materialism, ethics can never, properly speaking, be morals. If it escapes fatalism of the hardest sort, with all the consequent hopelessness for most, it cannot avoid hedonism, nor, in the logical end, an egoistic and utterly transient and trivial hedonism.
We have to confine ourselves, then, in any hope of finding conditions adequate for morality — conditions adequate, that is, for the life of serious duty — to the first and second of our groups. But from the second, — the systems of efficient causation construed in terms of monism and immanence, — the self-determining individual is necessarily cancelled. All the particular beings involved in the being of the monistic Whole are but modes or expressions of the sole self-activity of the Whole; they have no activity really their own, but only a derivative operation, determined by the One. This is either openly confessed by the supporters of these systems, or, if they attempt to evade it, they are compelled to end in more or less concealed confessions of it, despite all their efforts. If anybody doubts this, let him attentively read Hegel on this question, or T. H. Green, the brothers Caird, and Professor Royce.[1]
The first group of systems, the dualistic (or literal) creationisms, have, to first impression, a certain appearance of providing for the possibility of freedom, and therefore of a genuine morality. For it seems nominally possible that a Creator by fiat might yet say: “Be, thou! — a nature with power to perceive and to judge, and with will to choose, unpredestined; I create thee rational, and leave thee untrammelled.” But not to mention the complete contradiction of this which the usual theologies and other schemes of predestination introduce, from the need of organising the
- ↑ Let the interested reader consult, particularly, Professor Royce’s “Supplementary Essay” in the volume entitled The Conception of God (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1897), in the chapter where he undertakes to deal with the question of the freedom of the individual.
