we are slow to realize it effectively, each one 
 according to the degree of spiritual evolution to which he 
 has attained, it is none the less true of humanity, that 
 spirituality and not mere animality, in our every act, is 
 none the less the primal conception, or design, of our 
 Creator regarding us. When le droit was only interpreted 
 as le droit du plus fort, the savage marriage was by force ; 
 and the no less un- ideal conventional worldly marriage 
 even now exists at the present day. 
 
 Spontaneous action, when in accordance with reflective 
 reason, is not contradicted by reflective reason, but only 
 brought into just proportion under the principle of sufficient 
 reason, in which the three modes of causality are duly 
 exhibited. 
 
 "C'est la consideration de la loi (the rule) qui amene 
 1'Eime humaine a Dieu par l'ide de Tobligation, par 1'idee 
 
1 92 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 de la sanction et de la fin." Acts that have no sanction 
 in nature are monstrous, and without the sanction of morality 
 they are unholy. 
 
 Activity without a defined end, or aim, in view, is irrational, 
 unless instinctive, as is the skipping and hopping of a child. 
 
 "It is good," said yEschylus, "that fear acts as a 
 guardian of the soul, forcing it to wisdom or justice." 
 
 Hence the doctrine that " the fear of God is the beginning 
 of wisdom," as love is its end or consummation. 
 
 Fear and hope might pass away, if only love true, or 
 spiritual love remains. 
 
 In its finite actuality the moral law may be analysed or re- 
 solved into egoity, altruity, and deontology, or adoration of the 
 Deity. The life and death struggle always going on between 
 human beings for justice and mutual consideration, shows 
 how deep is the instinct in the human heart that the order of 
 the universe is a moral order which self-conscious rational 
 Beings can interpret and feel bound to enforce and obey. 
 
 It is because pure or reflective reason is sense trans- 
 cending that it leads us to shrink from mere sensuality, 
 which hides itself in holes and corners, " like a guilty thing 
 ashamed," before the higher spiritual nature of man, whose 
 face looks upward to whence cometh light. If, when God 
 gave Eve to Adam in Paradise for a helpmeet, or true 
 companion unto him, the sexual relation between them 
 was all that they recognized, no wonder that they were 
 ignominiously driven from a paradise which they could 
 not have enjoyed, into the howling wilderness, where pain 
 and sorrow were to develop the higher emotions that 
 come of evolved spiritualised reason, which is peculiar to 
 human nature. For man to do all to the glory of God is 
 to act always in consideration of, and in accordance with, 
 this higher reason, and in correspondence with the doctrine 
 of final cause, i.e., the spiritual evolution of man, to which 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 193 
 
 material things are meant but to minister ; not and never 
 to interfere with, or contradict. 
 
 "The moral judgment," says Hartley, "regarded as a 
 reflective faculty, carries its own authority with it, inasmuch 
 as it is the sum total of all the rest, and the ultimate result 
 from them, and employs the form and authority of the whole 
 nature of man against any particular part of it that rebels 
 against the determination and commands of the conscience 
 or moral judgment" To act according to the principle of 
 sufficient reason, is thus the fulfilment of the moral law ; 
 feeling, intelligence, and will, together with ratiocination 
 therefrom, which involves the Ideal of an Absolute Proto- 
 typal Being, from Whom all related Beings spring, are all 
 reflectively re -represented. The religious sentiment is the 
 characteristic par excellence of man's reflectively rational 
 nature : its commands are properly, or Ideally, one with 
 the moral sense or conscience, of which it is the ultimate 
 sanction ; unsanctioned law is not conceivable by reason, for 
 it is sanction that marks law, conscience inculcates goodness. 
 
 To the query, " Why must I be good ? " religion replies, 
 " Because it is the Maker's will," which, as a sympathetic, 
 practically rational Being, man's spontaneous tendency in 
 action is to carry out the one requirement of self-love, 
 social, and Divine, being action for the Best for Being as 
 such. It is to the Creator and Lawgiver of our Being 
 that conscience indicates our responsibility to preserve the 
 integrity of our real or spiritual Being, even at the cost of 
 its physical envelope ; and it is through rational activity in 
 thought, word, and deed, and obedience to the Creative 
 Legislator and the fulfilling of His righteous will, in accord- 
 ance with our reflectively rational conception of His nature, 
 as Absolute in power, wisdom, and goodness, that we may 
 cheerfully trust Him with both] our present and our future 
 destiny, together with that of all mankind. This is the 
 
 O 
 
194 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 logical, scientific basis of our sense of moral obligation 
 being grounded on the characteristics and tendencies of 
 human nature as a whole. A psychological code of morals 
 takes account of all the minute, but still accountable modifi- 
 cations which arise out of climate, country, and the social 
 medium in which a human creature is born. But pure 
 metaphysic, i.e., pure reason, keeps its eye fixed upon the 
 Ideal standard of Being. The exercise of individual reason 
 can never be dispensed with ; were it otherwise, how could 
 its evolution take place ? For spontaneous reason, like its 
 culmination in the principle of sufficient reason or conscience, 
 represents the consciousness of each individual Being, and 
 the reasoning of each person proceeds on the line of his, or 
 her own experiences. Hence we have been called " creatures 
 of circumstance"; for over our own circumstances at the 
 start of life we have no control, and individual development 
 is effected through the particular nervous organism, which we 
 have inherited from both our parents ; and if these parents 
 have been inharmoniously developed, through the unsuitable 
 fusion of incongruous idiosyncrasies, so also will their off- 
 spring present discordances of evolution which prevent the 
 existence of real tenderness between parent and child, and 
 between brothers and sisters among themselves. How then 
 can we attribute too much importance to the conjugal union, 
 both in respect of happiness, and in respect of the harmonious 
 development which answers to the complemental equilibrium 
 of faculties, in parents resulting in joy of life and the sense of 
 fulness, and perfection of Being ? It is in the true marriage 
 of souls being substituted for marriages of imaginative fancy, 
 or contracted for merely physiological or domestic purposes, 
 that the slowness or the quickness of the moral evolution of 
 the race mainly depends. 
 
 The principle of sufficient reason determines a person's 
 thoughts on the line of the true, the harmonious or beautiful, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 195 
 
 and the good. " Think of these things," says St. Paul : not 
 of make-believe, malice, envy, and despair ; for the mind 
 grows like what it looks upon, as the dyer's hand becomes 
 tinged with what it works upon. 
 
 This is a literal truth, which cannot remain altogether 
 ignored in our estimation of the individuals with whom we 
 come in contact. Society would become better, wiser, and 
 happier, and man would become better fitted for an earthly 
 paradise here, and a heavenly paradise hereafter, if only 
 people could be brought to believe that their practical 
 interests cannot ultimately suffer by their being true to 
 their better, or Ideal nature, to their natural desire for 
 union with one counterpartal Being, together with general 
 communion with their kind, also to their desire of know- 
 ledge and of understanding of truth, and to their sense of 
 responsibility to keep the moral law; each and all of these 
 being required in every act of daily life, and alone affording a 
 sufficient reason for self-determination, also the only sufficient 
 reason we can give for our faith, love, and hope in noumenal 
 Being is that their origin lies in the fundamental attributes of 
 humanity, and their consequent consistency with our whole 
 Being. The point of struggle in human nature is heredity 
 and physical confirmation. 
 
 The hyper-development of one part of our nature making 
 us passion-ridden to the silencing of intelligence, or to be 
 carried along, as by an avalanche, by " the ruinous force of 
 the will," or to have the heart hardened by seclusion from 
 mankind in pursuit of some dry intellectual discovery, are all 
 morbid psychoses, or states of partial, or hypnotised con- 
 sciousness, which render a man inhuman living, as it were, 
 in the dream of a somnambulist, instead of acting like a 
 reflectively rational, self-conscious Being, on the principle of 
 sufficient reason, towards which all our faculties contribute 
 their part, and which is the ground of moral responsibility. 
 
196 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Rational self-respect is the nobler form of natural self-love. 
 Of human love it has rightly been said : " The love of any 
 human Being for another cannot be greater or nobler than 
 the soul that conceives it"; and equally do we not well know 
 how vastly superior in kind and degree is the love of a 
 St. John or a St. Paul for God, to that of a simple peasant, or 
 a so-called sanctified worldling ? for the characteristic factor 
 of love is the sympathy that springs from the similarity of 
 nature existing between two persons. For a great love to 
 exist between human Beings, the sense of relativity must be 
 intensified by that of correlativity, or counterpartism, this 
 being the Divine method of counterbalancing individual 
 idiosyncratic one-sidedness of Being; but in our love of the 
 absolutely powerful, wise, and good Being, to whom different 
 nations give different names according to the nature of their 
 several languages "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord" the humility 
 of the imperfect before the perfect, of the finite before the 
 Infinite, is the chief characteristic. 
 
 If to self-love, and social, Divine love were not added, the 
 categorical imperative of duty to observe the two first would 
 be wanting : the lust of the eye, the pride of life, and violent 
 passion would alternately take the reins, and man would be 
 far more pitiable than the brutes that perish which enjoy 
 life upon the whole by being true to their animal nature as 
 such, without the abuse of speculative reason and imagination. 
 
 But man cannot live by bread alone, nor by mere worldly 
 parade; he requires faith, love, and hope in God to help 
 him to struggle against temptation, and to look beyond 
 this world for the ultimate satisfaction of the spiritual 
 nature given him by his Creator, by which he is made a 
 son of God, and an inheritor of the life eternal and Divine. 
 The sense of responsibility includes the conscientious 
 development of the higher faculties, by which alone we can 
 live truly here below, as well as in the heavens hereafter. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 197 
 
 Hence throughout man's eventful history we find the insti- 
 tution of a priesthood for the cultivation of the religious 
 sentiment, just as special instruction is found necessary in 
 the arts and sciences. 
 
 Could Ideal aspiration have been given for nothing? If 
 so, and if we are to share the fate of the rat, and the worm, 
 why mock poor humanity with a yearning destined only 
 to disappointment ? " Is man's nature," as Sir William 
 Hamilton asked, " only a living lie ? " 
 
 Tourgueneff asks, " Why, then, this tendency to pray 
 and praise ? this distinctive upward look for justice and 
 consideration, when our fellow-creatures refuse it us?" 
 
 Morality without being backed by the rational intuition 
 of religion would, indeed, have little chance of surviving 
 all the weeds that threaten to choke it*. We cannot always 
 command favourable conditions for ourselves, or for our 
 children : what then remains for the many placed under 
 conditions of life altogether unfavourable to spiritual evolu- 
 tion, without the rational intuition of the universal spiritual 
 Fatherhood of God ? This alone wards off despair, the 
 corrupter, the soul-destroyer. Surely it is the hope of a 
 better land that sustains the righteous poor ; although in 
 their case, as in the case of the majority of men, their faith 
 is dogmatic, instilled from without. We do not call God 
 the father of cats, dogs, lions, or monkeys, but the Father 
 of spirits. To know God, which as St. Paul says, is to 
 enter into the life eternal, is not given to the lower 
 animals ; hence the idea of a future life is not theirs, 
 neither is the moral law of universal benevolence revealed 
 to them. They are bound by no sense of responsibility 
 to maintain the moral order of the universe in all things, 
 and thus to live to the honour and glory of God. But 
 only through our being ourselves developed in benevolence 
 and justice, can we have faith in the goodness and perfection 
 
198 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 of God, the Ideal Being; for our judgments of others must 
 needs be tinged by our own characteristic idiosyncrasy. 
 
 Savages are like children, each one acting simply upon the 
 spontaneous impulses of his own idiosyncratic, unreflecting 
 nature, both being incapable of making the conceptive 
 generalization that only " what is fit for law universal, can be 
 really regarded as truly moral."* It is a postulate of reflective 
 reason that the Sufficient Cause, or Creator of all things, has 
 a sufficient reason for whatever He created, inspires, or occa- 
 sions ; and as action for the Good, or Best, for noumenal, or 
 spiritual Being, is the motive with which He has inspired us, 
 we cannot rationally credit Him with any other purpose. 
 
 We find it written in the Wisdom of Solomon : " The 
 ways of wisdom are ways of pleasantness, and all her 
 paths are peace." For in the eye of reason, the giving up 
 of an irrational or malignant will in conformity with the 
 Divine order, does not appear as a sacrifice, but as a 
 saving of both the subject and the object of malignity 
 from evil, or suffering, such being, indeed, redemption from 
 the ways that lead unto death. Thus also martyrs of 
 love, Divine and human, or of patriotism and philanthropy, 
 embracing, as they do, these several causes with their hearts, 
 feel that they are not really victims, for they are but truly 
 actualizing or carrying out their own nature in devoting 
 themselves to the service of others. 
 
 Suffering is the spiritual crucible appointed for man, 
 in which the sincerity of his religion, whether it be of the 
 heart, or of mere external observance, has to be tested and 
 tried seven times seven in the furnace of affliction. If a 
 man cannot trust his Creator through the trials of this life 
 in the certain faith that what God does, either actively, 
 or by permission, is well done, with what love or hope 
 can he face death, and still less immortality of existence? 
 
 * KANT. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 199 
 
 All trial, all struggles, when regarded as means to the end 
 of the evolution and perfection of our spiritual faculties 
 of faith, love, and hope, are approved of by reason ; and 
 were it not that the flesh is weak, we should voluntarily, 
 or of our own accord, embrace them, seeing that "qui 
 veut la fin veut les moyens." As to the new doctrine 
 that happiness is undesirable, it is literally self-contra- 
 dictory, and so is ridiculous. Meanwhile, pleasure and 
 pain, health and sickness, wealth and poverty, joy and 
 sorrow, hope and fear, are alike our educators here below. 
 None of them are weeds to be eradicated out of our pilgrim 
 way, or regarded as the intolerable. " If we cannot really 
 bear them, we die," said Epictetus. Impatience proceeds 
 from want of balance in feeling, intelligence, and will ; and 
 alas! also the doubt that our Creator has, what He requires of 
 poor finite man, *>., a sufficient reason for whatsoever we are 
 subjected to. Is it rationally conceivable that the Imposer 
 of the moral law should Himself disregard it, and act out 
 of malignity towards His own creation, or rather towards 
 the creature, whom, through the gift of reason, He has 
 admitted into His counsels ? The final end resumes the 
 motive and purpose of the whole of life. By the very 
 nature of our intellect, we are thus bound to judge of our 
 own creation, as well as of other occurrences. 
 
 Thus, in the Book of Genesis we see it stated, God saw 
 that His work was good. In other words, it satisfied His 
 mind and will as having the Good for Being as its ultimate 
 end : for what other end is rationally conceivable to us as 
 good ? All work, *.&, rational activity, implies an end or 
 purpose. 
 
 Reflective reason gives us Normwissenschaft, z>., know- 
 ledge of the meaning of the law, and of the rule. The moral 
 sense demands the fulfilment of the end in action, Zweck- 
 mdssigkeit, or right self-determination. This is the doctrine 
 
2OO Rational, or Scientific ', Ideal of Morality 
 
 of metaphysical, or spiritual Idealism. No rational human 
 Being has ever pronounced, or could ever pronounce a work 
 of malevolence (i.e., one the object or aim of which was the 
 infliction of suffering for its own sake) to be good. Hence 
 our instinctive trust in the goodness of God's Providence, 
 however veiled in thick darkness it may appear to us at 
 any particular moment. 
 
 " E'en the shadow on the dial marks the presence of the sun." 
 
 Both instinctive and reflective reason indicate that life is 
 given by the Creator for joy, which intensifies as we become 
 more and more fit for it. The natural instinctive desire of joy 
 of life is seen in the exuberant spirits of very young children 
 when given a treat. But only when our reason is sufficiently 
 developed to the height and breadth of the knowledge of 
 God, can an adult, or aged man arrive at steady cheerfulness 
 under all the trials of his life. But no life can be said to be 
 utterly joyless with love for its portion ; and who would not 
 shrink from the gift of an eternal hereafter without it ? 
 
 If, as Jesus said, " Love is the fulfilling of the law," we 
 must be sure that love, with its exceeding great joy, will 
 remain, whatever else may pass away. As love alone is joy, 
 so love alone can produce joy. Spiritual love is God's last 
 best gift to man ; spiritual love meaning not merely Divine 
 love, but also the love of spirits for each other. Love approves 
 itself to our reason, for it brings with it trust in the fulfil- 
 ment of the craving for joy of life that animates our will ; 
 and it is, moreover, the hostage, as being the present realiza- 
 tion of the hope that is an essential element of our Being. 
 "In its given content, the subject has relations which do 
 not terminate within that content."* 
 
 The spiritual faculties of man indicate a longer, fuller, 
 and more perfect existence than this planet affords. What 
 matters it, that the benevolence of God cannot be said to 
 
 * BRADLEY. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 201 
 
 find fulfilment here ? Disappointment here below only 
 makes us place our treasure above. 
 
 As to what Shelley calls the earthly Venus, of course, 
 whilst men have interpreted love as meaning the lust of 
 the flesh or of the eye, it can only be a more or less fre- 
 quently recurring accident of a man's life, destined to 
 gradual decay with the physical organism. Fortunately 
 for women, their masculinely enforced chastity has pre- 
 vented them from regarding love in such a hideous light. 
 License does not bring with it the true joy and dignity of 
 law, although it may forge chains of habit stronger than 
 those of nature.* Symmetry, or harmony of Being, can only 
 be found in monogamy. What is an object to us is not 
 foreign to us, that is to say, it must stand in some relation to 
 us, because it is only through its relativity to our feeling, 
 intelligence, and will, that it can become an object of thought 
 to us; only the most intimate relation of counterpart or 
 complement of our own Being answers to the Ideal of 
 marriage ; but as we cannot desire that of which we have 
 no conception, such marriages are few and far between. 
 
 External perception is a matter of accident, therefore the 
 later method of education dwells upon the importance of 
 furnishing object-lessons, because of their offering a variety 
 of objects, such as the daily experience of the individual 
 may not afford, to stir up the intelligence of youth. But 
 apperception, or reflective introspection is voluntary, and 
 seeks not only its own objects of predilection, but also to 
 comprehend the whole, or the complete scheme of the 
 rational universe. But how can this be done, when our 
 individual Being is lop-sided and idiosyncratic, and therefore 
 not capable of furnishing a rule applicable to all persons ? 
 The Hebrew myth of Eve being made from Adam's rib 
 indicates the perfect oneness of the two in one. 
 
 * Buddha spoke of * the beatitude of knowing the law. 
 
2O2 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Certainly, only through union with a complemental, or 
 counterpartal personality, can the equilibrium of judgment, 
 as of all the attributes of Being, in which perfection exists, 
 
 " But love is neither bought nor sought, 
 It comes a monarch to its own." 
 
 " True love is an intuition and a surprise ; - not the result 
 of a plan or purpose. 
 
 " Fidelity can only be predicated of true love, or comple- 
 mentary unions; for only when one is truly happy does 
 temptation to infidelity cease. 
 
 "The postulate of man's spiritual life is the harmony of 
 nature with spirit, or the spiritual constitution of the 
 universe."* 
 
 Thus marriage is both physical and spiritual in its passion 
 and purport ; as morality being altogether an inward, or 
 spiritual grace, cannot be substituted by any amount of 
 money given in charity, so, also, a man's making an offer of 
 marriage, or a woman's acceptance of it, is no certain sign 
 of true love, although the one may make believe to have real 
 benevolence, and the other may make believe to have attained 
 the happiness which is the true sign of perfect love. An essen- 
 tially unattached couple can only play at true love. If love is 
 not there, it .cannot be made, in spite of the common expres- 
 sion, "to make love." Yet the parties concerned would 
 indignantly repudiate the accusation of insincerity, which 
 is immorality to one who has any sense of truth left in him. 
 
 Morality aims at the Ideal in marriage, as in everything 
 else ; and the Ideal of marriage exacts, above all, truth, or 
 sincerity and harmony, or perfect sympathy between the 
 persons contracting it. Each one should give a fair but 
 complemental equivalent of feeling, intelligence, and good-will 
 to what the other furnishes. 
 
 These are the true marriages prompted by essential, or 
 * JAMES SETH. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 203 
 
 spiritual sympathy ; they only may truly be said to be 
 made in Heaven. 
 
 Those who truly love can bear all things, hope all things, 
 and endure unto the end, for their reward is with them even 
 now, spite of the painful process of the evolution of our 
 reason, which is the necessary preliminary to the beatitude 
 of finite Beings gifted with free will. 
 
 True love is the inspirer of chastity and sexual morality, 
 and also of religious aspiration, for it brings with it heartfelt 
 gratitude for true joy of life, such as no mere earthly 
 prosperity can suggest, and intensifies by doubling our sense 
 of dependence upon God. 
 
 For although struggle and punishment may be necessary 
 for the attainment of knowledge and the correction of error, 
 they alone could never produce love to God in the soul, nor 
 trust in His goodness for the future ; and what would the 
 prospect of eternity be without such trust ? 
 
 True love, meaning the perfect mutual affinity which 
 results in the sense of fulness of life and its ever-renewed joy, 
 knows no grudging at the happiness of others, for they who 
 drink of that fountain thirst no more ; therefore, unlike the 
 strugglers for worldly success, they are full of good-will and 
 desire for the happiness of their fellow-creatures, and more- 
 over, through the power and grace of love, they are more 
 capable of helping others on their way to the attainment 
 of the same, than when they are themselves desolate and 
 shipwrecked, weak and ungracious. The Ideal of morality 
 is an aloe growth, for it takes at least a hundred years for 
 the result of individual evolution to be apparent in a more 
 exalted social Ideal of the Good for Being. 
 
 In the meantime, many fresh ideals of mushroom growth 
 are started, and die the death of rootless things things 
 that have no enduring foundation in the essential nature of 
 noumenal, or real Being, the one Ding an sick und fur sick 
 
204 Rational \ or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 in the creation, on which the eternal cosmos hinges. Witness 
 the partial command of the elements which is given to man : 
 how, in spite of the law of gravity, he sends heavy cars up 
 Vesuvius, makes water rush uphill to suit his convenience, 
 makes electricity his messenger more rapid than wind, 
 and with the magnet guides his course over the trackless 
 ocean ; nor are the secrets of the stars hid from him reason 
 interpreting visual appearances and calculating their times 
 and places, feels no more a stranger amongst them than in 
 the jungles or the desert places of the earth. 
 
 Of course man only governs by, or through, the order 
 of nature the law of causality. He can only counter- 
 act one cause by the application of a more potent or im- 
 mediately active one in opposition to it. 
 
 Metaphysic has been compared to the web the spider 
 weaves out of its own entrails ; and certainly the three 
 modes of causality are known to man through being present 
 in his own Being. This it is that gives him the cue to 
 the understanding of the universe. We can only represent 
 truth to ourselves in so far as it is presented to us in the 
 modifications of our own feelings, intelligence, and will. 
 Experience is the one seat of reality for us : but be it 
 physical or spiritual, it is the spirit of man that interprets 
 experience through the concepts of the understanding. 
 
 "The more anything. is spiritual," says Hegel, "the more 
 is it veritably real." No finite Being is altogether self- 
 consistent. Personal individuality indicates idiosyncrasy of 
 character, or one-sided development of Being; each in- 
 dividual has to realize its various aspects in the chance 
 world of temporal events. Hence ideas and existence 
 cannot precisely correspond, and the want of this corres- 
 pondence means to some extent illusion'' But although 
 illusion exists here and there, the whole does not appear 
 so to us, as in general our ideas are answered by events." 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 205 
 
 We cannot say that existence does not on the whole 
 correspond with our ideas, although there are higher and 
 lower ideas more beautiful, and less beautiful, truer or 
 more exhaustive ideas; and our evolution consists in attain- 
 ing to these last, and in living up to that Ideal standard. 
 The more or less incomplete our knowledge is, the more 
 or less erroneous it is. 
 
 Privation and failure imply always an outlying field of 
 reality. "Anything is absolute, when all its nature is 
 contained within itself." 
 
 Finite Being means partial non-Being. "The criterion 
 of truth may be called the inconceivability of the opposite. 
 A thing is impossible because it contradicts positive know- 
 ledge." The self-contradictory is impossible of belief to 
 anyone. But this impossibility may be relative to the want 
 of development in a person. "The opposite of a thing is 
 impossible in so far as the thing is real." The opposite of 
 reality is nothingness, not mere privation of a part. 
 
 There may be facts that are only accidental appearances. 
 The principles of thought, or of internal harmony, are 
 divergent aspects of the one idea of the concrete unity of 
 Being. They are absolute and d priori, forming the ground 
 and understanding of all a posteriori reasoning. "The more 
 systematic, and more fully organized a body of knowledge 
 becomes, so much the more impossible becomes that which 
 conflicts with it at any point." "The more real or true 
 to experience a thing, or doctrine is, the more incon- 
 ceivable is its opposite." 
 
 A person with only sensibility and desire, without intellect, 
 and reflective judgment, is, as we say, "not all there" 
 either he is a born idiot or a madman. Equally a person 
 without the realization of finality, upon which all hinges, 
 is lost to virtue and happiness. 
 
 Without reflective judgment there is no sense of respon- 
 
2o6 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 sibility to the Creator ; there is, in fact, no real apprehension 
 of our absolute relativity to an Absolute Being, or of the 
 various real relations to other relative Beings who are bound 
 like us to obedience to the Cause of causes to Whom alone 
 the idea of duty applies. The man who consciously, or 
 voluntarily, ignores this se reltgue to the rank of a mere 
 animal, such as his own dog : for him no Father of spirits 
 exists, to whom his sense of accountability to be a true or 
 good man, such as he was designed to be, refers. The 
 human reason can neither go short of this conception, nor 
 go beyond it. 
 
 Who could wish to have dealings with such a man ? 
 Without it what is to hold or bind us under the pressure 
 of difficulties or the hallucinations of temptation ? Instead 
 of being a charioteer who drives his terrestrial body like a 
 vehicle that is entrusted to him, man becomes like the fly, 
 which thrown by chance upon the wheel of destiny, ex- 
 claimed, " How fast I go ! " Such is man without reflection, 
 and, consequently, without faith, love, and hope, and the 
 self-control that comes of these fruits of the self-conscious 
 spirit not of the body and its lusts. 
 
 Moral men who believe they believe in no Supernatural 
 Power, cannot prevent their being themselves the offspring 
 of ages of faith. Travellers tell us of a certain northern 
 tribe of nomads, which, when surrounded by Pagan star- 
 worshippers, prided themselves on the superior dignity of 
 their own daily worship, at sunrise, of the Unseen God. 
 Certainly those who have arrived, through the highest exer- 
 cise of all the faculties of their Being, at the conviction of 
 kinship with the Father of spirits, may well be proud of their 
 achievement ; but it must be remembered that the concept of 
 an intelligent, loving, and All-powerful Creator must be a 
 synthetic judgment, to which our feelings, intelligence of 
 causality sufficient, efficient, and, above all, final the last 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 207 
 
 involving the representation of our own will, or instinctive 
 tendency to act for the Best for Being must all contribute. 
 
 This causal trinity in unity of evidence, alone constitutes 
 a sufficient reason for our faith, as well as for our love and 
 our hope in the Supreme Absolute Being. 
 
 Believing, as we must do, in our own existence, we can 
 believe in other existences ; and loving others as we do, 
 we can rationally believe that they love us ; and as we 
 ourselves act for what we regard as the Best for Being, we 
 intuitively attribute the same motive to all rational Being 
 including our Creator. " Come let us reason together," says 
 the Jewish Jehovah, for it is thus that we arrive at a certain 
 faith and hope of good for where love abides, joy abides also. 
 
 But self-love, and social, without Divine love, would leave 
 the world a moral chaos, for as Wordsworth so beautifully 
 says in his ode to Duty, " When love or desire fails, duty 
 still holds the rudder of our course " ; for the principle of 
 sufficient reason itself is but the embodiment of what we 
 regard as the right of our Creator to require of us, as rational 
 Beings, in all our proceedings. Mere altruism, or self-sacrific- 
 ing regard for others, such as wife, children, father, or mother, 
 can no more dispense with morality, or conformity to the 
 Divine order of general justice and benevolence to all, than 
 prudent self-regard can dispense with kindly regard for others. 
 
 Our Ideals answer to the fundamental ideas of reason, the 
 representations of the attributes of Being, which are love of 
 truth, love of harmony, and tendency to goodness, or good- 
 will in action. Being is the quo nihil majus cogitari potest. 
 
 What do we mean by truth, if not truth to Being, i.e., 
 correspondence, or conformity with the nature of Being, 
 its attributes and its rational postulates ? Outside of .this, 
 we cannot understand, and consequently cannot love, 
 desire, or hope anything. The idea of our own Being, is still 
 the necessarily present in the Ideal of harmony, for egoity 
 
208 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 is the first factor in relativity, which must always primarily 
 involve two factors the subject and the object. The Ideal 
 of goodness is that of the categorical imperative of obedience 
 to the order of subjective and objective conception. Self- 
 love and social, are of Divine ordering; hence, to conform 
 to them in action, for the Good for Being, is our duty to God. 
 If either of these typical mainsprings of human conduct are 
 disregarded, whether it be the sense of Being, or the sense 
 of the relativity of Being, or of the concomitant sense of the 
 tendency of Being (feeling, intelligence, and will, being repre- 
 sented under the categories of sufficient, efficient, and final 
 cause), there can be no such thing as real morality; just 
 as St. Paul said, "Though I bestow all my goods to feed 
 the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and 
 have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." 
 
 Descartes includes feeling and will under the principle of 
 thought, requiring that they should be made clear, or intensi- 
 fied by reflective consciousness. Were it not an admitted fact 
 that "the theory of logic is still inadequate," I might, as a 
 woman, have hesitated to come forward with a new stand- 
 point for induction from effect to cause, and for deduction from 
 cause to effect. This standpoint I regard as furnished by 
 introspective reflection on the attributes of Being as they are 
 exhibited in the positive of our own Being, with the com- 
 parative recognition of similars, and the Ideal substitution of 
 a superlative similar, according to the law of Impersonation, 
 where we recognize processes of design, such as our own 
 minds conceive, although on a finite instead of an infinite 
 scale. To speak of the rights of man is to assume logically 
 that each person is an ultimate reality, whose claim to self- 
 realization, according to reason, ought to be respected and 
 satisfied. "Each, as part of a whole, must find its own 
 self-realization for the whole universe to be rational." 
 According to Hegel, reality must possess rationality ; and 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 209 
 
 the aim of Hegel's dialectic was to prove that all reality 
 is completely rational At all events, nothing but what is 
 presented to us in sensible experience, or represented by us 
 emotionally, intellectually, or morally, can be either recog- 
 nized, or re-represented by us reflectively. In this sense, the 
 French saying : " Ce qui ne se sait pas n'existe pas," is true ; 
 and it has also been well said that each one of us sees a 
 different world to the other, for the development of the 
 senses, and the evolution of the intellect and the emotions 
 differ in each case. The high, sense-transcending Ideal 
 treats of what has been called "the love of attributes," or 
 of spiritual excellence. ^ Low Ideals treat of the lust of the 
 eye, and the pride of life the life that fadeth and withereth 
 like the flowers of the field. 
 
 Each one's Ideal is in accordance with his, or her, onto- 
 logical evolution ; for " chacun cherche son plasir ou il le 
 trouve." True joys and enduring happiness are the quest 
 of those " born again to the Spirit." 
 
 For Hegel, the Ideal lies, not in ignoring the rational 
 claims of individuals, but in seeing in them the embodiment 
 of the universal reason in which each has his appointed 
 place in the Divine plan. We fall into more difficulties 
 than we avoid, by a low estimate of the self-conscious 
 individual. An orchestra, as we know, is composed of 
 different instruments, which together produce the grand 
 result of a perfect symphony; only each one must play 
 his part well. 
 
 Ambition, or the love of power for its own sake, has 
 been called the last weakness of great minds ; but when 
 one thinks of the cruel want of consideration for the feelings 
 and self-respect of others, even to counting their very life 
 as dust in the balance of one's own will, or self-importance, 
 ambition appears as an ugly foil to the pure spiritual 
 aspiration to influence other men for their own good, and 
 
 P 
 
2io Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 for what has been truly called the " greater glory " of God. 
 Ambition is, in fact, the preponderance of self-consideration 
 in the career of life ; whereas holy aspiration towards personal 
 excellence is kind and sympathetic, no one is made little of, 
 but both the leader and the led are alike blessed and helped 
 onward in the path of duty, which leads to the Father of 
 spirits, and to the rest and joy prepared for all good and 
 faithful servants of the Great King. Arbitrariness and 
 caprice are alike akin to ambition in ignoring consideration 
 for others, culminating, as in the case of some of the Roman 
 emperors, in an inordinate desire of exercising power on the 
 very slightest occasion, and moreover delighting in making 
 others feel that they were under coercion. Thus tyrants 
 are naturally cruel, like children and boys. This disposition 
 is particularly unsociable and unamiable in domestic life, 
 where it is designated as overbearingness. On the other 
 hand, to be utterly devoid of any desire for influencing 
 others for good, inspires contempt in those who are generous 
 enough to feel for the general interests of humanity. 
 
 Only by the reflective study of the roots, or springs, of our 
 desires can we arrive at any rational judgment as to their 
 worthiness, or worthlessness, for Being as such. 
 
 It is this that determines their merit, or demerit, and 
 enables us to decide whether they should be cultivated or 
 extinguished. Let us take for our consideration the desire 
 for private property as opposed to Socialism. Even if future 
 emergencies regarding food or clothing, and even intellectual 
 training, be provided for by a given social state, what would 
 be the benefit if these so to speak mechanical arrangements 
 tended to check the natural stimulation to industry prompted 
 by the various forms of feeling, such as self-love, conjugal 
 love, the love of offspring and country. Would any real 
 gain accrue to humanity in such a case ? 
 
 It is the particular demands made upon our emotions and 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 2 1 1 
 
 sense of duty that develop character. These demands are 
 the efficient causes of our evolution, as occasioning the 
 vivid sense of the particular relations in which we stand to 
 certain individuals, and towards our Creator, for without 
 real emotion how can we be said to love either God or man ? 
 Again, when the happiness of the individual is ignored, what 
 can be expected regarding the happiness of the race ? or 
 when the culture of the individual is neglected, what progress 
 of the race can be effected ? Is it by returning to the days 
 of tribal ownership, in which women, food, and arms were 
 shared in common, that the value of the individual soul, so 
 much dwelt upon by Jesus, will be increased ? 
 
 And if women be judged unworthy of intellectual develop- 
 ment, how can we wonder at the staring want of morality in 
 men who are the sons of such creatures ? Out of the moral 
 swamp of ignorance, indolence, and the lust and pride of 
 life, what but the minotaur could be expected to emerge ? 
 
 Thank God, however, as the ancients had their Hercules, 
 Theseus, etc., we have had men like Rousseau, John Stuart 
 Mill, Auguste Comte, etc., who all brought forward the im- 
 portance of the female element in civilization. Yet the 
 truth remains that those who would be free must themselves 
 strike the blow ; and until woman herself struggled for her 
 rights, there was little hope of her attaining them ; and the 
 newly-acquired knowledge that she has to fight her own 
 fight for the redemption of her sons from the degradation of 
 sensuality, as well as for her own redemption from ignorance 
 and its accompanying superstition, is strengthening her hand 
 in God. 
 
