the principles and results of actual social morality and spontaneously generated ideals of life that transcend convention, or, in other words, by the failure of current valuations and practices to meet the ideal demands of the higher personal spirit.
At the third and highest level of morality the personal spirit fulfils the demands of the second level in so far as these are not in contradiction with the personal and spiritual values that transcend existing social conventions. But at this level the given customary and institutional system of values ceases to be ultimately authoritative and determinative. The ideals or values affirmed by the rational self-conscious spirit are indeed social as well as individual. But the distinction has now arisen, never to be obliterated, between the social as given and as ideal, between the moral life as gegeben and as aufgegeben. Historically ethical reflection, i.e., a rational consideration of the principles of human conduct, has always arisen just where the social structure and its principles of customary morality have ceased to be authoritative and normative for the individual. In short, reflective ethics begins with the discovery of a rational self-consciousness in the individual. It was so in Greece, in Judæa, and at the beginnings of the modern world, in the Renaissance and Reformation. We may then have, with reference to the earlier stages of moral evolution in the race, a sociology of customary morality, and the general principles of such a science will be applicable to the practical problems of our own time in so far as primitive types tend to persist and reappear in the moral development of each succeeding generation. But the sociological method fails to be adequate just where reflective ethics begins, since this is precisely the point where the individual person becomes an independent center and source of ethical valuation. The very inception of ethical reflection is the cessation of absolute social authority, and the theory of society fails at this point to illuminate the ethical problem, since it is not primarily concerned with the individual as a principle of ethical valuation.
In approaching this problem one must not confuse the reflective and self-conscious person, who, as rational, recognizes over-individual meanings in thought and in social action, with the merely
