RELIGION AND MORALITY 147
not only the sacrifice of one's personality for the group, but the renunciation alike of one's personality and of one's group for the service of God ; but pagan philo- sophy only investijrates means of obtaining the greatest welfare for the individual, or for the group of indi- viduals, and therefore a contrast is inevitable. And there is only one way of hiding this contrast — viz., by piling up abstract conditional conceptions one on the top of another, and keeping to the misty domain of metaphysics.
That is what most of the post-llenaissance philo- sophers have done, and to this circumstance — the impossibility of making the demands of Christian morality (vvhich have been admitted in advance) accord with a philosophy built on patran foundations — must be attributed the terrible unreality, obscurity, unintelligi- bility, and estrangement from life, that cliaracterizes modern philosophy. With the exception of Spinoza (whose pliilosophy, in spite of the fact that he did not consider himself a I'liristian, develops from truly Chris- tian roots) and Kant (a man of genius, who admittedly treated his system of etliics as not dependent on his metaphysics), all the other pliilosophers, even the brilliant Schopenhauer, evidently devised artificial con- nections between their ethics and their metaphysics.
It is felt that Christian ethics are something that must be accepted in advance, standing quite firmly, not dependent on philosophy, and in no need of the fic- titious props put to support them ; and it is felt that Philosophy merely devises certain propositions in order that ethics may not contradict her, but may rather be bound to her and appear to ilow from her. All such propositions, however, only appear to justify Christian ethics while they are considered in the abstract. As soon as they are applied to questions of practical life, the non-correspondence, and, more than that, the evident contradiction between the philosophic basis and what we consider morality, appears in full strength.
The unfortunate Nietzsche, who has latterly become so celebrated, rendered a valuable service by his