 Instead of " youth at the prow, and folly at the helm of 
 life," we want reflective reason and eternal hope to steer 
 the bark of youth, so that it may not founder, or be disabled 
 at the start of the voyage of life, for where the treasure is, 
 there will the heart be ; and whilst this world and its passing 
 
2 1 2 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 shows are taken for the all in all of life, the provision made 
 by youth for its future even here is sad indeed to contem- 
 plate, and the name of the wrecked is legion. 
 
 Even religion, without understanding and influence of 
 reflective reason, cannot save man from the quicksands of 
 which folly makes a joke, or from the outraging of Nature, 
 which is the sin of disobedience to the Divine design. 
 
 Religion is the high sanction of the moral sense, making 
 obedience to God the categorical imperative of duty ; and 
 as it is through reflective reason that we arrive at the apper- 
 ception of our own soul, so only thus do we reach at the 
 idea of an Absolute, or Perfect Being, Whose will constitutes 
 for us the law of self-determination. When we speak of 
 the goodness of God, we mean that a perfect Being has 
 goodness for one of His attributes. The fundamental ideas 
 of reason are representations of the attributes of Being, 
 and are as much facts of the inner life of man, as hunger 
 and thirst are facts of the bodily life; we crave for knowledge 
 of causality as for bread. 
 
 The monstrous ideas of Deity, that have been the reflec- 
 tions of man's own undeveloped Being, have hitherto 
 beckoned him on to cruelty and destruction, rather than 
 to the emulation of God's good-will towards men, and to 
 the hope of Heaven, or happiness which springs therefrom, 
 and which a more developed consciousness of noumenal 
 Being suggests. Although eye hath not seen, nor ear heard 
 what yet remains for man to contemplate in another stage 
 of existence, yet reason assures us that there will be ultimate 
 satisfaction of the emotions, intellect, and moral will, and 
 that sympathy or love, justice, and benevolence must always 
 be desired by us. What is most required now is a re- 
 organization of society favourable to the building up of 
 individual character, which is now, alas ! so little attended 
 to under the present regime of cramming for public examina- 
 
Rational, or Scientific, laeal of Morality 2 1 3 
 
 tions, etc. Through the express cultivation of their several 
 gifts aesthetical, logical, or practical, men might well find in a 
 free country, on their own account, different, but congenial, 
 spheres of action ; although it would seem that some amount 
 of competition among contrasted natures were necessary to 
 maintain energy and sufficiency of balance in character. 
 Were every individual a finished moral Being, Socialism 
 might possibly take the place of competition, but not until 
 then. 
 
 It is the spread of individual moral enlightenment, and 
 enthusiasm, that alone can permanently regenerate society, 
 securing justice and the happiness and stability of nations. 
 
 That is evil which thwarts, and that is good which 
 promotes the ultimate end of action, which is for the 
 actualization and conservation of the integrity, or whole- 
 ness (what the Bible calls "holiness") of Being. 
 
 This is what Jesus meant in saying: "Be ye perfect, 
 as your Father in Heaven is perfect," thus teaching the 
 necessity of keeping the Ideal standard of perfect Being 
 always before our eyes. The automatism of habit induced 
 by the constant repetition of acts, may be, but is far from 
 always being, extended to the desires from which they 
 spring ; hence the wearisome sense of incessant struggle. 
 
 "The use of rewards and punishments is the support 
 of states," says Lord Bacon, "for thus is man swayed by 
 hope and fear"; mere routine is dead-alive paralysing desire. 
 But when our various desires become co-ordinated and 
 harmonized by pure reason ; and when morality is so 
 stimulated by the religious sentiment, an important part 
 of which is remorse for disobedience to God, when love, 
 and not fear, is felt for the Supreme Being, the harmony of 
 intelligence and will becomes the ruling habit of the mind. 
 
 Self-love may fail, and so also may social sympathy ; but 
 the sense of duty to God can never fail where reflective 
 
214 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 reason reigns. Reflective reason is the instrument by which 
 our lower desires are subordinated to our higher, or spiritual 
 nature. Here is the place of the second birth unto righteous- 
 ness, taught by Jesus and by the old Brahmanic religion, 
 the fruits of which are faith, love, and hope in our Creator. 
 
 Seeing that emotion is the sail, whilst reason is the rudder 
 that steers to the desired goal of happiness, or perfection of 
 Being for the terms are convertible the religious emotion 
 is necessary to drive man's hope to the better land beyond 
 the grave, where reason will be justified of her children 
 in the rest that remains for all who truly love God and 
 their fellow creatures ; merely to be driven by the penalties 
 of the law is not life indeed. 
 
 Such is the imperfection of our mortal nature, that man 
 needs the Almighty arm to lean on, and the Ideal Being 
 to look up to, to be able to keep his armour of faith, love, 
 and hope untarnished amidst all the smoke and fire and 
 death of the battle of life. To whom should the idea of 
 duty attach ? To whom should our sense of responsibility 
 apply, if not to our Creator, to the Master of life and 
 death, the Disposer of events, and the Inspirer of hope 
 as of the awful dread of the contempt of the laws, and 
 the order of reason ? 
 
 Individual love of liberty, when combined with the love 
 of truth, seeks to secure justice in the civil and political 
 laws, of which it acknowledges the necessity, respecting 
 even at what they are worth, the expediencies on which 
 executive authority mostly proceeds, in consideration of 
 the beneficial results of which any particular influence, 
 being brought to bear, may be productive. Without such 
 individual love of independence, combined with a profound 
 sense of morality, which will always be found to be directly 
 or indirectly related to the religious sentiment of hope or 
 fear, mankind, instead of progressing in knowledge, love, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 215 
 
 and benevolence, would fall under a dreary servile bondage 
 to authority, custom, and force. But as art for art's sake 
 is a solecism in reason, so the exercise of the will for mere 
 wilfulness* sake, would bring us back to the state of society 
 that prevailed before the Flood, when everybody did what 
 pleased himself only, or what pleased some other person 
 stronger than himself. Morality is the fruit of the distinct 
 evolution of each of the attributes of noumenal Being of 
 feeling, of intelligence, and of the will for the Good for 
 Being, synthetised in reflection on the unity of Being as a 
 whole \ reflection itself being but the culminating effort of 
 reason to attain to a standard of sufficient reason for faith, 
 love, and hope, out of which emanate self-reverence, social 
 regard, and Divine adoration, the three motive powers of 
 our human nature, upon which the Ideal of morality rests, 
 and on truth or fidelity to which our sense of responsibility 
 hinges. Hence love is the fulfilment of the law, or the 
 Divine order in the universe, for love is made up of faith 
 and hope : without these it is a starveling. It has been 
 well said, that " a great Ideal is the most practical thing 
 in the world." 
 
 As a matter of fact our practice is absolutely directed 
 by our ideas, bad or good, therefore a low Ideal is fatal to 
 virtue. What I want to present to the mind of my readers is 
 the true or Ideal position of rational self-love in any sound 
 scheme of practical morality. Here we have the positive, out 
 of which the comparative and superlative Ideals proceed. The 
 apparent contradiction between egoity and altruity is re- 
 solved into the higher harmony of love for the All-Father, 
 and obedience to His laws. The love of others is seldom 
 found in its highest perfection, unless associated with the 
 love of God. "I should have loved thee less, loved I not 
 virtue more" is a quotation made by me in a former 
 work ; and I was much blamed for substituting the word 
 
2 1 6 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 virtue for that of honour. But as the word honour is 
 emphatically a man-regarding feeling (the family being a 
 corporate self to which praise or blame is attributable), 
 substituting le respect humain for virtue, which is altogether 
 a God-regarding sentiment: so I repeat the quotation, only 
 withdrawing the name of Lovelace. It is a mistake to 
 suppose that ancestor worship is confined to China, for 
 duty is still held to be due to ancestors in all the great 
 Empires of Europe. 
 
 Conscience makes us fearless before man, but fearful of 
 offending our Creator. If man had no liberty of choice, 
 there could be no such thing as the sense of responsibility 
 to use the reason which God has given, however the heathen 
 or Philistine may rage. 
 
 The principle of reflective thought is that of sufficient 
 reason, which, while not ignoring the personal equation 
 necessary to be made in each case (for a man cannot be 
 what he is not, or do what he cannot), still holds the 
 standard of right and duty. The idiosyncrasies of each 
 person may be taken into account in the summing up of 
 what is required of them individually without lowering 
 the abstract Ideal. 
 
 Deprived of reflective reason, man would no longer be 
 able to regard himself as God's vicegerent upon earth, 
 but would fall into the category of a sentient machine, 
 under which Descartes places the lower animals. A Suffi- 
 cient Cause represents the idea of adequacy for the pro- 
 duction of a given effect: whereas efficient causation represents 
 a relation between at least two terms or factors. Spon- 
 taneous self-determination is under the principle of final 
 cause, or action for self-conservation, and for that of those 
 connected with us. Deliberate reflective will is under the 
 speculative sense-transcending reason, which postulates the 
 existence of a Sufficient Cause for our own existence, and 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 2 1 7 
 
 for that of all else of which we are aware, to Whom we 
 owe, as rational Beings, obedience and adoring co-operation 
 in the rational order of the creation in which we live and 
 move and have our Being. Man obviously requires outward 
 circumstances to call internal incentives into play. If no 
 objects capable of inspiring trust and love approach us, 
 how can we feel these emotions ? Hence it is only as the 
 higher elements of our nature become more and more 
 developed, through the presentations and representations 
 of fitting objects, that we are able to recognize around us 
 evidences of the exhibition of power, wisdom, and goodness, 
 in the orderly universe of which we form a part. Thus it 
 is that we believe from the analogy of design in the ma- 
 crocosm, and microcosm, that the same sufficient reason 
 for action which our Creator has imposed upon us, />., the 
 Good for Being, is the motive and aim of the entire 
 creation. 
 
 The mind of the lower animals having no part in the 
 conception of the cosmos, we do not attribute to it life 
 eternal. 
 
 The conception of the Good, or Best for Being, as such, 
 is not seen through the mental lens of an ignorant, thought- 
 less, or depraved person, such an one not having yet reached 
 the rung of the ladder of evolution fitting him for such a 
 conception. 
 
 Moral enlightenment, or the comprehension of the scheme 
 of the universe, can only be acquired by a general develop- 
 ment of the feelings, understanding, and will, by free and 
 independent moral inquiry. 
 
 Though the religious feeling, and the rational beliefs 
 arising therefrom, may supply motive and sanction to the 
 formation of Ideals of conduct, it is to the science of 
 ethic (which treats of the End, in view of which we both 
 spontaneously and reflectively act, i,e. y the highest Good for 
 
2 1 8 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Being as it has been Divinely ordered) that we must look 
 for rules of conduct, which are supplied in their incipient 
 form by the self- and social-propensities co-ordinated and 
 controlled by the practical reason, or sense of obligation to 
 act in accordance with them. The reflective sense of re- 
 sponsibility to obey the Divine order, cannot rationally be 
 supposed to inculcate the eradication of the component 
 elements of that order ; and if we are to love our neighbour 
 as ourselves, we must first feel a proper self-regard. "We 
 can only serve God by obedience to the plain dictates of 
 reason, and by faith in that moral order, through which we 
 necessarily interpret the world, seeing that He has constituted 
 it to be law to us. Morality is individual self-determination 
 for the true interests, or real Best for noumenal, or spiritual 
 Being, as such. But to generalize this principle of reason, 
 we must ourselves have arrived at it, for it can only be 
 introspectively known by us, or be intelligible to us through 
 our own feelings, intelligence of causality and will, or natural 
 tendency in action. As Sydney Smith said, " Corporations 
 have neither a body to be kicked, nor a soul to be damned." 
 Moral appeal in the last resort is always to the individual 
 Being. Hence the American assertion of the right of the 
 individual to pursue what he considers best for himself, 
 so long as he does not interfere with the same right in 
 another person. This is what constitutes society, as opposed 
 to the gregariousness of the early tribal communities. The 
 individual Ego is the stronghold of spirituality. " He is the 
 free man whom the truth makes free"; not the slave of 
 passion from within, or of pressure from without. Truth 
 to feeling, truth to intellect, and truth to the moral or 
 practical sense, is the sine qud non of a true man. "Treu 
 meiner Pflicht, mir selbst treu, dass Treu stets meine 
 Treue sei." 
 
 The Ideal of reason is properly one with that of evolved 
 
Rational) or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 2 1 9 
 
 spiritual Being, which it is its function to reflect as one 
 and indivisible. But as we describe things by their pro- 
 perties, so we define noumenal Being by its attributes, and 
 thus speak of the Ideals of reason under the categories of 
 feeling, intelligence, and will, and of reflective inference, or 
 transcendental metaphysic, which treats of the pure Ideal, 
 or Ideal Being, from which the notions of truth, beauty 
 or harmony, and goodness, are but abstractions. Our Ideal 
 of the universe, as exhibiting the order of reason, is 
 derived from our Ideal, or rational conception of its 
 Creator. 
 
 As it is through reason that we interpret the cosmos, 
 so the exercise of reason is implied in its design and 
 construction ; what we intelligize must be intelligible to 
 reason. 
 
 Man logically postulates the "ought to be," according to 
 the data furnished by his own rational Ideal of the purpose 
 of all activity in rational Beings ; " Evil, be thou my good," 
 says Milton's Satan. 
 
 As man rationally expects provided satisfaction for 
 physical hunger and thirst, so he rationally looks for the 
 gratification of his natural desires for love, for knowledge, 
 and for righteousness, for justice, peace, and universal good. 
 Such satisfaction not being found here, it is evident to 
 reason, that this world is but a preparatory stage of exist- 
 ence, commonly called "a state of trial," because fraught 
 with disorder, injustice, lovelessness, and even positive 
 malignity, or "devilry," as it used to be called. 
 
 Hence it is to a life beyond the grave, where, as Milton 
 says, " the Providence of God will be justified to man," that 
 we look for the hoped-for satisfaction of Being. Real in- 
 stinctive desire is one with the rational intuition of a purpose 
 to be accomplished. We do not call drunkenness, or theft, 
 instinctive desires, but aberrations from these, or immoral 
 
22O Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 ones. If we see a man the picture of hopeless despondency, 
 we surely do not say : " How beautiful, how delightful, how 
 Ideal is this state of Being ! " nor do we wish to embrace 
 his pessimistic philosophy, or his religion full of terrors. 
 
 As the reasoning faculty becomes more and more developed 
 in the race, the doctrines of damnation and pessimism will 
 be held in the natural horror we feel for whatever is a 
 direct contradiction of the principles upon which our life 
 is instinctively conducted : for man logically dislikes self- 
 contradiction, and as a thinking animal (vide Aristotle), when 
 told he is entirely on a wrong scent in seeking to understand 
 causation sufficient, efficient, and final a darkness that can 
 be felt settles down upon his spirit, a dread such as is 
 produced in us by an earthquake, a destroying whirlwind, 
 or a consuming fire and it is out of this horrible discord 
 of feeling, intelligence, and will, that superstition (Aberglaube) 
 springs. 
 
 Resentment, when called for by injustice, or by culpable 
 neglect of kindly consideration, so far from being inimical 
 to the interests of society is virtually essential to its existence. 
 " Be ye angry (or indignant) but sin not," says St. Paul. To 
 suppose a state of things in which injuries could be inflicted 
 without exciting any resentment, and consequently without 
 entailing any requital, is to suppose a community in which 
 the lives and property of men would simply be handed over 
 to those who have the least conscience, and the most 
 malignant will. Rapine, assault, and murder would become 
 normal and universal. Natural resentment has the im- 
 mediateness of an instinct, and the business of ethics is not 
 to extirpate instincts, but to exterminate injustice, or the 
 outraging of natural instincts. 
 
 If no sense of affront, no angry feeling at insult arose in 
 our own mind, who would avoid affronting others ? The 
 fact is, that the contradiction of nature refuses to be stated 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 221 
 
 in logical terms. How could we reflectively legislate against 
 the violation of the law of self-conservation, if the impulse 
 to defend ourselves were not innate in us ? 
 
 When we talk of our rights, we mean the right of man 
 to be treated like a rational Being. Compassion for others 
 is not injustice, or contradiction of this, for it is a part of 
 rational conduct to sympathise with the falling off from 
 perfection in our fellow-creatures, and to be ready willingly 
 to waive even our rights in favour of a fellow-creature more 
 distressed than ourselves. But the fundamental concepts of 
 intuitive reason remain, and we must always be able to 
 give a sufficient reason for our every act if we would truly 
 endeavour to keep the moral law ; for a good-natured fool 
 may be more dangerous than a knave. 
 
 Natural resentment, or virtuous indignation, if over- 
 indulged in, may nevertheless degenerate into malevolence, 
 which is as injurious to the subject as the object of it 
 Hence "the golden mean" of Aristotle. Self-love and 
 sympathy must be combined with the reverence for the 
 Divine order, or will (which is called true religion), for true 
 morality to be predicable of our conduct. 
 
 In the order of reflective reason, spontaneous emotions 
 become transformed, or translated, into abstract moral 
 sentiments under the laws of causality and the principle 
 of sufficient reason ; just as mere instinctive curiosity to 
 know what is going on around us, passes into an elevated 
 desire to understand the order of the universe, and the 
 nature of God. 
 
 Feeling, intelligence, and will, are here comprehended 
 under the indivisible Whole of Being ; although, as the 
 notes of a chord of music can be played separately, so 
 feeling, intelligence, and will can be separately appealed 
 to. Even empirical sense experiences, together with their 
 accompanying imagination and memory, must be taken 
 
222 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 into account for the comprehension of the nature and 
 destiny of man ; for thus is the physical cosmos revealed 
 to us as the necessary condition of finite consciousness. 
 None of the fundamental concepts of reason, which are 
 of the attributes of Being, and its modifications in psychical 
 experiences can truly reveal, or indeed give us any ideas of 
 the material universe, which only arise in our mind through 
 sensuous experiences of colour, form, sound, smell, taste, and 
 touch, or contact with its accompanying sense of resistance. 
 
 Our sense of right to hold our own as regards truth, 
 love, and justice, is equally exhibited in our struggles to 
 maintain a place for our bodies in space. Even the atom 
 shows resistance to force, although it may yield to fusion 
 through its chemical affinities, but still remaining always 
 capable of return to its individual integrity of essential 
 constitution, and of embracing a more perfect affinity, if 
 such should appear. 
 
 True love, which is the foundation of spiritual marriage, 
 or the marriage of souls, that is made in heaven, is not a 
 property, or quality of either of the individuals concerned, 
 but is the name for the relation of correlativity or counter- 
 partism of spirit that exists between them. It is this 
 Divinely-constituted supplementariness of one sex to the 
 other in physiology, and of one personality to the other in 
 ontology, that is the intensest form of relativity between 
 bodies and souls, as chemical affinity is the closest attraction 
 between unorganized atoms. Psychical complementariness 
 may stand in some relation to physiological heredity ; for 
 we are not responsible for ourselves, such as each one of 
 us comes into the world. But the seat of responsibility 
 for self-culture is in the reflective will, the law of which is 
 action in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason. 
 
 Now the sufficient reason for self-determination, according 
 to virtue, or the moral sense, is not the lust of the flesh, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 223 
 
 the pride of the eye, or worldly place and power. As 
 the flower fadeth, and the grass withereth, so these things 
 all pass away ; and, at all events, whilst still in the flesh, we 
 ourselves pass away from them, out of their sphere, either 
 into illness, weakness, and death, or, as the deep spirit of 
 man has borne witness throughout the ages under every 
 variety of clime and circumstance, into an eternity beyond 
 our time here, where the Father of spirits will become 
 more clearly revealed to us, and where reality, or enduring- 
 ness of existence, will no longer be attributed to things 
 of sense, of the earth earthy. Dr. Bradley, in his work on 
 Appearance and Reality, says that the essential message of 
 Hegel is that " outside of spirit there is not any reality, 
 and the more that anything is spiritual, so much the more 
 is it veritably real." 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 THE one object of this, and all my other publications, 
 has been to endeavour to present to the reading 
 public a rational definition and carefully worked-out ex- 
 hibition of the nature and process of Thought, spontaneous 
 and reflective, of which last morality is the crowning out- 
 come. 
 
 Spontaneous mental representation is phenomenal, ex- 
 pressing single aspects of the three attributes of Being, 
 feeling, intelligence, and will; whereas reflective represen- 
 tation summarizes them all in the wholeness, or unity, of 
 Being under the principle of sufficient reason. Morality 
 is the science of the end, or purport, of all rational activity, 
 and, consequently, of thought, or mental representation 
 itself, the aim and goal of which is the essential realiza- 
 tion and conservation of the integrity of Being. Even in 
 the mind of the savage the conception of causality is in- 
 separable from all received sensible impressions or appear- 
 ances, and in tracing back effects to their causes, he attributes 
 all that happens in the most direct, simple, and natural 
 form to some noumenal Being, who, like himself, is a vera 
 causa, thus unhesitatingly identifying causality with nou- 
 menal Being. But before the beginning of science man's 
 religion is anthropological, instead of spiritual or meta- 
 physical. Although self-consciousness leads necessarily (i.e., 
 logically) to the rational substitution of similars, the effect 
 being of the nature of the cause, it is to a similar spirit, 
 and not to a similar body, that it refers. Thus for the 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 225 
 
 production of effects of a spiritual kind, such as righteous 
 indignation against injustice, we instinctively, as is seen in 
 the whole history of man, assume the existence of a spiritual 
 Origin, or a Father of spirits, to account for the spiritual 
 phenomena of our own nature and that of all rational Beings. 
 It is to our sense of dependence arising out of our limita- 
 tions, or the weakness, of every part of us, that the emotional 
 origin of religion has been not unwisely attributed. More- 
 over the intellectual sense, which treats of the conditions 
 of knowledge, requires the logical assumption of an Absolute 
 Being to account for the existence of all related Beings, 
 the two principles of feeling and thought being corroborated 
 by the practical tendency to act according to the con- 
 sciousness of Being, and of the relativity of Being, with 
 which sympathy and aversion are connected. And finally, 
 the sense of responsibility for obedience in self-determina- 
 tion to the law of our Maker and Judge, constitutes the sense 
 of duty or conscience. Thus religion is seen to be the 
 legitimate outcome of our sense of the relativity of our 
 Being to that of an Absolute Being, the feeling of awe 
 preceding that of love, which is the result of knowledge 
 and hope. 
 
 Auguste Comte, the positivist, being unable to deny the 
 primordial existence of religion in our race, yet represents 
 religion as a mere phantom of terror, preached by the 
 powerful to the weak, to keep them subdued. 
 
 Even if Kant's hesitating hypothesis as to the possible 
 invalidity of our essential forms of thought were tenable : 
 granting, for argument's sake, that they were mere arbitrary 
 assumptions, as they were once supposed to be, they 
 would still be our only cue to knowledge of the Ego or 
 the non-Ego ; but since then Descartes' psychological science, 
 or the science of consciousness, has invested them with 
 the irrefragable certainty of vital experience. 
 
 Q 
 
226 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Moreover, whilst we go on building our bridges high 
 and wide, and flinging ourselves trustingly upon the ele- 
 ments because of our faith in the validity of our scientific 
 speculations, agnosticism is practically or virtually put out 
 of court ; only, unfortunately, until it is literally wiped out 
 its noxious offspring, pessimism, will continue to exist. 
 
 In saying, " Je pense, done j'existe," Descartes based our 
 knowledge of truth on our reflective consciousness, proving 
 at the same time, that without the Ego being there to 
 reflect on its experiences, no induction or deduction can 
 be made : the lower animals, being deficient in reflective 
 self-consciousness, Descartes regarded as automatic machines, 
 which act upon impulse from without, instead of from in- 
 ternal voluntary self-determination. Instincts are those 
 organized trains of activities, which are determined to the 
 attainment of biological ends. The activities of the 
 individual are thus determined on certain typical lines. 
 Instincts are recognizable by a general trend through an 
 inextricable maze of impredicable reactions ; the deep- 
 rooted instincts of personal life underlie all dialectic are 
 its subjective element. 
 
 Feeling is still the principle of reality, even in reflective 
 consciousness ; for if we become lost to a feeling, memory 
 can no longer picture it. But in reflection, the feeling of 
 worth or value takes the place of merely pleasurable 
 impressions and emotions. The ground of the moral sense 
 is intuitive approbation or disapprobation. But, as Dr. 
 Bradley has shown, these are themselves relative to the 
 Ideal of perfection held by anyone. Hence, contrary to 
 the general idea that morality is a simple intuition, it does 
 not exist apart from, or without a certain amount of 
 development of the co-operating elements of Ideality, and 
 their synthesis in volition. 
 
 Faith in the ultimate trustworthiness of our own faculties of 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 227 
 
 feeling, intelligence, and desire, or natural tendency in action, 
 as also in rational inference from the coherent association of 
 these in reflection, is the key to our understanding of the 
 universe. What we think of, or mentally represent, is our 
 own experience in Being : that is to say, the sensible, 
 emotional, intellectual, and moral impressions we receive, 
 together with the necessary inferences of our reflective 
 reason therefrom. The coherence of our objective know- 
 ledge is entirely due to the subjective association of our 
 ideas, and is relative to our reflective self-consciousness, or 
 the consciousness of the unity of our own Being. 
 
 The two things that have always interested man, and 
 must always continue to interest him, are his relations to 
 the Source, and to the sum of things ; for in these must 
 his own future destiny be involved. 
 
 What is the Ideal End of human effort, if not the perfect 
 life, both subjectively and objectively considered ? Is hope 
 an enduring part of man's nature, or does he instinctively 
 give it up whenever sickness or old age bring him near 
 to death? It has been well said, that "we die hoping, 
 though we live fasting." Hope is the moralizing element 
 in humanity ; upon it the moral aspirations of humanity 
 are built. The ancient quest of the summum bonum, and the 
 quest of the " Holy Grail " of the middle ages, both illus- 
 trate this. But without faith in our Creator, and the love 
 that comes of trusting adoration, to whom, or to what 
 should we look for the Good for Being to which hope 
 aspires, and which is the object of our rational endeavour 
 for our own offspring and for others, as well as for ourselves ? 
 Can this be deemed contemptible? If so, of course we 
 need not inquire concerning God. "By a bare bodkin," 
 as Shakspeare puts it, we can put an end to pain and 
 sorrow; or, as the Stoics expressed it, "If the house 
 smokes too much, the door is open, and we can leave it." 
 
228 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 " There is one end," says Kant, " which may be assumed 
 to be actually such to all rational Beings, and therefore one 
 purpose, which they not merely may have, but which we 
 may with certainty assume that they all actually have by a 
 natural necessity : and this is Well-Being, or happiness." 
 This is made clear to reason in the self-conservative action 
 of the nervous system. "That which belongs to his Being 
 is, d priori, in every man." Such are Feeling, Intelligence of 
 causality, and Will, or natural tendency to activity for the 
 Best for Being. 
 
 Whoever wills an end, wills the means to it, in as far as 
 reason directs his choice. 
 
 " It is one and the same thing to conceive something as 
 a desired effect, which I can produce only in a certain way, 
 and to conceive myself as acting in this way."* 
 
 "The Idea of happiness regards an absolute whole a 
 maximum of welfare in my present and all future circum- 
 stances."! Why no one should be ashamed to like a single 
 present pleasure, and yet despise happiness as a whole, is 
 curious ; for the actualization of, and the satisfaction of, all 
 the attributes of our spiritual Being is what essentially 
 constitutes human happiness and to what rational person 
 can this appear degrading ? Shall I like a peach and despise 
 love which is true joy ? 
 
 We certainly as instinctively strive after physical enjoy- 
 ment, as does all the sentient creation. But because we, in 
 addition to this, seek after the knowledge of the true, the 
 beautiful, or harmonious with our Being, and the Good, or 
 Best for it for ourselves and others, instead of suppressing 
 the desire for it, shall this be regarded as debasing ? 
 
 Hope is the food of love ; despair is its grave. "'Tis thus 
 our life is one with fears "; whereas it is by faith, love, and 
 hope that the spirit of man lives, and loves on, even when 
 * KANT. t Idem. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 229 
 
 in the deepest waters of affliction. It is through the fulfil- 
 ment of these Ideals that man attains to true adoration of 
 his Creator, his Father, and his God. 
 
 But as the great American divine, Theodore Parker, 
 said : " The love of God can no more take the place of 
 the love of man, than the love of man can take the place 
 of the love of God." Therefore the life of the cloister 
 stands condemned by reason, for the desire of our hearts is 
 for happiness, or perfection of Being ; and the reflective human 
 will is characteristically a faculty for determining oneself in 
 accordance with the conception of certain laws of mental repre- 
 sentation. " That which serves the will as the objective ground 
 of self-determination, is the end ; and this is assumed by 
 reason alone." Man, and generally any rational creature, 
 exists as an end in himself, and not merely as a means to 
 be arbitrarily used by this, or that will. In all his actions 
 for others, he must, at the same time, be regarded as an 
 end, as are all rational Beings ; and it is the integrity of our 
 Being that is required of us. 
 
 Here we have a summary condemnation of slavery, to 
 which the ancients had not attained. Creatures without 
 reflective self-consciousness have only a relative value as 
 a means to some particularly desired end. But persons 
 are always to be objects of respect, because their nature 
 points them out as ends in themselves. "That which is 
 an end in itself constitutes an objective principle of will."* 
 
 " He who attacks the freedom and property of others, 
 transgresses the rights of men."f 
 
 "The universal prerogative of rational Beings is that 
 they should be regarded as ends in themselves." 
 
 Kant summarizes Morality in these words: "The end 
 / have in view should hold good for every subject, or rational 
 Being. "Man differs from all mere physical Beings, in that 
 * KANT. t Idem. 
 
230 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 he is distinguished as an end in himself. Thus he must 
 always take his maxims from the point of view which regards 
 himself and every rational Being." 
 
 To be a good, or deserving man, is to be what the 
 Creator meant him to be. In giving a man such or such 
 particular gifts, or talents, to cultivate, He has only made 
 him responsible for what he has, not for what he has not. 
 
 The Ideally good-will is the proper object of respect. 
 The idea of the will of our Creator is attended by a 
 powerful emotion : we call it the religious sentiment ; but 
 man has to look through Ideal human nature (not through 
 physical nature, "red in tooth and claw") up to nature's 
 God ; and reflective ideation is the path .to l^ie knowledge, 
 which is to be expected of our own soul, and is also the 
 way to the comprehension of the Soul of the universe. As 
 to know God is to enter into eternal life, so the flow of 
 spiritual life, or sense-transcending consciousness reveals to 
 us the Ego, or self. Thus we compare the workings of 
 our own mind with those of an Ideal consciousness, such 
 as that of Jesus, and are either ashamed or glad in 
 ourselves, according as we have departed from, or ap- 
 proached the Ideal. 
 
 The principle of a sufficient reason for action, we do 
 not hesitate to apply to our Creator, for it is rationally 
 inconceivable by us that the penalties of suffering and 
 doubt should be imposed upon us for neglecting attention 
 to it, if He Himself contradicted it in His own govern- 
 ment of the world ; nor, on the other hand, can He be 
 supposed to create our will in direct opposition to His own. 
 As Jesus said : " How can Satan cast out Satan ? " A 
 fortiori it is inconceivable that benevolence should be 
 imposed upon us as law by a malignant Being. Feeling, 
 and intelligence of the identity of cause and effect, both 
 assure us that the will for the Good for Being, by which 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 231 
 
 God has characterized His rational creatures are hostages 
 to us for the benevolence of His own providence. 
 
 The lower animals, being devoid of introspective reflec- 
 tion, act instinctively or automatically, as they are prompted 
 by images from without, or by fear of pain, or desire of 
 pleasure, from within. 
 
 Only autonomic man is a law unto himself, or rather he 
 makes the Ideal type of nature to which he belongs, and 
 which he has been so constituted as to aspire to reach, as 
 his rule, or law, in self-direction and control, and ultimate 
 self-determination. It is in this that the sense of respon- 
 sibility to his Creator really refers in all highly-developed 
 Beings. Hence it is that no code of formal criminal laws 
 can exhaustively treat of morality. Meanwhile, the less 
 evolved individual has to act in the ratio of his own 
 knowledge of what is best for rational Being, as such. 
 This is the cause of all dissensions concerning morality, 
 which is essentially individual ; and for which civil law is 
 a poor substitute. 
 
 For the affection of the afferent nerves in perception, an 
 adequate objective cause must be actually present. As for 
 that of the sensorial nerves, an efficient cause, in the form 
 of a relation of resemblance, must actually exist between 
 two things, or two persons, as primarily between subject 
 and object, for the mental representation of one by the 
 other to be possible ; whilst for the play of the efferent 
 nerves, a final cause, or inherent directing tendency of the 
 Being itself must exist, prompting to action in accordance 
 with perception, and the apprehension of the relation between 
 subject and object. 
 
 Otherwise, why should we act in one direction more than 
 in another? And how could anyone interpret the purpose 
 of another, and so act in concert with him ? Bo we really 
 admire the person who neglects himself to the point of 
 
232 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 degradation, any more than we do the person who neglects 
 others? And is it not moreover rationally required of us that 
 our own offspring should stand foremost in our consideration ? 
 Reflective reason takes its stand upon the synthesis of " the 
 thought that springs out of the soil of humanity/' under 
 the principle of sufficient reason both for action and for 
 speculative or moral judgments; and, according to the 
 intuitive dialectical movement, proceeds to what Professor 
 Jevons called the "substitution of similars," judging that 
 what is true of a thing is true of its like, so far as it is 
 like. Hence all ordered work, or work with an end, or 
 purpose, in view, we attribute logically to a self-conscious, 
 i.e. t rational, Being, or person, who, as such, does what he 
 thinks best for himself, and his similars, and takes appro- 
 priate intelligent means for the execution of his designs. 
 
 Kant held that the synthesis of the imagination, although 
 blind, inasmuch as it does not consciously bring the cate- 
 gories into play, yet takes place according to the categories. 
 Thought, or the mental representation of causality, is thus 
 seen to be the formal or formative element, in both our 
 material combinations, and our social arrangements. Hence 
 the intelligibility to us of the world-plan, or the rationally 
 ordered world, because of our recognizing in the macrocosm 
 what Cyples called "the greater executive" the same 
 order that prevails in our own forms of mental representation 
 within the microcosm : all points to the subordination of 
 material conditions to the laws of thought, or the principles 
 of Being, our own concrete experiences being the essential 
 ground of our abstract concepts of the universal order. 
 To be thinkable, means to be ontologically predicable. 
 Nothing is intelligible except in its relation to Being: that 
 is, to our essential or spiritual Being. 
 
 Self-evidence is the one reality to which we refer the 
 explanation of everything. To say that a thing is self- 
 
Rational \ or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 233 
 
 evident to us, is to say that we must necessarily believe in 
 the truth of a thing self-contradiction, or the contradiction 
 of our experience, being the absurd. The formal categories 
 of causality become obvious in introspective reflection on 
 the cerebro-neurotic diagram, and in each sane individual 
 reason is externalised in the very structure of "the mind- 
 apparatus." The principle of sufficient reason is tantamount 
 to the idea of a system of related elements; as each atom 
 holds its own in space, so must each social monad be 
 individually respected. 
 
