if the future can be determined entirely by our own determination, i.e., if it is the result of our ideas, our sentiments, and our character. Even if one could prove the necessity of contingency for morality, it would be necessary to detach the element of contingency from the other elements in order to consider it in isolation. If you mix spontaneity, understanding, the idea and desire of freedom, with the contingency of acts unpredictable, your result will not belong entirely to the undetermined, but partly to the determined. Like freedom, responsibility loses all meaning, if it is grounded on an absolute contingency which escapes all knowledge. To be morally responsible is to be self-determined, but the self is not an indifferent force. Further, to say an act is determined by our pure self explains nothing, because (1) my pure self has no determination which distinguishes it from yours; (2) there is nothing to determine whether one act rather than any other should issue from its depths. Nor does this theory give any account of the moral good. Far from having a superior right, the moral law is a most insolent impiety towards spontaneity. The authority of moral ideas has no other origin than the mind's tendency towards equilibrium.
This paper, read recently before the Berlin Section of the German Society for Ethical Culture, is a brief statement of the writer's view as developed more fully in his book, Philosophische Güterlehre. "Every principle that aspires to dominance among mankind must make it its first aim to gain over the convictions, to win the intellectual adherence of men; only from this point, by a gradual growth inwards, can it conquer their hearts." Then arises the question as to the preponderant impulse, in accordance with the constitution of human nature, in the establishment of moral sentiment. The motives to goodness are: religious conviction, goodness for its own sake, logical reasonableness, individual profit, sympathy, habit, custom, love of honor, 'sense of honor,' and conscience. These are subjected to a threefold test, with the result that "the strongest among the motives of higher human nature is that which arises from our craving for self-esteem; its purest and best-sanctioned mode of operation is that which … we find in conscience." And the most perfect disposition to goodness is attained by the endeavor "to acquire in conscience a true value for one's self, a true warrant for one's existence."
