Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/215

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ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY

on the other hand, we do know that in our relation with mechanical Nature, in whose domain, after all, the larger part of our action lies, we are not free; we know that time is exceeding short, and that enjoyment is for the most part hope deferred. The lesson of life is chiefly fortitude and resignation. Lange, however, has no personal drawings toward egoistic ethics, nor to hedonism, even in its most public or social form. He announces himself as in ethics the legitimate successor of Kant: he desires to act, and to have men act, from duty solely; to seek the ideal and serve it at all personal hazard, though with due regard to the imperfections of men and the obstinacy of fact.

Lange’s sociology follows the lines we should now expect. His doctrine of the Whole leads him to a pronounced socialism, but he would have this socialism a real one, in which organised society is to correct the aberrations of the individual with vigour. He sees, too, like Dühring, the import of political economy in a comprehensive practical philosophy, and some of his earlier writings were devoted to vigorous discussions in it. Free-trade and laissez-faire can find no place, of course, in the practical theory of the moralist of the Whole. Spontaneous “harmony of private interests,” like the talk of the Cobden school generally, is to him mere vagary, springing from a fatuous social optimism. In many