 Evolution is of the Ideal of Being, i.e., noumenal Being. 
 This is the pivot upon which the intellectual, or moral, world 
 turns. The Ideal is the lever that moves it. This holds 
 even in the case of the humblest individuals. Each one 
 has his own Ideal of the Best. " Knowledge in finite 
 consciousness depends on organic stimulus." 
 
 Perception, apprehension, and comprehension convert 
 sensible impressions into emotional, intellectual, and moral 
 ideas of causality sufficient, efficient, and final. The 
 automatic play of the cerebro-nervous system furnishes " a 
 thinking apparatus," or sensible ground for the indivisible 
 association of feeling, intelligence, and desire or will, from 
 the reflective coherence of which all rational inferences are 
 drawn. Thus the unconscious psychical mechanism proper 
 is the "physical basis of mind" conditioning the mental 
 representations, which we call thinking, or thought; even 
 into the sensuous association of the imagination the cate- 
 gories of causality enter. 
 
 Self - representation under some form or other is the 
 abiding requirement of a finite Being, who is not placed 
 like the Creator at the centre of the universe; but re- 
 flective thought elicits general, or abstract knowledge, 
 out of concrete individual states of consciousness. Thus 
 although the process of thought, or mental representation, 
 
234 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 is subjective, it enables us to reach an objective result. 
 "The manifold of sensation is reduced by thought to the 
 unity of Being." But while sensation isolates us through 
 its mere subjectivity, emotion, with its sense of spiritual 
 relativity, unites us with all self- conscious rational Beings 
 (even including the Supreme Being), above all with the 
 complementary supplement of our lop-sided individuality. 
 Thus, whilst sexual appetite appears to be able to exist with 
 indifference, or even with hate, towards its object, because 
 of its pure selfism, and fleetingness of impression, spiritual 
 love is the eternally true, always requiring reciprocity, 
 nay, strict equivalence of emotion, and is of the abiding 
 essence of the human soul. Hence it is stronger than death, 
 and does absolutely give a foretaste of heavenly bliss. Truly 
 to love God, or man, is already to have entered into the 
 life eternal. The poet's dreams cannot reveal to us what 
 eye hath not seen, nor ear heard ; but true love is of the 
 spirit, not of the earth earthy, and is the one revelation 
 given us, even here below, of the unchanging source of 
 eternal blessedness. To love humanly, one " must be born 
 again to the Spirit " ; what is of the earth earthy does not 
 count in the life of the soul. 
 
 The logical necessity of ontological representation is the 
 principle of all knowledge ; thus thought is the representa- 
 tion of the immediate modifications of our Being in feeling, 
 intelligence, and will, and as sensational representation is 
 the groundwork of imaginative representation. 
 
 The identity of thought and Being is thus predicable. 
 The psychological theory of knowledge exhibits the co- 
 operation of neural, or mechanical presentations, with mental 
 representations. 
 
 Sensation supplies thought with the suggestive material, 
 out of which we elaborate our world, and comprehend the 
 starry sphere in the embrace of reflective reason. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 235 
 
 Now truth to our sense of the relativity of the object to 
 the subject, and of all Beings to each other, and to the 
 Absolute Being, together with the apprehension of the 
 relation of external material things to noumenal Being, 
 requires feeling and action, according to the relation in 
 which we stand to any given person or thing, as also to 
 the Divine Source of our Being, from which we infer that 
 all real relations are of Divine ordinance and contrivance. 
 Hence we summarize duty to God as being loyalty to all 
 spiritual relations, and action in accordance with our know- 
 ledge of all the relations He has constituted between 
 persons and things ; disregard of this Divine order being 
 virtual disobedience to the will of God, inevitably impairing 
 natural impulse, or instinct. The free-will of man has 
 been so much respected, even by our Creator Himself, that 
 we can factually voluntarily cast off, or ignore the idea of 
 our relation to Himself, the Invisible Source of our Being, 
 in Whom we live, and move, and have our related Being. 
 
 Man illustrates his wants by his contrivances, and by 
 his political and religious institutions. Auguste Comte 
 shows how man is at the very beginning religious ; hence 
 the life of the savage is full of religious rites and practices. 
 Also the institution of marriage is of early, although not 
 so early, a date as religion. It represents our need for 
 calling in the Divine sanction for completing our Being by 
 union with the complemental one, as also our desire for it to 
 be sympathetically respected and honoured by our kind. As 
 to real or spiritual companionship, reflective reason must 
 be more or less developed in us, which is rarely the case, 
 even at the present day, for true love to be truly desired 
 or achieved by any one, or rather two ; but until there is 
 true love-marriage, there will be no true society, no sacred 
 domestic hearth, but only manages de convenance. 
 
 "At a very early period," says Max Nordau, "the mind 
 
236 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 of man conceived, and accepted the belief in the existence 
 of God, and the soul, or spirit ; he became convinced 
 that there was something within him, distinct from the 
 body, which caused life, and which would survive the de- 
 struction of the visible frame." The longing experienced 
 by man for an Ideal growth, and for a support always at 
 hand (an "ever-present help in time of trouble") found 
 its gratification in the belief in the soul, in God, and in 
 immortality. " But," continues Max Nordau, " centuries 
 will be required to produce a human Being, who from his 
 birth up is prepared to comprehend life and the universe 
 from the point of view of reason, and natural science, 
 without prejudice, or superstition" ; and the same author 
 writes on the doctrine of marriage : " I hold that it is the 
 duty of society to protect woman from physical want, 
 man being better qualified by nature for the struggle for 
 existence than woman is. When material considerations 
 enter no longer into the contraction of a marriage; when 
 woman is free to choose a mate, and not compelled to sell 
 herself; when man is obliged to compete for woman's 
 favour with his personality, and not with his social posi- 
 tion and property, then the sacred and sublime spirit of 
 nature will bless every embrace. Every child will be 
 born surrounded by the love of its parents, and will 
 receive as its first birthday present the strength and 
 vitality with which every couple, which has been united by 
 the attraction of affinity, endows its offspring? 
 
 The reason why the subjective process of thought is a 
 cue to the objective order of the world, is to be found in 
 the logical principle that what is involved or implicit in 
 a thing can be explicitly comprehended by a thinker of 
 like quality of Being with the Creator, and contriver of 
 it. If it were not a rationally-conceived universe, it would 
 be unintelligible to us rationally-conceived meaning con- 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 237 
 
 ceived in relation to noumenal Being, the natural cosmos 
 being regarded only as machinery contrived for the carry- 
 ing out of the purposes of rational or spiritual Being. Hence 
 man, observing that a constant purpose of evolution runs 
 through the ages which is not perfectly fulfilled in any 
 individual life here, rationally postulates a better time 
 coming, when truth, justice, love, and mercy will walk 
 hand in hand, as true lovers hope to do for ever. 
 
 As the lower animals have no reflective, or speculative 
 reason, they take things as they come, with no sense of 
 outraged Ideals, no Divine despair of justice and good- 
 ness. Hence they have no nostalgic du bonheur, no Heaven- 
 sickness. For a rational Being it is in the fulfilment of 
 the Ideals of reason that happiness lies. 
 
 But man can no more enter at once into the peace of 
 reason, than a new-born babe can plan with its statesman 
 father for the good of his country ; the goal of evolution has 
 first to be voluntarily struggled for. 
 
 Only through identity, or similarity, of consciousness 
 can one person understand another; hence it would appear 
 that evolution is a process partly conducted through the 
 material organism, with which "we are darkly bound." 
 That the brain of an infant soon shows itself to be a 
 human brain has been insisted upon by Monsieur Taine 
 in his work on human intelligence, and ought never to be 
 lost sight of. 
 
 " It makes little or no difference what quality of imagery 
 our thinking goes on," says Professor James. "To have 
 seen the spatial form of an object is not to have knowledge 
 of it" It does not help matters even, to have that form 
 painted with colour. The visual image of a man does not 
 constitute our knowledge of the man ; neither is it from 
 other men's representations that we know God, but from 
 our own yearning need of Him. "Nur wer die Sehnsucht 
 
238 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 kennt, weiss was ich leide," may be said of the Divine as 
 well as of the conjugal love of which Swedenborg writes. 
 
 Even though he be deformed, " a man 's a man for a' 
 that," as Burns says of the lowly-born : witness Abraham 
 Lincoln, the great President of the United States of America. 
 
 Only where the consciousness is one with, or comple- 
 mental to his own, can one Being reach the inward heart 
 of the other. 
 
 " God and man regarded merely as sensible existences, 
 would be degraded past recognition." The word God is 
 the highest expression of realized, or perfect Being. 
 
 Intuitive intelligence is of the attributes and modifica- 
 tions of our own real Being, together with the logical 
 recognition and reflective "substitution of similars." When 
 morality degenerates into mere obedience to a set of 
 traditional, or conventional laws, that neither touch the 
 heart, nor satisfy the reason, the letter is substituted for 
 the spirit. "The notion," of which the Greeks spoke so 
 much, is of real, or spiritual Being. Hence Hegel taught 
 the Identity of Thought and Being. 
 
 Plato believed the Notion to refer to the Absolute Being. 
 Dr. Bradley says : " The man who demands a reality more 
 solid than that of the religious consciousness, seeks he 
 does not know what." Our real, or spiritual consciousness 
 is what is spoken of here. To assign to our reflective reason 
 less real place than to our merely physical experiences, is 
 an insult to our noumenal Being. 
 
 It is rationally inconceivable that the conclusions of right 
 reason should not be held wherever noumenal Beings exist ; 
 and wherever reason is obeyed, truth to Ideal Being, or 
 Goodness, will be found. 
 
 The categories of causality represent to us absolute 
 Knowledge, although they do not afford an exhaustive 
 comprehension of the Absolute Being. This has been the 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 239 
 
 stumbling-block of Hindu, Greek, and German philosophy. 
 Perhaps to the finite Being the Infinite must ever remain 
 veiled. We do not absolutely comprehend even our own 
 Being, but only argue from what we know concerning it. 
 It has been urged that even to discredit the categories we 
 must employ them; that to say "we doubt" is to acknow- 
 ledge a criterion of belief. The symbolic sensation is a clue 
 to guide a mind that is finite in its experience, from one 
 reality to another. Whilst the things of the world are in 
 flux, the spirit incarnated is stable and sure in its evolution : 
 madness, like passing delirium and sleep, is but a temporary 
 impediment to it. But symbols and realities must not be 
 mixed, excepting in the sports of fancy, when we wish to 
 move people to laughter. The principle of non-contradiction 
 may be said to be the resume of logic. 
 
 " Thought itself is a formal instrumental function in our 
 experience." * It is to feeling that we owe the consciousness 
 of the worth, or value, which objects have for us ; and it 
 is feeling that awakens the impulse to think causality. 
 It is our deeply-felt spiritual needs that account for our 
 Heavenward aspirations. Neither do they, nor do our 
 sufferings "out of the ground arise," but out of the 
 necessary mental representations by which our Maker has 
 revealed both Himself and His will to us. 
 
 To condemn knowledge because of its necessary sub- 
 jectivity is unjustifiable, for what can surpass self-evidence ? 
 Thought has not to fabricate the world, but to discover 
 and represent it as it is, or exists. Thought, or mental 
 representations, is found to be dependent upon sense 
 presentations ; these arise out of the play of the automatic 
 psychical mechanism, i.e., of the afferent, sensorial, and 
 efferent nerves. These illustrate the unity of sufficient 
 and final causality, and give rise to the fundamental 
 
 * LOTZE. 
 
240 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 concepts of causality ; thus these spring, like Minerva full- 
 armed from Jupiter's brain. Dialectics proceed on the 
 data of consciousness, answering to feeling, intelligence, 
 and will. 
 
 For instance I say to myself: "If I feel thus, intelligize 
 thus, and act thus, what may I expect as the rational 
 consequence of such feeling and action ? " Reflective con- 
 ception idealizes Being, taking it in its abstract completeness, 
 wholeness, or perfection. Thus it is that man arrives at the 
 rational idea of the Absolute, Prototypal, Creative Being, for 
 an Ideal must be of a really existing something. 
 
 If we think of an Ideal man, we do not picture him to 
 ourselves as lame, blind, or deaf; nor as wanting in feeling, 
 intelligence, or will. But as a matter of fact, each finite 
 Being, by the term, halts both physically and spiritually 
 in some respect. Hence his need of " a helpmeet unto 
 him." The real guardian-angel of a man or woman is his, 
 or her spiritual complement or counterpart, which each 
 regards as the better half, compensating his or her infirmity, 
 and in union with whom he has the sense of fulness, or 
 completeness of Being, and joy for ever. 
 
 Lotze speaks of thought as a tool, or as a way by which 
 to reach the hill-top of truth. There is an Idealism that 
 identifies knowledge and reality. " A man is what he really 
 knows," said Plato ; Christ said a man is what he does : 
 " The tree is known by its fruit." 
 
 It is in reflection that we discover the triform principles 
 of thought, which are associated with the three aspects of 
 Being feeling, intelligence, and will. But it is Being as a 
 whole that is the ultimate datum for all inference. As we 
 cannot take stock of a house, and all its contents, without 
 reference to a rational Being, so it is with regard to the 
 universe. Even the external world appears to us anew 
 under the ordering principle of sufficient reason, which is 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 241 
 
 reflectively, or introspectively, derived from the union of the 
 three postulates of thought. It is only through the inter- 
 vention of thought, or the mental representation of the 
 ideas of reason, that the world is intelligible to us. As 
 reflective reason is essentially constructive, we naturally 
 recognize design in the universe, and by the law of cause 
 and effect naturally postulate a cause similar in kind to 
 our spiritual nature for the effects produced on us. 
 
 The first datum of knowledge is the subjective state of 
 impressed feeling, and the first act of thought (perception) 
 makes this state in ourselves representative of an object or 
 cause, sensible or spiritual. 
 
 " Thought takes us out of the sphere of merely subjective 
 states to that of external facts corresponding with them. 
 Thought converts sensible impressions into ideas of physical 
 causality. It is through sensation that emotional and 
 volitional impressions are produced on us by external 
 things. It is thus that we become conscious of the 
 existence of objects. When no sensible impression is 
 received, no perception takes place." 
 
 In reflection on an object all the categories of the 
 understanding are contained : perception of an object, appre- 
 hension of its relation to us, and comprehension of what 
 is to be done. Although we cannot know how Being is 
 made, we can through reflection, in some degree understand 
 how thought, or mental representation, takes place ; but 
 although we may assume that mental states arise out of 
 organic, or neural stimuli, that does not explain reflective 
 idealization. In reflective reason with its implicit religion, 
 lie all the possibilities of science, art, and morality. Even 
 in the sensuous associative stage of imaginative representa- 
 tion, common to us and the lower animals, the causal forms 
 are present ; how much more is this the case in the moral 
 self-determination of our whole Being ! 
 
 R 
 
242 Rational) or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 To be scientific is to be exact and true to experience, 
 but the condition of so being is, as Descartes said, to 
 have clear ideas (des idtes claires) such as those of caus- 
 ality sufficient, efficient, and final. For the principle of 
 sufficient reason involves the idea of related elements ; 
 one essential attribute of Being recognized, the existence 
 of the others is logically assumed. It is because of man's 
 reflective self-consciousness that he postulates a Sufficient 
 or Absolute cause for his own Being, as also for that of 
 other rational Beings, and that he feels the sense of duty 
 to his Creator points to truth to the whole nature of his 
 Being, not only to one particular faculty of it. The directly 
 perceptive, or merely imaginative consciousness of the lower 
 animal, is simply swayed by desire and aversion, to which 
 hope and fear answer; whereas man through his reflective 
 reason has been made a law unto himself, to observe self- 
 respect, social regard, and Divine adoration ; to control 
 and direct himself according to the equilibriated activity 
 of his attributes of feeling, intelligence, and will, as required 
 by reflective reason, which, as Count Tolstoi says, " being 
 a Divine gift has to be taken into account and accounted for." 
 
 Civilized, or what are called good manners, are but the 
 masquerade of righteous self-control. They are adopted 
 for the mere purpose of expediency, to prevent the con- 
 stant jostling of one individuality against another. The 
 aim of all good manners is to polish off all sharp corners 
 in social commerce. But were men only governed by custom, 
 or social etiquette, a dead level of uniformity, so much 
 dreaded by Stuart Mill, might sap all individuality and 
 wither all genuine enthusiasm. True morality is, above all, 
 a thing of individual motive: it being for goodness of motive 
 that we feel ourselves accountable to our Maker. Sense 
 presentation and mental representation, under the categories 
 of causality, co-operate to produce the concrete fact of 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 243 
 
 knowledge. "We must not treat the world as a reality 
 independent of thought, or as unrelated to our necessary 
 mental representations of feeling, intelligence of relativity, 
 and natural tendency, or Tried, as the Germans call it ; 
 for in that case the cosmos, or rational order of the 
 universe, would remain unknowable by us to the end of 
 time. If there were absolute identity of Being, relativity 
 could not exist relativity implying similarity with 
 difference. Perceptions are particular, but conceptions are 
 general. They embrace classes of objects under the logical 
 postulate that A is A, not A is no A, together with the 
 excluded middle that nothing is at once A and not A. 
 
 " Hegel identifies the principle of thought with the prin- 
 ciple of reality. Without the immediate presence of real 
 Being in us there would be no reflecting subject to arrive 
 at universal science through generalisation, abstraction, and 
 ratiocination from concrete experiences." The American 
 expression, " I opine," is a clever distinction from " I 
 believe." Faith is the result of the consonance of our 
 whole Being. Truth is intuited through the harmony of 
 vital presentations in the neurotic diagram of each indi- 
 vidual. Only equals can really understand each other. 
 One friend may reflect one facet, or aspect, of one's charac- 
 ter, and another friend may sympathize with another; but 
 the object of true love, the counterpart, answers to every 
 aspect of our Being ; for, although by different routes, they 
 both arrive at the same Ideals, and so are of one mind, 
 one heart, one will. True love is the relation of com- 
 plementary attraction, or of attraction between oppositely 
 developed personalities. To speak of true love as existing 
 only on one side, or in the heart of only one of the two 
 factors (or terms) of the relation, is to ignore the relation 
 of the attraction of equal and opposite for each other. 
 "Wie suss es ist als Treu die Treue kiisst." But no joy 
 
244 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 is suggested from the embrace of one who is not beloved 
 by the other. The way men have hitherto regarded 
 woman has represented little more than a fancy for a 
 horse, a dog, or a kitten. Where there is no equality of 
 evolution of nature, and no complementariness of attri- 
 butes between two subjects of an affection, we do not call 
 it true love; "we have not the required totality of conditions 
 for the manifestation of psychic activities which result in 
 the sense of fulness and completeness of Being, the result 
 of which alone is joy for ever, leaving us more free for 
 joy in the external world, in the society of our kind, and, 
 above all, in communion with the Joy-Giver. For as it is 
 difficult for the blind and the maimed to sing praises to 
 the Life-Giver, so also is it a painful effort of faith in the 
 one who feels lonely and sad. Religion is the guide and 
 safeguard of life ; but true love is its crown of joy witness 
 the testimony of poets, biographers, and novelists, in all 
 times and places. What has the opposer, and doubter of 
 true love, to offer in its stead as the joy-giver ? And if 
 it be the desire of the All-Father that all His children 
 should share in the sense of perfection of life arising out 
 of perfectly balanced Being, surely it is a part of morality, 
 as the science of the end and the principle of sufficient 
 reason, not to ignore the appointed means both of happiness 
 and of spiritual evolution. 
 
 * People walk two and two in fairyland." Le pays des 
 rtoes can indeed only be seen a' quattr' occhi. " The Ideal 
 life is not the isolated life." " It requires two to be happy." 
 As Swedenborg said, " Even the spirits in heaven who have 
 not yet found their companion-soul, have not yet arrived at 
 perfect happiness." As the plants of earth droop and close 
 without the sun, so loneliness is a spiritual desert to the 
 emphatically relative Beings man and woman; and until 
 each has found his, or her, counterpartal soul, they remain 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 245 
 
 sad and alone, and isolated in the crowd. To each sex its 
 particular function, but in this they meet. 
 
 Love is, above all, the affirmer of immortality in the 
 heart of man ; he can no more understand the continuance 
 of life bereaved of his complemental half, than a child 
 can understand individual death. "We are seven," says 
 Wordsworth's little maid, although "two of us in the church- 
 yard lie." " Henceforth," says Mrs. Browning, " we stand 
 no more on the threshold of individual Being." "What 
 joy," says Robert Browning, 
 
 " when each may supplement 
 
 The other, changing each, as changed, till, wholly blent, 
 The old things shall be new, and what we both ignite, 
 Fuse, lose the vari-colour in achromatic white, 
 Exemplifying law, love's law." 
 
 Dr. Johnson spoke of love not as happiness, but as rapture. 
 His own marriage he called a love-match, though the lady 
 was twice his age, and far from attractive ; none the less, she 
 was remembered after death with the utmost tenderness. 
 " Love or attraction is the source of action ; morality sits at 
 the helm." Truly to love a human Being, a man must be 
 born again to the spirit, as much as to truly love God. " It 
 is a law of nature," says T. P. O'Connor, "that marriage is 
 only tolerable when it is entered on by people drawn to each 
 other by the overwhelming force of all that mental, moral, 
 and physical attraction one for the other, which we sum- 
 marize in the word Love" "Now," he continues, "passion, 
 that tremendous factor in the union of man and woman, 
 so potent to bind, to soften, to reconcile, was absent from 
 the marriage of Thomas Carlyle and his wife." "The 
 indispensable feeling," as Froude remarks, "was wanting." 
 The unhappy married life of the Carlyles is the best 
 answer to the maleficent folly of Tolstoi's recent condemna- 
 tion of passion which would reduce marriage to mere 
 
246 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 mechanism. It was from the want of passion arising out 
 of unsuitability of character that the unhappiness of the 
 Carlyles arose. 
 
 Jane Carlyle could write of herself, " I feel my heart is 
 capable of a love to which no deprivation would be a 
 sacrifice, and which would carry every thought of my 
 Being impetuously along with it " ; and Carlyle wrote of 
 Teufelsdrockh, " To our friend the hours seemed moments ; 
 holy was he and happy. The words from those sweetest 
 lips came over him like dew on thirsty grass, till better 
 feelings in his soul seemed to whisper, ' It is good for us 
 to be here/ Their lips were joined, their two souls, like 
 two dew-drops, rushed into one. Thus was Teufelsdrockh 
 made immortal by a kiss." So we see it was not the want 
 of the power of feeling on either side, but want of fitness 
 for each other, that was the cause of the lifelong wretched- 
 ness of Carlyle and his wife. 
 
 Plato said "that one illustration is worth a hundred 
 arguments." How much more telling must such an 
 illustration be, when it is the well-known experience of 
 two well-known persons. 
 
 When Tolstoi made a protest against love-marriages, 
 saying that "marriage is concerned of nothing else but 
 of domesticity and child-bearing," he was false to 
 psychology and morality. " The Ideal life can be deter- 
 mined only by a consideration of the nature of the Being 
 whose life we are considering."* None of the primary 
 emotions are, in themselves, evil ; even revenge has been 
 well defined as "wild justice," i.e., unreasoned justice, and 
 consequently, action falling short of, or going beyond justice. 
 
 The Greeks hypostatized, or put under the protection of 
 a mythological person, each of the faculties of man. 
 With them, revenge was clothed with the dignity of "the 
 
 * JAMES SETH. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 247 
 
 awful goddesses," the Eumenides. Those who took refuge 
 in their temple were held sacred, as were those who fled to 
 the sanctuary of Westminster in the middle ages ; both of 
 these answering to the Jewish Cities of Refuge, and all 
 were advances upon spontaneous unmeasured revenge. 
 But still, revenge was held to be binding upon man until 
 benevolence was substituted for it by Christianity. 
 
 There is a Japanese poem in which it is said, " Tier upon 
 tier they sit, the awful dead, waiting for their sons or other 
 relations to pay the debt of blood that is their due." This 
 is a clear testimony to the belief of the Japanese in a 
 future state of Being, as was the Greek superstition, that 
 the manes of the unjustly done to death, still haunt 
 their life-abode until their vengeance is accomplished. 
 
 To treat true, or spiritual love as a whim, is to deprive 
 the language in which we express our dependence upon 
 God, of its richest nomenclature. In proof of this, we 
 have " the Jewish Song of Solomon," and " the Hindu Song 
 of Songs." These are interpreted by some as erotic poems, 
 by others as religious symbolism. But the fact remains 
 that these two enthusiasms are identical, both representing 
 the utter dependence of the subject upon the object for 
 blessedness of life. 
 
 Now, in spite of all that has been written concerning 
 what a man really seeks for, the satisfaction and fulfilment 
 of his own Being must necessarily be the goal of his 
 endeavours, for it is to this that reason points. For the 
 perfection of Being, towards which knowledge tends, the 
 beloved counterpart, or better-half of our Being is as 
 essential, seeing that it is of Divine origination, as is the 
 love of God itself; just as sympathy with, and affection 
 for our kind is as essential an attribute of our Being, as is 
 rational self-love, or proper care for self. There need be 
 no more fear that true conjugal love will die out because 
 
248 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 unguarded by social police, than that the instinct of self- 
 preservation or the religious sentiment, will disappear from 
 among men ; what is of the essence of a Being, can only die 
 out with the Being itself. Therefore, for true love, for social 
 sympathy, and for Divine love, " there is no death or change." 
 
 Our sun may be extinguished, our earth may pass away 
 out of the firmament, but the Word, or Reason, will for 
 ever remain a bond between noumenal or spiritual Beings, 
 which will endure wherever related Beings exist ; and 
 wherever related Beings exist, they suppose an Absolute 
 Being as their sufficient cause. 
 
 Innumerable Beings, according to the principle of heredity, 
 go to make up the development of each individual person. 
 " Whatever lives, absorbs into itself all that is congenial 
 to its nature." As plants assimilate the sun's rays, so 
 spiritually-minded persons absorb the things of the spirit ; 
 and carnally, or worldly-minded persons assimilate the 
 surrounding social influences after their own kind. "To 
 the pure, all things are pure," and to the malignant, all 
 things seem to admit of malignant interpretation. What- 
 ever is congenial to ourselves in the social medium around 
 us is apprehended and assimilated by us respectively. 
 
 It has been said that "reason teaches wise men, and 
 experience fools." The baby may be classed under the 
 latter head. Yet by degrees it grows rational. 
 
 The great races of mankind have gradually done away 
 with the survivals of past barbarity, whereas many savage 
 tribes have lapsed, as babies die, without having attained to 
 the dignity of reflective knowledge, and so undreaming of 
 the Ideals of Being, of truth, of love, and of goodness. 
 
 Among the vulgar errors that have to be exploded is 
 the separation of metaphysics and religion. Ontology, or 
 metaphysic, is the seat and subject of religion ; were it 
 otherwise, insects and alligators would be religious. " The 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 249 
 
 whole cerebral movement is consciousness with a view to 
 life function." But Ideal Being has a wider sphere, yearning, 
 embracing the universe itself, as only the spiritual Being 
 capable of reflective reason can. 
 
 " Sense-consciousness sets up a specific cerebral activity, 
 but the disposure of nerve tissues varies in each individual, 
 and also, to a certain extent, in each family, the members of 
 which are more or less analogues. One consciousness-flash, 
 as such, produces another, either immediately or mediately, 
 through a stirring of nerve cells."* 
 
 Yet when the mind is charged with a foregone opposite 
 conclusion, the same news, say the news of a battle, com- 
 municated to two different persons at the same time, might 
 produce completely opposite effects sorrow in the one, and 
 joy or triumph in the other. 
 
 Reflective self-consciousness, the standpoint of rational 
 inference, is, oddly enough, often confounded with selfish- 
 ness ; no wonder that metaphysic is avoided whilst such 
 opinions prevail. No doubt merely physiological conditions 
 do at times affect metaphysical states of consciousness, the 
 disturbed play of the cerebro-nervous system confounding 
 metaphysical judgments. But morbid, or diseased function, 
 does not constitute typical representation, just as convulsive 
 movements of the body are not the synonym of human 
 activity. " Our sense organs always put in their claim to a 
 first hearing, but they cannot explain all our experience." The 
 synchronous reciprocity of action of soul and sense account 
 for their morbid affections of each other during this stage 
 of our existence. Matter is the means to the immediate 
 play of thought, ensuring synchrony of action between mind 
 and mind amongst finite Beings. Dialectic, or argument of 
 reason, proceeds upon the mental re-representation of the 
 modifications of our sense of Being, of our sense of the 
 * Prof. T. S. LAURIE. 
 
250 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 relations existing between subject and object, and of our 
 normal tendency in action. The first we call feeling, the 
 second intelligence, and the third will. These three internal 
 senses are stimulated into definite consciousness by sensible 
 impressions, or sensations ; upon these, perception of sufficient 
 causation, apprehension of efficient causation, and compre- 
 hension pf final causation, or purpose in action, immediately 
 take place. Perception answers to the question, " What ? " or, 
 " To what class does a thing belong ?" Apprehension, to the 
 question " How ? " or, " Do we know anything ? " this is 
 always through the relation in which it stands to us and 
 comprehension answers to the question, "Why?" or "With 
 what purpose are we bound to act, whether in harmony with 
 the object, or antagonistically towards it?" 
 
 Human reason reaches its culmination only in reflective 
 introspection. The principles of causality, or d priori 
 intuitions of reason, are not clearly realized by us in the 
 abstract through mere psycho-physical consciousness, but 
 only through reflective introspection, assisted by memory. 
 
 Our own Being is itself a presentation, or exhibition, of 
 sufficient, efficient, and final causation, which, reflectively 
 considered, represent the attributes of Being, z>., power, 
 wisdom, and benevolent will, or goodness towards all that 
 are in any way after our own kind. 
 
 The reality of our own Being is self-evident, and the 
 truth of the inferences of reason therefrom cannot be 
 distrusted, or tampered or trifled with. Its relativity to 
 the supreme reason, and to the consequently postulated 
 Supreme Being, makes us conscious that it ought to be 
 respected in our own person, and in that of all the members 
 of our kind, altogether apart from the accident of social, or 
 conventional classification. 
 
 The moral sense arises, in the finite Being, out of 
 reflection on these ontological principles, and out of the 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 251 
 
 sense of being responsible to our Creator to maintain 
 the purity and dignity of his origin. The bearing this 
 in mind, we call conscientiousness, or the mind conscious 
 of God and righteousness. 
 
 "A man cannot shake off the causal category if he 
 would," says Professor Laurie ; " causality is productive, 
 efficient, and regulative." The end of man's activities is 
 predetermined in his automatic neural organization ; it is 
 obviously the conservation of Being in its integrity. The 
 notion of a pre-established parallelism between mind 
 and matter, carries with it a necessary harmonizing of 
 the inner and the outer life. True self-actualization is 
 only by means of realizing the higher, or Ideal self, not 
 by indulgence in gross animal appetites, or through the 
 selfish disregard of the happiness of others, any more 
 than by a flippant ignoring of our Divine origin and 
 destiny. 
 
 All judgment arises out of the sense of some form of 
 similarity between the subject of thought and its objects. 
 We are in contact with the material world through our 
 senses, with the spiritual world through reflective reason, 
 under the three great spontaneously-thought principles of 
 causality, in conjunction with their synthesis in the reflective 
 principle of sufficient reason. Thought, although ultimately 
 analysable into the principles of emotion, intellection, and 
 volition, refers also to the conditions of finite Being. We can 
 no more neglect our physical organism with impunity, than 
 a musician can neglect the instrument which is to express 
 his musical ideas. When emotions are inappropriately 
 expressed, they become ridiculous ; and when the desired 
 end of harmony appears as a discord, it altogether shocks 
 our reason, or moral sense. Just as a house is not a " Ding 
 an sich und fur sich," but owes its existence to the nature 
 of human Beings in every section of it, and in everything 
 
252 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 it contains, so the material cosmos has no rationally-con- 
 ceivable meaning, or purpose, apart from self-conscious Being, 
 capable of intelligence and happiness. Even in formulating 
 physical laws, we must never lose sight of the fact that 
 it is our own being and mind (by which last, I mean the 
 psychological system of consciousness) that is the ground 
 of their formulation ; that it is we, who by applying the 
 principles of causality derived from our own Being to the 
 interpretation of the modifications of our cerebro-nervous 
 system, become aware of the external cosmos, or order of 
 creation, and draw therefrom our conclusions concerning 
 man's place in Nature as the spiritual offspring of the 
 Father of spirits, in Whom we can trust for the fulfilment of 
 all the rational desires, with which He has inspired us. 
 
 The moral law, or principle of morality, is purely re- 
 flective, or apperceptive, having the Ego for subject-object; 
 hence we do not speak of the morality of the Infinite Being, 
 but of His power, wisdom, and goodness, or benevolence; 
 man's morality lying in the reflective imitation of these. 
 
 The most gradually-developed of the principles of thought 
 is the principle of sufficient reason, which represents the 
 satisfaction, or fulfilment, as well as the raison d'etre, of 
 Being: the one "Ding an sich und fur sich," as proceeding 
 from the Father of spirits, we being rather His offspring 
 than His creation; but his physical frame is analogous with 
 that of the beast. 
 
 In reflective reason, the physical organism sinks into the 
 insignificance of a mere condition, not a vera causa of 
 anything. The Bible expresses this, by saying that man 
 was made in the image of, or like unto, his Maker, thus 
 being rendered capable of distinguishing between good and 
 evil. 
 
 The Japanese had once a pariah class that they designated 
 " not men," for so degraded were they, that they made no 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 253 
 
 distinction between right and wrong. So much for the 
 Oriental institution of a pariah class, on which, even that 
 of the serf is an improvement, although requiring extinction. 
 
 The Stoics defined virtue as truth to human nature, man 
 being, as Aristotle said, " a thinking Being," or, as the Germans 
 say, an Ursach-suchendes Thier (a cause -seeking animal). 
 Now according to Kant, for conformity to law there must 
 be intuitive knowledge of law ; not merely knowledge of 
 the varying and variable laws of any particular place or 
 time, but of the law written on the fleshy tablets of the 
 heart by the Creator of man, viz., the moral law of action for 
 the Best for Being, as such. Psychical evolution means the 
 development of our .faculties of feeling, intelligence, and 
 will; hence the instinctive desire of progress, or advance- 
 ment of every kind, exhibited by all the great peoples of 
 the earth emotional, intellectual, and moral vigour inducing 
 artistic, scientific, and metaphysical activity. 
 
 The Philistine, however, interprets the instinct of progress 
 as a simple endeavour to what he calls "get on in the 
 world" to win a title and be near royalty. No writer has 
 ever given more weight to egoity than Kant. The reflective 
 concept of morality is derived, in its last resort, from the 
 instinctive motive of self-respect, from which speculative or 
 reflective reason draws the conclusion, that all action must 
 be for the Best for Being as such ; having, moreover, in 
 view that such is the will of our Creator, for herein lies 
 the required sanction of morality. 
 
