to become absolute. Nor is the present argument without application to the considerations suggested by such an Ethical Realism as Professor Howison’s. In the definition of the ethical significance of the independent individuals that constitute Professor Howison’s “City of God,” it is evident that much stress must be laid upon the fact that any ethical individual remains, as to his independence and as to his rights, logically the same eternal object for all the various other beings that constitute his fellow-citizens. In Professor Howison’s account, moreover, the “City of God” itself, to which the various subjects, rejecting all monistic frivolity, retain what Professor Howison calls a “stainless allegiance,” is obviously, both as ideal and as eternal ethical reality, the same for all, being both their object, to whose laws they mean to conform, and the reality wherein their moral aims are fulfilled. Now this, as it stands, is Realism. The ethical dignity of the contents of the real objects, whose independence and sameness is presupposed, does not alter in the least the logical character of the category involved. Logic is not ethics, but the ethical categories must be logical. And the logical status of the foregoing concept is obvious. One independent moral agent is, by virtue of his independence, no mere object in the experience of any other agent. The “City of God,” as such, is nobody’s experience, not even God’s. But, in the moral world, various free-agents can and should unite in recognising the rights of any one moral agent as the same for them all. And the “City of God,” as reality, is the same for all, gods and men. The consequence
Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/217
This page needs to be proofread.
180
THE CONCEPTION OF GOD
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5b/The_Conception_of_God_%281897%29.djvu/page217-1024px-The_Conception_of_God_%281897%29.djvu.jpg)