hence it is certainly not known as a physical object may be known. But it is not merely an hypothesis.
(f) The resulting view of ethics attaches some meaning to the concept of an ethics 'from above.'
If we are right in concluding that on psychological grounds as well as on metaphysical grounds there is a continuity and identity in that life-policy which we call the will, soul, or self, the law of our life must be defined in terms of those objects or causes which this unitary wish can recognize as its own. What we have to seek in this world as moral agents is not primarily the satisfaction of a differentiating bundle of wishes: it is the satisfaction of the Wish.
Loyalty to the object which the Wish at any time can recognize as its own must determine the destiny of all minor wishes; though every such minor wish, other things equal, will be interpreted as a specific application of the original Wish. This will be its 'meaning'; and the ethics of particular instincts will be summarized in the principle, use them for what they mean.
When the Wish has embodied itself in a cause, however, there is a note of ruthlessness in its attitude to the outstanding wishes, which Royce has signalized in the word loyalty. It may not be amiss to point out the cognate note in a thinker of very different mould, who has likewise recognized a most general instinct, giving it the not wholly false name of the will to power. Geist, said Nietzsche, ist das Leben, das selber in's Leben schneidet.
But Nietzsche's conception of the wish, as a subjective urge for the unloading of energy, lacks just that element of permanent attachment to an external meaning which is insisted upon by both writers whom we have been comparing. And if, as Royce maintains, that external meaning is from the first the divine being, whether or not we consciously so define it, our rule of life becomes also, to this extent, an 'ethics from above.'
Harvard University.