 Kant's rendering of the moral law is, "Act only on that 
 maxim whereby thou canst, at the same time, will that it 
 should become universal law." A man reduced to despair 
 by a series of misfortunes, finding more evil than satisfaction 
 in life, asks himself whether it would not be well to put 
 an end to it, but reflection shows that a system of nature, 
 of which it should be a part to destroy life by means of 
 
254 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 the very feeling^ whose special nature it is to impel to the 
 improvement of life, would contradict itself, and, therefore, 
 could not exist as a system of nature, or of the introspective 
 reason, or self -consciousness, which represents the Ideal 
 attributes of our spiritual nature. It is our spiritual nature, 
 not our animal body, which should be a law to our will, 
 which should not be determined by a passing neuralgia, or 
 disordered digestion. Bodily comfort and social convenience 
 may suggest many maxims of expediency, but cannot 
 furnish the axiom, or what Kant called "the categorical 
 imperative of duty." 
 
 " Natural Hang, or Neigung" (trend), said Kant, "is the sub- 
 jective possibility of a certain desire, which precedes the clear 
 conception of its object" ; this last may, or may not, be 
 antagonistic to pure reason; but the desire for Weil-Being, 
 or perfection of Being, is a part of all our self-determinations, 
 "If now," says Kant again, " we attend to ourselves on an 
 occasion of any transgression of duty, we shall find that 
 we, in fact, do not will that our maxim should be a universal 
 law, only we assume the liberty of making an exception 
 in favour of our own inclination once now and then" But 
 the canon of moral obligation remains, that we must be 
 able to will that the maxim of our actions should be a 
 universal law : herein lies our real spiritual evolution. 
 
 The synonym of morality is perfect humanity. Thus we 
 find the humanities a part of the scholastic training of 
 the middle ages. Perfect or Ideal humanity is seen in 
 voluntary self-determination in accordance with the attri- 
 butes of our spiritual Being, or (in philosophical parlance) 
 with ontological or metaphysical principles. "No soul," 
 said Plato, " is voluntarily deprived of truth " ; and morality 
 requires further, action according to truth. The utilitarian 
 introduces the consideration of consequences, but these we 
 must in some degree leave in God's hands. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 255 
 
 The familiar moral axiom, " Do unto others as you 
 would be done by," has been shown by Kant to be 
 a necessary deduction from the logical recognition of 
 similars, with the accompanying judgment, that what holds 
 good of a thing holds good of its like, which culminates, 
 in reflective reason, in the formal substitution of similars,* 
 through which man arrives at the idea of a Personal, or 
 Self-conscious, Supreme, Absolute Being to whom all 
 other Beings are relative called "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, 
 Brahma, Ahura Mazda, etc., etc.," in different times and 
 places, as in different tongues, although some races have 
 thought it profane even to give a name to the Supreme 
 Being. It is from the intuitive functioning of our under- 
 standing, that we derive the belief in, and hope of, a 
 future, more enduring, and happier state of Being, than is 
 our present, quickly-passing lot As we say noblesse oblige, 
 so we feel it inconceivable, that perfect power, perfect 
 wisdom, and perfect goodness should produce nothing 
 more satisfactory to reason and the reflective moral sense, 
 than is such a fearful scene of discrepancies, injustices, 
 heartbreaks, and despair, as we find this world to be, 
 spite of the Divinely - ordained rainbow of love, which 
 spans the darkest abyss, and teaches us what to hope 
 for. 
 
 " Du meine Seele, Du mein Trost, 
 Du bist den Himmel mir bestimmt 
 Mein guter Geist, mein besseres Ich." 
 
 " The categorical imperative is conformity to the end ; 
 inculcated by reason, the hypothetical imperative regards 
 the means to an end, or purpose. 
 
 " To base morality on its genuine, or essential principles, 
 so as to produce a purely moral disposition, and to engraft 
 them on men's minds for moral instruction, and for common 
 
 * JEVONS. 
 
256 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 practical purposes, would be to furnish the greatest possible 
 good to the world"* 
 
 " Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," 
 said the crucified Christ ; and, again, " If thou hadst known 
 . . . the things which belong unto thy peace." 
 
 " Everything in nature works according to laws. Rational 
 Beings alone have the faculty of acting according to principles 
 i.e., to the conception of laws."*!* But ft must be remembered 
 that beyond our own conceptions we cannot go ; more is not 
 required of us ; when a person says, " I have done my best," 
 tout est dit. 
 
 The will is the faculty to choose that only which reflective 
 reason recognises as good as ruled. The conception of the 
 command of reason is called an imperative, i.e., an obligation, 
 the authoritative voice of duty, for the fulfilment of which we 
 are responsible to our Creator ; and therefore we hold all men 
 equally bound to the observance of it. 
 
 "All imperatives are expressed in relation of an objective 
 law of reason to the will of a subject" "There is thus a 
 metaphysic of ethic, although for its application to man 
 morality has need of anthropology ";J even the physical 
 conditions of our existence here being represented by reason. 
 
 But as Christ said : " Seek first the Kingdom of God and 
 its righteousness," Plato said in a similar spirit : " Education 
 must proceed on Ideal grounds." 
 
 We must begin with the principles of reason, which are 
 valid for every rational Being, as such. The anthropological 
 conditions to which man is subject here have given rise to 
 the counsel of expediency ; but circumstances have to be 
 taken into consideration only in the second place. Pure 
 reason rises to Ideal conceptions where perceptible examples 
 fail us. "Moral laws are derived from the general concept 
 of a rational Being, i.e. t a self-conscious Being, whose self- 
 * KANT. f Idem. % Idem. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 257 
 
 determinations are bound to be voluntarily rational, i.e. y in 
 the ratio of, or in accordance with, the nature of noumenal 
 Being, that being what we mean by man's free-will as 
 opposed to being passion's slave, or the drudge of the flesh 
 and mammon. 
 
 To a perfect good or holy Being, the word ought does not 
 apply a Being who acts in the direct ratio of his holy 
 nature could not be otherwise than good. By being true to 
 his own Being, or perfect nature, he must be Goodness and 
 Love ; whereas the earth-bound, sense-conditioned, finite 
 Being is liable to constant aberrations from his spiritual, or 
 essential, nature : for although the spirit may be willing, the 
 flesh is weak. 
 
 The cerebro-nervous system (i.e., the afferent, sensorial, 
 and efferent nerves) may be regarded as a psychological 
 organism for the perception of external objects, for the 
 apprehension of their relations to each other, and for the 
 expression of the syllogism of thought, which is the mental 
 representation of the affections of Being, of its relation to 
 other Beings, and of the consequent logical self-determina- 
 tion, which is action according to the affections of Being, and 
 to its intelligence of the relations existing between it and 
 other Beings, and between other Beings to each other. But 
 to be true to the essential, or spiritual, nature of Being, and 
 to our apprehension of the equal claim to respect, which, as 
 such, all spiritual Beings must have upon each other, and 
 which results in action for the Best for all self-conscious, or 
 rational Beings, speculative reason has to be developed by 
 deliberately and voluntarily drawing general inferences from 
 particular facts of our own experience, as also from those 
 of our kind. First and foremost of these inferences is the 
 belief that, to account for mental phenomena, there must 
 exist a noumenal substans, that is the subject of them, i.e., 
 of feeling, intelligence, and will; and this once admitted, 
 
 S 
 
258 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 the same internal sense of ontological causality sufficient, 
 efficient, and final requires the synthetic representation of 
 these as the only sufficient reason for noumenal activity 
 in judgment, or self-determination. The Hindu regarded 
 matter as maja y illusion; and, as we know, the once-called 
 "everlasting hills" sink in landslips, whilst mountainous 
 islands have arisen out of the deep in a single night, and the 
 ocean bottom has ever been shifting. Towns that were once 
 on the sea-coast now stand inland, whilst new sea-side resorts 
 flourish along the shore. But the nature of man has not 
 changed, but has only evolved as does that of babes, 
 some of whom pass away unmatured here, as wild tribes 
 have died out, or rather passed on to other planets to 
 continue their evolution beyond the sun. 
 
 "The soul is the logical subject of inner experience." 
 But it is not merely a subject in the logical sense, but a 
 substance, a real Being, whose manifestations or trans- 
 actions constitute the so-called activities of the soul. The 
 word soul, or psyche, has been so mixed up with animalism, 
 that it is not a scientific term. 
 
 "That only inner experience possesses for us immediate 
 reality is a fundamental epistemological principle. Idealism 
 must, therefore, always gain an indisputable victory over 
 every contesting view of the world, although it does not 
 dispense with our obligation to recognize also the reality 
 of the external world." The word re-cognition points to 
 the fact of our immediate cognition of matter being through 
 our own physical organism, to which the external cosmos 
 is strictly related, this relation being the efficient cause of 
 our apprehending it. The very word phenomena is meaning- 
 less without the assumption of real Being, or a noumenon, 
 of which the phenomena are; and of other Beings, to which 
 the phenomena appear. Thus we say, " I feel," " I per- 
 ceive," " I think or apprehend," " I desire," " I conclude 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 259 
 
 or resolve." But to say, in the abstract, perceptions are, 
 thoughts are, feelings, resolutions are: or to say "the 
 present knowledge knows the past knowledge," is not at all 
 fairly to describe psychological facts ; it is in fact not 
 logical speech. " I know that I know," implies self- 
 consciousness. 
 
 The great object of modern philosophy has been to arrive 
 at a theory of knowledge. The question is no longer of 
 the immediate verification of a doctrine, such, as for ex- 
 ample, the doctrine of a future state of existence for 
 human or self-conscious, and, consequently, rational souls ; 
 but rather it is a question of whether the reasoning upon 
 which a doctrine is based is valid, or whether the doctrine 
 admits of rational interpretation according to any recognized 
 principle of the mind, or whether it is any given inference 
 of reason implicit in any attribute of Being, such as the 
 moral sense ; or, on the other hand, is there any principle 
 of thought which would be contradicted by the predication, 
 say, of man's mortality or of his destiny being one with that 
 of the higher mammalia or of the insectivora ? The answer 
 to this is " Yes." The principle of sufficient reason, which is 
 the principle of morality, under which reflection is con- 
 ducted, absolutely requires a larger field of action for man's 
 emotions, intellection, and moral aspiration, than this life 
 affords. Not only is art long, whilst human life is short ; 
 but also love is capable of an endless future ; and as to 
 the domain of science it is broad indeed, embracing, as it 
 does, the starry sphere ; whilst morality or virtue strengthens 
 with its growth, and becomes more and more capable of 
 conceiving and executing untold good, so that the uni- 
 verse may become one Heaven. The hard schools of 
 discipline will then be closed, their purpose being accom- 
 plished; and the will of God being everywhere fulfilled, 
 the moan of the solitary spirit, and the complaint of the 
 
260 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 oppressed, will be exchanged for the true music of the 
 spheres, the universal harmony of souls. Every form of 
 spiritual music will then prevail, from the duo that for 
 ever represents the home of the heart, up to the symphony 
 of all the souls of the good made perfect after, or through, 
 great tribulation : after struggle peace ; the battle won the 
 olive crown. This is the school preparatory to the life to 
 come the blessed life, not hell-fire ; for certainly whilst 
 malevolence endures no peace is possible. 
 
 Faith is in the essential principles, and attributes of Being : 
 its power, or sufficiency for causality, and its wisdom or 
 efficiency to compass its end that end being goodness, 
 perfection, or beatitude of Being. The presumption, or 
 assumption, of the principle of sufficient reason, which is 
 the principle of rational self-determination in feeling, thought, 
 and spirit, is that nothing designed by an omnipotent, 
 omniscient, and omnibenevolent will, can fall short of 
 accomplishment, or be a self-contradiction. 
 
 All have to learn faith, love, and hope in God. Without 
 these special characteristics of humanity we are of all 
 creatures the most miserable. As the lower animals cannot 
 break the law, because they are ignorant of it, so they have 
 no anguished moral sense at the picture re-represented by us, 
 without and within, of imperfection, distortion, and wretched- 
 ness. Why, then, equip man with the Ideal of the Best, 
 of the perfect, and happy life, if this stage of existence be 
 the only one allowed to him ? Why should " Show us 
 the Father" have ever been the cry of souls, if the Father 
 is never to be revealed to us, or if communion with Him 
 be an impossibility ? Even the most hideous superstitions 
 testify to man's being born a seeker after God, and a striver 
 after the Ideal. 
 
 " Man's obstinate questionings," that Comte and the 
 agnostics of the present day altogether condemn as proofs 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 261 
 
 of his folly, rather than of his higher nature, have been well 
 treated by Alfred Fouillee. He says, "a question asked 
 is an idea of mind called into play," and in speaking, more- 
 over, of " Involution des idees forces," i.e., directive ideas, he 
 remarks, " It is the subjective development of the human 
 intelligence, and the self-consciousness which it attains, that 
 enables us to ask questions, and to reply to them, know- 
 ledge of the universe being inseparable from self-conscious- 
 ness"; and he adds, "We can find nothing in the world 
 which we are not prepared to ask of it by virtue of our 
 own internal development. The world becomes what it is 
 to our cognizance only by the development of our own 
 consciousness." Spontaneous thought is the power by which 
 we interrogate Nature ; by reflective thought we interrogate 
 our own, or human nature. Scientific discoveries are made 
 under the forms of hypothesis, verification, and applica- 
 tion. In the case of the study of morality, or of the exer- 
 cise of man's free will, in the first place to act is to know 
 both how we act, and why we act. We do not create 
 psychic facts or phenomena any more than we create physical 
 phenomena, although we can apply them in many cases 
 according to our reflective self-determination. The sensitive 
 element is introduced to us from without; but the relation 
 of our sensations to the profounder subjective phenomena 
 which underlie them is an object of possible study. Psycho- 
 logy is thus not separate from physiology, and it gives us 
 a knowledge of ourselves such as we become, and such as 
 we can make ourselves under the action from without, and 
 the reaction from within. This is the meeting-point between 
 mind and matter, and the seat of self-government, self- 
 restraint, and proper self-assertion. In other words, this is 
 the proper field of morality. We cannot make ourselves 
 feel more deeply than is natural to us, or become philoso- 
 phers at will; but we can become more or less saint-like. 
 
262 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 The object of this, and all my works, has been to formulate 
 and exhibit a rational system of the spontaneous principles 
 of knowledge, and of the reaction of reflection upon them. 
 
 Descartes' particular function in philosophy was the in- 
 sistence upon the recognition of the ontological principle 
 involved in every special predicate. Cogito ergo sum is 
 surely more true to logic than "Though I reflect I do not 
 exist " would be. Now one's cogitations may occasionally be 
 supposed rather than real; but the thinker of the thoughts 
 needs no other demonstration of his or her existence than 
 the fact of thinking, or mental representation. 
 
 The spontaneous perception, apprehension, and comprehen- 
 sion, which alike singly, and taken together, connote noumenal 
 Being, together with the reflective generalizations of pure 
 reason, under the principle of sufficient reason, are vital exhi- 
 bitions of our own spontaneous mental representations of the 
 principles of causality sufficient, efficient, and final; thus the 
 existence of phenomena or appearances argues the existence 
 of a noumenon, or " Ding an sich und fur sich," to whom 
 things appear, or are, phenomena. The faculty of projecting 
 images out of the phenomena of sensation is shared with us 
 by the lower animals ; hence they have percepts, but only to 
 man belongs apperception, or reflective Self-consciousness, 
 in which what is implicit in perception becomes explicit in 
 reflection, apperception being of the subject-object. 
 
 The existence of the objective, or the non-ego, is 
 guaranteed by the ontological principles of causality, 
 through which we understand the necessity of sufficient, 
 efficient* and final causality for all effects produced upon 
 us, because we know ourselves as centres of causality. 
 Without such intuitions the phantasmagoric Berkleyan 
 doctrine might prevail, and we should have no sufficient 
 reason for our objective faith, love, and hope. Our life 
 might then be, indeed, " a dream within a dream." 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 263 
 
 The objective satisfaction of the nature, and needs, or 
 requirements, of intelligent, or noumenal Beings, is what 
 sharpens the subjective sense of causality, the clear concep- 
 tion of which in its three aspects is the sine qua non of 
 all our understanding of self, of the universe, and of God. 
 
 Relativity, or likeness, is not only the first condition of 
 true social communion, but also of gregariousness. With 
 the finer organism, and the power of rational self-deter- 
 mination in man, appears the tendency, unshared by the 
 lower animals, to voluntarily specialize the development of 
 the faculties of body and mind according to, or in the 
 direction of, individual idiosyncrasy. This is particularly 
 the result of reflective, co-ordinating reason. " External co- 
 ordination, through custom, can only be preserved by means 
 of some system of outward positive institutions. But self- 
 culture, in any particular direction, is the great agent in 
 specialization of development." 
 
 Both customs and language should be such as to form 
 " stepping-stones to higher things," instead of being, as they 
 often are, dead checks in the path of evolution "use and 
 wont" being taken for natural logic, and external practices 
 for religion. 
 
 The liberty of the individual to be what he is best fitted 
 to be, is the watchword of western civilization. Yet in social 
 institutions but a few sides of human nature are taken 
 into account, and logicians tell us that " it is the bane of 
 ratiocination to treat names, or words that represent but one, 
 or few, aspects of things, as if they comprehended the whole 
 of truth." Again, as fulness, or completeness of Being, is 
 only realized through the union of man and woman, so only 
 through the realization of the solidarite humaine, or the 
 solidarity of each and every man with his kind, can social 
 evolution proceed, social organization depending upon the 
 recognition of essential inner relations, regardless of the 
 
264 Rational) or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 accidents of custom, such as dress and social etiquette, 
 which, alas ! in what is facetiously called le grand monde, 
 is regarded as the all in all. 
 
 Self is an essential factor in voluntary action. " Sans le 
 moi, on ne peut se rendre compte de rien." Reflection 
 affirms tendency in action ; we may, or may not, know 
 ourselves, nor did we make ourselves Beings moved by 
 a constant purpose in action, for it is thus that we are 
 constituted. 
 
 " Desire," says Professor Sully, " constitutes, in a greater 
 or less degree, an integral element in all true conative 
 processes. The entertaining of distinctly painful ideas for 
 their own sake, or without any desire to get a secondary 
 result of pleasurable consciousness from so doing, is seen by 
 all to be abnormal and immoral," leading, as it does, to 
 cruelty, suggesting the thought : " Evil, be thou my good." 
 
 Action for the Best for Being may be regarded as the 
 Ideal type of all volition, just as love is the Ideal of all 
 emotion, and truth is the Idealism of all observation. The 
 subject is painfully or pleasurably impressed by an object, 
 or by the idea of an object ; it intelligises the relation in 
 which that object stands to it, and acts accordingly under 
 the connate tendency for self-preservation, or for the con- 
 servation of the integrity of Being as such. 
 
 It is the reflective self that is truly selective, acting upon 
 general conceptions, rather than hypnotized by immediate 
 or directly given impressions. There is systematic thought 
 exhibited in general conceptions, in which self-love, social, 
 and Divine, are alike represented as motive powers. 
 
 The identification of the self with the Ideal will, which 
 constitutes pure volition, as opposed to mere passive desire, 
 is synonymous with the assimilation of a particular idea 
 into the body of thought. 
 
 It is from reflection on our imaginative representations 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 265 
 
 in connection with our feelings, thoughts, and desires, 
 that purely rational or conscientious volition arises, pure 
 reason referring to reflective self-consciousness, i.e., to the 
 Ideal Self, whose mainspring is good-will, or love, in the 
 three forms of self-reverence, social regard, and Divine 
 adoration. 
 
 " Remember your good hearts," was the text of a Japanese 
 sermon. Will has been defined as a conative determination, 
 or natural tendency in action, represented before any re- 
 flective judgment can be formed as to the nature, or Ideal 
 of morality ; but the seat of free-will is reflection, with its 
 requirement of equilibriation of feeling, intelligence, and 
 desire. 
 
 If we recall to memory the happiest hours of our life, 
 we shall find that in them, the Ideal of thought was, as it 
 were, incarnated in our own life for some brief space of 
 time ; more than that cannot be expected in this life of 
 woes, in this valley of the shadow of death, where trial of 
 some kind is always making itself felt, either regarding 
 our own destiny, or that of others. Abstract good-will is 
 analysable into its constituent elements feeling, intelli- 
 gence, and tendency in action. " If the assumption of a 
 physical world is the legitimate and necessary standpoint of 
 physics, the assumption of a spiritual Being, or intelligent 
 agent, is the equally necessary metaphysical standpoint of 
 psychology."* The synthesis of Being and thought is the 
 one thing necessary to be grasped. As sensuous existence 
 is imaged, so spiritual existence is personified in rational 
 conceptualism. All reflective concepts are formed under 
 the categories of thought, or the fundamental ideas of 
 verce causes, or of causality sufficient, efficient, and final 
 of which the human understanding is composed. Should any 
 one of these not be taken into account, our conception of an 
 
 * LADD. 
 
266 Rational, or Scientific > Ideal of Morality 
 
 object must be incomplete. Nothing is conceivable apart 
 from its relation to, or except under its relations to noumenal 
 Being. Probably the idfos claires desiderated by Descartes 
 can only be the outcome of our completed evolution. Only 
 in the Absolute Being may the connection of thought and 
 will be undeviating ; conditioned Beings are, by the terms, 
 handicapped by their conditionings. The practice of a 
 perfect Being is only logically conceivable as identical with 
 its essence ; whereas, with us poor mortals, the spirit may 
 be indeed willing, but the flesh, to which it is bound, is 
 weak, and the will consequently wavering. Reason is the 
 law of identity with, and non-contradiction of Ideal Being. 
 A complete idea or notion can only arise out of our whole 
 Being, which must itself be true to, or have attained to its 
 type. This, however, is only partially attainable through 
 the complementary union of opposites, which is the law of 
 elective affinity ensuring the balance of the faculties. Before 
 Sir Isaac Newton's discovery of the principle of gravity, 
 it was not unnatural to suppose a fetish, or demoniacal 
 vitality in lifeless, or unorganized matter, seeing how 
 things, apparently spontaneously, shift their position when 
 their centre of gravity is disturbed, creaking and falling 
 about as they do. Again, earthquakes were interpreted 
 as signs of the wrath of God ; but science has revealed the 
 chronic rule of law throughout creation law meaning, 
 established relations between Beings and Beings, and 
 between Beings and things, as also between the means 
 and the end, or rational relativity. The rational categories 
 of mental representation, far from being of dubious cer- 
 tainty, are actual representations of vital presentations, 
 affirming the existence of a thinking subject, and of objects 
 of thought. As an instinct, such as that of hunger or 
 thirst, argues its satisfaction, so our possession of reason 
 argues its own justification and fulfilment. Progress is 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 267 
 
 mostly by antagonism. It is a struggle for the attainment 
 of the Best for Being. In evidence of this, we can no 
 more regard ultimate and final mental dissatisfaction, as a 
 desirable, and to be hoped for conclusion, than we could 
 so consider chronic physical suffering. What virtue can 
 there be, in pretending we like distress for its own sake? 
 
 Harmony, attained through equilibrium of forces, does 
 not tend to erratic motion, although as in the case of 
 union arrived at between complementary souls, it leads to 
 regulated balanced activity, that precludes stagnation. 
 Tyndall said, that "uncombined forces produce the cata- 
 clysms of the universe, in their rush into combination"; and 
 certain it is that the instinctive striving after the equilibrium 
 that comes of satisfied elective affinities, is a condition of 
 the peace and welfare of society being attained. 
 
 " We should then love Thee best 
 Were our affinities at rest." 
 
 " Our lifted lives at last shall touch 
 
 That happy goal to which they move, 
 Until we find, as darkness rolls 
 Away, and evil mists dissolve, 
 That nuptial contrasts are the poles 
 
 On which the Heavenly spheres revolve." 
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE. 
 
 " Oh ! ye that taste that love is sweet, 
 Set way-marks for the doubtful feet 
 That stumble on in search of it : 
 Sing hymns of love, that those who hear 
 Far off in pain, may lend an ear, 
 Rise up in wonder and draw near, 
 Lead lives of love, that others who 
 Behold your lives, may kindle too." 
 
 CHRISTINA ROSSETTI. 
 
 Lives like Byron's are more like the flash of a meteor, 
 than like a fixed star in the firmament, by which a man 
 may be helped to steer his course aright. Such a pole- 
 star is true love, the story of which has been carefully 
 
268 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 preserved in every age and country, and transmitted from 
 generation to generation, describing to other races, "the 
 haven where they would be." For each a lodestar exists. 
 
 "True love is the unity of souls." The satisfaction of 
 the senses has little or nothing to do with true love. As 
 marriage can exist without true love, so true love can exist 
 without the marriage ceremony taking place. 
 
 " Conjugal love," says Tolstoi, " is destroyed before 
 marriage, when sexual pleasure is cultivated before 
 marriage ; yet," he continues in his Confessions, " I had 
 never heard from any of my elders, that the life I was 
 leading, after the fashion of the youth of my class, was 
 reprehensible. Surely there will come a time, an epoch, 
 when the life of the voluptuary will be unveiled ! What 
 cowardice is this pretending not to know what everyone 
 knows, and, moroever, regarding it as a matter of joke ! " 
 
 " If there is any question of equality between man and 
 woman," continues the same writer, " let the equality be com- 
 plete" As it is of the marriage of souls of which I speak, 
 so is it of the equality with oppositeness, of development 
 of spiritual attributes, that I am specially treating, under 
 the name of true love, or spiritual affinity. 
 
 Well might the ancients (the Greeks said the fable came 
 from India), when imagining life in conjunction with one's 
 perfect affinity, suppose that the gods themselves would 
 be jealous of their happiness, and therefore divide them, 
 leaving them to pass their lives in vain struggles to 
 find each other, like Cupid and Psyche. When love is not 
 founded on spiritual affinities, and conformity of Ideals, 
 but is regarded merely as a means to the end of domestic or 
 family life, so that the children are considered above either 
 the wife or the husband, and their troubles, real or imaginary, 
 throw everything else into the shade, conjugal love has taken 
 flight, if ever it could be said to have existed. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 269 
 
 In the classes in which the fine arts are cultivated, the 
 feelings, the intelligence, and the will are ideally aroused ; 
 but as it has been said of pity, so it may be said of each 
 and all of the emotions, or sources of action, that if they 
 are once aroused from the latent state without being actually 
 fulfilled or realized practically, they rot the heart, or are 
 themselves ground down, as is the nether millstone when 
 there is nothing else for it to grind. Ennui, scepticism, 
 cynicism, and pessimism haunt the man of culture, in a 
 way that Sancho Panza never dreamt of, for the Ideal per- 
 verted or disappointed is a dangerous guest. And again, as 
 Tolstoi has powerfully exhibited in his Kreiitzer Sonata, 
 hate sits clo.se by lust, so that the gratification of the 
 merely animal passion of love does not suffice for fidelity, 
 or save from jealousy. 
 
 Nothing is more favourable to self-development than self- 
 devotion, wrongly called self-sacrifice ; for the body is not 
 the real self, and whether self-devotion refers directly to 
 some beloved object, or indirectly to some abstract cause, 
 say to the cause of truth, justice, or liberty, or philanthropy, 
 it is as a matter of fact self-actualization, or moral self- 
 realization. 
 
 The doctrine of immortality, the basis of which is strictly 
 metaphysical, resting on spiritual ^^-consciousness (as ex- 
 hibited in the Japanese belief that " life is but the scabbard 
 of the soul, which can be set free at any moment"), is, 
 above all, the agis of morality, making the memor ultimi 
 always present. Goodness, and the concomitant hope of 
 God's goodness, are the only rationally-conceivable justifica- 
 tion of man's troubled existence here, and of the imper- 
 fection of " this body of death," as St. Paul calls it, which 
 is a constant cause of anxiety and alarm. 
 
 When we speak of the goodness of a man, we mean his 
 voluntary realization of the ethical Ideal oi Being. The 
 
270 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 sense of Being is both the a priori and the a posteriori, or 
 reflectively given, basis of thought or mental representa- 
 tion. The Ideal of happiness, or Heaven, is of a time 
 and place where "feeling shall be one with joy or love." 
 As man reasons from each new platform of self-conscious- 
 ness to which he has attained, through the mixed experiences 
 of joy and suffering, so the prospect of reason seems to 
 stretch out to infinitude of progress in the capacity of 
 adoring our Creator. The unfolding, or evolution of a living 
 spirit, must always be identical with itself development 
 not meaning the turning of one thing into another. The 
 birch-tree does not develop into an oak, although an oak 
 is evolved from an acorn. 
 
 Sufficient, efficient, and final causality, are necessarily 
 at one with each other, and the efficient cause cannot be 
 at variance with either of the concepts, on which all reason- 
 ing proceeds. Not to trust to the final cause is pessimism 
 the denial of instinctive and reflective reason. 
 
 To seek enjoyment in anything that contradicts either 
 of the essential elements of Being, must, therefore, be in 
 vain. It is in the synthetic unity of mind, under the 
 reflective principle of sufficient reason, that all our true 
 judgments, sensuous and sense-transcending, are rooted. 
 
 Man's great difficulty is to realize himself reflectively, 
 and to understand himself. Only after he has attained a 
 fairly clear view of the Ideal of Being can he do this. 
 The fine arts greatly help man to the conception of the 
 Ideal ; hence their attraction, and the respect in which 
 they are held. 
 
 As the moral sense, or the reflective sense of perfection 
 of Being, develops in us, devotion to an imperfect Being 
 becomes secondary to devotion to the absolutely Good or 
 Perfect Being. But although secondary human love or 
 devotion to a beloved fellow creature is as positive an 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 2 7 1 
 
 element in human existence as is the devotion to a Supreme 
 Being, which we call religion, and which is in fact an 
 after-thought, an after-emotion, arising out of reflective 
 reason, the one fear that may be said to survive hatred, 
 or antagonism, is the fear of estrangement between our- 
 selves and the beloved Being, human or Divine. Hence 
 devotion has an element of such deeply-felt dependence in 
 it, that it becomes awe, or reverence, both in the case of 
 Divine and human love. Dr. Bradley, in his Appearance 
 and Reality, says that filial and sexual, or conjugal devo- 
 tion, shares this characteristic of the religious sentiment. 
 Dr. Bradley says, moreover, " First amongst the moral 
 demands which call for satisfaction is the suppression of 
 the divorce between morality and benevolence. Morality 
 has proved to be unreal unless it stands on, and vitally 
 consists in, gifts naturally good ; every kind of human 
 excellence is undeniably good, while at the same time the 
 highest rank should be reserved for the inner life." Evil 
 may possibly be definable as the regarding our material 
 and worldly interests as of more importance than those of 
 the spiritual life, such as faith, love, and hope in good- 
 ness for the joy of life, which we feel to be the test of 
 goodness. " Oh ! taste and see that the Lord is good ! " 
 said the Hebrew Psalmist. The sense of duty, or responsi- 
 bility, to a Supreme Being, is a great aid to self-knowledge. 
 True love also makes us take stock of ourselves through 
 our eagerness to excel, so as to be worthy of the same 
 respectful love we ourselves give to the beloved object ; 
 for only respectful love is true love. Music, emphatically 
 above all the fine arts, helps man to realize his capacity 
 for the tender yearning of love its joy, and its triumph 
 as also his capacity for deep depression, and the hopelessness 
 of utter bereavement ; therefore in all religious ceremonies 
 music has played a great part. Dancing is also a sort of 
 
272 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 ocular rhythm. Poetry is more expressive of the intellect 
 of man, although its imaginative word-painting throws a 
 great deal of light on the emotions. Truth is the Ideal of 
 knowledge, as the sense of harmony, or loveliness, is the Ideal 
 of feeling, and goodness is the Ideal of perfect or right action. 
 There is a wonderful unanimity among poets and novelists 
 as to the phenomena of true love or spiritual harmony. 
 All endorse the idea of Dante's Vita Nuova in the sense 
 of turning over altogether a new leaf in the book of life, 
 making the reader him or herself feel, to use Shelley's 
 words, " bright, beautiful, and free " : bright, because it has 
 become so clear to him that life is meant for joy ; beauti- 
 ful, because the sense of being in perfect harmony with 
 another Being makes him estimate himself of higher worth ; 
 and free, because the slavery to the groove of his own 
 idiosyncrasy is broken, and he walks in the strength of 
 fulness and completeness of Being, or in the strength of 
 two. Things can only be intelligible to a self-realizing 
 Being, i.e., they are only so in connection with the categories 
 of the understanding, or the consciousness of causality 
 sufficient, efficient, and final; the concepts of causality are 
 altogether ontological. 
 
 Reflection is not a reproduction of objects, but of the 
 states of subjective consciousness induced in us by them. 
 It is by reflecting on these that the Ego interprets its own 
 motives in self-determination. Thus also it gives sensation- 
 signs significance. " Mathematical terms are inappropriate 
 to spiritual realities." The data of the senses are impres- 
 sions, not, in the proper sense, cognitions ; whereas causality 
 is immanently known to man, called the lord of the creation 
 under God, being himself a vera causa. The cause is related, 
 as cause to effect, by virtue of some intrinsic quality of its 
 nature, which is embodied in that relation. Causality is a 
 form of connection which is generally thought only to hold 
 
Rational) or Scientific ', Ideal of Morality 273 
 
 among the phenomena of the material, whereas it is par 
 excellence the governor of the moral, universe. In the re- 
 flective concepts of causality we generalize our experiences 
 in feeling, intelligence, and will on the principle of non- 
 contradiction of experience. Epileptic fits and convulsions 
 are only accidental conditions of the body, physiologically 
 occasioned. Being is the only sufficient source of purpose, 
 or of sufficient causation. In what we call a design, we see 
 the adaptation of one thing to another for the production 
 of a given end conceivable by reason. Apprehension arises 
 out of our knowledge of a particular relation existing 
 between things, which is the efficient cause of an effect 
 produced on us. 
 
 A relation is a point of contact, or of identity, between 
 the subject and the object, which is the only rationally-con- 
 ceivable efficient cause of feeling. We can only rationally 
 postulate our own essential tendency in self-determination 
 to act for the Good, or supposed Good, for Being, as ex- 
 planation of the purpose of all rational Beings. Distorted, 
 indeed, must be the nature which says : " Evil, be thou my 
 good " ; and strange the inference that the Creator Who 
 imposed the Best for Being Himself holds hell-fire for the 
 majority. 
 
 It is from our own experience, and that of other persons, 
 that we induce the general concept of finality, or rational 
 purpose in action (Zweckmassigkeit). Our hopes of future 
 happiness are simply deductions from our necessary concept 
 of Ideal Being, and of a Being of Beings Who, being 
 absolute, fulfils His conception of love and goodness, or 
 benevolence ; in Whom we need, therefore, fear no shadow 
 of change, Whose goodness cannot be doubted, because, 
 unlike finite conditioned Beings, He is not dependent on 
 the will or the caprices of others. 
 
 Leibnitz, in exhibiting, in his principle of sufficient reason, 
 
 T 
 
274 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 that nothing takes place in the universe which exchides a 
 rational vindication, laid bare the rational springs of the 
 universe, the purpose or final cause of which is to be a 
 home for finite spirits their cradle, their place of education, 
 and the scene of their ultimate higher self-realization, or 
 happiness. Thus does it also afford us a key to theology. 
 The monads of Leibnitz have no spatial attributes ; for 
 Leibnitz, God is the monad of monads. 
 
 " Each mind is spiritual, and is a living and perpetual 
 mirror of the universe." When we say that the principle 
 of variety asserts that no two exactly similar things exist, 
 we only mean that oxygen is always oxygen, although its 
 action may be modified by mixture with another physical 
 element ; and that we should not logically call things the 
 same if they differ in any respect. For truth, it must always 
 be remembered, refers to the necessary concepts of our 
 understanding. Different stages of evolution in the differ- 
 ent attributes of Personality constitute different individual 
 idiosyncrasies, i.e., a variety of standpoints from which finite 
 spirits regard the universe; but Being is one in its essence. 
 
 " The senses tell us what happens, but not what necessarily 
 happens." The subject, or Ego, itself is the source of our 
 idea of substance, and of certitude. Intelligence is of the 
 harmonious, or of the discordant, relations that exist between 
 Beings and Beings, things and Beings, and between our own 
 desires and self-determination to act for the Good for Being, 
 or, reflectively, for the conservation of the integrity of 
 Being, that rationally necessitates our teleological inter- 
 pretation of the universe. 
 
 The inferences of reason are from the facts of 
 existential experience. No conclusion can, or must be, 
 contradictory of its datum, as the means to an end 
 cannot be a contradiction of the end proposed. For me 
 to have analysed my conception, I must have grasped 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 275 
 
 its synthesis, to which my whole Being or mind must 
 contribute. Relations are reciprocal, the forms of judg- 
 ment are categorical. 
 
 As physiological Being is a whole in itself, so conception 
 is from our complete mental outfit of feeling, intelligence 
 and will, morality being the outcome of reflection under the 
 principle of sufficient reason. 
 
 It is by reflection on the complex economy of his own 
 mental structure, that man arrives at the psychological basis 
 of ethics in which physiology has a part commanding his 
 attention. 
 
 "II n'y a pas de bonne bete," say the French. Either 
 stupidity or ignorance disables one for pure moral judgment ; 
 hate as the contradiction of love is immoral. 
 
 The legal institutions that have prevailed throughout 
 different times and places, are only indications, like high- 
 water marks, of the standpoint in moral evolution, socially 
 arrived at in such and such times and places. Evolution 
 is, above all, moral ; love is both its path and goal. Evolu- 
 tion means increase of knowledge, together with stricter 
 adherence to reason in practice. We gradually modify our 
 social institutions in the ratio in which our own evolution, 
 as to our Ideals of truth, love, and goodness, has advanced. 
 In spontaneous direct consciousness, pure or speculative 
 reason is implicit. The intelligible object is first constituted, 
 as such, to us, by our perception of a modification of our 
 own Being in respect to sensation, or feeling. 
 
 The apprehension of the relation in which an object 
 stands to us is the apprehension of a similarity in kind with 
 variety, or differentiation ; but, together with differentiation 
 in various directions, redintegration may occur in many com- 
 plex ways. An indefinite variability of organisms being thus 
 conceivable, next comes comprehension, which is emphatically 
 teieological, or which determines activity for the Good, or 
 
276 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Best, for Being. Apperception, or reflective self-conscious- 
 ness, in which we make our abstract conceptions explicitly 
 rational, under the principle of sufficient reason, is more 
 slowly developed; it resumes the great fundamental 
 principles of causality by which the internal and external 
 cosmos are governed. 
 
 Leibnitz stated that physical monads are moved by 
 efficient causation, and spiritual monads by final causation. 
 In voluntary action the natural tendency to act for the 
 conservation of the integrity of Being is realized as re- 
 ferring to our real, or spiritual Being, rather than to our 
 animal organism. Efficient causation which arises out of 
 the relation between things may be spasmodic. 
 
 Carlyle warns us against burning away in mad waste the 
 plainly Divine elements in our Being, changing our holy of 
 holies into a place of riot, thus making the soul itself barren, 
 impious, and hard ; hungry animalism meaning spiritual 
 extirpation and mendacity. 
 
 But because animalism is not to be rampant, this should 
 not preclude the exercise of the faculties given us to fit us 
 for our existence in this mundane sphere. The exercise of 
 all unperverted faculty is good, in the sense of being both 
 pleasant and helpful to our true welfare, together with that 
 of others. How can you do unto others as you would be 
 done by, if you have no natural tendency to any particular 
 kind of action for yourself? This has to be answered by 
 the agnostic. Mere sensation may determine spontaneous 
 conation, for the satisfaction of our instincts ; but reflective, 
 or real, volition involves rational attention to some chosen 
 object, supposed to conduce to our essential well-Being. We 
 are not merely receptive even in desire, but we are positively 
 active in volition, in which attention and muscular conscious- 
 ness are both called into play. The conative, or active 
 faculty, expresses the more passive attitude of desire. " For 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 277 
 
 internal volition the attention is directed to the idea of some 
 change to be effected in a psychical state : in external 
 volition to motor ideas." Reflective will is the result of a 
 generalized idea. Now an idea is composed of the principles 
 of the human understanding, i.e., those of causality 
 sufficient, efficient, and final which represent its attributes 
 power, wisdom, and goodness; the principle of sufficient 
 reason admits of no contradiction. 
 
 Thus the idea or notion represents the whole of Being, 
 which is the ground of all the inferences of pure reason. 
 " Ideo-motor action or conation, does not necessarily involve 
 attention. When conation includes attention, it may be 
 compared to the personal directing of a telescope." To 
 say " I feel ; I know ; and, therefore, I will direct my attention 
 to such or such a subject," is to recognize one's own exist- 
 ence, whether we realize it intellectually or not. Je pense, 
 done fexiste. The moral law is derived from the general 
 conception of a rational Being, meaning one that acts in 
 the ratio of, or in agreement with, its nature of feeling, 
 intelligence of relativity, and tendency to will, or act, in 
 accordance with both of these attributes. 
 
 Art can only live, if it is in accord with both the laws 
 of physical nature, and of human metaphysical nature. 
 The unnatural is neither the true, the beautiful, nor the 
 good, and no arbitrary institutions can make it so. More- 
 over, the highest art is always ethical, in so far as it is 
 based on the fundamental and final Ideal, that good shall 
 have the great mastery over ill ; therefore, a novel, ending 
 unhappily, may what is called realistically represent life 
 in its incompleteness here, but it is not an Ideal work of 
 art; also the rational concept of the subserviency of body 
 to mind must be observed. It is not states of our organs, 
 but of our minds, that are Ideal. In reflective thought, 
 human re-representation is opposed to the merely sensitive 
 
278 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 presentations, or imaginative representation (which is pro- 
 bably the resume* of the representative faculty of the lower 
 animals emotion, intellection, and judgment) answering to 
 animal instinctive feeling, intelligence, and tendency. 
 " The object of the true ascetic," says Buddha, " is not to 
 afflict his body, but to subdue his body, or physical organism, 
 to his spirit, so that the best energy may be thrown into 
 the higher life." In the Sutta, entitled " The foundation of 
 the Kingdom of righteousness," we find it written, " The 
 Kingdom of God is within the spirit of man, and it is 
 made manifest in his correct mores, or habits" for rational 
 service is what the Father of spirits requires in His rational 
 creation. 
 
 The Ideal of philosophy is reflective inquiry concern- 
 ing the existence of things, the nature of Being, and 
 what constitutes the right, or good, in conduct. Philosophy 
 busies itself with historical criticism, and with the analysis 
 and content of the particular sciences, together with recogni- 
 tion of the deeper needs, and ultimate aspirations of human 
 reason. It is older, and of more permanent interest, than 
 any particular science. Above all, philosophy inquires into 
 reality for the ascertainment of truth, or right concepts 
 about things, and emphatically into the rational validity of 
 our concepts concerning Truth. Hence it may be called 
 the science of sciences, for it is the science of reason itself: 
 of what it consists in, of what are its limitations, and of the 
 tallying of our abstract conceptions of things, with their 
 action upon us. 
 
 Phenomena can only be known to us as they fall under 
 the categories of thought, for only as effects produced 
 upon us do they enter into consciousness. Common-sense 
 realism is dualistic: on one side, it is psychology as a 
 natural science, or as a branch of organic chemistry of 
 physiology ; and on the other, it is metaphysic, or speculative 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 279 
 
 philosophy of consciousness. Next comes logic, as the 
 study of the assumptions, postulates, and conclusions of re- 
 flective reason. All speculative hypotheses are ontological 
 in their character : logic, or the Word, is but the expression 
 of Being ; it is taught as an art, to prevent the contra- 
 diction of Being, or to protect one from self-contradiction. 
 Pleasure is a psychological term referring to the mixed 
 sentient and imaginative consciousness : it answers to 
 the spiritual joy felt in the appreciation of value, or worth, 
 in the reflective reason. Mens sana in corpore sano is a 
 logical expression, but powerlessness in a function often 
 leads to reflection, and makes a philosopher of a mere 
 man. Desire involves feeling, with the apprehension 
 of an object to be attained. Judgment is positive, com- 
 parative, and superlative, implying comparison with a 
 standard. Judgment assumes that some given object is a 
 means to a desired end, or to the desire of our desires 
 the perfect life. The desires of unreflecting youth are 
 tinged or shaped by the immediate stage of the evolution 
 of the imagination. Thus we speak of "love's young 
 dream." Now I have recently seen pictured illustrations 
 of the dream of a young woman, and of a young man. 
 The first representation was of a pretty-featured, charming 
 "little miss," fashionably dressed. The second portrayed a 
 handsome young fellow, looking strong and martial, in 
 uniform. Both of these pictures must have been drawn 
 under the sway of imaginative sense-consciousness, for 
 reflective reason is occupied rather with the essential Ideal 
 relations in which the object stands to the Ideal, or 
 spiritual Being, than with this body of death and the 
 clothes with which we cover it. 
 
 But alas ! how few aspire to the comprehension of God 
 and the universe. Thus it is forgotten that, as the dove 
 cannot mate with the eagle, so one who holds lower 
 
280 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 intellectual and moral Ideals than another, cannot truly 
 mate with that other. Hence incongruous incompatible 
 conjunctions : the groaning of the wise under the yoke of 
 the fool, the increased alienation of the fool from wisdom, 
 because with him familiarity breeds contempt. 
 
 Poetry, the drama, and the fine arts, as such, are indirect 
 means, or reflective modes of stimulating and cultivating 
 the emotions, answering to the training of the eye in 
 drawing, or of the ear in music. They are, therefore, of 
 great rational and moral value; hence we speak of the 
 advantages of a liberal education, as opposed to the mere 
 grammar-school tuition. Of course, only from good poetry 
 can a good result be expected, and a vicious drama may 
 corrupt instead of improve. Poetry, like everything else, 
 can only be pronounced to be good, when the effects or 
 results it produces on the characters of its readers are 
 good. It must, however, be borne in mind, that what may 
 be good for the full-grown person, may not have a good 
 effect upon the mind of a child, or of an adolescent. The 
 word good is purely an ontological term, referring always 
 to conscious, or rather self-conscious individuals. Art 
 shadows forth, in concrete forms, the Ideals of the imagina- 
 tion ; hence, the body being but the fleeting, vanishing 
 shadow of the spirit, an old woman is not considered a 
 fitting heroine of a novel. Ideal conceptions, or reflective, 
 subjective, general ideas, are of universal enduring truth, 
 beauty or harmony, and goodness. These are the great 
 Ideal realities answering to man's need and capacities for 
 faith, love, and hope, he not being able to live by 
 bread alone. 
 
 Moral purpose is that which reveals character; and it is 
 seen in what a man chooses or avoids. 
 
 The word, and fact of evolution, has resolved the difficulty 
 of the existence of " a process of becoming " (Hegel's Wer- 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 281 
 
 den} within the compass of an abiding reality. As the 
 rose is evolved (entwickeli) from the bud, by sunshine and 
 rain, so is the spirit of man evolved by pain and pleasure, 
 joy and grief, hope and despair ; and, above all, by his 
 own steady direction of his will to the path of right duty 
 and order. 
 
 The following extract from Professor James Seth's most 
 admirable work, A Study of Ethical Principles, is a fair 
 sample of the gradual evolution of the moral sense, amongst 
 even philosophers, since the time of Plato. "The ultimate 
 measure of well-Being having been found in the perfection 
 of the development of the total nature of the individual, 
 the maintenance by the State of the true relation of eco- 
 nomic to ethical good, of material to spiritual well-Being, 
 may take many forms ; but with regard to the internal 
 and ethical, all men will be seen to be equal: class interests 
 do not exist here. In the ethical sphere will be found 
 true democracy." 
 
 "The capitalist and the day-labourer stand here on the 
 same level, and the true State will regard the interests of 
 each alike. If the preservation and development of the 
 highest manhood of its citizens is the supreme duty and 
 the ultimate raison detre of the State, a certain amount of 
 leisure has to be secured to all, so that no citizen shall 
 lose the reality of citizenship, and sink to the status of a 
 slave." Even Christianity countenanced slavery during 
 several generations; but the development of pure reflec- 
 tive reason has at last set the spirits in prison free, and 
 offers to all a certain hope of future blessedness, the near- 
 ness or remoteness of which is seen to lay partly in their 
 own hands ; for each of us has to work out his own salvation 
 voluntarily, and of heart's desire. Professor Green defines 
 personality as the quality in a subject of being consciously 
 an object to itself. "Not only do we know our inner 
 
282 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 experiences in feeling, and thought, and purpose, by the 
 inner vision of reflection," says Dr. Martineau, " but we are 
 continually relating them to others." "The man who 
 sacrifices himself in a noble cause," says Aristotle, "acts 
 for the sake of that in him which is most himself; and 
 his self-regard, or self-love, is a blessing to his fellow- 
 men." Heraclitus said, " It behoves all men to know 
 themselves, and thereby to exercise self-control." 
 
 For Xenophon, to know oneself meant "to know how 
 much, or little, one is able to know one's own power." 
 
 Socrates said that "the maxim graven on the temple 
 of Apollo, at Delphi, enjoined the discrimination between 
 good and evil, as well as the knowledge of one's powers." 
 
 Critias, in the Platonic Dialogues, says, " Self-knowledge 
 involves all other branches of knowledge," for to know the 
 three modes of causality is indeed the " open sesame " of all 
 the sciences. Desire is directed to some form of pleasure, or of 
 pleasurable activity ; the object of reflective will is to realize, 
 or actualize, perfection of Being ; therefore, we can dread fear 
 and hate as painful and deteriorating to Being, and so to 
 oneself. To take care of ourselves properly we must obey the 
 Delphic maxim, <l Know thyself." " For what really belongs 
 to me," says Socrates, " is not only my clothes, or arms and 
 legs, but my Self is identical with mind or soul. When I 
 speak to Alcibiades I address myself to his soul, or mind, 
 not to his clothes or his legs." 
 
 The same philosopher, being asked to define the Self, 
 says, "It is the agent who employs the body as instru- 
 ment"; and he added that, "in looking into another's soul 
 we perceive our own self reflected, as one sees one's eyes 
 reflected in the eyes of another." This applies more par- 
 ticularly to congenial souls. Only when the goal of perfect 
 rationality in feeling, intelligence, and will, in thought, word, 
 and deed, is at last reached, will Heaven or the abode of 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 283 
 
 perfect harmony between God and man, and between the 
 spirits of just men made perfect be won, for time or for 
 eternity. Then only shall we know or understand the 
 providence of God towards us. 
 
 Dante, in speaking of the dead Beatrice, describes death 
 as the "beginning of peace." Certainly the light thrown 
 by the casting off this mortal coil of pain and fear and 
 constant ailing, must be great indeed upon the glorious 
 possibilities offered by the universe around us ; but long 
 and weary transformations may yet remain before the 
 spirits of those who are not of the enlightened of this 
 world, and, above all, of those who deliberately refuse to 
 listen to the voice of conscience, despising the path of 
 duty, by which alone the goal of evolution is to be reached, 
 the goal being the perfection of life or happiness. 
 
 As the young of the lower animals exhibit the results 
 of training, in inherited modifications of the nervous system, 
 so it is through succeeding generations that each individual 
 becomes a stepping-stone in the evolution of the race. 
 Children that come of a truly good, or duty-doing family, 
 are more susceptible of culture than are the offspring of the 
 savage, the depraved, and the uncultured. Spiritual evolution 
 is not of the muscles of the arms or the legs, or even of any 
 cerebral artistic faculty, but it is of the essential attributes 
 of Being, i.e. y of feeling, intelligence, and will. 
 
 From these is the reflective principle of sufficient reason, 
 with all its wealth of inferences, drawn. The things of the 
 spirit are, moreover, eternally enduring. 
 
 " The sense may slip its transient pleasure 
 
 For richer boons of sense renewed, 
 But love, which spirit alone may treasure, 
 By time or change is unsubdued." 
 
 " Flesh against spirit prevaileth not," for who soweth to 
 the flesh, soweth to corruption. "Time," says Lotze, 
 
284 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 "cannot be called a series or a process, for there is neither 
 development nor process in time itself." Time is a con- 
 dition, not a cause of progress. The idea, or mental repre- 
 sentation, of time postulates a permanent Reality or 
 Substance, which does not essentially change, but of 
 which the conditions only change. The doctrine of the 
 " rights of man " is strictly relative to his sole possession 
 (as distinct from the lower animals) of the Divine attribute 
 of self-conscious reason. Hence we call men alone the 
 "sons of God," as being not slaves, or puppets, but sharers 
 in the Divine counsels. Hence for man alone does reason 
 predicate, or predict, an immortal destiny. The great 
 advance made by Christian Protestantism beyond Roman- 
 ism, is its assertion of the right to private judgment, 
 appealing to the reason and conscience of the individual, 
 instead of submitting the individual conscience and reason 
 to the Pope, or any persons delegated by him to receive 
 confession. 
 
 All rational government is by consent of the governed. 
 But man cannot reverse the attitude of conscience towards 
 our Creator, and substitute an inferior authority. Freedom 
 is of the very essence of man's nature, his Creator having 
 even left him free to deny, defy, or ignore Him, as also 
 to ignore the reason with which He has gifted us. 
 
 Of course, the consequences of his so doing are logically 
 determined by the laws of causality ; and as the Kingdom 
 of God is within, so it is within us that the penalty is 
 paid : in the deterioration of our Being, in the loss of self- 
 respect, self-help, and self-control ; and, with these, depart 
 faith, love, and hope, both in God and man. 
 
 The temporary frustration of the Good, which reason 
 teaches to be the final goal of all, is no doubt compensated 
 for in the eternal scheme of things, nor need we ever fear 
 that evil will prevail ultimately. "Lieve vapor fu questo 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 285 
 
 che paso dinanzi al sole e non 1'offese." Without faith, 
 love, and hope in God, and hence in the moral order of 
 the universe, how could eternal life be a blessing to us? 
 It would rather be, like the Medusa's head, a thought of 
 horror, to turn us into stone. Do those who love not (that 
 is to say, those who do not know true joy) really desire a 
 future state of Being? The inquiry of logic, is not how 
 to reach new knowledge, but how, when we think we have 
 reached a piece of knowledge, can the step be justified by 
 reason ? Our inferences from perception, apprehension, and 
 comprehension, must not be identified with what G. H. Lewes 
 called the psychological spectrum itself. Consciousness of 
 the logical process does not begin till we have already got 
 past the formation of some sort of judgment, and wish to 
 know if it be a rash, or a wise one apperception is self- 
 verification. Logic attempts to explain how a judgment 
 is formed. The main task for the more accurate logic is 
 to look behind merely verbal conclusions to the facts 
 which the words attempt to express. Precise definition of 
 the notions used is most important, and strictness of definition 
 is required to justify a conclusion. Merely descriptive names 
 are ambiguous. " Formal logic only gives a rough gram- 
 matical account of the matter. When a conclusion is absurd, 
 we must doubt the premisses." "The meaning of a total 
 assertion is dependent on its weakest part, as the strength 
 of a chain is upon its weakest link," so that in logic, as in 
 mathematic, there is no such thing as a trifling error. 
 Every descriptive name is one of a pair of contradictory 
 names, as ugly, or non-beautiful, is the contradiction of 
 beautiful ; stupid, or unintelligent, is the contradiction of 
 intelligent ; and as malevolent is that of benevolent. But 
 there may be opposition without contradiction : diversity 
 in details without negation of essentials. For opposite 
 forms, and degrees of intensity of development, may 
 
286 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 induce apparent contradictions, which disappear on closer 
 investigation ; also there may exist a superficial resemblance 
 of aspect without entailing a radical similarity of qualities 
 in persons or things. When there is absolute contradiction, 
 such as vice and virtue, wisdom and folly mutual stulti- 
 fication ensues, such as one sees in the case of unmatched 
 couples. 
 
 It is our imagination, perception, apprehension, and com- 
 prehension, that give sensation-signs their significance. Sense 
 impressions are acted, and reacted upon the mind or logical 
 understanding. Sensations do not resemble things. The 
 sweetness is not in the apple apart from our sense-impres- 
 sions of it. Hence I hold sensations to be merely conditions 
 of our physical existence, which are often of so painful a 
 character that we hope to be no more subject to them in 
 a future state of Being. We can only be properly said to 
 know a universal truth when we are able to translate it into 
 a concrete experience. It is only by abstraction from given 
 experience that we can consider truth in itself. How, for 
 instance, can a person understand the nature of true love, 
 or predicate its existence in the particular case of any 
 other person, if he has never himself stood in the par- 
 ticular relation of complementariness of Being and con- 
 sequent mutual attraction to any human Being ? Results 
 are conditioned by the realization of the means to an 
 end. Thus happiness meaning the perfect satisfaction of 
 feeling, thought, and will, how can it exist apart from the 
 fulfilment of these conditions ? If a finished scholar, or 
 even a poet, cannot fully realize a particular physical pain, 
 or the particular nature of parental affection, without having 
 experienced either, how much less, considering the great 
 variety of counterfeit forms of love that exist, can that 
 pure spiritual relation, which arises out of the comple- 
 mentary evolution of two souls, blending them together, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 287 
 
 so that together they constitute a single perfect spirit, be 
 comprehended by the person to whom it is unknown 
 through experience ? 
 
 For real human love, as opposed to brute tenderness, a 
 man must be born again to the spirit, as much as for the 
 real love of the Father of spirits. Seeing that spiritual 
 conception, like physical conception, can only be after its 
 own kind, it is certain that where there is inequality of 
 mental evolution misunderstanding must exist. Hence 
 the legal maxim that a man should be judged by his 
 peers, which is not only true of the English House of 
 Lords, but is a universal truth. 
 
 The soul, as self-conscious, is self-realizing, and is there- 
 fore intelligent, and intelligible. As the body is imagined 
 physically, the soul is conceived Ideally, i.e., in relation to 
 its manifestations in feeling, intelligence, and will, from 
 which the ideas of reason are drawn. All our essential 
 conceptions are relative to these, although in each case 
 they are conditioned by variations in the physical organisms, 
 on which impressions are produced. All reflective ratiocina- 
 tion is equally from, or under, the categories of thought, 
 which represent the modifications of the essential attri- 
 butes of noumenal Being, these having been originally 
 presented to us sensationally, or neurotically, through the 
 cerebro-nervous system, under the categories of causality 
 sufficient, efficient, and final. It is through the relations 
 existing between subject and object, that we arrive at the 
 knowledge of the order of the outer world as well as at that 
 of the inner world. A social Being can only be socially 
 evolved. Caspar Hauser was a melancholy instance of 
 this reverse treatment. Knowledge proper is translatable 
 into experience. We know universals, or the categories of 
 thought, only as given in our experience, and in the ex- 
 perience of similar Beings ; and we can only by abstraction 
 
288 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 separate or generalize them from concrete experiences. 
 The only real knowledge is of self, as given in self-conscious- 
 ness ; all the rest of our knowledge is inference of reason 
 therefrom. Abstractions, from their very nature, cannot re- 
 represent the concrete realities of life, and love, and hope, 
 together with the agonies of disappointment, forlornness, 
 and despair. 
 
 Universals are realized only in reflective thought, which 
 has the Ego, with its modifications in feeling, intelligence, 
 and will, for its one object of apperception and ground of 
 inference. Reflecting on it we unconsciously, or intui- 
 tively employ the reflective category of sufficient reason, 
 which is arrived at by co-ordinating the categories of 
 causality. Taking them together with their sub-concepts, 
 we summarize all the normal experiences of the race. In 
 reflective generalization the formulated notion of sufficient 
 reason precedes the moral sentiment, or law of spiritual 
 determination. 
 
 Thus, also, the living emotions of the religious conscious- 
 ness no doubt depend for their consistency and permanence 
 on the Ideal realization of the principles of causality suffi- 
 cient, efficient, and final these representing the attributes 
 of Being resumed in Personality. 
 
 " The mind," says Spinoza, " perceives the things which 
 it conceives no less vividly than through memory." The 
 argument from design postulates as Sufficient Cause for 
 the existence of the universe, or cosmos, a Supreme Being, 
 absolute in power, wisdom, and goodness. To call nature 
 God is as though one called drums, fiddles, and fifes 
 musicians. 
 
 " The chain of cause and effect requires a beginning in a 
 Great First Cause "; but this is the reasoning of a somewhat 
 advanced evolution. Mere animism, or fetichism, satisfies 
 the savage mind. But however latent the logical conscious- 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 289 
 
 ness of man may remain as to the principles of causality, 
 the belief in a Sufficient Cause for the existence of order, 
 or design, in the relativity, and tendency of Being, is virtually 
 belief in a Supreme Noumenal Being. For full religious 
 consciousness, feeling, intelligence, and reflective will in 
 the form of the moral sense, are all required to be fairly 
 developed the determination of the reflective will involving 
 self-consciousness, and through the sense of the must, and 
 the ought to be done, Divine consciousness : that is to say, the 
 Ideal recognition of the object of our sense of responsibility. 
 
 As to the doctrine of morality being the outcome of mere 
 " social contract," little as the moral sense is at present 
 developed in the general society of any country, it would 
 be all but latent at the present day but for the existence 
 of the religious sentiment, which has borne witness to the 
 Personality of the Creator, and of the consequent rational 
 intercourse which should subsist between Himself and His 
 rational creatures since time began. 
 
 Although the knights of the middle ages bore upon their 
 shields the motto, " Dieu et mon droit" yet the fine old Pagan 
 maxim, " Fiat justitia, ruat ccelum," was virtually replaced 
 under the reign of feudalism, at least in the case of the 
 upper classes, by "Fais ce que veux advienne ce que pourra" 
 Follow your own sweet will, happen what may. 
 
 " Fais ce que dots advienne ce que pourra " is the 
 pure outcome of the moral sense. Utilitarianism main- 
 tains respect for present expediency; the temptation into 
 which it falls is that of casuistry, or Jesuitism. But 
 true common sense never really asserts the supremacy 
 of material, or worldly, considerations over conscience. 
 Certainly, as Madame de Stael says, " L'amour humain 
 et Divine est tout ou rien dans la vie." 
 
 Wagner has been blamed by Max Nordau for attaching 
 too much importance to the love between man and woman ; 
 
 U 
 
290 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 but that it is the strongest of the passions for good or 
 evil admits of no dispute. 
 
 There is a secondary principle that has been substituted, 
 more or less, for that of morality, i.e., that of honour, or the 
 upholding of the dignity of a person's name or family. 
 It is, of course, no real substitute for morality, excluding, 
 as it does, the lower classes ; but it had its uses as an inter- 
 mediary principle, standing between feudal dissoluteness and 
 monkish rule, and peasant brutality. But when we find it 
 gravely substituted for virtue, reason revolts, and, weighing 
 it in her balance, finds it wanting. The Greeks and Romans 
 had some excuse for their oligarchies, seeing that the 
 Heraclidae, etc., claimed Divine honours for their clan, as 
 having been founded by demi-gods ; just as kings, until the 
 time of Cromwell, were supposed to hold their title by right 
 Divine. It was, as we know, Cromwell who, in modern 
 times, pleaded the higher claim of morality to the loyalty 
 of man. After him, Napoleon threw open wide the doors of 
 honour with the announcement : " La carriere est ouverte 
 aux talents," instead of being closed to every other right 
 but that of birth. 
 
 Perhaps the day may come when morality and religion, 
 representing, as they do, true humanity, or man's proper 
 feeling, real intelligence, and virtuous will, may be regarded 
 as the one thing worthy of honour and encouragement. At 
 present society condones immorality, if it be not accompanied 
 by misfortune, or poverty. 
 
 " An Ideal of virtue is the spring from which morality 
 renews its life," says Professor Green, "for the habit of 
 moral self-interrogation or self-examination is what pre- 
 vents moral deterioration. Even the standard of mere 
 respectability could never have been attained by man if the 
 temper, which acquiesces ultimately in it, were universal ; for 
 even that has only been reached by men who, each in his time 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 291 
 
 and turn, have refused to accept the way of living which 
 they found about them'.' 
 
 When will the goal be reached, and the long search of 
 the spirit for the Best, the highest Good, the perfect life 
 call it what you will be ended ? Only beyond the grave. 
 
 " When ?" and "Where?" This is the cry of souls soaring 
 on straining pinions. This is the question suggested to us 
 by the sight of the starry firmament, as also by the 
 moral sense, or conscience of man ; and it appears to me 
 that it must be that of all persons of profound thought 
 and emotion. 
 
 Surely " the Heavens are telling the glory of God " to the 
 more developed human spirit; they combine with a more 
 evolved consciousness, or conscience, to make us anticipate, 
 with a living, burning desire and hope, a happier state of 
 existence in "a better land" beyond our earthly sepulture. 
 This is the natural expectation of reason concerning Him, 
 Who is the life, light, and joy-Giver. The faith in a future 
 state of Being has subsisted under every variety of form of 
 imagination, according to the time and place in which it 
 prevailed throughout the history of man, who is himself the 
 temple of the Holy Spirit here below. " If a son ask his 
 father for bread, does he give him a stone ? " said Jesus. 
 How much less shall the All-Father so deal with us ! 
 
 The obverse aspect of God's goodness is surely the 
 blessedness of a self-conscious and God-conscious Being. 
 
 Will there not come a time when all God's rational 
 creatures will truly be able to call Him blessed, when final 
 causality will be accomplished in the beatitude of the rational 
 creation ? Surely the promise implicit in instilled hope will 
 not fail of fulfilment. If even we strive not to be defaulters, 
 surely the Omnipotent will not fail us. 
 
 It is because our own Being is positively known to us, 
 and that of other Beings comparatively, that we unhesitatingly 
 
292 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 assume the Good for Being as the goal of all our rational 
 activity, and consequently of that of the Supreme Being, 
 our Creator, Preserver, and continual Benefactor. 
 
 This conception of the moral or practical sense, is the 
 starting point of comparison of motive, and the standard 
 of final decision of judgment as to right and wrong in self- 
 determination. In the idea of a law, that of a lawgiver is 
 evoked, as also the idea of the character of the lawgiver. 
 
 The diversity of opinions as to the nature of Being and 
 its tendency, and as to what the summum bonum is, towards 
 which we all involuntarily strive, is occasioned by the 
 difference in standpoint on the ladder of evolution, on 
 which each one of us stands, as the horizon of the person 
 standing on a mountain-top is more extensive than that of 
 one on a dune or sand-hill. Scepticism, with its attendant 
 pessimism and sophistry, comes from the want of emo- 
 tionally or morally developed intelligence. Shakspeare's 
 Shylock did not regard justice from the same point of view 
 as he who said, " Owe no man anything but kindness " 
 the debt no man can logically disown. 
 
 It must always be borne in mind that only reasoned 
 inference is of real and enduring value. Finite knowledge 
 is a product of the interaction of spirit and body, which 
 argues an Intelligent as Only - Sufficient Cause for its 
 fons et origo. Of an Absolute or Perfect Being, a 
 relative, limited, imperfect Being can, of course, have no 
 exhaustive conception, as a creature can form no absolute 
 conception of its Creator. Only through our modifica- 
 tions of feeling, intelligence, and will, can we argue to 
 the cause, or causes, of the effects produced upon us. 
 Simply under the logical canon of contradiction, we can- 
 not conceive a Creator, Who having so stringently impressed 
 the moral law, or action for the Best for Being, upon His 
 rational creatures, should Himself make death and destruc- 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 293 
 
 tion, le dernier mot de Funivers, although He can be 
 rationally supposed to inflict temporary suffering for ulti- 
 mate good. " The problem of metaphysic is, of what 
 nature must the ultimate reality be, in order that through 
 it we may account for our experiences." * 
 
 The real method for the ascertainment of metaphysical 
 truth is the searching out what are the fundamental 
 postulates of reason, for it is upon these that all science 
 proceeds. It appears to me that those of sufficient, efficient, 
 and final causality, answering to Being, to relativity, and 
 tendency of Being, together with their synthesis in intro- 
 spective reflection under the moral principle of sufficient 
 reason for self-determination, exhibit together, that the 
 creative purpose in exposing us poor mortals to such 
 fearful ordeals, is for the development of the attributes 
 of Being, of its relativity, and of its tendency, so that we 
 may be fairly equipped for the blessed life hereafter. 
 
 Both our knowledge of Being as a unity, of which 
 Personality is the physical and finite expression, and our 
 knowledge of Nature as a unity or a universe, alike force 
 upon us a rational view of the creation : that is to say, that 
 the external world is made to correspond with the exigencies 
 of noumenal Being in its successive stages of Thought, 
 which represents the play of feeling, intelligence, and will 
 under the postulates of causality sufficient, efficient, and 
 final these organize our experiences of life into a whole, 
 from which we can reflect, and from which we can draw 
 rational inferences as to our source and goal. "The ideas 
 which lie at the basis of mathematics, physics, biology, 
 psychology, ethics, religion, and art, are related to each 
 other as phases of one idea the idea of self-conscious 
 reason." f 
 
 Our conceptions of all external existences are resolvable 
 * J. L. MclNTYRE in Mind. t J. J. WATSON. 
 
294 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 into the sensible, emotional, intellectual, and practical 
 impressions which are combined in thought, these being 
 the objects of rational representation. 
 
 Each one's reflective knowledge is, properly speaking, the 
 outcome of his ontological evolution, grafted upon that of 
 the race as we know it through history, monuments, etc. 
 
 It is in this sense that the philosophy of one age is the 
 common sense of another. But the pioneer of a new idea 
 is generally, at first, laughed at, then blamed, and finally 
 accepted. 
 
 Frederic Harrison says, " I put the poetic and emotional 
 side of literature as the most needed for daily use." As a 
 matter of fact, it has been through fairy-tales, legends, 
 fables, sagas, and other forms of imagination that the 
 earlier races and our own children have been trained to 
 conceive the Ideal. 
 
 Plato regarded the Ideal, which I hold to be of the whole 
 of Being, its feeling, intelligence, and will, as the object on 
 which the pupil's eye should be fixed throughout education. 
 "If a young man has once looked upon the Ideal and loved 
 it," said Confucius, "it matters not how soon he dies." In 
 spontaneous representation, desire either to approach or to 
 avoid an object, is the rational conclusion of the syllogistic 
 mental representation arising out of the sense of the 
 modifications of our Being, in feeling and in intelligence 
 of the relation in which the object stands to the subject. 
 These reflective reason combines under the principle of 
 sufficient reason for self-determination. It is upon this last 
 principle that our responsibility to our Creator rests. 
 
 Thus is the course of action suitable to a rational Being 
 under given conditions indicated, so that it may be able 
 to justify itself through being in harmony with the general 
 Divine order, to which the moral sense and the religious 
 sentiment alike point. 
 
Rational) or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 295 
 
 To put feeling and desire (Tried) out of the court of 
 reason, is like driving a ship out to sea without a sail, and 
 without a rudder. 
 
 Spinoza says : "True knowledge, and the intellectual love 
 aroused by it, belong to the mind qua eternal " for know- 
 ledge being infinite pertains to the eternal. This is in 
 truth a convertible proposition, which is Locke's definition 
 of truth. True love and the intellectual knowledge, i.e., the 
 knowledge of the real relations between things aroused by 
 it, are the eternal elements in man's nature, as is also our 
 sense of allegiance to our Creator. 
 
 Before Descartes, thought and reason were supposed to 
 be things apart from feeling ; whereas Descartes comprised 
 feeling (or the sense of Being), intelligence of the apprehen- 
 sion of relativity, and purposive determination, or will, under 
 mind, or the representative principle. All intellectual acquire- 
 ment based on mere imagination and memory is perishable. 
 
 Spinoza says : " The mind is subject to the passions 
 springing from sensual appetite only whilst the body 
 endures." The mind, in knowing anything in the form of 
 eternity, is knowing its own eternity, and the emotions 
 consequent on it. Our belief in finality is a part of our 
 necessary conception of our own Being, and seeing that 
 our conception even of that is vague, what wonder 
 that our conception of the Absolute Being, though equally 
 real, is still more vague ! Although we know a rose through 
 its effects on our senses, we do not exhaustingly know even 
 its nature. 
 
 The dialectical movement out of which our belief in 
 Deity proceeds, is the recognition of our own attributes of 
 power, wisdom, and goodness in the creation of our own 
 Being, which we feel to be altogether relative and con- 
 ditioned through our sense of absolute dependence upon 
 power more absolute, and wisdom and goodness more 
 
296 Rational, or Scientific , Ideal of Morality 
 
 perfect than our own and this in spite of what David of 
 old called the clouds and thick darkness, that often for a 
 time veil to us the throne of the Supreme Reason. 
 
 Moreover, the scientifically-revealed principle of evolution 
 enables us more and more to accept these so awful, apparent 
 eclipses of love and mercy with a patience built on faith in 
 the goodness, or benevolence, of the Father of Spirits. Have 
 we not often to pursue much the same course in the educa- 
 tion of our own offspring ? The principle of sufficient 
 reason by which the adult mind is guided, is scarcely 
 guessed at by the child, and is only painfully exercised by 
 us in reflection, is ever present in Him, Who was, and is, and 
 is to come : Whom the Israelites named " I AM," being the 
 opposite, or supreme contrast of the becoming (or Werderi) 
 of Hegel, of the finite conditioned creation. 
 
 Pessimism is the contradiction of our normal conscious- 
 ness. When a dog bites everyone promiscuously, it is said 
 to be in an abnormal state, or mad ; and when anybody 
 "runs a-muck," like the Malayans, we say that he is mad 
 through savagery, or uncultured reason. 
 
 The highest postulate of reason is action for the Good 
 for Being. It is in this that physical and spiritual forces 
 differ ; although even plant life strives automatically towards 
 the sun, " which is of all sweet thoughts the life and 
 element," for it is the emblem of joy. 
 
 A proposition is valid according to its agreement with the 
 fundamental principles of reason. These are the tests of 
 truth, and beyond this we cannot go. When it is said 
 in the Book of Genesis, "God created the world," what 
 meaning would the word have for us unless our own mind 
 furnished a key to the conception of Deity ? What would 
 the phrase convey to us more than to the cat or the dog? 
 Comprehension turns upon recognition of similarity of some 
 kind or degree. Different as are the aspects of the same 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 297 
 
 reality, there must exist an underlying identity of things "with 
 ourselves, for them to be objects of representation by us. 
 
 Analogy and comprehension of the more and less with 
 the positively given, is the ground of argument. We can 
 only judge of the qualities of a thing by its effects upon us. 
 
 Essential reason works through organism to a far-off goal, 
 as instinct points to immediate satisfaction. Thus are we 
 impelled by the besoin d aimer because "a lodestar lurks," 
 as Browning says. 
 
 It has been said that God is patient because He is 
 eternal ; so if we have faith in our own immortality as sons 
 of God, we also can be patient. 
 
 What the human will should, or ought to, will is the 
 fulfilment of the Ideal will, or that of the Absolute, or 
 Ideal Being the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of the 
 universe. The Ideal of reason and of the will should exist 
 in inseparable unity. The completely rational act would 
 be the realization of the Ideal. The function of Ideal 
 conception is to guide the world process to perfection of 
 Being, with its concomitant blessedness, or beatitude. Can 
 there be found anyone to assert that suffering is our Being's 
 end and aim ? 
 
 The redemption of the spirit from the burthen of this too 
 solid, although ever-dissolving flesh, is the release which we 
 look to death to afford us. 
 
 Instincts are of organic growth, as are our bodily appetites. 
 It is not by these alone but by the intuitions of reason, and 
 its inferences from self- consciousness, that man has to 
 conduct his life and Being. 
 
 By looking from Nature, "red in tooth and claw," up to 
 Nature's God, small comfort is attained. The purpose of 
 things happening as they do is only signified to us through 
 our own rational purpose in action, i.e. t the Best for spiritual 
 Being. "Good is the way leading to this." 
 
298 Rational, or Scientific ', Ideal of Morality 
 
 Although physically conditioned, mental phenomena are 
 as open to investigation, nay, even more so, than are 
 physical phenomena. 
 
 For ages the sun appeared to man to move round the 
 earth ; as when we speed through the country in an express 
 train the country seems to fly before us. 
 
 Perfect evolution of feeling, intelligence, and will would 
 involve the idea of the complete realization of the Ideal 
 of Being, or of Being as Ideally conceived ; but we should 
 be tyros in the conception but for the conspicuous means 
 furnished by Divine Providence to aid man in his endeavour 
 after perfection of Being, viz., the conjugal relation when it 
 presents " the great bridals of complementary souls." 
 
 It must always be borne in mind that the human con- 
 sciousness is constituted for the working out of the creative 
 design, not for ignoring, or improving upon, it. " Irreverence 
 for the dreams of youth," for its yearning for love, and 
 desire for happiness, is not conducive to morality, but the 
 reverse hopelessness being fatal to morality. 
 
 The sane mind treats phenomena, or occurrences, rationally, 
 we having a rational mind for their interpretation under the 
 laws of causality, i.e., of verce causes, or noumenal Being. 
 
 The insane mind takes no note of things, or events, or 
 misinterprets them, through the defective working of the 
 cerebral organism. 
 
 Count Tolstoi speaks of " the impossibility of not think- 
 ing," and holds that life has no joy to a rational Being if he 
 do not know its meaning. True happiness involves the sense 
 of the fulfilment of the Ideal. 
 
 If we ignore any essential fact of Being, our reasoning must 
 be erroneous, as being drawn from insufficient data. Tolstoi, 
 in his Confessions, lays stress upon his having first tried to 
 solve the problem of his own life. Hence his earnestness, and 
 remarkable candour, without which no general truth can be 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 299 
 
 arrived at. Absolute honesty in argument is one of the rarest 
 of qualities, V arriere pensee being ever present with most people. 
 
 To understand the will of the Regulator of the universe, 
 man must carry out that will by being true to the rational 
 nature, with which he has been endowed. 
 
 The search after the Cause of causes is the search after 
 God. From life, and noumenal Being, must life and 
 noumenal Being proceed. 
 
 Tolstoi speaks of "man adrift and God the shore"; for 
 on what, or whom else, can we cast anchor or find ground 
 for our Ideal of Being ? 
 
 The same author says, moreover, that to understand life, 
 we must apply to those who are true to their own Being, 
 and thus exhibit its meaning. "The life of the grand 
 monde, as it is pleased to call itself, is a travesty of life ; 
 it is a life of shams, and make-believe." It has been to 
 the Idealists of all times and places, that the mass of 
 mankind have always had to look for help in the con- 
 duct of life here, and for any definite hope regarding here- 
 after. Swedenborg maintains the continuance of spiritual 
 affinities in every state of existence. 
 
 This opinion approves itself to reason, seeing that each 
 finite Being would have but a partial comprehension of 
 anything viewed only from the standpoint of his, or her, 
 individual idiosyncrasy, one's affinity being the complement, 
 or supplement, of that idiosyncrasy. Is this practice extinct ? 
 
 It is the law of counterpartism that provides against 
 the imperfection of finite Beings. Polar opposites would 
 suggest antagonism, were it not for the identity of essence 
 in both. No wonder that an Ideal marriage is still a 
 rara avis in terra, considering that Manu, the great Hindu 
 lawgiver, speaks of the Asura form of marriage as one of 
 wife purchase; and that, according to Aristotle, the ancient 
 Greeks were in the habit of buying their brides. 
 
300 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 In Servia, at the beginning of our century, girls had reached 
 such a low price that their value was reduced to one ducat each. 
 It is said of American girls that they legally sell themselves. 
 
 The Padans, a rude people of India, gave field-mice and 
 squirrels in exchange for a wife. The Irishwoman who 
 possesses a cow is eligible. 
 
 Accidental differences of place or time produce different 
 standpoints for the imagination, and the habitual social 
 entourage peculiar to each person greatly modifies the way 
 in which he, or she, regards things ; but reason is one 
 because supersensible. 
 
 Individual diversity of degree of evolution, in the several 
 attributes of humanity, throws great light on diversity of 
 moral idealization. But the one thing needful for true 
 love to be possible is sympathy in the conception of 
 the Ideal of Being, without which each must shock the 
 other at every turn. The abstract object of the will in 
 both cases must be the same, i.e., the true Good for real, or 
 spiritual, Being, not passing pleasures, or the gratification 
 of evil passions. The purely righteous, or rationally 
 ordered benevolent will, is the "wedding garment," without 
 which the heaven of true or real love, Divine or human, 
 and happiness cannot be entered, whether it be a ques- 
 tion of the heavenly, or of the earthly paradise : the first 
 signifying harmony with the will of God, and the second 
 meaning eternal harmony with one's beloved counterpart. 
 
 Merely sensual pleasures have nothing to do with real 
 and abiding joy or happiness. The glutton, or the wine- 
 bibber, is not really happy ; neither is the licentious, or 
 unfaithful man, capable of beatitude. Christ strove to save 
 men from their sins, not in them, as seems to be generally 
 imagined. Reflection gives the emphasis of logical 
 realization to thought, and our mental representations 
 of things, and thus confirms our faith, love, and hope. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 301 
 
 Right feeling is feeling appropriate to the relation in 
 which one Being stands to another, and, above all, to the 
 relation in which we all stand to the Supreme Being. Clear 
 ideas of causality induce practical conformity to reason, and 
 make us able to delight in the moral law, rather than to 
 tremble and kick against the pricks of it. But of all these 
 inspirers of morality true love is the greatest. "L'amour 
 seul a le secret de toutes les delicatesses du sentiment." 
 
 True love is also the greatest intensifier of the sentiment 
 of dependence upon God, substituting, moreover, joy and 
 gratitude for fear and trembling. The actual, or present, 
 perfect joy of love is the Divine hostage for our abiding 
 felicity. To say that an exhaustive affinity exists between 
 two persons is to say that they have both found their 
 true guardian angel in a complementary, or completing, 
 spirit; and that they have thus jointly attained to the 
 equilibrium of feeling, intelligence, and will, which con- 
 stitutes perfection of Being. What wonder, then, at the 
 "dear delight of love," its sense of triumph at finding the 
 canker-worm of isolation crushed for ever, whilst a new 
 life of abiding companionship throughout eternity unfolds its 
 divine perspective before the ecstatic gaze of the united pair. 
 
 Well might Tennyson exclaim : 
 
 *' If there were nothing else for which to thank the Heavens, 
 But love ; that only love were cause enough for praise." 
 
 " Du warst das Gliick, der Inhalt 
 Meines Lebens, wie ich es tragen werde 
 Wenn du darin fehlst, weiss ich nicht." 
 "Du bist der Himmel mir bestimmt." 
 " Wehre den Kampf es wiirde ebenso erfolglos sein als der 
 Kampf mit der ewigen Liebe." 
 
 " There is a world which is known, love, only to you and me, 
 That world is all our own, love, throughout eternity." 
 
 Of such love, commonplace love (ALltagsliebe) knows 
 nothing. 
 
302 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 In Greek sculpture there is a masterpiece, representing 
 the blind Ajax, with outstretched arms, imploring the 
 gods for light in protest against ignorance of the position 
 of the foe. I have lately seen what seems to me a suit- 
 able pendant to this in a piece of sculpture, representing 
 a woman with uplifted hands in protest against loveless- 
 ness light and love both representing joy of life man and 
 woman together alone bring light and love to life. 
 
 As love is the joy of human life, so marriage is its 
 coping-stone ; and it is equally true that " of all God's gifts 
 He is Himself the Crown " ; and when His goodness is 
 most brought home to us, how can we forget Him ? 
 
 True sympathy starts from a true intuition, however 
 obscure and confused, of the similarity of another's mind 
 to our own : similarity in difference. 
 
 The most peculiar and deepest sympathy is not amen- 
 able to our own will, for it arises out of the harmony of our 
 idiosyncrasies, so that its content must lie outside the region 
 of arbitrary selection. This is the real definition of the 
 "Je ne sais quoi" of the French. 
 
 Lord Lytton, in his beautiful song " Absent, yet present," 
 says, "All that I think, and all that I know, is that with- 
 out wherefore I worship thee so"; this would indeed be 
 anomalous. 
 
 To me there appears no doubt that the rationale of this 
 imperiously-induced love at first sight, is the sense of the 
 general harmony of another's Being with one's own : " Thou 
 shalt know him when he comes, by the holy harmony that 
 his coming makes for thee." This is so mysterious to the 
 outsider, that in the middle ages it was regarded as magical. 
 Even the parties concerned regarded it as a mystery, but 
 as a mystery to be trusted as one trusts oneself. 
 
 Mr. Mallock has truly said, that " God Himself seems, 
 as it were, to stand aside, so that the spell of the ecstatic 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 303 
 
 joy of true love may work undisturbed," even as He allows 
 the fire to burn, the water to drown, and the sun to warm 
 the just and the unjust alike. The Power that makes the 
 ocean ebb and flow is one and the same with that which 
 conditions these attractions and repulsions that stir the 
 spirit of man beyond his own control. Hence it has been 
 said, that "true marriages are made in Heaven." The 
 merely physical marriage is of the earth earthy, and the 
 conventional form of marriage belongs to the passing states 
 of society, being sometime polygamic, sometime monogamic, 
 subject, as are women's bonnets, to prevailing fashion. " Les 
 entraves a la liberte des cceurs qu'ont mises les institutions 
 sociales sont au profit de I'egoisme et de la secheresse 
 d'ame." Certainly they cannot be accused of having the 
 base (!) aim of happiness. 
 
 " La Bible 1'a dit : II n'est pas bon que 1'homme soit 
 seul. On n'echappe pas a la douce loi, dont Dieu Lui-meme 
 a fait une des conditions et une des joies de 1'existence 
 humaine. On ne trompe point le cceur par 1'esprit (nor 
 by a perverted will). Un moment arrive ou Ton sent au 
 fond de Tame, une vide qu'il faut remplir, un besoin 
 d'affection auquel il faut satisfaire." 
 
 Above all, the affection "nearest and dearest of all." In 
 exalting maternal affection above the spiritual one of two 
 equally developed Beings for each other, man brings 
 humanity down to the level of brute and insect life. 
 
 Walter Scott, who hopelessly loved his own Ideal of 
 womankind, although he was what is called happily 
 married, wrote the following beautiful lines : 
 
 " True lovers the gift which God has given, 
 To man alone beneath the Heaven : 
 It is not fantasy's hot fire, 
 
 Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly ; 
 It liveth not in fierce desire, 
 
 With dead desire it doth not die ; 
 
304 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 It is the secret sympathy, 
 
 The silver link, the silken tie, 
 Which heart to heart and mind to mind, 
 In body and in soul can bind." 
 
 "That which thy sense can touch not, that is most thine 
 own." This is the motto of true love or spiritual affinity. 
 Ontological evidence is not the less real, because the real 
 Ego is not stateable as sensation-content, for it is not only 
 more, but other than sensation-content." "Only by a 
 j^conscious rational Being can the feeling of isolation, 
 or loneliness, be thoroughly and intensely realized, for only 
 such an one can realize his own shortcomings, and felt 
 need of spiritual union with a complementarily- developed 
 Being, both for virtue and for joy of life. 
 
 True marriage affords to each the strength of two. It 
 produces in us cheerful patience and long-suffering, and 
 keeps alive in us, through present joy, the hope of better 
 times in a better land to come. Of course, such marriages 
 suppose on both sides passionate devotion, that only a 
 high intelligence and an enthusiastic moral nature can 
 know. Simple domesticity has its simple pleasures, if it 
 be based on a simple faith in the happy outcome of pur- 
 suing the path of duty. But as to supposing that it is 
 sufficient for the spirit of man, it is nearly as far removed 
 from being so, as are any of the variety of marriages con- 
 tracted with an arriere penste, or with a weather-eye open 
 to concomitant social advantages, such as money and 
 position, hereditarily transmitted or individually obtained. 
 Such unions cannot be taken into account by philosophy 
 or religion. Those who marry for such purposes have 
 their reward here, but, may be, result withal in scepticism 
 as to the existence of real joy of life, because the real and 
 the chief purpose of human marriage, which is the in- 
 stinctive longing for the spiritual helpfulness of sympathetic 
 
Rational) or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 305 
 
 companionship, has by them been lost sight of, but not 
 extinguished. 
 
 The gratification of the desire of the eye, or of the lust 
 of the flesh, or of the pride of life, are things of the earth 
 earthy. Only true love survives the grave, because it is 
 of the spirit, and so eternal. As we cannot breathe in 
 a vacuum, so the soul of man, being social, cannot live 
 alone. Hence rather than do so (to use Longfellow's 
 simile) he, "like the dove that, flying from far-off Palmyra 
 stops to quench its thirst at the brackish waters of the 
 desert," either condemns himself to the worst kind of 
 solitude that of solitude a deux> or to promiscuous 
 sensuality. 
 
 As a matter of fact, until true love is found, isolation 
 remains unexorcised even by religion ; as God Himself is 
 said to have pronounced that "it is not good for man to 
 be alone,'' but requires absolutely a helpmeet unto him. 
 Only through true love can the majority of men touch the 
 hem of the skirt of the Ideal, or of Ideal Being, or living. 
 True love lifts man's moral nature, through its unselfishness, 
 to the loftiest height attainable by the individual. And 
 when blessed by it, the incense of the heart rises involun- 
 tarily to the Giver of this greatest of joys. True love is 
 therefore, of its very nature, religious ; on it is written, like 
 on the vessels of the temple at Jerusalem " Holy unto the 
 Lord." " Love is man's grand opportunity. To have achieved 
 such a joy is one of the chief vantage points of mortal 
 existence, whatever else comes after." In those whose 
 evolution is advanced, love is developed from a mere instinct 
 of the body into an all-absorbing mental affection. Through 
 its spiritualization of our mixed nature, it makes us at once 
 enter into the life eternal, even here below. 
 
 True love may indeed be wanting in worldly wisdom, 
 because at its birth the chord of self-interest is silenced. 
 
 x 
 
306 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 " Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with might, 
 Smote the chord of self, that trembling, passed in music out of sight." 
 
 Well is it, indeed, if even religion be not for a moment 
 lost sight of in its exquisite rapture. "My all in all" 
 seems the natural expression of it. Horace wrote, " I 
 doubt if any man really understands the hidden joys of 
 woman's love until he comes to forty years." Witness 
 Beethoven's experience of the " Ewige Geliebte," to which 
 we owe his " Adelaide " ; and most of the grandes passions 
 have been after that age. 
 
 Those of us who hope for another existence, include in 
 this hope a longing that their love will be renewed, not as 
 it was under the first influence of passion, but such as it 
 is after we have struggled and sorrowed for our love's sake. 
 
 " May the love that is mine not be loved in vain, 
 May the love that is ours be renewed again, 
 May the love that is God's be revealed and reign." 
 
 Shakspeare says, " From loveless marriage, base adultery 
 springs." 
 
 " Hate waits upon despair. 
 Spiritual longings by the sense blinded 
 Flint at heart, makes dense the vision of the mind." 
 
 Surely then, attention should be turned to these con- 
 siderations, " tandis que toutes nos institutions sont au profit 
 de l'e"goisme ou d'une vie factice." Still, seeing how few are 
 really born again to the spirit with regard to religion, there 
 is no real cause for wonder at the slow development of 
 spiritual marriage even amongst the most advanced races ! 
 
 The great doctrine of reciprocity taught by Confucius 
 requires an essential equality to exist between the two 
 factors of a relation. Hitherto this has only potentially 
 existed between man and woman, as the intellectual 
 faculties of woman have been altogether uncultured. 
 
 Learning a tune on the piano, the use of the fan, and 
 above all, the art of dress, cannot stand to a woman in 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 307 
 
 lieu of the study of logic, of mathematic, and of moral 
 philosophy, in all of which, any normally-educated man 
 is in some degree instructed. That the mothers of states- 
 men, etc., should belong to the illiterate and uncultured 
 classes, has been a curious piece of social economy ; or 
 rather, it is a survival from the times when " might was 
 right," when the shape of a woman's face or figure, and 
 the delicacy of her skin, decided her place as queen or 
 kitchen-maid in the social system, just as in the early days 
 of Israel, Saul was made king because he was taller than 
 the rest of his countrymen. The fact of women now often 
 being taller than men, would in olden times have been 
 interpreted as an indication of the Divine will with regard 
 to her social position. The categories of sufficient, efficient, 
 and final causality may be called the predicative assertions 
 necessarily assumed by a rational Being to underlie feeling, 
 intelligence, and will; whilst the inferences therefrom may 
 be termed hypothetical judgments, because they partake 
 of, or are coloured by, the idiosyncratic development of each 
 individual thinker. We each of us interpret propositions 
 in the light of our own understanding, rather than in 
 their abstract content. 
 
 Feeling is consciousness of Being. Hence we say to a 
 congenial person, "You make me feel alive." Intelligence 
 is of the relations in which Beings stand to us and to 
 each other, as also to the material framework of the 
 universe, of which our body is a part; whilst the sense 
 of finality or morality is given us in our normal or typical 
 tendency, in all our activities and purposes, to promote our 
 own joy of life, and that of our similars. These latter are 
 interpreted by the commonplace as our social equals, whilst 
 the spiritually-minded regard spiritual affinities (Wahlver- 
 wandschaften) as constituting the only abiding relationships 
 which we shall carry with us into a future state of existence. 
 
308 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Coleridge, in his magnificent ode " Dejection," says : 
 
 "We receive but what we give, 
 And in our life alone does Nature live : 
 Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud ! 
 And would we aught behold of higher worth, 
 Than that inanimate cold world allowed 
 To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, 
 
 Ah ! from the soul itself must issue forth 
 A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud, 
 
 Enveloping the Earth 
 And from the soul itself must there be sent 
 
 A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, 
 Of all sweet sounds the life and element. 
 * * * * * 
 
 Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud 
 We in ourselves rejoice. 
 
 ***** 
 
 I may not hope from outward forms to win 
 
 The passions and the life whose fountains are within" 
 
 Coleridge, like Shelley, was both poet and metaphysician. 
 
 Kant said, "The existences of rational Beings under 
 the moral law can alone be thought of as the final cause 
 of the existence of a world." 
 
 Now the moral law refers directly to the conservation of 
 the integrity of our spiritual Being. "Seek ye first the 
 kingdom of God and His righteousness," said Jesus; hence 
 self-examination is a Christian duty. What a wild struggle 
 must be occasioned in the soul of a child of parents whose 
 natures are contradictions and negations of each other at 
 every point ! No child, born of unsuitably-matched parents, 
 can be a true joy to one or the other of them. 
 
 The existence of the moral law of action for the Best for 
 Being is the rationale of our hope for a happy future. Hope 
 must always have a raison d'etre, and not be a propos de bottes. 
 
 Man alone wanders about "with blank misgivings of 
 worlds unknown," " looking before and after, and sighing 
 for what is not, in what has been called " a Divine despair." 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 309 
 
 Surely the Father of spirits cannot have made of man's 
 nature " a living lie," as Sir William Hamilton put it 
 "a story without an end." He Whose most beautiful 
 name is Love, the Joy- giver, must needs be just and 
 benevolent. 
 
 To psychology, as reflective science, the categories of 
 thought are only the most persistent and universal forms 
 of psychosis themselves. They are the necessary mode of 
 the behaviour of mind in consciousness, as it is automati- 
 cally affected under physiological conditions. Their synthetic 
 application is the supreme work of ontological introspection, 
 or apperception, which alone affords us a truly rational 
 ground of inference, or a trustworthy clue to the problems 
 of the universe ; with such considerations as arise out of 
 our lower animal nature metaphysic is not concerned. The 
 forms of Knowledge represent essential forms of Being. 
 
 It is only through the unifying activity of reason that 
 we can draw inferences, or conclusions, as to the existence 
 of an external universe, as also to the existence and nature 
 of the Creative Being, and as to what can be logically 
 anticipated regarding the destiny of man. 
 
 Metaphysicians have been twitted with weaving, as the 
 spider does his web, out of his own Being, or rather body. 
 It certainly is so, but it appears to me that the work of the 
 great Creator is not a fit subject for the imputation of 
 absurdity. No doubt the categories of mental representa- 
 tion or thought really are simple outcomes of man's feeling, 
 intelligence, and will, as they are conditioned by the cerebro- 
 neurotic organism. But for their Ideal synthesis in reflection 
 under the principle of sufficient reason, we have to go to pure 
 ontology, or to the supra-sensible, or noumenal Ego, which 
 is the subject-object of reflective synthesis, as being the 
 contemplator of the phenomena of consciousness, and the 
 submitter of it to the mirror of introspective memory, as the 
 
3io Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Subject-Object from which the inferences of reason are 
 drawn, both inductive and deductive. 
 
 As no two individuals are exactly alike as to the stage, 
 or the kind of their development, only one person can con- 
 ceivably perfectly suit any one of us to suit, meaning the 
 production in us of the spiritual equilibrium, which is 
 necessary for well-Being and virtue. Only when thus suited 
 can they be a joy for ever to each other. Equality is the 
 sine qud non of such an union ; therefore, until women have 
 been more intellectually, and men more morally developed, 
 the cases of such union must be few and far between. 
 
 We must not confound things that stand in different 
 relations to us, and consequently produce different effects 
 upon us under one and the same category. The pleasant, 
 kind friend is one thing ; our whole soul's affinity is another. 
 Only strictly counterpartal natures can count on each other for 
 the fidelity that comes of perfect satisfaction of Being. 
 
 In reflection we have the scientific basis for the reflective 
 belief in the existence of the soul as a Substance, or real 
 Being, of which emotional, intellectual, and self-determining 
 activity are the manifestations. Psychological science treats of 
 mixed states of consciousness. " To the question : ' What is 
 consciousness ? ' no better answer can be given than to say : 
 * It is what you are whenever you feel, think, fancy, or 
 will.'"* Only in reflective self-consciousness can we observe 
 the empirical order of psychological facts, i.e., the passing 
 phenomena of consciousness. Knowledge must ever walk 
 every step by faith in self, in the testimony of similars, and 
 in God. The inferences of reason are permeated through 
 and through with metaphysical hypotheses. " Metaphysical 
 hypotheses are successions of psychoses demanding to be 
 faithfully described, and then explained ontologically."t 
 
 These explanations, to be axiomatic, must have that 
 
 * LADD. t Ibid, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 3 1 1 
 
 fulness of reality which belongs to the experience of the 
 human race, including the trend in development of the entire 
 mental life*. "Can there be any correlation between two 
 series of phenomena, which needs no metaphysical hypothesis 
 of a real Being working effects, and having effects produced 
 on him in a world of real Beings, related to himself?" Beyond 
 our ontological conviction of the reality of the Ego, or self, 
 we cannot go. Beyond the " I feel," " I think," " I will," 
 together with the reflective science of human nature and 
 its lofty implications, we cannot pass, either in fact or in 
 judgment. 
 
 As to how facts of knowledge are ever to be explained 
 without some kind of ontological theory, reason, as such, is 
 powerless to explain. But it has been urged that we can 
 voluntarily defy or negate the principles of thought, so we 
 can the principles of physics, but at our own peril that way 
 madness lies. 
 
 Volkmann defines psychology as " that science which sets 
 before itself the problem of explaining the general classes 
 of psychical phenomena by means of the forms of mental 
 representation as empirically given" i.e., by means of the 
 speculative conception of mental representation, according to 
 the laws of the life of such representation, i.e., under the 
 categories. 
 
 For the words, speculative conception, I should substi- 
 tute reflective mental re-representation of the introspectively 
 observed modifications of our own Being in feeling, intelligence, 
 and will. Hence, our conception of pure Being, or Being 
 Ideally conceived, is apart from arms, legs, liver, and lungs. 
 Hence, also, it is a superlative conception, taking the 
 positively-known existing as the ground for comparative 
 and superlative inference. This being so, the uncertainty 
 that still prevails at the present stage of man's evolution 
 concerning what morality consists in, or as to what morality 
 
312 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 pure and undefiled, really is, ceases to astonish us, for at 
 least we know how imperfect still is our comprehension of 
 our own Being. But how few there are who ever dream 
 that, as Shakspeare said : " There are more things in 
 heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy." 
 Let us wonder no more, then, at the diversity of opinions 
 as to the moral Ideal held by different individuals, and 
 different races, at different times and epochs of the world's 
 history ! There can be no appeal made even to feeling when 
 the intellect is cramped or distorted by superstition; and 
 will-power is equally sapped by traditional authority, or by 
 a too philosophic tendency to suspension of judgment for 
 conscience, or justice, sake. Then, again, hereditary neurosis 
 and temperament must be taken account of temperament 
 being due to racial and climatic influences. 
 
 Psychological discrepancies result from different degrees 
 of animal sensibility to pleasure and to pain. From 
 intensified sensation through the aberration, or suppression, 
 of reason, we easily glide into sensuality worse than mere 
 animalism, and into selfishness culminating in cruelty that 
 amounts to madness, or into some hard theology of the 
 brain, rather than of the heart. 
 
 The religious practices of the ancient Mexicans, and of 
 African savages of the present day, are exhibitions of 
 the cruel forms taken by religion under undeveloped 
 reason. Christianity, itself the religion of love, was itself 
 distorted under the rule of the Spanish Inquisition, and 
 even the reformer, Calvin, is an illustration of the evil of 
 setting aside natural feeling and desire, as the Stoics did 
 in the very name of reason. 
 
 By Ideal realism I understand the correspondence of 
 the objective with the subjective, as without our impres- 
 sions from the senses we could not judge of material 
 objects. Only what satisfies our emotions and desires 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 3 1 3 
 
 can really approve itself to our intellect. No one de- 
 scribes a cruel parent as a just parent. Cruelty is still 
 more opposed to justice than is over-indulgence, for 
 there are natures so finely strung that it would be 
 difficult to spoil them; whereas cruelty turns the natural 
 emotions sour, and works like madness in the brain 
 through inducing despair of heart and will. Leibnitz 
 maintained the law of finality, or the purpose of good, in 
 rational activity as the law of souls ; whereas efficient 
 causation governs material things, i.e., their movements 
 are determined by their relations to each other. 
 
 The only sufficient reason conceivable by humanity for 
 all that Providence has allotted to us, and even for the 
 very existence of matter, is the well-Being of self-conscious 
 and God-conscious Beings, which mere animals are not. 
 Man does not exist for the sake of mountains, rivers, or 
 oceans, or for the sake of insects, reptiles, cats, or dogs ; but 
 for his own sake as the beloved rational offspring of the 
 Father of spirits, from Whom the light of reason emanates. 
 
 With the growth of self-knowledge comes ontological 
 belief. As self-knowledge implies development, it is not 
 to be wondered at that the generality of people ask what 
 ontological belief means ; for without a certain degree of 
 self-realization, we cannot speak of the inner life and Being, 
 although the mind may act spontaneously through the 
 nervous system. 
 
 The theory of mind can only be expounded on the basis 
 of what the soul appears to itself to be. We can only 
 know the thing by, and through, the categories of thought, 
 which are those of causality. That which is not knowable 
 by us under the categories of sufficient, efficient, and final 
 causation, cannot be a reality to us. That which has not 
 reality for its object is not knowledge. No evidence can be 
 greater than self-existence. In its last resort, all knowledge 
 
 us IT 
 
314 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 is of actual states and relations, of real persons answering 
 to our own consciousness, and of real happenings to 
 us and to them. One sect of theologians calls another 
 blasphemers, forgetting that we can only be true to our own 
 convictions ! 
 
 Hence, although abstract reflective postulates may be 
 logically valid, such as Stuart Mill and Shelley made with 
 regard to the infinitely greater happiness derivable from 
 intellectual beauty and spiritual affections, than any fine 
 pleasures that the senses can afford ; still, such is the nature 
 of the human understanding, that unless we have had some 
 measure, or degree, of enjoyment from either of these 
 sources, we can conceive nothing real concerning either 
 the one or the other, because positive individual experience 
 is the only basis of Ideal or superlative conception, which 
 is always an abstraction from, or a generalization of, a 
 positive fact of individual experience. Hence Idealism 
 cannot be logically opposed to Realism, for it guarantees 
 the existence of objects, as well as of the subject of 
 impressions through the laws, or principles of causality. 
 What is not relative to thought proper, as such, does 
 not really exist for tis. Still, each individual is so con- 
 ditioned by heredity, that wherever the nervous organism 
 is defective, " le jugement s'en ressent." 
 
 Thus, as with regard to air vibrations, no sound is heard 
 by a person with an imperfect organ of hearing, and as 
 without an organ of sight to respond to ether vibrations, 
 no light is seen, so if we are cerebrally defective, the play 
 of reason, or of the understanding, is disturbed, the meaning 
 of things is lost upon us, and nothing can be signified to 
 us by the external universe ; for where there is no dis- 
 crimination of identity and difference, or of cause and effect, 
 no reflection upon the workings of a mind can take place ; 
 where there is no proper self-consciousness, there is nothing 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 315 
 
 from which to argue, or from which to draw conclusion ; also 
 there is no comprehension of Ideal human nature considered 
 in the abstract, and hence no sense of the existence and 
 possible nature of Deity and Duty, and of relativity to Being 
 as the raison d'etre of the physical cosmos. The principle 
 of sufficient reason is only known to us through the 
 fact of our being ourselves intelligent practical agents. 
 It is the ground of the moral law ; or rather, the moral 
 law is the logical outcome of it. Naturally we are bound 
 to be true to the rational nature given us by our Creator ; 
 for if our Creator were not voluntarily obeyed by us, His 
 offspring, we should be slaves, not sons of God made like 
 unto Himself, autonomous, or self-directing. For this is 
 what being gifted with free-will means. As the billiard-ball 
 moves because it is pushed from without, so the planets 
 move through external attraction or repulsion. But the 
 soul of man is constituted so as to direct its own, activity 
 according to the principle of sufficient reason ; and if he 
 fail to do this, whether from a slavish position in the world 
 towards his physical, or his spiritual masters, or through 
 habitually drugging himself, and deteriorating his nervous 
 system, he falls from his high estate as a rational Being, 
 and sinks under the category of a lower animal, the sport 
 of its own instinctive impulses, and the slave of external 
 circumstances, which are not properly causes, but mere 
 conditions of finite Being. 
 
 As like can only affect like, but for our body we should 
 not come in contact with other bodies, and know of their 
 existence. Observe we say " We have a body, not that we 
 are a body " ; and that this body is, for a time only, more 
 intimately bound up with our real Being, than is any other 
 material substance. It is like an instrument of music that 
 we hold in our hands, which thrills to external movement, 
 and to any movement which we ourselves inaugurate : we 
 
316 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 can even ourselves use means to unnaturally affect, or even 
 to destroy it. 
 
 To pursue the simile of a musical instrument, our telluric 
 body is but a transient medium of vital force, withering as 
 the grass withers, and falling into dust as does the flower 
 of the field, probably to be succeeded by a series of fresh 
 organisms, fitting us for fresh fields and pastures new in 
 the starry clime. Long before Buddha's doctrine of the 
 transmigration of souls had been promulgated, men had 
 located the souls of their departed heroes in one or other 
 of the stars of the firmament hence, probably, the worship 
 of the " hosts of heaven " was not mere nature worship. The 
 categories of thought have their foundation in the very 
 essence of noumenal Being, and their forms are those of 
 living causality sufficient, efficient, and final ; hence religion 
 has always been one with animism, i.e., the recognition 
 of the soul in nature. Real objects are only knowable 
 to us, in the forms of possible objects of representation, 
 each one's conceptions of objects being subjectively 
 modified by his, or her, idiosyncrasy of power, knowledge, 
 and goodness. 
 
 How could we know that the Good for self-conscious 
 rational Being is the object of creation, excepting as an 
 inference from personal intuitive tendency, and from the 
 reflective sense of obligation to act for the Best for Being, 
 which constitutes the moral sense. A man says, "Fiat 
 justitia, ruat ccelum " ; woman says, " We must be kind, 
 come what may " ; hence the necessity of counterpartal 
 judgment. 
 
 The subjective aspect of knowledge is seen here, and, 
 says Professor Ladd : " If we try to tear out of the 
 phenomenon of knowledge the ontological postulate, or 
 belief in experienced reality, which is of its very essence, 
 as knowledge, we do not lose the real reality of our own 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 3 1 7 
 
 minds simply, but we lose all Being and all knowledge at 
 once." "The faculty of thought invokes metaphysical or 
 ontological assumptions. Without the ontological assump- 
 tion belonging to reflective thought, what is called science 
 is nothing but the dreamer's well-ordered dream."* The 
 legitimately derived results of reflective thinking, are held 
 intuitively to be as valid as the primary representations of 
 reason. Then "the term knowledge cannot be denied to 
 logical conclusions ; the whole body of physical science consists 
 of such conclusions."! Yet an agnosticism, which we do not 
 think of applying to our physical experiences, is, strangely 
 enough, applied to the mind, by which experiences are 
 summarized. It cannot be too much insisted upon, that the 
 knowledge that consists of the derived results of reflective 
 introspection, cannot be expected to exist without reflective 
 thinking, or reflection. The proceedings of our mind, as 
 well as those of our external senses, are S^-known and 
 Self-registered. There exists for us no evidence stronger 
 than Setf-evidence. It is the standard of comparison and 
 the ground of Idealization. 
 
 The neural processes that condition our consciousness of 
 objects, may fail or become distorted. But as we see in 
 cases of delirium, of coma of long duration, of hallucination, 
 or of chronic insanity, the distressed and bewildered subject 
 of them remains, as it were, behind, until at some blessed 
 moment, the silver cord that binds the soul to the body is 
 loosened, and it is allowed to depart. With the dissolution 
 of our physical mechanism, physical wants and requirements 
 cease, as we know ; but whilst ever, and wherever the soul 
 continues to exist, its need of loving and being beloved, 
 will remain its essential attribute. Love is not only the 
 fulfilling of the law, but the one comprehensive satisfaction 
 of spiritual Being. The efficient cause of love is community 
 * LADD. t Ibid. 
 
3 1 8 Rational, or Scientific^ Ideal of Morality 
 
 and harmony of nature, and above all, complementariness 
 of Being. Love is the relation of attraction between sub- 
 ject and object. What is called true love is, all exclusively, 
 a relation between two persons. "A relation is not the 
 adjective of one term only." Relativity involves reciprocity. 
 Hate is but the painful negation of love, as disappoint- 
 ment is the sense of frustration of natural desire ; or as 
 to feel despair, is to feel beggared of our natural inherit- 
 ance of hope. 
 
 " When I can read my title clear 
 
 To mansions in the skies, 
 I '11 bid farewell to every fear, 
 And wipe my weeping eyes." 
 
 WATTS. 
 
 No one can say he knows the effect produced by the 
 realization of a relation such as true love, unless he has 
 had the experience of a completely mutual affection. 
 Indifference is naturally also reciprocal, although offended 
 and personal vanity may turn it into hate on one side. 
 A fond fancy may exist on one side only, for a person 
 as for a thing. Thus one might have a fancy for a slave, 
 a horse, or a dog ; but this is not what love means. Attrac- 
 tion, both in the physical and spiritual world, is "equal 
 and opposite." If a thing carries out its nature, it is called 
 active. Compare the feelings of the hireling with those of 
 the enthusiast for any cause, and the meaning of the word 
 activity strikes us at once. The enthusiast is all alive: the 
 hireling is a machine, that is put in motion from without, 
 by a motive not his own. The peculiar delight of true 
 love lies in the fact that both parties concerned feel truly 
 alive in every nerve of soul and sense ; and when the 
 hour of bereavement strikes, we no longer feel to be "all 
 there " : a sense of deadly chill, like death itself, comes 
 over us ; the apathy of despair would settle down upon 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 3 T 9 
 
 our soul, but for the faith in God's eternal loving-kindness 
 by which we can pray : " The Lord watch between thee and 
 me when we are parted." 
 
 When we speak of two persons being of one heart and 
 of one mind, we mean that each chord of thought, being 
 made up of the complementary activities of two opposite 
 or counterpartal natures, is a realization of perpetual, 
 harmonious activity. Love stimulates the intellect, and 
 exalts the life of the heart. Even the vision of the Highest 
 is helped by true companionship ; the loving pair stirring 
 each other to voluntary activity, theirs is the strength of 
 two. The social one leads the shy one into society, and 
 the more retiring one prevents true sociability from de- 
 generating into worldliness and frivolity. But although 
 the duet is the primary form of sociability, the great 
 symphony of Beings which society should represent, to- 
 gether with the religious sentiment or common adoration 
 of God, are all alike absolute social necessities for the 
 complete happiness of the human individual; and of 
 course, only of individuals can society be composed no 
 individual existing, no society is possible. Thus the silly 
 talk about lovers being selfish, is only one of the inventions 
 of the envy that is the shadow of love, because love is 
 intuitively known to be happiness. Now happiness, far 
 from losing any of its delight through being broadcast, is 
 actually intensified by its enfolding us from without as 
 well as from within ; and it is well known that our own 
 joy makes us desire to promote the joy of others. Mere 
 worldly success, on the contrary, suggests suppression of 
 others. It is only when the heart has been brought into 
 its fullest action, together with the intellect and the bene- 
 volent, or good-will, that we are capable of the rapturous 
 adoration of God, in which natural gratitude plays so great 
 a part. A child may believe that a whipping is good for 
 
320 Rational) or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 it, but gratitude is not at once aroused by the whipping. 
 Only when his own joy is full, can poor, limping, human 
 nature ungrudgingly behold the delight of others, and feel 
 gratitude for the joy of others as well as for his own. To 
 understand the world, means to know its rational import as 
 reaching beyond the grave. Mere science may be the 
 systemization of a law or order of knowledge, profiting 
 little to a rational Being ; or again, it may be merely of 
 the different words through which men attempt to express 
 their minds in different countries. 
 
 But introspective reflection leads us to seek the explana- 
 tion of the origin of our own Being, and of that of others ; 
 of the whence and whither of our kind. 
 
 Essential entity proceeds when the grave closes over what 
 St. Paul calls this " body of death." 
 
 Professor Ladd says : " The defective psychical experiences, 
 the lacking psychoses, especially of the affective kind (as 
 illustrated in Kant's own character) account in no small 
 degree for the defective character of a philosophical system." 
 Sir Isaac Newton seems to have been equally undeveloped 
 on the emotional side. 
 
 On reflection only do we know what we feel, think, and 
 desire, or will, imagine, or remember; and it is from our 
 realization of these positive facts of consciousness, that 
 we reason as to the place of man in the universe, and his 
 destiny here and hereafter. Above all, it is from our 
 reflective, superlative, or Ideal conceptions of Being that 
 we conceive the notion of a Supreme Being, absolute and 
 perfect in all His attributes. The odd pantheons of 
 humanity, savage or cultured, all point to the intuition 
 in man that the source of all true activity is intelligent, 
 emotional, and practical Being not chaos, or the fortuitous 
 concourse of storms. 
 
 "Let there be light," said the Jehovah of the Jews; 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 321 
 
 but only to life and for life does light exist ; and only by 
 a Being capable of design, is order recognizable. Only 
 a self-conscious, intelligent, moral agent is keenly alive 
 to his relations to other similar, but not absolutely identical, 
 Beings, as also to an Absolute Being, Whose existence is 
 presupposed by these very relations, and to Whom he 
 stands in the relation of a son to a spiritual Father. 
 
 It is in the exercise of sense-transcending reason that 
 we feel it impossible to be satisfied with the imperfect 
 intelligence, blind sensibility, and absence of morality, 
 with which we are constantly brought into contact here 
 below, not to mention the depressing influence of the 
 painful and humiliating consciousness of our own short- 
 comings from virtue and spirituality. Hence the rational 
 postulate of the better land, the Elysian fields, the happy 
 hunting grounds, the new Jerusalem, the harmonious com- 
 munion of saints which men have everywhere striven to 
 imagine. 
 
 The rational assumption that " Good will be the final end 
 of ill," has always approved itself to the human race, man 
 naturally desiring to rejoice in himself or his own Being, 
 in that of his kind, and, above all, in the thought of his 
 Creator, for otherwise how awful must our destiny appear 
 to us if regarded as the sport of blind forces, and we without 
 a Protector, Friend, and Guide in the vast universe, what- 
 ever may be our place of abode in space. But though our 
 planet should be rolled up like a scroll, shapeless and 
 meaningless, not a tittle of the Word of Reason shall pass 
 away. 
 
 As Hegel maintained that in logic lies the secret of all 
 that is, and all that is to come, so it is evident that in the 
 nature, or essence of a thing, lie all the possibilities of 
 inference concerning it. The prophecies of reason are the 
 forecasts of science ; from the datum the conclusion is 
 
 Y 
 
322 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 derived, the nature of the effect indicating the nature of 
 the cause, together with the converse. 
 
 Equally, the essential or spiritual relations that exist 
 between finite Beings must continue wherever the two 
 factors of a relation exist. 
 
 "By those hours of happiness I claim thee mine in 
 Heaven " : so runs a beautiful song. In other words, " Thou 
 art the spirit that alone enabled me to realize the conscious- 
 ness of utter satisfaction of Being under God " ; hence the 
 recovery of such satisfaction is inconceivable by reason, 
 excepting under its experienced essential condition. As to 
 the merely physical conditions of pleasure, the thing that 
 pleases us to-day might satiate or bore us to-morrow, and 
 gradually disgust us in old age. 
 
 As in this transitory scene it matters not where we find 
 the counterpartal Being that is to be our soul's delight, 
 so whether it be in Tellas, or in Jupiter, the spiritual relation 
 required by us must equally hold its place. Hence the 
 sense of the eternal in true love, which, instead of being 
 a figment of fancy is a logical necessity of thought ; and 
 it is because I have lived this experience, and continue to 
 live in the light of it, through memory and hope, that I have 
 undertaken to write this Apologia pro Amore, to show that 
 the secret of its exceeding joy lies in the relation of comple- 
 mentariness between two noumenal or self-conscious Beings 
 of equal, although opposite, spiritual evolution, because of 
 the spiritual equilibrium resulting from their union, and 
 their striving together after the same Ideals of truth, 
 harmony, and goodness. 
 
 Moreover, I hold that only through this union can finite 
 Being arrive, through its own complementarily initiated 
 completeness, at the reflective comprehension, however faint, 
 of the holiness, or perfection, of the Supreme Being. It 
 takes man and woman to represent humanity in perfection. 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 323 
 
 Nations, like individuals, are one-sided in their develop- 
 ment The ancient Mexicans worshipped devils of cruelty, 
 so did also the Syrian worshippers of Moloch ; the Israelites 
 a stern Jehovah, who demanded "an eye for an eye and a 
 tooth for a tooth " : but later, as the spiritual influence of 
 woman had made itself felt, the conception of a God of love, 
 or benevolence, alone approves itself to man's more developed 
 reason. What is to be good if not to be benevolent ? and 
 why is the expression, "a good for nothing," a term of 
 reproach ? but because it argues the absence of benevolence : 
 witness the involuntary physical shudder that accompanies 
 the approach of a wild beast. But how much worse is it 
 when a human monster of malignity approaches us ! 
 
 " Blow, blow, thou wintry wind, 
 Thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude ! " 
 
 says Shakspeare. As to a person's good-nature, people are 
 seldom in doubt; but worth is necessarily differently 
 estimated by different individuals according to their capa- 
 cities for thought and judgment: but the word always 
 includes capacity for good to others of some kind, high or 
 low, material or spiritual. 
 
 Again, if you only exhibit qualities that are not sympa- 
 thized in by your entourage, you are regarded as a bore, 
 or one whose society is good for nothing, through its not 
 furthering what is supposed to be the interest, or welfare, 
 of those present ; whereas, he who gives them a lift in 
 the social scale is regarded by them as good-hearted. It 
 is thus obvious that whatever mistakes we may individually 
 make as to what is the most really conducive to the 
 happiness of a rational, responsible Being, the one who 
 provides for what we individually regard as our happiness 
 is the one we regard as worthy of affection ; and by the 
 law of the concept we generalize the idea. 
 
324 Rational y or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 What the moral sense particularly inculcates is good-will 
 towards men, and reverence for the Divine will, which reason 
 recognizes to be good for the furtherance of our spiritual 
 evolution. And what could any external things avail us if 
 we remain brutal, loveless, or worthless ? 
 
 Idealism claims to explain the universe under the funda- 
 mental ideas of reason, through the intellectual necessity of 
 belief in the causal principle. I recognize in the universe an 
 Infinite Mind, not only as contriving and producing the things 
 which present themselves to my senses, but also as contriving 
 and producing what I call my mind, or reason, with the principle 
 of sufficient reason, which is once and for all the Good for 
 noumenal Being. 
 
 Now " the definition of the universal principle of causality 
 is that whatever is found in the effect must be found in the 
 originative power into which the effect is refunded ; hence 
 conscious, percipient mind found in me must be refunded 
 into the Infinite Something" that being "TEnte possibile" 
 of Rosmini. 
 
 The word " universe" is an Ideal postulate assumed in 
 explanation of the convergence or unity of our experiences 
 as self-conscious Beings. My thinking is the essential fact 
 for me to argue from. Thought takes the unity of Being 
 as the standpoint of comprehension, and the relativity of 
 the objective world to the subjective, or spiritual, world, as 
 the pivot of mental representation in accordance with the 
 synthetic principle of sufficient reason, which has the nature 
 of Being, and our understanding of it, as the key to the 
 interpretation of all the activities of noumenal Being: our 
 own Ideal purpose in action being the only rationally 
 conceivable clue to the purpose of the creative energy. 
 
 The watchword of philosophy is the unity of Being, as 
 such ; the unity of God was the watchword of Israel. " The 
 more the invisible fact of Self, in which consciousness centres, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 325 
 
 is pondered, the more one seems to see the dependence of 
 the idea of a Supreme Being on it." 
 
 This is what is meant by a rational theology, or a theology 
 based on logical inferences. Surely one would not boast of 
 holding an irrational theology. The Credo quia impos- 
 sibile of the middle ages is shocking to reason. Common 
 sense justifies philosophy, and is justified by it. We cannot 
 become aware of, or perceive anything, excepting as it affects 
 us through our own feelings or sensations. We can only 
 apprehend the nature of a thing through the particular rela- 
 tion in which it stands to our own Being, and reason can 
 only comprehend anything through our own principle of 
 action. Reason is "the candle of the Lord," through which 
 we read the revelation of Himself; and we can only be said 
 to comprehend the meaning of His Providence through the 
 Divinely inspired conception of finality, indicating, as it 
 does, Good for spiritual, or real Being. 
 
 Our notion of evil does not only involve the physical 
 exercise of self-defence, but it advises us to risk our bodies, 
 when necessary, for the maintenance of rights, and for the 
 sake of our spiritual integrity ; for man cannot live by bread 
 alone, but by faith in God's justice, mercy, and goodness, and 
 under the sense of responsibility to make His kingdom of 
 righteousness prevail over sin and sorrow. 
 
 Forms or fashions of culture in any given time or place 
 are an appreciable element in the human individual ex- 
 perience ; as Mr. Balfour has shown, they produce "a 
 psychological atmosphere, or climates favourable to the 
 growth of some sentiments and beliefs, whilst being deaden- 
 ing and fatal to others"; so also do such circumstances as 
 wealth and poverty, social position, and solitude, health, 
 and sickness, greatly influence our evolution. Climate, par- 
 ticular modes of life, power, success, neglect, and cruelty, 
 all have a part in the determination of the character of an 
 
326 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 individual: " character meaning the sum of that which charac- 
 terizes a person^ that which makes him himself, not another 
 it therefore includes the whole mind." 
 
 True learning is idealized knowledge. " Experience must 
 have reached its fruition for the Ideal to arise out of the 
 real." A positive must be acknowledged to exist before a 
 negative is conceivable. Thus, until a high standard of 
 moral worth has been reached, blameworthiness is not felt. 
 The universal cannot be a subject of speculation before the 
 individual Ego is reflectively but positively realized. " The 
 Ideal realm is built out of the substance of real Being," 
 as it is reflected on under the principle of sufficient 
 reason; the Ideal is the fulfilment, not the contradiction of 
 the really existing. 
 
 " It is the splendid faith of Hegel in reason" (says Professor 
 A. Seth) "which gives such massive proportions to his thought: 
 within it room is found for all the difficulties of existence'' 
 
 Before Darwin, the naturalist, had proclaimed the scientific 
 doctrine of evolution, Hegel had spoken the word Werden 
 (becoming) ; definite involution is involved in the idea of 
 evolution. 
 
 The last word of the science of the day being evolution, 
 it stands to reason that the perfect maturity of reason, or 
 its ultimate synthesis, is not yet ours, and probably never 
 will be the heritage of this planet, which rather exhibits 
 reason, as children exhibit reason, in its elementary state. 
 Only the very few steal marches on their fellows, who rather 
 bear them a grudge for so doing instead of showing any 
 readiness to profit by the new light afforded them, par- 
 ticularly on the ground of morality, where they resemble 
 Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, " qui aimait a se mettre 
 dans un bon colere," and also liked indulging in other 
 tastes not accordant with reason. 
 
 In speaking of the shewers of the way of peace the 
 
Rational) or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 327 
 
 joy-teachers Moncure Conway says : " Whenever there is 
 one contriving a new benefit for mankind, some relief from 
 evil, some mitigation of pain, some sunbeam to brighten the 
 darkness of despair and death, the Creator is glorified? 
 " The Christ beloved is He Who gave men rest in the 
 faith, that even as they forgive the trespasses of men, so 
 will their Father in heaven forgive them their trespasses." 
 
 " Pure religion, and undefiled, before God and the Father, 
 is this, to visit the widow and fatherless in their affliction, and 
 to keep himself unspotted from the world." The opposite 
 doctrine, that nothing succeeds like success, is characteristic 
 of our so-called civilization, but it is not a counsel of perfec- 
 tion in harmony with the injunction to keep oneself unspotted 
 from the world. Love, human and Divine, is certainly the 
 fulfilling of the law ; but what renders it difficult to practise 
 in this world is, that kindly toleration of moral infirmity 
 and ignorance may itself lapse into laxity of judgment and 
 action. 
 
 Ceremonial and ritual rescued men from the degrading 
 worship of animal instincts of the earlier world, and from 
 being cowed and terrified by the elements. But the bar- 
 barities of devil worship are passing away, and the time 
 will come when all will alike seek to promote the health, 
 virtue, and happiness of each member of the great human 
 family. But although he who is righteous over-much 
 may make himself believe that he cares not for his own 
 happiness, it is a wise saying that " charity and justice 
 begin at home" and certain it is that only our own needs 
 and desires can inform us of the needs and desires of others 
 whilst spreading in ever-widening circles. Reverence for 
 the Ideals of feeling, intelligence, and will, is beginning 
 now to be substituted for the idol worship and blood 
 offerings of savage and half-civilized peoples. 
 
 The service of God is seen now to be one of perfect 
 
328 Rational) or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 freedom, because it is in accordance with reason and human 
 nature. Formerly physical or spiritual self-mutilation was 
 supposed to be the only acceptable sacrifice hence cruel 
 intolerance for the difference of opinion between men, which 
 is the inevitable result of the different social mediums in 
 which they are brought up. Only in a rationally organized 
 state can the true destiny of spirit be realized ; but as there 
 must always exist essential relativity between man and man, 
 we must hope that there is a better time coming, when, the 
 Fatherhood of God being fully realized, the brotherhood of 
 man and man will be so also. 
 
 Professor Kraepelm, in his Psychologische Arbeiten, when 
 treating of the kinds of mental capacity that are within us, 
 summarizes them under the three laws of capacity : ist, 
 that for the perception of sensory stimuli ; 2nd, for the 
 association of ideas, i.e., thinking ; and, third, for voluntary 
 movement. But not one of these can dispense with the 
 labour of the other, although there is division of labour. 
 The new psychology is too often ignorant of philosophy, 
 under-estimating reflective introspection, which is the true 
 ground of the inferences of reason. Philosophy must be 
 based upon the facts of human nature, or metaphysical 
 entity, not on beast, bird, or fish nature ; their experiences 
 are indeed but partially conceivable by us, and may thus 
 often be misinterpreted by us. 
 
 Whatever may be the importance justly attributed to the 
 scientific treatment of physical nature, the very definition 
 of the word philosopher " the lover of wisdom " points 
 to the human individual as the seeker after truth, and of 
 the golden rule of conduct, and no one knows better than 
 he does, that art is long, and the life of one individual far 
 too short for his search after truth to be exhaustive. 
 
 Self-knowledge is the all-important for the shaping of 
 our lives. The reflective activity of mental life, from which 
 
Rational) or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 329 
 
 the concept of mind is derived, is called self -consciousness. 
 So much for the so-called selfishness, or accounted . im- 
 morality, of self-consciousness. It is said of the Orientals, 
 " Die Morgenlander immer Kinder bleiben " (the Orientals 
 always remain children) so it must also be affirmed of the 
 unsetf-conscious. 
 
 In every act of self-consciousness some definitely dis- 
 cernible content of sensation, of imagining, of feeling, of 
 thinking, and of activity, or conation, is to be found. " To 
 be self-conscious, and to remember r^-cognitively, is to be 
 conscious of being identical, or self-same/' says Professor 
 Ladd ; and he adds : " If there be any immortality of mind 
 it is the continuance of a self-conscious recognitively known 
 /^-development." But this does not necessarily involve 
 the memory of the physical details, or small social eti- 
 quettes of earthly time and place. Hate and pride are 
 forgotten, only the love that makes of life a path of 
 light remains. The concept of causality, in its three 
 modes, arises in the mind in active response to induced 
 feeling, exhibiting the relation which exists between 
 our inner self and the object affecting us, and through 
 which our normal tendency in action is aroused, which 
 is always in accordance with the law of conservation of 
 life, or energy, i.e., for the preservation of the integrity 
 of Being. The process of conceptive generalization is 
 one of secondary self-projection on the principle of non- 
 contradiction of experience. Unless we admit the meta- 
 physical import and validity of the work of the human 
 intellect, science cannot exist. The concomitant correlation 
 of mental and bodily, as of bodily and mental changes, 
 can never be grasped by us until we have "suffered a 
 death change into something rich and strange": that is to 
 say, until our inauguration into a future and higher state 
 of Being, from whence we can look back, as a man does 
 
330 Rational, or Scientific , Ideal of Morality 
 
 upon his childhood. There is no imagining of the new 
 and various conditions of time, place, and matter, to which 
 the spirit may be subjected hereafter. Reason relating strictly 
 to pure, or spiritual Being, its forecasts only refer to the 
 possible modifications of the attributes of feeling, intelligence, 
 and will possibility meaning for us rational conceivability. 
 
 The metaphysical explanation of the two orders of phe- 
 nomena, sensible and spiritual, in the life of man is not 
 inconsistent with philosophical monism. The mind of the 
 finite Being seems to us to stand in necessary relation to 
 some bodily form. Only of Him, Who was, and is, and is 
 to come, Whose place is infinite space, Whose time is 
 eternity, can pure Being be predicated : only of the un- 
 conditioned One can absolute existence, or perfection of 
 Being, be conceived. 
 
 Arguments regarding the source of our Being, and a 
 future state of existence for man, are simple corollaries 
 from our rational conceptions of the existence of this 
 Supreme One, Who through the gradual evolution of our 
 higher faculties becomes revealed to us as Love, as Wisdom, 
 and as Power. Only in the light of this conception are 
 faith in truth, and love, and the hope of eternal good, 
 rational. 
 
 The law of impersonation of spiritual attributes is as 
 binding upon us as is. that of objectifying sensations. If the 
 lower animal creation were possessed of the power of 
 introspective reflection, from whence all abstract concep- 
 tions emanate, together with the faculty of logical induc- 
 tion, and deduction from them, then there would be no 
 impassable gulf between man and beast, and the Buddhis- 
 tic faith in transmigration would appear more rational 
 than the religion of Christ. No wonder that Buddha and 
 Spinoza have been accounted atheists, seeing how they 
 mixed up mind and matter. Moreover, Christ taught the 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 33 1 
 
 love of the Father of spirits, instead of blood sacrifices to 
 the awful Jehovah of Israel, and that the kingdom of God 
 is within the spirit of man, that alone being His holy 
 temple. 
 
 It is the possession of the principle of sufficient reason, 
 which invests man with a moral sense, of which conscience 
 is the outcome conscience meaning the sense of responsi- 
 bility to act in accordance itiith our moral Ideal of our own 
 free-will, not as slaves under a taskmaster. 
 
 Human beings have rights and claims only as partaking 
 actually, or potentially, of the Divine reason, or purpose, 
 in action. Through conscience man works voluntarily with 
 God, and for God, so that His will may be done, and our 
 joy may be full : for surely the goal of creation must be 
 the happiness of self-conscious, and therefore rationally 
 judging, creatures ; or must there ever exist the wounded 
 to minister to? 
 
 Protestantism appeals to the conscience of the individual 
 against the authority of tradition ; Protestantism must 
 therefore be an abiding creed of the subjects of evolution: 
 for reason has nothing to say to official authority, but 
 treats only of the laws of thought, or of the necessary 
 conditions of mental representation, which is the repre- 
 sentation of the progressive modifications of our feelings, 
 our intelligence of relativity, and of our rational tendency 
 in conation, which is for the conservation or welfare of 
 Being. 
 
 For what other purpose is power given, to governments 
 or authority constituted, but for the promotion of the good 
 of humanity, which, of course, is strictly composed of indi- 
 viduals ? Therefore when an established government mani- 
 festly neglects or opposes this end by interfering with 
 individual rights, such as the right to life, the right to 
 liberty, and the right to proper consideration for joy of 
 
33 2 Rational, or Scientific , Ideal of Morality 
 
 life, the denial of which is positive cruelty, such power is 
 rightly withdrawn from it, and another form of govern- 
 ment is called for. 
 
 Of course no individual whatever can have the right to 
 act contrary to nature and right reason, which is our only 
 standard of action, representing, as it does, the purposes of 
 absolute wisdom, absolute power, and absolute goodness, 
 in spite of our ignorance and' fallibility. As Jesus said, 
 there is but One absolutely Good, the Being of Beings, the 
 Cause of causes, the Inspirer of faith, love, and hope in 
 Being, in Whom we live and move, and have our Being. 
 
 The ultimate definition of reason is the apprehension of 
 relativity to a standard intuitively conceived. Plato said, 
 " A soul shall be saved by a sense of proportion," i.e. t of 
 relativity to an Ideal standard ; Confucius suggested the 
 standard of reciprocity : " Do not unto others as ye would 
 not have them do unto you." The Jewish Decalogue was 
 also chiefly negative ; but Jesus laid down a positive stan- 
 dard that of love, or absolute benevolence, even towards 
 those who despitefully use us. 
 
 Now the Father of spirits being invisible to sense, and 
 therefore unpicturable by the imagination, we can only 
 refer to our spiritual Ideal of perfection for our notion of 
 His character and government, or Providence. As it is 
 by ratiocination, or calculation of the degree or kind of 
 relation in which one thing, or object of thought, stands to 
 the subject, or Ego, and to other objects, that we regulate 
 our conduct towards it, or them, rationally, so it is by the 
 degree of reality of our apprehension of the degree and 
 kind of our relationship to the only conceivable Sufficient 
 Cause, or Creator of our Being, that our faith, love, and 
 hope are measurable and justifiable. 
 
 The nearest and dearest of human relationships, because 
 the one of most strictly equivalent emotion, is that in 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 333 
 
 which man and woman stand to each other in human 
 marriage: "only by the gentle bond of love alone, should 
 life to life be linked." "Pilgrim of earth, the home to 
 which you haste is Heavenly, bound by the kindred tie of 
 Heaven and home." If man were a mere animal, the body 
 its size, colour, and proportions would naturally be the all- 
 important consideration in the contraction of marriage. But 
 
 " Love 's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
 
 Within his bending sickle's compass come ; 
 Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
 But bears it out even to the edge of doom." * 
 
 But there has to be a gradual evolution of the spirit, for 
 true love to be possible to man or woman : In the 
 beginning was promiscuous or tribal correspondence between 
 the sexes ; next discordant polygamy ; then monogamy, 
 bringing with it the amenities of the domestic hearth; 
 and last, when reflection has brought forth its perfect 
 fruit of faith, love, and hope, comes what Shakspeare 
 calls " the marriage of true minds, to which," he adds, " let 
 there be no impediment." Just as complementariness of 
 forms and colours is required for natural, physical attraction 
 to exist, so for affinity of spirits to exist, there must be 
 counterpartism in the development of spiritual attributes. 
 
 Seeing that each individual is bound to move in the 
 groove of his, or her, own idiosyncrasy, what can we do 
 to save ourselves from, or to escape from this one-sided, 
 incomplete, individual development, except using the very 
 means the Lord of Life has provided ? 
 
 Both the voice of Nature, and that of spiritual yearning 
 (Sehnsucht) urge us to the enduring bond of union which 
 we call marriage with an oppositely-developed Being. For 
 spiritual equilibrium to exist (what Robert Browning calls 
 "the music of man and maid") there must be diversity 
 
 * SHAKSPEARE. 
 
334 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 of development in identity of kind. As the eagle cannot 
 mate with the dove, so the undeveloped cannot mate with 
 the developed. 
 
 Agreement (Einstimmung) on any particular point may be 
 arrived at by analogues, or even by persons of contradictory 
 natures, as there is a general consensus of conventionality in 
 manners at any given moment of time, or place ; but spiritual 
 harmony involves the whole of two natures, so that they 
 together must afford a typical representation of humanity 
 through their complementariness, and counter-dependence 
 on each other, and comprehensively on God, for perfection 
 of joy of life. 
 
 For an appearance to exist, there must be an intelligent 
 Being to whom it appears, and unless righteousness, holiness, 
 or wholeness of Being can be predicated of a person, the 
 impression they receive must partake of that Being's one- 
 sidedness of standpoint, or partiality of representation. 
 Only the fulness of humanity can mirror Deity and enter 
 into His rest, or the peace and rest that comes from 
 believing in Him. This is the rationale of the sense of 
 peace, and perfection of Being, with its concomitant happi- 
 ness, which is the seal or sign of real conjugal love, such 
 as Swedenborg spoke of as the " coping-stone of beatitude." 
 Even in heaven, or that state of Being in which the presence 
 of God is more fully revealed, this note of perfect human 
 harmony cannot be found wanting : for as I have already 
 quoted, "Divine love can no more dispense with human 
 love, than human love can dispense with Divine love." 
 
 The sensorial and the systemic senses are the physical 
 purveyors of hereditary tendencies. Beethoven came of a 
 musical family, and different members of the Herschel 
 family had mathematical gifts. In fact, whenever any of 
 the senses have been hereditarily exercised, the special 
 ability which runs in the line of least resistance is found 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 335 
 
 to exist, more or less, in most of the members of a family. 
 Also where deficiency of culture of any sense has long pre- 
 vailed, such as Madame Sand describes in Les Mauprats, 
 where the moral sense seemed quite deficient, or only 
 existing in a rudimentary state from want of cultivation 
 of it, the same deficiency is exhibited by the family in 
 general. 
 
 But individual idiosyncrasy is none the less marked for 
 this ; and it is this diversity of individual experiences, 
 which is so great a factor in evolution, that requires a 
 shared complementary life, both physical and spiritual, to 
 equilibriate the individual nature and supplement its de- 
 velopmental deficiencies, so that human nature, in its 
 entirety, may be represented by the united pair. This is 
 the rationale of the " Sehnsucht der Liebe," of " Le besoin 
 d'aimer, 1 ' which are one and the same with what Amiel calls 
 " La nostalgic du bonheur " ; for in each other's presence only 
 is the fulness of life and joy found, because each is the 
 required supplement of the other. Nature seems rather 
 to prompt through desire, to the acquirement of the 
 means to the end of perfection of Being or happiness, 
 than to that end itself. It is only in reflective or pure 
 reason, that man contemplates the End itself. Strange to 
 say, up-to-date religion and philosophy have agreed to 
 taboo the word happiness, and to ignore the end for which 
 we act. 
 
 True love, or spiritual marriages, are the real mariages 
 de raison, for they are the outcome of enduring, because 
 spiritual, affinity ; and enduringness is of the very essence 
 of the conception of happiness. Morality, or virtue, is the 
 mean to the end, but love is both path and goal. " Lorsqu'on 
 aime on ne cherche plus, la vie est pleine " ; " Le monde se 
 sauve a chaque heure par 1'amour et par le travail": the former 
 being the great stimulus to the latter. The attractive 
 
336 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 force of love is felt in every sphere of our Being, but 
 there must be a foundation of true worth on both sides 
 for attraction to endure. To say, " Love 's of man's life 
 a thing apart, 'tis woman's whole existence," is to talk 
 nonsense; man, as well as woman, needs a lifelong com- 
 panion "whose hand-clasp brings moral strength, whose 
 presence means homer It may be urged that Shakspeare 
 makes a man say to a woman, " Teach me how to love." 
 Love is certainly a woman's strongest point, whilst strength 
 of body and brain is man's. As to those who deny the 
 possibility of mental science, one would be obliged by their 
 telling us on what grounds they believe in any true science, 
 or what is the raison d'etre, or rationale of any science what- 
 soever. Every rational appeal must be made to our own 
 consciousness, beyond which a man cannot go, any more 
 than he can jump over his own shadow. 
 
 Even a momentary realization of true love where cir- 
 cumstances forbid its consummation, is like a moment's 
 halt from the "Sturm und Drang" of life, "a momentary 
 taste of Being, from the well amid the waste " ; and as 
 Christ said of Divine love, " He who tastes of that fountain 
 shall thirst no more." But by Divine decree the forlorn 
 sense of loneliness is only stilled for a time by any other 
 relation but that of true conjugal affection. It is the 
 sense of heart-emptiness that drives men into bad society 
 or sensual excesses ; and the unsatisfactoriness of general 
 society to the heart of woman leads her to try and get 
 up some merely sensational liaison, or general excitement 
 of the nervous system, to disguise to herself the void of 
 emotion and reflective sentiment. 
 
 " Ich sah das Leer in deinem Herzen," says Heine. Novalis 
 wrote : " Love, or harmony, is the end and aim of the 
 world's history its great amen." When the search after 
 the Ideal is renounced, man rapidly deteriorates. " En defaut 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 337 
 
 de la guerre, et de Tamour, il me restent les plaisirs de la 
 table," said an elderly Frenchman, and he added, "et je m'en 
 trouve tres bien." To which a Russian nobleman replied : 
 " Mais n'oublions pas celui du jeu." But nervous excitement 
 is a poor substitute for the real satisfaction of spiritual 
 companionship, which never palls. Nothing can be more 
 silly than jokes about true love ; the union of counterparts 
 in marriage being obviously appointed for the rectification 
 of the want of individual equilibrium of feeling, intelligence, 
 and will, which is as conducive to morality as to the joy that 
 comes of fulness, or completeness, of Being. 
 
 The psychologist who studies and demonstrates psycho- 
 logical processes, cannot divest himself of the metaphysical 
 conceptions and assumptions, which are essential parts of 
 his own developed mental Being. It is these that constitute 
 the positive data for inferences regarding the Creator, and a 
 future state of existence. Abstraction of principles must 
 be from actual concrete experiences of feeling, intelligence, 
 and will. Such experiences, however, require proper, or 
 appropriate, circumstances to elicit them. Logic cannot 
 divorce itself from ontology : the Word, or Logos, being 
 the expression of the potentialities of Being, and of the 
 inferences implicit in it. Moral action is towards the 
 fullest working out of the Ideal of Being, both for ourselves 
 and for Beings like us. 
 
 The perfection of a thing lies in its compassing its end 
 hence " Zweckmassigkeit " is another word for self-conscious 
 reason. No finite Being can compass its end without 
 knowing it that end having been determined by its 
 Creator ; some rational conclusion concerning it must 
 therefore be arrived at for morality to be possible Ethic 
 is the science of the end. 
 
 Both Plato and Dante saw in the high love that springs 
 from perfect sympathy in the Ideal, held by each of the 
 
 Z 
 
33 8 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 complemental pair, the last rung of the ladder leading up 
 to God. Those who have helped their fellows to rise either 
 to an Ideal of scientific truth, or to that of the real loveli- 
 ness which is required for spiritual harmony, or to that of 
 a morality the firstfruits of which is the love, instead of 
 the fear of God, have been the greatest benefactors of the 
 race. Such have been all the great philosophers, poets, 
 saints, musicians, and other artists whose works have been 
 handed down to us, embodying, as they do, the great Ideals 
 of humanity. 
 
 Some have called them prophets, some poets ; but 
 they have ever been Divinely-illuminated Beings, who, like 
 Prometheus, have been the first to steal the fire from 
 Heaven, which was ever after to gladden the hearts and 
 illumine the minds of men. 
 
 But the saying, " Poeta nascitur, non fit," does not apply 
 to geniuses only, for each one of us comes into the world 
 with definite inherited tendencies, both physical and spiritual, 
 which greatly determines our career. Nevertheless, man is 
 either a spiritual Being, undergoing spiritual evolution 
 through hereditary and individual modifications of the 
 cerebro-neural system, or he is an animal pur et simple, 
 who has only to eat and drink, and be mimetic like a 
 monkey, of which he has been said to be the heir-apparent. 
 Moreover, as a spiritual Being, man is bound to act under 
 the moral law, or reflective principle of sufficient reason, 
 for this is the ground of his sense of responsibility to his 
 Maker, Reason being the exponent of the nature and 
 fitness of things, in whatever part of the universe man's 
 lot may be cast. But if we take the ground that man is 
 indeed a mere animal, we are bound to inquire why should 
 he, unlike the lower animals, have been gifted with such 
 "large discourse of reason," if his end and destiny are to be 
 the same as theirs ? From the means employed we argue 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 339 
 
 as to the end in view. The activity of the lower animals 
 is limited to the requirements of this passing scene ; but 
 what of man's hope of enduring love, what of his universal 
 animism, and spiritual aspiration, however poor and silly may 
 be the forms it assumes in low stages of mental evolution ? 
 What of his endeavour to track the course of star, planet, 
 and comet ? What of his sublime despondency, his yearning 
 for what is not ? Moreover, the lower animals are debarred 
 from any conception of the first Cause, their Creator, through 
 being limited to sensible, or imaginative, perceptions and 
 incapable of abstract conceptions, or of rational inferences 
 from general laws of thought, or intuitive mental apper- 
 ceptions. 
 
 If a man has no such access to the idea of an intelligent, 
 benevolent Creator, he has nothing upon which to cast 
 anchor when the day of trouble comes ; then he has no 
 power of hope whereby to withstand fate, and as despair 
 saps moral courage, such a man must feel indeed "lost," 
 as the term goes. 
 
 It is because man knows that he knows, knows what 
 he feels, desires, and wills, that he feels faith and confidence 
 in the goodness of the Creator who has so constituted him. 
 Nature being void of self-consciousness, furnishes him with 
 no moral law. It is to his human rational nature that 
 he owes moral teaching, and through which he learns 
 faith, love, and hope in God, and recognizes his responsi- 
 bility in action. 
 
 Even the lower animals have a certain faith in good- 
 ness, and expectation of kindness, once the fear of the 
 wild creature has been stilled and replaced by the hope 
 of joy that comes of love in any form. 
 
 It has been well said that the measure of a nation's 
 civilization is given by the place which woman holds in 
 it. The slave-wife, and the toy-wife of Ibsen's DolFs 
 
340 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 House, are not exhibitions of the true marriage of souls. 
 If we are even to "eat and drink to the glory of God," 
 i.e., in a rational manner, surely man's marriage should be 
 conducted under the law of the spirit, and not be purely 
 a tie of the earth earthy, contracted for the lust of the 
 eye, or for the pride of life. True love is a relation 
 between two persons, which grows out of the very essence 
 of their Being. As the intervals of music are of the 
 Divinely-ordained physical order of the universe, so the 
 scale of spiritual affinities is more emphatically the ex- 
 hibition of the will of the Father of spirits, as to what 
 notes shall be struck together for fine issues. Coleridge 
 defined God as "the Supreme Reality, that makes all one 
 whole " ; and Beethoven spoke of the beloved as the 
 "Ewige Geliebte," the " Geliebte in Zeit und Ewigkeit," 
 once truly loved, loved for ever : that which is a part 
 of the life of the soul cannot die with the body. 
 
 The very watchword of true love is "for ever" What 
 kind of Heaven could exist for souls incapable of spiritual 
 or ontological fidelity ? 
 
 Such are termed by Coleridge "disherited souls toy- 
 bewitched," " made blind by custom." The fidelity of the 
 cat may relate to the domestic hearth, which may be de- 
 stroyed at any moment; but the fully-developed man finds 
 no rest, no home for his heart, mind, and desire, but in a 
 complemental equal soul. "I have no home by sea or 
 shore but only in thy heart," says Jean Ingelow; "True to 
 the kindred points of Heaven and home," sings Wordsworth. 
 
 The rationality of the will (i.e., its strict relation to 
 personal Being] implies that it must aim at nothing less 
 than the harmonious articulation of its whole activity in 
 the unity of self-consciousness." It is the impulse of the 
 natural, unregenerate, unreflecting man, to take care only 
 of himself; but Hegel says, "Be a person, and respect other 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 341 
 
 persons" Personal, or self, respect is the only cue to 
 what is required of us by others ; and it admits of no one 
 person using another, or others, as mere means to his own 
 advancement. Evolution is egoistic, socialistic, and deon- 
 tologic, or religious. Each category of thought has to be 
 respected : our Creator has not constituted us so that we 
 eat to please God, but because we feel the need of food ; 
 nor do we fall in love to please God, but because we feel 
 " a lodestar lurks " for us in one particular Being ; neither 
 do we strive to protect ourselves from suffering to please 
 God, but because the law of action is action for the Best 
 for Being. But reflective consciousness under the principle 
 of sufficient reason pronounces all these things good, and 
 we rationalize accordingly. 
 
 " Only through the sublation of matter to spirit does 
 the body become what it is meant to be the organ for 
 the manifestation of a spiritual activity." Morality is only 
 explicable in relation to self-conscious, reflective Beings, i.e., 
 persons. Our Ideal of morality becomes higher and higher 
 in the ratio of the evolution of our own Being. On the 
 moral ground, endeavour is itself success and evolution. Thus 
 evolution cannot take place by proxy. This throws light 
 on the Christian doctrine, that each one must work out 
 his own salvation ; thus only can he truly forward the 
 salvation of others. Public legislation can only provide 
 against the open infringement of public order, and enforce 
 the preservation of public decency, but the Kingdom of 
 God is within us. 
 
 Civilization ultimately rests upon the basis of thought, 
 or mental representation, which is of the immediately in- 
 duced modifications of feeling, intelligence of relativity to 
 Being, and of the instinctive tendency to action, or self- 
 determination, for the conservation of Being, and reflectively 
 for the realization of the Ideal of perfection of Being, 
 
342 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 "All tend upward, though weakly, like plants in mines, 
 which never saw the sun, but dream of him and guess 
 where he may be, and do their best to climb and get to 
 him." And so the spirit of man, like fire, strives ever 
 upwards, but consciously of his own desire. 
 
 Righteous government can only be the outcome of 
 righteous individual thought. Of course a righteous, or 
 rational, social medium, would be a most important aid in 
 the education of the young. How little can the best of 
 individual teaching avail against the steady influence of 
 bad examples, and the actual, as well as virtual, contra- 
 diction of truth or reason in the social medium, in which 
 the mind of the young must expand, or contract. The 
 best of Roman Emperors, Marcus Aurelius, had, as we 
 know, the depraved Commodus for a son ; this was no 
 doubt in part accounted for by the depravity of his mother, 
 the infamous Faustina, and there was nothing in the social 
 medium around him to correct her influence. 
 
 Goodness must be individual and universal before the 
 state of Being we call Heavenly can exist. Meanwhile 
 the sense of our own imperfection must make us pitiful 
 towards the errors of others, " lost with us under the same 
 stars," and earnest in our endeavours to help them in the 
 path of struggle and difficulty, which we all have to 
 tread in this state of existence fighting ourselves, and 
 helping others to fight the real battle of life, which is 
 for faith, love, and hope in God. Seeing how everything 
 earthly slips from our grasp, well might David exclaim, 
 "In Thee, O Lord, do I put my trust, let me never be 
 put to confusion." 
 
 " The fact that a series of feelings, the infinitely greater 
 part of which can be gathered up, as it were, into a single 
 conception accompanied by a belief in reality, induces the 
 evident logical conclusion that something different, and 
 
Rational, or Scientific ', Ideal of Morality 343 
 
 transcending the immediate content of consciousness, must 
 be the bearer, relater, and idealizer of experience as past, 
 present, and possibly future. Some kind of noumenal 
 matrix has to be assumed to account for phenomena, or 
 appearances." 
 
 " There must exist a something that is modified " in feeling, 
 intelligence, and will to account for the mental representa- 
 tions of these occasioned by objective impressions which 
 we call thought ; but only in the voluntary act of reflec- 
 tion is this something evident to us in the light of self- 
 consciousness. 
 
 Apperception is of the abstract truths which stand 
 revealed to us through introspective analysis, under the 
 category of sufficient reason for belief. Abstraction and 
 generalization are the functions of pure reason, which is 
 the spiritual birthright of man, constituting him what the 
 Stoics termed " a citizen of the universe," and giving him 
 the freedom of all the cities thereof, however various may 
 be the transformations of his physical clothing, according 
 to the place in space he for a time occupies. 
 
 It seems to me to be too much lost sight of that man is 
 a rational Being 'from his birth. Monsieur Taine, in his work 
 on human intelligence, has admirably exhibited the very 
 early tendency to the generalization of individual experience 
 evinced by little children, which shows that if they were 
 helped to reason rightly upon their childish experiences, 
 they might be taught to reason rightly from the beginning, 
 seeing that they are always asking Why such or such 
 things exist, happen, or are purposed. Then we should 
 have to deal with more rational and better conducted boys 
 and girls than we have at present, who would not ruin their 
 future before they had seriously entered upon life. Then 
 society would no longer act as the deadly upas tree upon 
 all our natural instincts, and upon the pure connate spiritual 
 
344 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 intuitions of reason, which being no longer, as in the present 
 day, contradicted by social usages, and sneered down by 
 public opinion, would shine, like the sun, more and more 
 unto the perfect day. 
 
 " Under the great world scheme of evolution, humanity 
 may almost be said to struggle unconsciously to fill in the 
 invisible framework of its pre-ordained progress towards the 
 Ideal." That standard, unseen by sense, but towards the 
 realization of which every member of the human family 
 involuntarily struggles and instinctively strives, is the Best 
 for Being, as the actualization of the Divine Idea in the 
 creation of the spiritual world. As to self-neglect being 
 regarded as the condition of altruistic regard, and Divine 
 love, it is either a farcical, or an ascetic fancy, not a postulate 
 of reason. 
 
 Trust, or faith, in God is the highest form of faith. Love 
 of God is not shown in the endeavour to improve upon the 
 nature He has given us, but only in obedience to the will, or 
 design, of God in His creation of the spiritual universe. 
 This is the highest Ideal of moral activity. 
 
 Belief in an Absolute, or Perfect, Omniscient, Omnipotent, 
 Creative Being, from whom the spiritual universe is an 
 emanation, is, and must ever remain, the characteristic 
 attainment of man's reflective reason. 
 
 The moral order of the universe shows man's place in it 
 as the one Being "an sich, und fur sich," instead of being 
 created, like the rest of the animal creation, to be the prey 
 or food of another: the body of man being the temple of the 
 Divine Spirit ; even the savage mostly gives a religious form 
 to cannibalism. 
 
 How, then, is it that man has become a denier, or an 
 accustr, of his Creator? The explanation lies in the fact 
 that we can only know anything through our own con- 
 ceptions of it. No parrotings of the conceptions of others 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 345 
 
 can be substitutes for faith, love, and hope, which are 
 fruits of individual growth in knowledge, justice, and love. 
 Only the pure spirit can see the Father, for this evolution 
 is required in all of us. 
 
 Even the consciousness of our own child is not our 
 own consciousness ; and if a stranger come between us and 
 our child, and distort its conceptions of us, we may be 
 powerless to make him realize our feelings and purposes. 
 Infidelity and lawlessness are as contagious as they are 
 deplorable. True love and true adoration of our Maker 
 are their only antidotes. Love is as sight to the blind ; 
 through it we contemplate the world as in a magic mirror. 
 
 Without faith in the goodness of God and man up to a 
 certain point, society could not exist, but only gregariousness 
 for purpose of mutual protection, such as we see it in the 
 case of the lower animals, and in very barbarous tribes in 
 which everyone's hand is against one of another tribe. 
 Such a state of things could not be conducive to the arrival 
 at one conclusion as to the nature of reason, and its revela- 
 tion of a First Great Cause, the order of Whose creation, 
 natural and human, is for the Best for spiritual Being, which 
 must surely be ultimately accomplished by perfect power, 
 wisdom, and goodness, in the case of every individual. 
 
 It is through faith that we sing songs of love and hope, 
 joy and freedom freedom meaning willing obedience to 
 the government of the All-Father, in Whom we trust, 
 Whom to know is at once to enter upon the life eternal 
 of love and hope, both with regard to God and man. In 
 these sad times, "to know life" is often held to be syn- 
 onymous with knowing the death in life of faithlessness, 
 lovelessness, and hopelessness. However, these are not the 
 proper outcome of reason, for truth answers to the essential 
 attributes of Being : beyond that source of evidence there 
 is none. Without our faculties of faith, love, and hope,. 
 
346 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 what could we mean by truth, loveliness, and goodness, that 
 happy forecast of reason that all is well because our Father 
 is at the helm ? 
 
 If our own spiritual Being be utterly undeveloped and 
 unevolved, the source of evidence is only latent in us. As 
 what we call the existence of light cannot be brought 
 home to the blind, so no reflective inference can be expected 
 from those whose feeling, intelligence, and will for the good 
 end, are undeveloped. Of what use, then, arguing with 
 them regarding a happier hereafter for man ? Truly only 
 love, Divine and human, is the fulfilment of the law, it 
 being the sufficient reason for faith and hope, for they are 
 contained in love. 
 
 However practical and amiable woman may have been, 
 she has hitherto had little part in the speculative progress 
 of society, because of the poor education that has, until 
 lately, been given her. What has hitherto been her 
 instruction concerning the great principles of the under- 
 standing ? But what may we not hope for humanity, now 
 that the prison-doors of her spirit are unlocked, and the 
 fountain-heads of ancient and modern wisdom have been 
 revealed to her ! With mothers thus cultured, surely the 
 sons will become more moral, and therefore more believing. 
 
 Balzac said, "The tune of love can be perfectly well 
 played on one instrument " ; it requires no full band to 
 express it. But for this to be, woman need be as 
 intellectually developed as man. The institution of marriage 
 will, above all, be favourably affected by the new bond 
 of true companionship, which equivalence of culture 
 will produce between the sexes ; and as to the choice of 
 a life - companion, then will woman recoil from one 
 who does not stir her highest possibilities of emotion, 
 intellection, and volition. Then we shall hear no more 
 that "men will be men," which means that the old or 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 347 
 
 animal Adam will for ever oust the new or spiritual Adam. 
 Certainly as woman has, indeed, an uphill path to travel 
 to make up for her intellectual degradation in past ages, 
 so also has man to purify himself by prayer and fasting, 
 as did the young squires of old to fit themselves for 
 knighthood, before the real nature of true love can be 
 revealed to him : for he has to learn that " that which thy 
 sense can touch not, that is most thine own." We have to 
 thank the troubadours of the middle ages for the assertion 
 of the spiritual nature of true love. The story of 
 Tannhauser is one of the legends belonging to that time. 
 In Germany the singers of these legends were called 
 Minnesangers. Max M tiller says the word is derived from 
 meinen, to think. "La dame de ses pensees" was often 
 entirely out of reach of the knight errant from the point 
 of view of marriage. Thus, as for Divine love man must 
 be born again to the spirit, and cast off the seven deadly 
 sins, so before the notion of true love is conceivable by him, 
 he must cast off what is "of the earth earthy." 
 
 Both man and woman must rise out of the ashes of 
 their lower selves, to a true, spiritual, and therefore eternal 
 union with each other: "once found, found for ever" is 
 the motto of true love. Dreadful indeed would it be, had 
 the same agonizing search for one's counterpartal or com- 
 plementary, spirit to be renewed at every fresh birth into 
 the universe of God, for we have been told that God 
 Himself said, " It is not good for man to be alone," and 
 that he must therefore have " a continual helpmeet " 
 unto him, as not even God can take the place of the 
 equivalential companionship He has Himself designed for 
 man and woman equivalential not meaning here identity, 
 but analogy. 
 
 I have just come across an extract from a sermon by Canon 
 McColl, which appears to me a most intelligent interpretation 
 
348 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 of the words of Jesus, " In my Father's house are many 
 mansions"; for he says, "Jesus here indicated that there 
 are different spheres of bliss, and different degrees of 
 happiness in Heaven, and an endless progress, each soul 
 enjoying at each stage" (of its evolution) "the utmost 
 degree of happiness of which it is capable." 
 
 Even here below, as might have been expected from a 
 Benevolent Creator, a certain amount of enjoyment accom- 
 panies human life under all its endless diversity of 
 conditions, and even at its lowest stages of spiritual 
 evolution. 
 
 The instinctive endeavour is therefore (to use a forcible 
 expression of the lower classes) "to better ourselves." 
 Now, however sorry one may be to lose a capable servant, 
 who could be so selfish as to prevent that "bettering of 
 themselves " that comes by an increase of wages, etc ? 
 
 Still the good and faithful servant is the one who finds 
 joy in the esteem and affection of his employer, and so 
 remains faithful to one service. Thus each has his reward 
 after his own kind. Those who live to the spirit have the 
 joys of the spirit, those who live for what is of the earth 
 earthy, have their pleasure of it a pleasure as fleeting as 
 are its objects. 
 
 True love has been compared to a melody which is 
 music in one key, and giving perfect satisfaction to the ear ; 
 whereas discords can be resolved into partial harmonies in 
 many keys without completely satisfying either soul or 
 sense. " Once," says a charming writer, " I saw no meaning 
 in life ; now I feel and know, and hope through that ex- 
 perience." 
 
 "Autrefois je doutais de 1'amour, et cette doute, affreuse 
 souffrance, faisait le mal de tous mes jours. Maintenant 
 que Dieu m'a conduit vers toi je crois au bonheur et a 
 1'esp^rance." To be contented with the imperfect is no sign 
 
Rational \ or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 349 
 
 of goodness : it is not life, but death, when nothing stirs. 
 It is of the very nature of hope to hope for the best, not 
 for the middling ; but of course constituted as this world 
 is to be a place of trial, in Heaven alone can we expect to 
 sing the great Amen ! 
 
 If the will of the Father be for the life and happiness 
 of His rational creatures, how can it be evil in us to strive 
 for our own life and happiness, as well as for the life and 
 happiness of others ? Why, then, is not every pains taken 
 to afford each and every member of society fitting oppor- 
 tunities for contracting a happy marriage, instead of 
 marriage being considered chiefly as an opportunity for 
 the acquisition of money or title in other words, of making 
 a good worldly bargain. If to live rightly is to be true 
 to the nature of a rational Being in every respect, this is 
 a strange parody of marriage. "Only in the life of the 
 spirit is true happiness to be found, for to that end were 
 we created." Our real life is the gathering of the fruits of 
 the spirit sown in us by the Father of spirits, which, as 
 St. Paul says, are faith, love (or true joy), and hope : for 
 thus only are we equipped for an eternity of happiness. 
 
 "La solidarite humaine" is the true doctrine of Chris- 
 tianity : " If ye love not the brother whom ye have seen, 
 how can ye love the Father Whom ye have not seen ? " 
 said Jesus. 
 
 To quote again from Count Tolstoi, "The will of the 
 Father is for the life and happiness of men. His laws or 
 commands are but the necessary conditions of this happiness " ; 
 as our obedience to them is the condition of our health, 
 of mind and body. Hence if we cannot always rejoice, we 
 must always hope; otherwise we are like the man in the 
 parable, who said, " I knew thee to be a hard man, reaping 
 where thou hast not sown." 
 
 When we hear of an earthly parent who acts kindly 
 
350 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 toward his children, we applaud him with our whole 
 Being: is it then rational to attribute unkindness and 
 cruelty to our Heavenly Father ? What we should desire 
 and pray for, is for strength of the spirit sufficient to 
 overcome the weakness of the flesh, and trust always in 
 His goodness. Without faith in God, love of God, and 
 hope in His goodness, what should we be ? for what could 
 we strive ? and " desire failing," what would life be to us 
 more than to a mollusc or jelly-fish ? But although science, 
 art, and a good government, or a good social medium 
 favourable to virtue, may help on, and, indeed, are necessary 
 aids to spiritual evolution ; still it remains true, that each 
 one has "to work out his own salvation," which proceeds 
 step by step, meaning voluntary self-determination for 
 the right. 
 
 u No soul is willingly deprived of truth," said Plato; 
 therefore intolerance of temper towards ignorance and error 
 is as silly as the so-called Holy Office, or Inquisition, was 
 cruel to those who could not be converted to its own dogmas 
 coercion not being conversion, man having been given 
 free-will by his Creator ; but " forcing men to labour for 
 themselves," says Kingsley, "by bitter need, and after a 
 most Spartan mode of education, treating them with that 
 seeming neglect which is, after all, the most provident care, 
 because by it alone can man be trained to experience self- 
 help, science, true humanity, and so becoming men and 
 women worthy of the name." 
 
 Attraction, with its negative form repulsion, are the winds 
 that fill our sails in the voyage of life. Intelligence through 
 the principles of causality is relative to the proper end or 
 goal of desire, and prompts to action helpful towards that 
 end. Then comes reflective self-conscious determination in 
 accordance with the equilibriated order of mental represen- 
 tation, which presents Being as one whole. Upon this reason 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 351 
 
 takes her stand, and becomes the rudder of our course, 
 which we can only let go at our own peril as well as at 
 that of others. But alas! it is written, "Per aspra ad 
 astra " ; and only in death need we expect to find our last 
 trial upon this earth. 
 
 There is but one sufficient reason for activity, and that 
 is the nature and requirements of noumenal (God-conscious) 
 Beings. The nature of a Being prompts it to action in 
 harmony with its tendency (Tried). Of a good, perfect, or 
 typical Being, no bad action, or action from a bad motive, 
 is logically predicable. Hence we can rationally find peace 
 and rest as to the ultimate destiny of man, because of the 
 Absolute perfection of the Divine nature, which involves 
 perfect benevolence, with its concomitant beneficence. The 
 part in his own destiny which has been left to man's 
 free choice regards the means to be employed in the 
 pursuit of the object, or end, imposed upon his will, which 
 is for the Best for Being, that being the ultimate 
 motive of all rational activity. It is in this case that 
 we find " Knowledge is power." To know the various 
 relations in which we stand to various spiritual Beings, is 
 half the battle of life; to be true to these relations in 
 purposive action is the other half. Hence to deprive man 
 of the knowledge of God and man is cruelty ; and to act 
 against knowledge, or reason, is to act sinfully as being 
 against conscience, which is the categorical imperative of 
 duty towards our Creator. Every self-conscious or reflec- 
 tive Being is the spiritual offspring of the Father of spirits, 
 as said the ancient Greeks, "We are His offspring"; and 
 what sort of Father would that one be Who could rejoice 
 in the sufferings and destruction of His own children ? 
 Hence the moral law : Act always up to what you conceive 
 to be the Best for Being as such, in as far as it lies in your 
 power, and knowledge, for it must be remembered that no 
 
352 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 individual can surpass his own special faculty of mental 
 conception, or stand above the platform of his own com- 
 prehension, any more than he can go beyond his own 
 particular capacity for physiological activity. Therefore, 
 as only our Creator can absolutely know wherein our 
 natural deficiencies lie, no man can rationally sit in 
 moral judgment upon another, although as a member 
 of society he can enforce certain moral regulations for 
 the protection of society generally, each one himself 
 taking heed to "seek first the Kingdom of God and 
 His righteousness." 
 
 " They do but grope in learning's pedant round 
 Who on the phantasies of sense bestow 
 An Idol-substance, bidding us bow low 
 Before those shades of Being that are found 
 Stirring, or still, on man's brief trial ground 
 As if such shades and modes which come and go 
 Had aught of real life in their poor show, 
 To sway our judgment, or to stanch a wound." 
 
 No marble halls, or gilded trappings, can soothe the 
 aching heart, or heal the mind diseased. Only love and 
 sympathy with our fellows can affect the former, and only 
 faith and hope in obedience to God cure the latter. Thus 
 no external form of marriage, when the fusion of souls 
 is wanting, can give the sense of fulness, or completeness 
 of Being, and the abiding joy of life, and in life, which we 
 call happiness. For only under this condition can the sense 
 of lonely isolation, which is like despair, be for ever 
 exorcised. Our children leave us to form their own conjugal 
 ties, the friend of our bosom naturally does the same ; but 
 it remains written that " it is not good for man (or woman) 
 to be alone," even though God be omnipresent. Only in 
 the understanding of truth, in the love of God and man, 
 and in beneficent action, does the soul find its real life. 
 
Rational^ or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 353 
 
 Hence the reward of virtue does not lie in bread, or in 
 social distinction, or in the gratification of ambition, but 
 in loving, and being beloved (nur lieben heisst Leben), in 
 the power that knowledge gives to help oneself and others, 
 and in the hope of God's goodness which opens to us infinite 
 vistas, of delight in His creation. Thus even when we feel 
 most bereaved, and, as it were, forsaken of God, we may be 
 being most prepared for the soul's harvest of love, which 
 is joy, including as it does both faith and hope, without 
 which Heaven could not possibly exist. 
 
 What could God Himself do for the faithless, loveless, 
 and hopeless ? It were as though we should expect a 
 person that was at once blind, deaf, and dumb, and wanting 
 the sense of touch, to admire the beauty of the physical 
 universe. The explosive forces are as sanitary when 
 required, as are the attractive cohesive forces, because they 
 are helpful towards the development of man's reason, in 
 which are involved our instincts of the Unseen and Infinite. 
 Thus are we taught 
 
 " That life is not as idle ore, 
 But heated hot with burning fears, 
 And bathed in baths of hissing tears, 
 And battered with the strokes of doom, 
 To shape and use." 
 
 Just as the process that iron ore is subjected to offers 
 an image of man's being made perfect through suffering 
 so also does the treatment of gold ore : it also has to be 
 tried by fire, as the human heart has to be tried by "the 
 living fire of pain " and mental anguish. Whatever is good 
 for the soul, or spirit, of man, cannot be called evil surely 
 the way is good that leads to moral perfection, which is the 
 condition of true happiness ; certainly not by our debasing 
 ourselves through evil feeling, thinking, and acting, can true 
 joy be attained. 
 
 2 A 
 
354 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 As John Stuart Mill said, it would be a distortion of our 
 intelligence to believe in the justice of an eternity of 
 punishment for evil committed in a brief life through 
 ignorance of good, and through weakness of flesh, so it 
 would be equally a contradiction of the motive imposed 
 on us in action (*>., action for the Best for Being) to 
 attribute to our Creator other than a benevolent design 
 in our creation. 
 
 Is not the happiness of a people our only test of the 
 goodness of its governor? The widespread instinct, or 
 rather intuition, of reason throughout our race " from 
 Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand," of the 
 recovery of friends after death, the belief of King David 
 that though they cannot return to us, we can go to them, 
 is our abiding consolation under bereavement, however 
 heart-breaking. 
 
 Hope has been called the magic minstrel, whose strain 
 rises higher and higher the more the deep waters of 
 affliction compass us round. The rainbow, both in the 
 Jewish and Greek religions, was regarded as the messenger 
 between Heaven and earth, represented by the many- 
 coloured robe of Iris by the Greeks, and by the Jews as 
 the sign of the covenant God made with man that He 
 would not destroy him. 
 
 And do not all the stars of Heaven stand as witnesses 
 of the existence of the many mansions in the Father's 
 house, where each spirit may be congenially lodged when 
 it leaves our poor little Tellas, in which is the valley of 
 the shadow of death ? What may one not hope of the 
 Creator of life, and light, and good ! 
 
 Meanwhile, when creeds change, and forms of govern- 
 ment fail, there will still remain a present source of 
 hope for the human race in the evolution of spiritual 
 affinities, above all in that of the supreme affinity between 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 355 
 
 correlated spirits, which is what true marriage of souls 
 means. It has long ago been remarked how careful 
 man has been to rear horses and dogs under favour- 
 able conditions for the exhibition of typical qualities ; 
 and it remains for the same principle to be insisted on in 
 human marriages. 
 
 The jumbling of unsuitables, or the pretence of fusing 
 contradictory attributes, must be put away with other 
 childish things characteristic of undeveloped humanity. 
 
 Only when the hour has struck for the " souls' great 
 bridals " will true civilization be inaugurated ; then shall 
 we be prepared through the earthly joy of home for the 
 Heavenly Paradise. 
 
 The true source of love is the conjugal union from it 
 children spring, not parents from children, therefore the 
 parental bond does not count first. Let the fountain of 
 love, then, be pure at its source health-giving, joy-giving, 
 and, above all, gratitude-giving to God. It is this that 
 "will make all things new"; only when love reigns can 
 the Kingdom of God be said to have come. 
 
 " The dreams of youth," against irreverence for which 
 Longfellow warns us, must be translated into fact, as all 
 imaginative fiction worth reading is based upon facts of 
 human nature; for the realization of the Ideal has only 
 hitherto been the portion of the few, but for universal 
 happiness it must be the standard of endeavour for 
 everyone. 
 
 Even to look with longing eyes upon the " land of 
 promise" is a step made towards it, for the love of love, 
 as well as the scorn of scorn, has to be learnt by each 
 of us for the bourne of the Ideal to be reached ; and it 
 must be remembered that the rational Ideal of humanity 
 lies in the fulfilment of truth, of harmony, and of 
 goodness the last involving self-love, social, and Divine. 
 
35 6 Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 
 
 Thus love made perfect is the fulfilment of the law, 
 or Divinely established order of human nature, in 
 which alone can peace and joy be found obedience, 
 not sacrifice, being what our Creator requires of us. Who 
 is the good man, if not he whose life is an illustration 
 of the creative idea, from which alone our Ideal of life can 
 rationally be drawn ? 
 
 Spiritual love is God's last best gift to man. 
 
 The conception of the Ideal being the last triumph of 
 reflective reason, what wonder is there that it takes so 
 long a time, as well as favourable circumstances, for the 
 realization of it. Just as the rising sun first gilds 
 the mountain tops before its light reaches the recesses 
 of the valleys, so the thinkers of all times and places 
 first catch the holy illumination of the Ideal, and 
 having (to borrow the words of Confucius) "looked upon 
 it, and loved it," they have ever sought to disseminate it 
 amongst their fellows, either in the form of natural 
 and spiritual philosophy, or in that of some definite 
 form of religious faith, determined, in great measure, by 
 the climatic or geographical influences of their country, 
 and its environment. 
 
 The younger a country is, the more provincial are its 
 inhabitants ; that is to say, the more narrow and limited 
 are the conceptions of its people. Reflection's perfect 
 work is still less arrived at per saltum than is physical 
 science, and requires the leisure not to be found in the 
 birth struggles of a nation. Still, every time and place 
 has its little band of thinkers, "the world forgetting, by 
 the world forgot"; for though they have the vision and 
 the dream, theirs is the gravity of hope for the future, not 
 the sprightliness of the busy men of action, or of the daily 
 climbers of the treadmill of pleasure. 
 
 Idealists look for a country that is founded in righteousness, 
 
Rational, or Scientific, Ideal of Morality 357 
 
 in love, and in the infinite hope that is based on the goodness 
 of God. 
 
 For the most part the world loveth them not, for "the 
 world loveth its own," its fellow-competitors for its prizes 
 and its successes. 
 
 Had reason no reward for her followers, had she not ways 
 of pleasantness and paths of peace even here below, they 
 would be of all men the most miserable, being mostly 
 rejected and despised of men here ; but knowing in Whom 
 they believe, they are willing to stand and wait. 
 
 THE END. 
 
PLYMOUTH : 
 
 W. BRENDON AND SON, 
 PRINTERS. 
 
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